Something Informal

"Aviation in the U. S. has been stagnating. . . . We are all copying. . . . None of us are building the plane that the public wants to buy, and that proves we are standing still. . . . We are going to fix it so a man can take a couple of lessons on Friday and fly his plane home on Monday. . . ."

Thus a year ago spoke lanky, bushy-haired William Bushnell Stout, vice president of Stout Metal Airplane Co., designer and builder of Ford tri-motors (TIME, May 26). Airmen knew that Designer

Stout is not given to empty talk; they wondered what was up his sleeve. Last week Stout brought out of his sleeve a plane "that the public wants to buy"--a small two-seater monoplane distinctly and purposely suggestive of the famed old "Model T" Ford automobile. He named it the "Sky Car," admitting (hoping) that "the public, in its usual fashion, is likely ... to dub it something less formal." The Sky Car is a low-slung, truncated cabin suspended beneath a cantilever wing, with a tail assembly mounted at the end of an outrigger framework. The engine is a 75-h. p. pusher, with the propeller whirling between the members of the outrigger. The ship is all-metal, blue and silver, weighs under 1,000 lb. Anything but racy, it looks and is a winged bus. The venturi tube (which catches the wind for the speed indicator) attached to the nose outside, even suggests an oldtime Ford crank. But it is the cabin interior that Designer Stout has ingeniously arranged to make the automobile driver feel instantly at home. The dashboard almost exactly duplicates that of the oldtime Model T Ford car. The pilot sits at the wheel, flips a conventional Ford motor switch on the instrument board, presses his heel on an ordinary Ford starter button, pulls out a Ford choke rod, shifts his feet to--instead of a rudder bar--a set of pedals like the old Ford transmission pedals, yanks with his left hand a Ford brake lever that locks both wheels, or brakes either one for ground-steering. Because the engine and propeller are far separated from the cabin, it is claimed that noise in flight is no greater, to the occupants, than that of an automobile going 60 m. p. h. over smooth roads. The claim is it will take-off in 35 ft., can use average boulevards as landing fields.

The entire project, developed in the Stout Engineering Laboratories at Dearborn, is ostensibly Designer Stout's. But rumors in the industry persist that, if successful after six months trial, the plane will be taken over by Ford for large-scale production.

Said Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr. who, with his wife, was the first "outsider" to fly in the Sky Car: "Bill Stout told us it would become but a matter of two or three hours for anyone who drove an automobile to learn to fly [the plane]. . . . Speed is 100 m. p. h. You can get 24 miles to the gallon of gasoline and stay in the air nearly five hours with a tank full. It will first sell in the neighborhood of $1,500; and might be purchased within a few months for less than $900."

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