tape 14 (side 1) 1947 - sanders takes ercoupe; erco ...1947 - sanders takes ercoupe; erco...

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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-


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


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


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


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


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.


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


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


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.


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

.... . '


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

tape 14 (side 1) 1947 - sanders takes ercoupe; erco ...1947 - sanders takes ercoupe; erco...

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