I . -...
TAPE 14 (Side 1)
1947 - Sanders Takes Ercoupe; Erco Experiments
Sanders Aviation Inc. had purchased from Erco all the
drawings, tools, parts and materials on hand for the Ercoupe.
They were also the Ercoupe distributors for the world: They
set up an office, a hangar and shop on the field and operated
the field as a fixed bas~ operator also. At first they
assembled and sold Ercoupes from parts already on hand, and
later Erco left the tools in place in the Erco shop and
Sanders ordered more parts as needed. The production
continued on a small basis and in August 1948 the S,OOOth
Ercoupe was produced. Minor improvements and model changes
were continued during this period. A shoulder harness
arrangement was offered as optional equipment, this being .
the first in the light airplane industry. Also a seat for
a child of not over 75 lbs. was provided in the bagg~ge
compartment in lieu of ba9g~ge. The Sanders operation
str~ggled on during the period of '48 and '49 which was the
time when all of the light airplane companies were having a
very difficult period and only three of them, Cessna, Beech
and Piper, and the latter just barely, managed.to survive.
Sometime during the early 1950's the Sanders
discontinued their Ercoupe operation and sold the Ercoupe
drawings, toolings and such parts as they had to Univair
in Denver. Univair was a company that supplied spa~e parts
.. TAPE 14 (Side 1) 2 •·
and materials to owners of airplanes that were no longer
being manufactured.
I now want to go back and tell about a number of
differentftems or events that occurred during some of this
same time period from, say, 1945 till 1948.
Immediately following World War II we started worki~g
on a number of improvements or additions to the Ercoupe.
One of these was the development of the tricycle ski arrange-
ment I've already mentioned. Another one was getting Edo
floats for the Ercoupe and making an Ercoupe seaplane. This
made a relatively neat package and at first looked quite
promisi~g. With the Ercoupe's sliding windows and the
walkways on either side, you could get off either side and
down onto the floats either fore or aft of the wi~g,and.with
the 7° dihedral even the low wing position was not a
terrible disadvant:g~se the tip of the wing was only
a foot or so lower than the tip of an ordinary high wing kw
airplane. The wing could be brought in over a ~ dock,
but not over a high one. With the low wing and relatively
widespread floats, the plane felt very solid on the water
and could be handled very easily in good winds. As produced
after the war 1 however 1 .the Ercoupe had a severe disadvantage
on floats. I don't remember mentioning this when I first
talked about the post-war Ercoupe, but the business element , at Erco had decided that all of the post-war Ercoupes should
•
.. TAPE 14 (Side 1) 3.
be two-control and that no provisions would be included for
using three controls as in the case of the pre-war Ercoupes.
Of the 900 orders for Ercoupes that had come in before the 1loo
war, only 112 of which·were produced, only 6 of the@l\.orders
asked for the full three controls. Four of these were .the
first four that went to the CAA. After their first trials,
the CAA flew its 4 airplanes without the rudder pedals as
two-control airplanes; and as a matter of fact, after a bit
they lost all of the rudder pedals.
In 1948, I believe it was, John Geisse of.the CAA
asked me for a set of rudder pedals, because he wanted to
use them in some tests with his cross-wind type landing gear
on an Ercoupe, and they couldn't find any of the CAA rudder
pedals. I managed to find a pair for him. !)b-Howard Ailer o~ Longiisland, New York, was setting up a fly-yourself system
where he hoped to have a sort of Hertz Rent-a-Car system in
use with airplanes, having bases at various places. He
ordered five Ercoupes to be delivered serially and the first
one was delivered with rudder pedals, because he figured that
the general run of pilots would want themdder pedals. After
he '.d had the first airplane a couple of weeks it was tried
both with and without the rudder pedals a couple of times
and after that they flew it without rudder pedals. He
ordered the rest of the five as two-control airplanes. That
left only one rudder-pedal Ercoupe that went somewhere ·in
the Carolinas, which we lost track of. With this background
TAPE 14 (Side 1) 4 .
it was decided to save $25 or so on the rudder pedal supports,
and put all of the post-war Ercoupes out as two-control
airplanes without rudder pedals. This also enabled the
installation of a brake pedal, a foot pedal for the brake,
as well as the hand brake, which was a nice feature to.have.
I believe, however, based on later experience, that
eliminating the rudder peqals as an option was a bad mistake.
This was mainly because immediately after the war there were
thousands of pilots available who could fly airplanes with
rudder pedals but did not know how to handle a two-control
Ercoupe satisfactorily. It does require to be handled in a
certain way, and the ex-military pilots not only did not
know how to handle it, but they knew that they knew how to
fly and assumed that they did not need any special
instruction to fly this "simple, easy-to-fly airplanef". So
they often embarrassed themselves, and us, too.
But to get back to the seaplane. The seaplane floats
did not have the stable taxiing characteristics of a
tricycle landing gear and they did not work well with
two-control operation in strong cross-winds, either landing
or taking off. Under ordinary conditions two-control
operation worked very well, but for the strong cross-wind
conditions and the floats, three-control operation was
really necessary. This would undoub~edly have been taken
care of had the Erco effort not petered out. Incidentally,
the Ercoupe handled reasonably well with the original tail
TAPE 14 (Side 1) 5.
surfaces, but with the floats having extra fin area forward,
it did a little better to put extra fin area beh.ind also,
and we installed a third fin and rudder directly in the
centre over the fuselage, giving us a .. three-tailed Ercoupe,
which reminded us of a miniature Constellation.
Another item under development for the Ercoupe was
a retractable landing gear. This would have increased the ,,h.
top speed about 15 mph and run it up to 140~ The main design
was completed and installed on one experimental Ercoupe and
preliminary flight tests were made. The main wheels folded
~afi~ into the wing centre section. The nose wheel folded
back and was almost completely but not quite completely
enclosed. The. gear doors and closi~g elements were never
completed on this project, so the full maximum speed
possibi~ity was never attained. The gear was operated by
means of a single hand lever, and the weight of the. gear was
balanced by means of springs. This operated reasonably
satisfactorily, although the gear had enough mass and inertia
so that if it were brought up suddenly and quickly 1 .it
stopped with a hard jerk. This needed correcting with a
damper of some sort. All in all, the retractable arrangement
was promising but it was dropped when the Ercoupe production
faded out.
TAPE 14 (Side 1) 6.
Incidentally, one of our staff, I think maybe it was ;_,-_.~ ~z._,f-4... )It re-l_.d.
Bill Green, suggestedAputting an SUP on the front of ERCOUPE,
which made SUPERCOUPE, and so we called it that.
One Ercoupe was modified to give the following ~ive
improvements:
1. decreaseftake~off run and take-off distance to
clear a SO' obstacle;
2. improve the rate of climb of the airplane;
3. steepen the glide approach to landing:
4. decrease the landing run: and
5. improve the pilot's vision in landing, take-off
and climbing flight.
To accomplish this, one modification was to increase the ~pan
from 30' to 34'. Another modification was to increase the
aileron length by 2' each, also. A third was to us~ slotted
ailerons which made a good slotted flap and to droop them 20°
for use as a flap and to have an extreme differential aileron
motion from that 20° down position when the aileron was used
as a flap. The extra adverse yaw that occurred when the
ailerons were deflected down as flaps was overcome by deflecting
the rudders as far inward as they went outward, thus nearly
doubling their deflections. Another modification was to use
a split flap in the centre section of the wing, carrying the
flap effect across the whole span. The experimental airplane
was flight tested (I flew it quite a bit myself) and it did
accomplish the desired results. It would of course·have
TAPE 14 (Side 1) 7.
added a bit to the cost of the plane, but the effort would
have been continued had the company continued to produce
light airplanes.
Another experimental development carried on during
1946 and 1947 for the Ercoupe was the development of a
special muffler. We had_a young physicist on the staff who
went into the problem quite thoroughly. After a fair amount
of both theoretical and experimental work, he finally
developed a muffler that would attenuate both the high
frequencies and the low frequency sounds from the engine
exhaust and it appeared to be quite satisfactory. It was
quite large, I believe the cylinder was about 7" or 8" in
diameter, and possibly 18" long, I don't remember exactly_.
It was very. difficult to fit it into the Ercoupe cowling,
but we did and made flight tests. This was the best of a
number of different mufflers that were made and flight
tested, measuring the,sound l~vel at the ground as the
airplane passed over. The measurements were made at the
· far end of the runway when the airplane was about 300 •.
above the ground, climbing at full throttle. They were
also made cruising overhead 500' above the ground, and at
1000' above the ground. These tests showed that with this
best muffler the people on the ground should be bothered
very little by the noise of the airplane going over. We
then obtained a somewhat smaller diameter 4-bladed Sensenich
' TAPE 14 (Side 1)
propeller and the tests with this showed a slight further
reduction in the noise level measured. The airplane
8.
performance was not quite as good with the 4-bladed propeller,
however. All in all, ·we were relatively well pleased with
our noise reduction efforts from the standpoint of th~ people
on the ground. However, we still had to do a good job of
insulating the cabin from the mechanical noise of the engine , ~~
and the noise of the propeller. This of course hasAbeen done
fairly satisfactorily. It's been done very ·satisfactorily on
the large jet airplanes, fairly satisfactorily in the small
private planes, but it would have been a little harder with
the Ercoupe than for most planes because of the large amount J;:~ of~glass in the canopy. These efforts would of course have
improved later Ercoupes had their production been continued.
The design of a 4-place Ercoupe ~ started in 1946
and carried on through 1947 and part of 1948. The
construction of the first experimental airplane was started ~.,.do_
in 1947 and was about 75% completed when the work on-~ ·~I "'I..Cc.
~ was stopped. It was basically a stepped-up Ercoupe
with a retractable gear. In fact, the same gear as that on
the retractable Ercoupe was to be used but beefed up if
necessary. The fuselage necked down behind thembin,
however, with a full door on the right hand side, as in the . case of most modern 4-place airplanes. It was designed with
the idea of corning out at first if necessary with a 150 hp
Franklin engine, but hoping that the same weight Franklin engine
.. TAPE 14 (Side 1)
Wt7·~~ ~stepped up to 200 hp in accordance with the Franklin
company~s plans. It hurt me a lot to see this airplane
dropped, but it hur~t still more to see the next one,
which I will tell about, dropped also.
In the spring of 1941 well before this country got
9.
into World War II, I was making some computations regarding
a twin-engine airplane that would have at least some of the
characteristics of the Ercoupe. During the summer and fall
of 1941 I had some help from a couple of my young engineers
at Erco, but of course when December 7 came along, this work
all stopped. It looked at the time that this entire venture
would have to be put off until after the close of the war,
but an interesting situation developed.
Some•excellent engineers applied for work at Erco,
but with the war on we could not take them because of some
~sib£cj foreign connection. One of these men was Dr. Felix
Nagel who had been educated in Germany but had been working
in this country for 10 or 12 years at the Martin and the
~ Douglas CompanyAand was an American citizen. His mother
still lived in Germany, however, and the FBI would not permit
Erco to hire a person in that situation. We then formed
a~other little company called Aircraft Development Corp.,
wholly owned by Erco but operating in an entirely ~ a.k-v.-:1- .tr:-r .,.,;ilj .._~.
areaA I was presideht of this company and hired Felix Nagel
and an Italian engineer, who incidentally had married the
TAPE 14 (Side 1) 10.
daughter of a United States Senator1 and also a Canadian
mechanic who for some reason couldn't be used on war work.
An auto dealer in College Park had had to give up during the
war years, and I rented his office and shop area and set up
our activities there. The work on the twin-engine des~gn was
carried on there and as time went on a few other people were
added to the staff. By the end of the war, the preliminary
design work had been completed, a complete wooden mock-up
of the fuselage area and other parts, landing gear and so
forth, had been made and the detailed design was pretty
well along.
During this period I put in full time with overtime,
evenings and weekends at Erco on our war efforts, but I got up
an hour early and put in a little time before the Erco work
started, at this little ·unit in Coll~ge Park, so I had at
least a half hour's contact with it most every working day.
The des~gn had some unique features and I believe that.it
would not only have been the first light twin to be produced
after the war, but would have performance and flight charac
teristics that would have been hard to beat for a while. It
was des~gned to have two engines of at least 150 or 160 .hp
each, but these were not available in a light form at that
time. There were two different 125 hp engine models available . then, both of which would be boosted to powers from 145 to 160
later. And this was what we were counting on. One of these
was a 4-cylinder Lycoming engine and the other was a
TAPE 14. (Side 1) 11.
6-cylinder Continental. In order for thes.e to have the plane·
fly satisfactorily with at least four people on one of the
125 hp engines, I gave the airplane a large span, 45', and
we tried to make it as.sleek as possible, as close as
possible to a ~a4d~~ sailplane in form. It had a
tapered wing which was thick enough in the center to house
either of the engines completely, since they could be
furnished with fuel injection systems and would not have
carburetors hanging down below. With the oil not housed in
a sump below but in a separate tank, the vertical dimension
of the engine could be made very shallow and the engine
could be made to fit completely within the .contour of the
wing itself. One of the'then new NACA low-drag, so-called
laminar-flow airfoils was used which had the thickest part
of the wing near the center of the chord. With the fully
retractable g.ear, then, this would make a very clean twin
engine airplane. The center panel of the wing including the
engines was straight, but from the engines out the wi~g was
tapered in such a way that the planform gave very nearly an
eliptical loading for the wi~g and airplane as a whole.
With the 45' span, it should therefore have a very low
induced drag and be able to do reasonably well, even with
just one 125 hp engine operating. The general conf~guration
of the plane was a little more like the W-1 than the Ercoupe,
in"that it had a high wing and used pusher propellers. The
tail surfaces were very similar to either the W-1 or the
Ercoupe, with horizontal surface between two vertical ones-
TAPE 14 (Side 1) 12.
In this case the horizontal surface was supported on the
fuselage like that of the Ercoupe, and it had two vertical
tails, like that of either one. In this case the vertical
tails were directly behind the propellers, so that by setting the fin at a slight angle
ae.i:l..egt.i.a9- t.ae i4-R a oli~Rf: amol7IN;, we could get a celitain
amount of correction against the yawing tendency of a single
engine, when a single engine was in use. With this arrange-
ment, it would have been relatively easy to get approximately
the same trim airspeed for a given control wheel position
regardless of whether the power was on or the power was off,
and throughout the entire speed range. This helped the
ease with which one can obtain a single limitation to the
elevator movement to serve with the power-on and power-off
condition. In the front ·there were two individual seats
for the pilot and co-pilot, but the rear bench seat was as
wide as that in a car of that day, so that it could seat
three people if desired. The airplane could therefore be
considered either ~ 4-passenger or a 5-passenger airplane.
Although this was a high-wing plane, as far as the
wing-fuselage combination was concerned, the wing was no
higher than .it needed to be to give propeller clearance.
And so it might be better to call it a low fusel~ge plane
rather than a high wing. With the twin-engine pusher
arrangement, we could run the nose of the fuselage as far
forward as we desired and have a good structural support for
the nose wheel, even with a good, long wheel base for the
j
TAPE 14 (Side 1) 13.
landing gear. Furthermore, I designed a gear supporting the
nose wheel in such a way that it moved up and backward as the
load was supplied to it, and it continued to move up and
backward as it retracted into the fuselage. The wheel would
in effect be dragged over obstacles by its landing gea·r
support in about the same way that the rear wheel of an
Ercoupe gets dragged over obstacles, and I hoped that this
would relieve much of the punishment that a nose wheel has
to take, particularly when it is supported from the rear,
as it has to be in a single-engine tractor airplane.
When World War II ended, the &ircraft ~evelopment
Corporation was dropped and the activity moved into Erco
itself. The new design had two features that needed extra
development. One of these was the cooling of the pusher
air-cooled engine entirely submerged within the wing. The
other was the development of a suitable extension shaft
arrangement because the propellers were located about 2~'
back of the engines .. to give reasonable clearance from the I .
wing. We made cooling tests, both at Erco and on ~ dynamometer
at the Lycoming plant. I used exhaust ejector pumps for
pumping the cooling air through the engine baffling and
used inlets in the leading edge of the wing in front of each
row of cylinders, as had been worked out by the NACA. We
finally attained satisfactory cooling at full throttle on
the ground, but the baffles that we had installed cracked
and did not last very long. Because of the pulsations that
TAPE 14 (Side 1) 14.
were in the cooling air as it was pulled through by the
exhaust ejector cooling pumps, we could not use any flat
surfaces in the baffling without vibration and failure, and
this problem still needed development but was certainly one
that could have been worked out satisfactorily. Ground runs
were made with the extension shafts also, but this was not
worked out completely satisfactorily at the time the work
stopped because of the general stoppage of the light airplane
work at Erco.
We called this twin-engine job the Ercoach, .and not
being able to complete the project and see it in actual use
has been one of my greatest disappointments.
During this same post-war period of time, two
now Side 2
· During the post-war period, two interesti~g Ercoupe
modif.ications were accomplished by others in the field. One ~
of these was a rotatable Ercoupe, devised by Wismer Holland
of Valdosta, Georgia. The Holland folding wing device is a
s~mple structure. With his device, the bolts holdi~g the
outer panel in place are removed and the wing is swung upward
and back in a horizontal position over the cabin and the rear
part of the fuselage. The trailing edges of the wings dovetail
TAPE 14 (Side 2) 15.
on top of the cabin, out of the way, and in this position
do not restrict vision, do not change the center of gravity
and do not present a vertical surface to be affected by high
winds. The propeller had an effective guard of rods which
encircleJ it to ensure safety on the ground. This part of
the road equipment~ designed in sections so that it ~ be carried in the b~ggage.compartment in flight. He used
the propeller to carry him along on the road at .average
traffic speed, and had no difficulty with oil temperature
or cylinder head temperature. All in all, it was a neat and
clever arrangement but the idea didn't seem to take as a
practical application.
The other interesti~g Ercoupe modification was a
twin Ercoupe built for Thresher Brothers Air Circus of
Alberton, Georgia by J. B. Collier, Southeastern Air Service.
The twin arrangement was made by taking two Ercoupes,
removi:ng the lefthand wing panel from one of them .apd the
r~ght hand wing panel from the other one and joining the
two centre panels together. The tail surfaces were also
joined together, but just one fin and rudder combination was
used in the center where the two tails were joined. Thus
there were three vertical fins and rudders altogether. Both
nose wheels were used, but for the rear landing gear, only
the outer one of each Ercoup~ was left in place and the inner
one was removed, so it was really a 4-wheeled arra~gement.
The plane had conventional controls, and could be flown from
TAPE 14 (Side 2) 16.
either cockpit. It had been rolled, looped and spun. It was
then a 4-place airplane with two people in each of the
separate cockpits. It was said to cruise at 140 mph and
could be flown at 100 ~ph on one engihe. It was an interesting
novelty used at airshows.
Our daughter Betsey. was 16 years old at just about the
time that World War II ended and she started taking flying
lessons in August 1945. She wanted to be able to fly any
kind of airplane and not be limited to Ercoupes, so she took
her flying lessons in Cubs. Her instructor was Everett Hart
who was our Erco experimental test pilot at the time. Ev
had been an instructor at the Parks Air College in East
St. Louis, both in regard to academic work and in regard to
flying. Parks had had at least one of the pre-war Ercoupes
all through the war, and when he got interested in taking th~
distributorship for the post-war period, we had some contact
with Ev Hart in regard to this and he was still so interested
in the airplane, having given some instruction in it, that he ~
wanted to come with Erco. And so we hired him1 When he was
our experimental test pilot for the entire post-war Ercoupe
period. Ev and Betsey rented Cubs from George Brinkerhoff at
the Coll~ge Park airport. The lessons went along rather
s~owly, however, because all three of our children had
difficulty with motion sickness when they .were young, and
Betsey still could not take much bumpy air. Ev said that
during their lessons, he would watch Betsey, and when,her lips '
• TAPE 14 (Side 2) 17 •
turned green, he would call it a day and head for home.
I remember that when I gave her her first ride in an airplane
several years before, I had taken her around Queens-Chapel
airport for a couple o.f take-offs and landings and was
turning around on the ground to take off again when she tossed
her cookies and that was the end of flying for that day. She
.:~:1~~~v.-.~h C":La··-ooat!:M:Ie er lessons for the winter months and in early
spring started again at Queens Chapel airport with Bill
Henderson as her instructor. She soloed in April 1946 and
got her private license after she was 17, in August. Then
she got checked out in Ercoupes, also. In the summer of
1947 Bob Sanders hired her to help sell and demonstrate
Ercoupes. He had an Ercoupe without wings displayed in a
storeroom in Hyattsville, Maryland, for a period of about
two weeks and Betsey spent most of the daytime in this display
room~ telling people about the characteristics of the ErcoupeJ
and she attracted quite a bit of attention morni~gs and
evenings when she taxied the wing-less Ercoupe with a pQlice I
escort from the field to the display room, a matter of a
couple of miles, and back again in the evenings. During and
after that period, she also gave flight demonstrations to
prospective customers. Her most interesting .experience in
this matter, she said, was a time when with less than 100 hou~s
of airplane time, she gave a flight demonstration to an .
airline pilot. He told her that he was amazed at what the
airplane would do, or possibly she. He had her worried when
he made his landing approach to the half-mile Erco field at
• TAPE 14 (Side 2) 18.
90 mph, which she was not used to, but he got it down, held
it off and landed satisfactorily.
Donald as a cadet in the V-5 program, was still in
pre-flight when the war ended, and he was disappointed.that
he didn't. get to become a Navy pilot. He had been fully
occupied without any vacation or time off from the late spring
in 1940 when he started at Carleton College in Minnesota, to
the early summer of 1946, when he had completed his first
year at the University of Maryland. So he decided to take a
vacation that summer and do nothing but learn to fly. He too
took his instruction from Bill Henderson at Queens Chapel
airport and before the summer was over he had obtained his
private pilot's certificate. He did a fair amount of flying ~c-~IJ..d-~
over the next two years; both~flew, most~y in Ercoupes.
In the summer of 1946 I decided that I would like to
have an Ercoupe of my own, so I put in a written order to
our sales department, hoping to get the distributor's discount.
Sales immediately took the matter up with Les Wells and Henry
Berliner and Henry came to me and said "We can't sell you .an
Ercoupe, Fred". I said "I'i:l like to have one for my very
own". So he said, "Well, I'll tell you what we'll do; we'll
assign you one for your very own, but it'll still be the
company's property and we will maintain it for you and fill it
with fuel." So ErcoupeH2439H was mine, at least for my own
personal use. This was while thi~gs were still on the upbeat.
TAPE 14 (Side 2) 19.
In the early summer of 1947 I returned from a business
trip in my Ercoupe and landed on the north-south runway at
Erco field. As I rolled to a stop, I was much surprised to
see an Ercoupe on the grass off the runway with Dorothy and
a company pilot in it, Oscar James. During the flush period,
Erco had set aside about 3 Ercoupes and established a club
so that any of the employees could learn to fly or if they
had licenses, fly these airplanes, and Oscar James was the
pilot in charge of this activity. Even though things were
not flush in the early part of 1947, this activity had not
been discontinued. It was available for the immediate
family members of the employees, as well as for the employees
themselves. It turned out that without letting me know anything
about it, Dorothy had been learning to fly on this pr~gram
and was well on her way toward soloing.
me by telling me after she had soloed.
right, a=Q a little bit ahead of time.
She wanted to surprise
She surprised me all
People ·had just. assumed
that she must know how to fly when they learned that Donald
and Betsey and I did. She soloed somewhat later and got her
private license in the fall. This involved quite a
coincidence, because it just happened that as I carne in from
another business trip in my Ercoupe and landed on the north
south runway at Erco field, there at the side on the grass
was an Ercoupe with both Dorothy and Oscar James. ·He waved
me over and said, "Come, meet a new private pilot." She had
just finished her final tests and he had given her her
temporary certificate. The permanent one would come later
TAPE 14 (Side 2)
from the C~~- She, like Betsey, ~ just about 100 hours
of solo flying, but it was very good after th~ flying
around the country with Dorothy, to know that she could
20.
handle the airplane entirely_ by herself very well. And over
the years we have covered most of the country and parts of
Canada and Mexico.as well.
During the war years when I was taking the train back
and forth between Washington and New York quite frequently,
I used to spend some of the time on the train thinking about
how airplanes could be improved further, particularly for
private use. It seemed to me that closer to the best
possible performance could be obtained and with fewer stall
type accidents if the airplane could be made to help the
pilot to fly always at a suitable angle of attack and always
with a good margin from the stall. One approach might be to
make the airplane itself so that it would tend firmly to hold
any a~gle of attack for which it was set or trimmed •. With
such .an arrangement, the pilot could set the control directly
for the angle of attack desired; the airplane would then
continue to fly definitely at that angle of attack and at
the corresponding indicated airspeed. ·The trim indicator
could be marked off directly in terms of indicated airspeed
.·and the positions for certain optimum flight conditions could
be designated directly. Then if the pilot wanted to fly at . .
the speed which would give him the best rate of climb, he
would merely set the trim indicator for the point so marked,
TAPE 14 {Side 2) 21.
and the airplane would fly at that speed. In like manner,
the airspeed giving the best performance could be set for the
maximum angle of climb or for the flattest glide. The trim
control would then become the basic speed control. Moving
the elevator control from this firmly trimmed position could
be made to require the overcoming of a certain acceptable
break-out force. The pilot would presumably have to do this
~~getting the tail down to cause rotation at a high angle
of attack in the take-off, ~ for flaring off the flight
path in a landing~and for making any emergency movement in . . ~
the air~ or possibly overcoming the effects ofAgusts.
It happened that this was easy to try out experimentally
for one speed at a time on the Ercoupe. There was a given
elevator position, and the corresponding fore-and-aft control
wheel position, for each indicated airspeed on the Ercoupe.
~l ~ h . . I'>"LL'f r~~ar ess or t e cq pos1t1on, ~
very little with various loadings.
the.c~ location changed ·~AJ...c,~ 'Also Athe tri:nUned airspeed
remained very nearly the same regardless of whether the power
was on or off. That made the Ercoupe ideal for this sort of
arrangement. All I had to do was select an indicated
airspeed, find the position of the control wheel for that
airspeed, and then block it so that it could not go forward
fro~ that position, but could come back or could turn for
lateral control. Then, by setting the longitudinal trim tab
full forward, the control wheel would always tend to rest up
against the stop and it would take a certain force to pull it
TAPE 14 (Side 2) 22.
back from that position. n. ~-r{, .
I then made~easily removable stops
which covered the speed range reasonably well and set out to
make some flight trials. I found that for any of the speeds
selected, for any one speed, that is~ the indicated airspeed
would remain the same within very small limits, from full eX
power in a climb through cruising -ana ;Level. a.cd horizontal
flight and down to a power-off glide. Also, the same indicated
speeds held good at altitudes clear up to 10,000'.
This is fortunate and natural~ because any given
elevator position holds a given angle of attack1 and with a
constant angle of attack1 the indicated airspeed is constant
throughout the entire range of altitudes, although the true
indicated airspeed corrected for temperature a~ude
increases with altitude. Of course maintaining a constant
airspeed under these conditions depended on the natural
longitudinal stability of the airplane and if a disturbance
'occurred, the phugoid oscillations would be set up and.would
have to damp out. Fixing the elevator L!lowev€t)--in" this wa~ J
gave a. greater damping than with free elevator controls and
helped some in this regard. All in all, it seemed to work
reasonably well, even in moderately gusty air in VFR flight
and the general idea seemed to be promising.
In late 1947 there was a meeting of the Industry
Advisory Committee of the NACA in Los Angeles. About a week
TAPE 14 (Side 2) 23.
ahead of that, there was a meeting in Dayton, Ohio, of the
Institute of Aeronautical Sciences on general aviation
subjects. Do~othy and I decided to flX to botb meetings in ~t?.' ~ &y~ etn d..(, v . .r"f U .X"'~ ~J>.c..Gc..
my Ercoup·e,-1\ I taped on a control wheel stop that would give.
an indicated airspeed of about 102 mph and decided to •leave
it on for the whole trip if feasible. At the Institute
meeting in Dayton I met many aviation notables, including
Orville Wright (I ~believe that was the last time I saw him)
and James (Mac) MacDonnell. The .HacDonnell Airplane Corp.
··which was organized just before the war in St. Louis, Missouri,
had grown rapidly during the war and now was reduced somewhat
to about 3300 employees. All of its orders had been for the
military and it was now actively producing Phantom and
Banshee jet fighters for the Navy. It was also working on
helicopters for the services. Mac was of course aware of
the light plane depression and of the fact that Erco was in
financial difficulties and struggling along with a-skeleton
crew. In that connection, all of us Erco officials were
going along on greatly reduced salaries and in fact had not
been paid anything for the last couple of months. I was
still hoping, however, that Erco would pull through and resume
its aircraft activities. At any rate, Mac invited me to visit
him at his plant in St. Louis on our way to the west coast
apd invited Dorothy and me to stay at his house with his
family.
TAPE 14 (Side 2) 24.
The day after the Institute meeting in Dayton, Dorothy
and I flew to St. Louis and landed on Lambert Field, which
was the main St~ Louis airport and on which the MacDonnell
plant was located. This was the same field, incidentally,
that Hans Hoyt and I had landed on in a Jenny for the J923
St. Louis National Air Races and with only enough fuel left
to taxi a few feet. It was entirely built up now and quite
active; quite a change from the grass field with the two
hangars on it in 1923.
I was taken to the MacDonnell plant where I noticed
that all of the employees referred to him in a somewhat
familiar but respectful manner as "Mr. Mac". When he first
organized his company he saw that I was well tied with the
Ercoupe development at Erco, but he gave me the open
invitation to come see him anytime things were notfuvourable
at Erco. Now he offered me the job of Director of Research
of the MacDonnell Aircraft Corp. I thanked him, and said
that I would be glad to consider it if things did not work
out at Erco, and if, because I was still vitally interested
in light airplanes, MacDonnell would get into the light plane
activity also. He said that he too was interested in light·
airplanes and would take it up with the Board of Directors,
but he didn't really think that they would go for it; he
informed me later that they didn't.
• TAPE 14 (Side 2) 25.
It was interesting while I was visiting the factory,
Banshee jets that were to make flight tests in the area would
run to Chicago and back just to warm up for the flight tests. A~
In 1923 it too~A'ver 4 hours to fly a Jenny from Chicago to
St. Louis one-way. While I was visiting at the MacDonnell
plant, they demonstrated for me the operation of 11 Little
Henry 11 which was a small one-place helicopter, the power
plant of which was a jet, a ram jet on the end of each rotor
blade. The man in charge of the helicopter design was no t~tt~ ~ than c. L. Zakarschenko, who had done the structural
design for Mac during the construction of the Doodlebug in
Milwaukee, back in 1929.
We left St. Louis about noon the next day, but the
weather was not good and we got only 100 miles to Rolla,
Missouri, where the Missouri School of Mines is located.
The following day we couldn't take off until afternoon and
then again made only about 100 miles slipping into Springfield, '
Missouri. Here we were weathered in for a couple of days,
but it was a very pleasant couple of days.
Springfield had a rather large airport some distance
out of town, but a small one right on the eastern edge of
town, and we landed on that one because we knew that Jim F (1/t," .
Johnson, one of the members of the Non-Scheduled~dvisory
Committee1 was living on that field .. Jim, and his wife, called
.... . '
TAPE 14 (Side 2) 26.
Pete, welcomed us with open arms and invited us to stay right
on the field with them, which was fine wtah usf. They lived
in a one-storfy building which included the airport office,
but a portion of which had been made over into living
quarters. The next day was Sunday, and we had an early
dinner, as I remember it because the Johnsons had to go to ~~ ~
At " ~ t:he Johns~~~~o~i just kept sitting 4J
a funeral which began I believe about 1 o'clock.
. , ,··
there, talking for a while at the dining room table. While ~
we were there, the door back of me leading to the airport J . · . 2 office op_~ned an~ who .. should .wal~ in but Bill Piper, ~r-·.
0 ~ ~~J.a;.'f)I.J?-J.~ 1./.dk: ~ 'J a-,:..-l#..e,,./~~~ ~~-<·•'- ~ ~r and his wife, Clara.A Bill was schedule[ to attend the same /
~~ti-1~ meeting of the Industry Advisory Committee of the NACA~th~t
I was,j..pr==T;ns-~rrgei€S. His son, Bill Piper, Jr., was in the
Los Angeles area, trying to help sell Pipers in those hard
times and Bill, Sr. was driving Bill Jr.'s car to him.
Mrs. Piper originally came from Dallas and he was going to
drop her off there and drive the rest of the way by himself.
In the meantime, they happened to be coming through Spring
field, and thought they'd stop off to visit the Johnsons. - ,.
I
We had a good visit with them until the Johnsons came home,
and then they stayed most of the afternoon before driving on.
When the weather cleared, we flew out to the west
~oast, and landed at Monrovia, near where my brother Herb and
his wife Virginia were living then in Arcadia, ~ some
; I
I ,
I ThPE 14 (Side 2) 27.
20 miles or so east of Los Angeles proper. After the meeting,
or rather as part of it, Mr. Horner, a meffiPer of our committee
and president of United Airlines, who had a DC-3 there, took
the whole committee down to see the Convair plant in San