Fantastic stuff, lyric, thank you!
So if New Yorker is redone, it should be without black ID stripes on tail and stabs. And the size of and position of diamond pattern would just be a best-guess.
Still curious why Duncan's plane has a yellow and black checkerboard rather than the diamond pattern. I read an interesting tidbit about him and his plane. He liked the emblem with the six-gun toting skeleton riding on a saddle-equipped flying machine gun and planned to call his aircraft "Winged Death" but his superiors wouldn't allow it. So he sarcastically named the plane "Dove of Peace" and added the dove graphic, but still used the skeleton emblem on the cowl.