Beech 17 Staggerwing Parts Catalog

Full document text

G N I w • 5 \ y Beech 17s A D R E T 5 E The Staggerwing was the first of Beech's carriage-trade designs BY PETER M. BOWERS One of the all-time classic airplanes of American general aviation is the Beechcraft Model 17, universally known as the Stag- gerwing. It is notable on several counts-it was one of the first high-performance air- planes available to the public; it was intro- duced during the Depression and was a con- tinuation of another company's aircraft; it had an unconventional configuration that resulted in an inaccurate but accepted name; and it had a remarkable production longevi- ty for a biplane in the age of the monoplane. The Model 17 originated during the peri- od when many major aircraft production plants were either cutting back, changing the orientation of their product lines or shutting down completely and surrendering to the Depression. By 1932, Walter H. Beech had built an impressive career in aviation. Starting with Swallow Aircraft in Wichita, he quit over a disagreement with the bos~, J.M. Mollen- dick, on design philosophy and became one of the co-founders of the Travel Air Aircraft Company in the same city in late 1924. When the giant Curtiss-Wright conglomer- ate bought Travel Air in 1929, Beech, presi- dent of Travel Air, became a vice president of Curtiss-Wright. With the Depression re- ally under way in 1930, Curtiss-Wright closed its Travel Air division and moved much of the staff and tooling, including Beech, to its St. Louis plant. Here Beech was charged with carrying on some of the Travel Air models and establishing new low-cost models for the greatly reduced market. These did not sell well enough to justify continued production, so the St. Louis plant was closed in 1931. Beech took advantage of this opportunity. He gathered a few of his former employees and founded Beech Aircraft Corporation on April 1, 1932, leasing a portion of the closed Cessna Aircraft plant in Wichita. (Clyde Cessna, who had quit Travel Air over another design dispute with Beech, was one of the three founders of Travel Air and still a good friend.) The object was to build a high-performance, deluxe four- to five- seat cabin biplane for the carriage trade, or what was left of it. Beech and one of his former Travel Air engineers, Ted Wells, had been doodling with the design in their spare time since 1930 and had hoped to get Cur- tiss- Wright to build it as a continuation of the Travel Air line. However, Waco was the major producer of 125- to 250-hp aircraft at that time-the co'mpany already had a near monopoly on the cabin biplane market, with its lower-powered and very boxy but efficient C-series. So, Beech's effort was doubly daring in taking on both the Depres- sion and the solidly established competition. While Model 17 seems an odd number for the first product of a new company, the number was significant to Beech. Model CW-16 was the last of the old Travel Air line that was built in St. Louis and 17 was the next number. When the Curtiss plant reopened a year later, it advertised but did not build its own CW-17 model. But the company did carryon the sequence with Models CW-19 through CW-25. Beech Model 17 was relatively conven- tional in overall structure. The welded- steel-tube fuselage was rounded out with wooden formers and stringers. The wings were rather innovative in using spars built up of steel-tube trusses, but they did retain wood-truss ribs. The fixed tail surfaces were wood, and the movable tail surfaces were steel tubing. The quality of the "Beechcraft finish" on the fabric covering became an in- dustry legend. Access to the four- to five- place cabin was through a large, single door on the left side, with two pilots sharing a throw-over control wheel. The powerplant was the 420-hp Wright R-975-E2 Whirl- wind under a snug NACA cowling. Cooling problems resulted in an odd modification- T7zefirst Beechcraft, the 420-hp Model17R (above), was born in 1932, despite the Depression and the challenges of an established competitor. {ontinued because the face of the cowling was closed, individual airscoops were provided for each of the nine cylinders. Significant design features, actually inno- vations on that class of airplane, were: re- tractable landing gear (introduced on the third airplane built); a full NACA cowling for a variety of radial engines that was inte- grated fully into the lines of the airplane, instead of being an add-on as it had been with most preceding designs; and, eventual- ly, wing flaps. As a biplane, the Model 17 broke with tradition on four major counts. For one, Beech was one of the first biplane designer's to mount the wing directly on top of the fuselage instead of holding it above the fu- selage on struts. (Waco was the only other manufacturer to use this significant advance in streamlining and structural simplification at the time.) The design's relatively high wing loading seemed to call for the use of conventional wing flaps, but Beech came up with something different. To serve as an air brake by adding drag, the rudder was split vertically to open toward both sides but still retain the rudder function. This short-lived innovation appeared only on the first two Model17s built and soon was deleted from one in favor of drag flaps, added to the un- dersurface of the upper wing. The most distinctive feature of the bi- plane was the arrangement of the wings rel- ative to each other. On most biplanes, the upper wing is positioned some distance ahead of the lower in a configuration known as positive stagger. Since the Model 17 eventually was to have retractable landing gear, the only convenient place to mount and stow it was on the lower wing, as in some contemporary low-wing monoplanes. Since the lower wing would be too far aft in positive stagger, the arrangement was re- versed, placing the lower wing ahead in the configuration known as negative stagger. This feature was so conspicuous that the