MAIN MENU CONTRIBUTORS MENU RECENT ADDITIONS 1000aircraftphotos.com BOB BANKA COLLECTION Photos

Bob Banka may have had one of the largest collections of aircraft photos, numbering over a half-million photos. This is even more remarkable since he took the photos himself at locations all over the world! This amounts to around 14,000 36-exposure rolls of 35mm film about a third of a mile long. Bob is like most other photographers, so the number of photos hr had in his inventory was far fewer than the number of times he pressed the shutter button on his camera. Why did Bob have so many photos? It's because he used to have a business well-known to model builders who purchased detail photos so they could build highly realistic models. Bob's introduction to aviation was building, designing and flying model airplanes. His first one was a 10 cent kit he built at the age of 5. His first radio-control model was a Fairchild PT-19 in 1966. Dozens of models of varying complexity later, Bob acquired a business called "Scale Model Research" in 1983 from a fellow modeler. His first catalog was only 4 pages long, but eventually grew to 250 pages of lists of photos and 3-view drawings.