arguably the most unusual aircraft ever built...?

(article included in its entirety)

His magnificent flying machine

Jack Tiffany worked for a long time to see his Pitcairn PA-18 autogiro
take flight

By John Erardi | enquirer.com

Jack Tiffany wanted this story to be entirely about the Pitcairn PA-18
autogiro aircraft, arguably the most unusual aircraft ever built.

But the story of locating and restoring the Pitcairn autogiro is part
Ulysses, part Indiana Jones and part "Jurassic Park."

So strange-looking is this forerunner to the helicopter with its long,
wide and seemingly droopy blades that the mere sight of it overhead
stops people in their tracks - just as it did when it first took to
the skies in 1932.

Yes, the Pitcairn might be the most interesting thing to come out of
New Carlisle, Ohio, since John Dillinger emerged from a building on
Main and Jefferson streets on June 10, 1933, with $10,000 after his
first bank heist.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0qzfyj5ZI4&eurl=
http://www.antiqueairfield.com/articles/show/99-pitcairn-autogiro-flight-video"target="_new

Without Tiffany, the Pitcairn might never have been brought back to
life. And without the Pitcairn, the world would be a poorer place.

Tiffany, who lives in Spring Valley, southeast of Dayton, has the
genes of his late father, Jack Sr., an airframe and power-plant
mechanic and an experimental aircraft crew chief.

Tiffany's first memory is of sitting in his father's lap as his dad
piloted his Aeronca Chief at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. He also
remembers being tied with rope to the center post of a pot-bellied
cargo plane his dad was flying at Fort Bragg, N.C.

The 13-year-old thrill seeker watched goggle-eyed as paratroopers of
the 82nd Airborne jumped out the door to test their chutes. This
impressionable sight explains nearly all you need to know about Jack
Jr.

"That's when you became an idiot," Jack Sr. later razzed his son.

Tiffany served in the Army Special Forces in the 1960s, came home and
made 3,000 skydiving jumps. He was the first person to fly in a
vertical wind tunnel in 1966 - way before it became a sport known as
indoor sky-diving or "body flight."

At the time, Tiffany was a civilian employee working for the
government at Wright-Patterson, where he served as one of the human
lab rats for NASA astronaut Gus Grissom. Tiffany's 5-foot-6, 150-pound
frame was almost identical to Grissom's.

When Tiffany turned 30, his father threw a big party and had to pay
off all the people he had bet that Jack Jr. wouldn't live to see the
day.

Tiffany, you see, decided early on he would never be shortchanged. He
was diagnosed with leukemia at age 12, the same disease that claimed
his 12-year-old cousin. Which explains the rest - including Tiffany's
dogged pursuit of the Pitcairn PA-18 Autogiro.

Like so many future aircraft restorers, Tiffany was a modeler growing
up. He never forgot watching autogiros being test-flown at Wright-Patt
in the 1940s. He knew that if he ever got into restoration, he would
restore an autogiro.

At the time, he didn't know which autogiro, but in the end, there
could be only one, the PA-18.

Part Ulysses, part Indiana Jones, part "Jurassic Park"

How else to explain an aircraft that disappeared from the face of the
earth 67 years ago, never to be seen again until this summer? On a
July day, with its five-cylinder Kinner engine roaring and its four 20-
foot long rotor blades - giving it a total blade span of 40 feet - the
PA-18 flew three times above Andy Barnhart Memorial Airport in New
Carlisle, near Dayton.

Workers at the nearby nurseries that surround the area stood in awe.

"None of the residents around here had ever seen anything like it, and
you've got to remember, they've seen darn near everything, because
this is aviation central," Tiffany says. "If people are like that
today, can you imagine what they were like in 1932?"

Fantastic tale

Tiffany can explain what the autogiro is and how it works to those who
ask. Foreunner of the modern-day helicopter is one way to explain it.
Link between Leonardo da Vinci's imagination and Juan de la Cierva's
drawing board is another.

But how do you explain a 20-year-dream, a 1½-year hot pursuit and 8½
years of restoration? How do you explain a story that involves Amelia
Earhart, who crashed two autogiros? Or one that includes Johnny
Miller, an Earhart competitor who beat her to California in the first
cross-country flight of an autogiro, and who died at age 102, just
before Tiffany's resurrected PA-18 flight?

The autogiro was the creation of Spaniard Juan de la Cierva, and first
flew in 1923. The genius of its design was its stall-proof engine. The
craft could fly at low speeds, even hover, although it would sink
gradually, like a parachute.

American industrialist Harold Pitcairn formed the Pitcairn-Cierva
Autogiro Company in 1928 in Willow Grove, Pa. By 1932, 19 PA-18s were
built and sold - in the middle of the Great Depression - with the
intent that someday there would be a chicken in every pot, and a PA-18
in many, if not every, garage along with the family car.

The PA-18 that Tiffany would restore was Harold Pitcairn's personal
plane. He sold it in 1935 to department store heiress Anne
Strawbridge, who was 53 at the time and immediately began flying it.
That transaction - and Strawbridge's love for the plane and strong
sense of independence - would ultimately save the autogiro.

In 1940, with war on the horizon, Pitcairn agreed to sell his fleet of
PA-18s to the U.S. government as part of a leasing program with
England, which intended to use the P-18s for wartime reconnaissance.
Included in that agreement was the autogiro he had sold to
Strawbridge.

But Strawbridge refused to part with her autogiro. It remained safely
in a hangar at her Philadelphia home when the fleet of PA-18s Pitcairn
had sold to the government was sunk off the coast of England by a
German U-boat.

Tiffany knew the story of Strawbridge's PA-18. But he didn't know what
had become of it, or where it had gone after it last flew in 1941.

"I'd been after it for 20 years," Tiffany says, "and I just figured it
was gone. That's when Nick came along."

"Nick" is Nick Hurm, a page designer in The Enquirer's sports
department who was a high school junior when he first heard his
stepfather mention the Pitcairn autogiro.

Hurm, of Lebanon, had an extensive collection of aviation magazines,
which is how he came across two small photos and a short write-up
titled "Antique Alert Notice" in the back of the September 1957
edition of "American Airman."

"Enclosed are some shots of a poor little Pitcairn autogryo ...
sitting and rotting away at Langhorne, Pa."

That tiny story was all Hurm had to go on in the spring of 1997. But
he eventually tracked that same autogiro to Al Letcher, who lived in
California's Mojave Desert, and had purchased it a year earlier.

It had gone through six owners between the time Strawbridge had it and
Letcher purchased it. Most notably, for 42 years, it was in the care
of Ted Sowirka, who had stored it in pieces under a tarp at a
Pennsylvania airport. He knew what he had, but not the financial
wherewithal to do anything with it.

When it comes to saving the Pitcairn, Strawbridge, Sowirka and Tiffany
are the holy trinity.

Tiffany needed Letcher to sell him the Pitcairn. It almost didn't
happen.

Tiffany says he "shot (his) mouth off" at the 1999 Oshkosh (Wis.) Air
Show about "having" the Pitcairn, even though all he had was an oral
agreement that he and his friends would restore and clone it.

After the air show, Letcher called Tiffany to say he'd received "a
ridiculous offer from Oshkosh" and had sold the autogiro right out
from under Tiffany.

Tiffany hung up and proceeded to get more livid by the second. He
called Letcher back.

"I should have had the right of first refusal to match that offer if I
wanted to," Tiffany told him.

Letcher agreed. "You're right,. It's yours."

Tiffany hung up the phone and gleefully told his wife, Kate, who does
fabric restoration, that they had the machine.

"Great," she said. "What did 'we' pay?"

Another phone call.

Gulp. $85,000.

For a retired government worker and schoolteacher, 85 grand doesn't
come easy. Two weeks later, enter a Xenia businessman and fellow
restorer.

"Jack, I hear you need some money," the man said.

"Yeah, a lot of money," Tiffany said.

The price came down to $65,000. It wasn't too much for the
businessman. He's one of those dealmakers who make the world go round.
And because the anonymous benefactor had stepped forward, Tiffany and
his longtime buddies - Don Siefer, a retired electrician, and Herman
Leffew, a retired contractor and shopkeeper, who form the heart of
Leading Edge Aircraft Restorations - were on their way to the Mojave
Desert to pick up the Pitcairn.

"(The PA-18) was what we call 'a basket case,' " Tiffany recalls. "I
didn't know how much was there, but I knew most of it was, about 80 to
85 percent as it turns out."

Even for retirees working on it full time, a typical restoration takes
two years, Tiffany said. This one took 8½ years. But on July 10,
Tiffany's Pitcairn flew. Afterward, Tiffany asked pilot Andrew King of
Virginia, chosen because of his reputation at a great flier of antique
aircraft, how the ship responded.

"It felt like a giant pterodactyl swooped down and picked me up and
lifted me into the sky," King answered.

A perfect analogy.

"Once the helicopter was built, these autogiros became dinosaurs,"
Tiffany later said. "That's why I've always said the autogiros are
right out of prehistoric times."

The next day, on its fourth and final flight to date, the PA-18 ran
out of gas while in the air because of a broken fuel pump. King made a
dead-stick landing without as much as a hiccup. Try doing that in a
regular plane.

A week later, Tiffany adjusted the rotor blades from 2 degrees to 4
degrees, thinking it would get the ship airborne quicker. King took
off down the runway, and with rotors generating too much lift and too
little centrifugal force, they "coned," which means they were pulled
outward, and ultimately almost straight up.

The twisted rotors have since been fixed and are now being painted.
That setback alone cost about $3,000.

The PA-18 is insured for liability, but nobody will write a policy on
it for collision. No insurance company knows its value - there isn't
another PA-18 flying.

And nobody knows about future offers. Don't be surprised if it winds
up in somebody's flying collection - if Tiffany and his investors
decide to sell it.

Typically potential buyer attention doesn't come until public
unveiling at one of the big air shows. Tiffany and his investors have
put "somewhere short of $200,000 into it" since the initial purchase
8½ years ago.

But Tiffany and his friends declare that their crown jewel will fly
again - hopefully in November - and will be ready for the Oshkosh show
next summer.

The sounds of history

Andy Barnhart Memorial Airport on Ohio 571 is one of a handful of
places in the country that turn out depth and quantity when it comes
to restoring and flying the aircraft of the Golden Age of Aviation
(1919-39).

The Golden Age includes barnstormers, restorers and icons like Charles
Lindbergh and other record-breakers.

In two short decades, writes George E. Mattimoe, "airplanes changed
from slow, wood and wire-covered biplanes to faster, sleek, all-metal
monoplanes."

The beauty of the Golden Age aircraft isn't merely in their design,
fabric work and engineering.

"It's also in the sounds that they make," says Doug Smith of Sidney,
one of the premiere aircraft restoration specialists in the country.
"When you see a Piper Cub flying by, it'll catch your eye, but the
sounds these airplanes make, the radial engines and all that, is what
really gets you."

Of all the Golden Age aircraft, none were like the Pitcairn autogiro.

"When you combine the rarity and the quality, it really is
impressive," Smith says. "It's one of the best things ever to come out
of New Carlisle ... There's nothing else that looks like the
Pitcairn."

Smith's words fit Tiffany like a Crosley automobile shoe brake, which,
by the way, is in the Pitcairn autogiro.

"There aren't many times in life where you can start out with a blank
canvas and have that possibility for perfection," Smith says. "But
when you restore or build an airplane, you have that possibility - if
everything goes just right."

Now - having endured a few bumps on the air strip and a few more to go
- the Pitcairn PA-18 Autogiro approaches perfection.

Guys like Jack Tiffany don't come with prints, and they sure don't
come with brakes.
http://news.cincinnati.com/apps/pbcs...IFE/810210346/
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- gpsman