FOR OPENERS
Bill Winter's The Piper Cub
The Piper Cub. What accounts for its everlasting appeal as a modeling subject? It flies well? Many planes fly well. It is simple? Hundreds of airplanes are simple. It is famous? So are many others. But why is it famous? After the Wright Flyer, the Cub could be history's most celebrated flying machine. Like Smokey the Bear, it has a lasting image. The "Cub," "Cub Yellow" — millions of people know what it is. For forty-odd years, it has been darn near part of our language.
This little two-seater, a simple frame of bare-bones steel tubing, is some kind of magic. It upstaged its automotive counterpart, Henry Ford's always-black Tin Lizzie. It lives on, and on. It is one of a unique handful of machines which, filling a niche perfectly, earned singular prestige, as did the DC-3 among transport aircraft. The Cub springs quickly to mind whenever one tries to list the workaday superstars of seventy-five years of flying history. No humbler design ever acquired such a mystique.
More people, including the writer, learned to fly in a Cub than in any other machine. Already familiar on every rural flying field in America, it became doubly world famous as the Grasshopper of WWII. Oh, there were contemporaries, but the Cub, then the Grasshopper, is the one that is remembered. Now it is more lastingly familiar than the car you drive. In power, durability, handling qualities — in all that it brought to the job — it alone balanced perfectly on the razor's edge of anything less being inadequate, and anything more being more than was needed. The ubiquitous Cub simply fitted in so well, you'd never notice it, yet it was observed by all. If much of this had to be luck, the 65-hp Cub is, nevertheless, among the most worthy of aircraft.
We can put that in human terms. Consider Charlie. Charlie was then (1945) a salty, eagle-eyed old-timer who roosted at the old Santa Fe airport. His pride and joy was a classic red Cessna Airmaster, for his cross-country jaunts. Course lines were drawn like game trails all over his tattered, all-brown charts. But for his everyday work it was a million-mile Cub, a grizzled barnstormer and air-show type — you know, the toilet-paper-cutting (most cuts win) wizard, the "drunk" who steals the warming-up airplane while the announcer spiel—he sported this faded red peaked cap and a perpetual tumbleweed cigar always clenched at 270 degrees.
He was a mountain pilot. Now that's a very special breed of cat, for only those who know the lore of the mesas and the canyon winds live to swap stories. If he couldn't fly with you, he'd tell you to take the Cub and get lost, but don't mention money. He'd land his Cub anywhere to go hunting, and would come back with his venison piled in the rear. Or he'd land on top of some dam and go fishing.
His depth perception was micrometer-sharp. When he drove, he allowed just enough space for the paint to clear. He put down the Cub with a silken touch when "the earth looked flat." And so on this bright Rocky Mountain morn he took us up to preach the mountain-pilotage Bible, according to Charlie.
First, there was the matter of wind. To cross that mesa from downwind, you first got altitude, then leveled off and flew over it. Never try to climb over it, for the waterfall of wind was unmerciful. But if you were going downwind, he declared it impossible to hit the ground as you approached the lee edge. Try it, he'd challenge. Why it was that we always had supreme confidence in an SLP (Senior Local Pilot) we never understood — except it was obvious this one must have done something right to live to be a sage. We pushed over into a steep dive, taking aim at the brow of the cliff — and held it! Almost to the ground, the wind lifted the Cub like magic, bumped it past the cliff, and the dive continued uninterrupted.
Over a nearby canyon of the Rio Grande, Los Alamos sparkling white just off to the right, he went into this steep bank, round and round, letting the ship sink gradually into the canyon, down and down, and presently, as a conspicuous doorway of an ancient cliff dwelling kept flashing by, he'd point on every pass and say, "See! There!" And where the canyon widened enough to flatten the wings, he skimmed the dry-season trickle of water, yawing one wing tip then the other to slice it through a flat-out flock of ducks, who took evasive action in marvelous Immelmans. Then back in the steep bank, round and round, slowly ascending, the Cub struggled out of the gorge.
There, a strip of dirt road. A wheel landing at full throttle — he practically ignored the throttle — and the Cub was racing across the barren land with a comet tail of dust. A right-angle turn ahead, a small tree at the intersection. Around it we went, full tilt, on the wheels. Flying again, but so low the dust trail hung on. Power lines ahead. Would he go over them or under them? It was now or never. He went under them — as he knew he would.
At long last, he set up the approach, then informed us we would do the "drunken pilot" act. Now we've always suspected that some people can fly a Cub at less than minimum flying speed. We've watched Piper test pilots long ago, not wishing to walk across the field, haul a Cub off the ground after the briefest of runs, in a sort of nose-high slip to do a slow-motion slide across the field.
The hairiest part of the drunk-pilot act — to the spectators — is the jack-rabbit landing. It looks fearful. The bounces are for real, and gigantic, but Charlie was only kissing the runway, and while the scant airspeed after each bump should give one goose bumps, the ship really felt rock-solid, and then another galloping bump, and another, all the way down the runway. After one bump, Charlie called, "How many times would you like to see the wheels turn? Pick a number from one to five." He had to be nutty. Humor the old boy, we must. Not wishing to embarrass him by asking for five — awful if he rolled them six times, instead of five, or maybe four. He could be shattered. If you are slow in timing this picture, we are talking of wheel turns in the air, after a bounce, not on the ground. So we said "two." Once could be an insult, we figured. Down dropped the Cub, touched ever so lightly, and air appeared between the wheel and the runway. Slowly it turned, once, twice — and stopped! And thus ended a routine hop.
Down to Hobbs the next day to watch the locals practice for an air show. Two guys in Cubs were slicing toilet tissue ribbons. Altitude is limited so you don't have all day for this act. Seven cuts was the best. So old Charlie borrowed a Cub and showed them how. Thirty-seven cuts! He did not fly back and forth attacking the ribbon, but hung there, just swinging the wing tip, back and forth, like a scythe. You don't buy this? That is your problem and I don't care if you fly 747s or jet fighters. He did allow that it was an old trick to squeeze the roll before you tossed it out — takes longer to unravel. Maybe so. But we will wonder what held up that Cub as he slipped it this way and that ... cut, cut, cut — 37!
You can still see Cubs at air shows. Whether it was the late great Bev Howard skimming the runways inverted, or the Old Professor, these show Cubs, if you can catch an act, demonstrate that no airplane ever devised can more precisely extend the human arms and legs and senses of the man at the controls. The crate is alive — the pilot its brain.
This is why we will build model Cubs forever. Maybe Hazel Sig's Clipped-Wing Cub — the big one she flies is a typical air-show ship. There are others.
But to our mind, the finest of the model Cubs, in the classic sense, was the 6-foot J-3 by Chuck Hollinger, which appeared in Air Trails during the fifties, and was kitted by Berkeley. That Berkeley Fairchild low-wing trainer was another Hollinger masterpiece. When Berkeley failed, the product line went to Fox, and then to Sig. We'll bet that Sig has some Hollinger J-3 plans in the barn. How about that, Sig? Mac? Mike?
Ah, the Cub-yellow Hollinger Cub. What a collector's item. And what a bird. A model Cub that captures the essence of the real Cub, in its framing, in its flight. The stuff that dreams are made of.
Transcribed from original scans by AI. Minor OCR errors may remain.
