thumb|Bowers's [[home-built aircraft|amateur-built airplane design, the Fly Baby]]

thumb|A [[Bowers Fly Baby|Bowers Bi-Baby, this is the Fly Baby with the optional upper wing installed.]]

Peter M. Bowers (May 15, 1918 – April 27, 2003) was an American aeronautical engineer, airplane designer, and a journalist and historian specializing in the field of aviation.

An engineer for planemaker Boeing for over 35 years,

Bowers is famed in the aviation community for his role as a military and general aviation historian and writer, and designer of the popular Bowers Fly Baby homebuilt aircraft design.

Bowers's first ride in an aircraft was in 1928, at the age of 10. He began intensively designing and building aircraft models, which led to requests for plans and articles about them from editors of model airplane magazines—his first article appearing in 1938 in Air Trails.

Bowers took a course in aeronautical engineering at the Boeing School of Aeronautics in Seattle, then enrolled as an Engineering Cadet in the Army Air Corps.

Bowers learned to fly in 1948, and by 1962 had reportedly logged over 3,000 hours of flight time, mostly in sailplanes, homebuilt aircraft, antique aircraft, and "other romantic types"—becoming "an internationally-known consultant on aviation history and sport flying."

Starting in the 1950s, and culminating in 1962, Bowers designed a noted homebuilt aircraft, the Bowers Fly Baby (winner of the 1962 Design Contest of the Experimental Aircraft Association—one of the most successful homebuilt designs, eventually built by over 500 homebuilders)

Bowers also designed and built the Namu II, and also completed and flew a Detroit G1 Gull primary glider.

Under its Fly Baby entry, Jane's All The World's Aircraft, 1964–1965, says of Bowers:

<blockquote>

Mr. Peter Bowers, an aeronautical engineer with Boeing in Seattle, is a principal source of detailed information on vintage aircraft in the United States, and has provided much of the data for a number of replicas of 1914-18 War aircraft now under construction or flying. He is currently engaged on a redesign of the Fokker D.VIII monoplane of 1918 in association with Herr Rheinhold Platz, the original designer, with a view to starting a replica building program.

A full-scale Fokker Triplane replica of this period has been under construction by Mr. Bowers for nearly five years. At least six others are known to be under construction from plans that he has provided.

Another aircraft built by Mr. Bowers is a full-scale replica of the Wright Model EX of 1911, the first aeroplane to cross the American continent. This machine was tested as a towed sailplane in the Autumn of 1961 and is to be powered by a converted "B" Ford automobile engine from a 1938 Funk monoplane.

In addition to this work on replicas, Mr. Bowers has designed and built a single-seat light aircraft known as the Fly Baby...

</blockquote>

Bowers was the founding president of the EAA's Chapter 26, in the Seattle area. Bowers wrote or co-authored over 40 aviation books, and several hundred magazine and journal articles. His first articles, about his model airplane designs, appeared in Air Trails magazine in 1938. (AAHS), and a principal contributor to the AAHS Journal from its first issue in 1956 until the late 1960s.

Starting in 1972, Bowers wrote over 800 articles detailing historic aircraft for a column in General Aviation News called "Of Wings and Things." Bowers was a fixture of the newspaper for decades, until his death in 2003.

Awards and recognition

  • 1962: Winner of the Experimental Aircraft Association's 1962 Design Contest (reportedly the only one ever held
  • 1968: service to the EAA award.
  • 2017: Stearman book identified as one of three "quasi-classic" histories of the man and the planes by HistoryNet.com

Death

Bowers died in 2003

  • Airpower (Sentry Publications)
  • Wings (Sentry Publications)
  • Western Flyer (1972, began his aviation history column "Of Wings and Things")
  • General Aviation News ("Of Wings and Things" column, continued.
  • Unconventional Aircraft, April 1, 1990
  • Scale Aircraft Drawings: World War 2, Vol. 2, 1991
  • Lockheed Constellation: Design, Development, and Service History of all Civil and Military Constellations, Super Constellations, and Starliners, with Curtis K. Stringfellow, December 1, 1991
  • Triplanes: A Pictorial History of the World's Triplanes and Multiplanes, with Ernest R. McDowell, 1993
  • Wings of Stearman: The Story of Lloyd Stearman and the Classic Stearman Biplanes, Historic Aircraft Series, December 1, 1998, ASIN : B08GKTCCSH
  • Of Wings & Things, Vol. 1: 1972–1979, 2000
  • America's Outstanding Aircraft of World War II: Plus Odd Aircraft, October 15, 2011
  • Scale Aircraft Drawings, September 10, 2021
  • Stearman Guidebook: Book 1: American Aircraft Series, with Mitch Mayborn

Civilian aircraft

  • Guide to Homebuilts, Modern Aircraft Series, Sports Car Press, NY, 1962; 1984
  • Fly Baby Builders Manual, 1964
  • Aircraft Profile series, Profile Publications Ltd. (U.K.):

:* Aircraft Profile No. 51: The Gee Bee Racers, 1965

  • Flying the Boeing Model Eighty, 1984

Military aircraft

  • The Sixty Best Airplanes of World War One (60), 1960
  • World War Two: Outstanding U.S. Aircraft Plus Odd Aircraft, 1961
  • Aircraft Profile series, Profile Publications Ltd. (U.K.):

:*Aircraft Profile No. 14: The Boeing P-26A, 1965

:*Aircraft Profile No. 37: The Curtiss JN-4, 1965

:*Aircraft Profile No. 45: The Curtiss Army Hawks, 1965

:*Aircraft Profile No. 2: The Boeing P-12E, 1966

:*Aircraft Profile No. 79: The Nieuport N.28C-I, 1966

:*Aircraft Profile No. 80: The Curtiss Hawk 75, 1966

:*Aircraft Profile No. 83: The Boeing B-47, 1966

:*Aircraft Profile No. 97: The American DH4, 1966

:*Aircraft Profile No. 116: The Curtiss Navy Hawks, 1966

:*Aircraft Profile No. 245: Boeing B-52A/H Stratofortress, ASIN: B0007BNZS6, 1972

  • Fortress in the Sky: The Story of Boeing's B-17, 1976
  • United States Navy Aircraft Since 1911, with Gordon Swanborough, Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, MD, 1976 (Second Edition, 1982)