1932 Nicholas-Beazley NB-8G

A folding-wing parasol monoplane from Marshall, Missouri’s mail-order aviation supply house, with a rare British Armstrong Siddeley Genet engine. One of 57 built.

The mail-order airplane

In the 1920s, if you owned an airplane in America, there was a good chance a box from Marshall, Missouri came to your door. The Nicholas-Beazley Airplane Company grew into the largest mail-order aviation supply house of its day, shipping everything from war-surplus engine parts to dope and fabric out of a catalog thick enough to stop a door. We have a copy of their 1931 catalog in the Collection.

In 1929 the company decided to build airplanes of its own and hired a British-trained engineer named Tom Kirkup to design them. His NB-8 flew in 1931: a two-seat, side-by-side parasol monoplane, gentle enough for a beginner, with a wing that folded back along the fuselage so the owner could tow it home behind a car and keep it in a barn. It sold for about $1,790. Nicholas-Beazley built 57 of them, and a 58th from spare parts, before the Depression ended airplane building in Marshall. Today about five survive, and none of them is flying.

A British heart

Serial K-56 was completed on March 24, 1932, and it left the factory floor on a 90-horsepower American Lambert engine. It flew less than 22 hours that way. In August 1933, before the airplane was ever sold, the factory took the Lambert off and installed an 80-horsepower Armstrong Siddeley Genet Mark II from Coventry, England, serial number 1008. The Genet is the “G” in NB-8G. It was designed in 1926 for the British light-aeroplane trials, five small cylinders built to weigh almost nothing, and Nicholas-Beazley built this model around it. Serial 1008 has been in this airplane ever since, and it is the only Genet in our hangar.

Fourteen owners and two coasts

Its first private owner was Tommy Webber of Marshall, who bought it in October 1933. A year later it went to the Pacific Northwest, where it would spend the next twenty years: to a physician in Everett, Washington; to Northwest Air Service at Boeing Field in Seattle; and to the Eyerly Aircraft Corporation of Salem, Oregon, the company of Lee Eyerly, who later became famous for building amusement-park rides. From 1936 to 1945 it belonged to E. L. Smith, a fireman in Eugene, Oregon, and the Eugene Vocational School rebuilt its center section during the war. Partners in Eugene kept it flying into the 1950s.

In 1957 it went to California, and in 1958 to Kenneth Herman, who held it for decades as a restoration project that never quite got finished. In 2008 it came home to the middle of the country, to Cam Blazer of Leawood, Kansas.

Cam Blazer’s airplane

Cam was a founding member of the Nicholas-Beazley Aviation Museum in Marshall, and this airplane was his life’s project. He bought it in 2008, cleared its title in a Kansas court in 2012, and between 2024 and 2026 brought it all the way back: new spruce wing spars, new ribs and leading edges, every cable and piece of hardware replaced, and a new cover in blue and silver. Cam did much of the work himself. He died on February 4, 2026. On February 28 the airplane received its Standard Airworthiness Certificate.

How it came home

I first talked with Cam’s family in July 2026. What they wanted most was to see Cam’s airplane fly, and I want that too. In October we agreed that it would come to the Collection, and it comes home from Gardner, Kansas on November 16, 2026.

It needs work before it flies again. Its magnetos have to be overhauled, and its Genet, last overhauled in 1940, will need a full overhaul in time. Very few people anywhere still know these engines, and we are fortunate to have that knowledge close at hand. Because that is the promise here: like everything in this hangar, Cam’s airplane will fly. Thank you to Cam’s family.

Filling 1932

1932 was the worst year the American airplane industry ever had. Fewer than a thousand civil airplanes were built in the whole country, and about half the companies that had been building them in 1929 were gone by 1933. Until now we had nothing in the hangar from that year. The NB-8G fills it, and it fills it with a company that did not survive the Depression, which is how most of the airplane builders of that era ended.

History drawn from the airplane’s FAA registration and airworthiness files, read page by page, and from the owner’s records. Full provenance report available on request.