Work slowly continues on the new Sentinel Owners & Pilots Association website. It’s a one-man show and Jim Gray is not a professional wesite developer, so it’s going to take awhile to complete it. As you may have seen, there are still problems with pages not displaying properly with some jumbled text and overlapping paragraphs and images. Those are being dealt with as time allows. Designing for viewing a website of this type on multiple devices is quite challenging for someone who hasn’t dealt with it or used the WordPress platform before.
Two new pages have been added to the Historical section under the Resources category. The first page, titled “L-5 Serial Numbers“ lists all of the military serial numbers (USAAF, Navy, RAF) and production data. You may remember seeing the charts on the old L-5 website, and in fact they date all the way back to the “L-5 Data Pages” (forerunner of this website) that was first published in 1999. The charts have been updated somewhat and one long-standing error corrected, but there isn’t much else new there except that the RAF ‘KJ’ serial numbers have been added. The serial number page is HERE, and of course it can be accessed from the menu. A searchable database allowing you to see specific information about each aircraft will eventually be added, but that’s a very labor-intensive back-burner sort of project. The comprehensive database for it has been completed however.
The other new page, HERE, titled “L-5 Nomenclature“ is a rundown of the various L-5 models and their various designations. While the basic information is familiar to most people, it has been expanded to include details that you may not know about and that aren’t likely to be found in any books or on other websites – at least not until the copycats start copying the content here and posting it on their own pages as many did with the old website. Give it a read and see what you think.
JG