Let’s just say it will take a special kind of buyer to drive (fly?) away with this beauty.
Last summer, demand for RV rentals saw an unprecedented 650 percent surge as Americans sought ways to vacation without crossing the paths of other people. Because the cause thereof still haunts us, Summer 2021 looks to be another RV season, with one rental agency’s survey concluding Americans are more comfortable renting an RV than flying. Combining the best of both forms of transport, though is still possible, provided you can afford the odd, Convair airliner-bodied Fleetwood RV that’s for sale in California.
Listed on Bay Area Craigslist is a 1979 Fleetwood Pace Arrow RV, whose boxy body has been swapped for the sleek fuselage of a Convair CV-240, which was made between 1947 and 1954. Its seller attributes its early-’80s construction to a pair of men, one a Tony Tosta whose name appears online only in association with the RV, and the other the more interesting Jason Von Straussenburg.
According to the Santa Barbara Independent, Von Straussenberg was one of four pseudonyms used by a man named Roger Crona, who reportedly escaped a Michigan prison in 1972. By 1983, Crona had met Tosta in Southern California, where the two constructed a quartet of vehicles bodied in the fuselages of scrapped aircraft. This Convair-Fleetwood, christened Andromeda, was the “mothership” of the fleet and was outfitted about as well as one could expect for amateur RV builders in the early ’80s.
To read the full story from James Gilboy in TheDrive.com, and see a gallery of photos, click here.