Despite having had a father who's entire career was in aviation, I remain, much to my chagrin, pretty bad at aircraft identification identification. It took me a while and a circuitous route to work out which plane these cufflinks depict.

When I first saw them cufflinks, I thought the plane was a Cessna. But most Cessnas are high-wing right? So, even though the registration number on the side of the little plane, N-5000Y, belongs to a Cessna 172 today in real life, that's not what this plane is.

I remembered Dad talking about flying Piper aircraft and the names Apache and Comanche twin. When I looked up photos of these planes, they looked much like the cufflinks. But Piper made a number of different planes, all looking somewhat similar - at least to me!

After a bit more digging around I came across the Aircraft Identity page on the Federal Aviation Administration website, where you can look up a plane by its registration and also see which planes the registration formerly belonged to. Between 1961 and 1972 N-5000Y was assigned to a Piper PA-23-250 which makes it a Piper Aztec and probably dates the cufflinks to the same period.  How's that for a bit of unnecessarily nerdy detective work?

Used. Good condition, but a couple of small chips in the dark paint/coating on one cufflink. Please check the photos. They have spent a lot of years kicking around in a box, or in the back of a drawer with other old cufflinks, tiepins and watches and they're no longer quite perfect. But then again, they're old and have a backstory of belonging to a pilot with a long, long career in aviation flying everying from the Chipmunk to the Concorde.

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