10 Wooden Planes

For three decades, Daniel Haligoin and Montaine Mallet, a husband and wife airshow team, wowed crowds as “The French Connection,” performing an almost impossibly tight formation routine that was as much ballet as aerobatics. Their mount, the CAP 10B, became an icon of the show circuit, and even the most seasoned of aviators would stop […]

Before the idea of Flying Ubers, or even flying cars, there was a notion post-World War II that there would be an airplane in every garage. There were many approaches to this attitude, from Molt Taylor’s literal interpretation in his Aerocar to Al Mooney’s M-18 Mite, a single-seat pocket rocket that hoped to take the […]

The Beech Staggerwing, one of the first corporate aircraft, offered pilots the chance to travel in style and comfort while covering ground in a hurry. The model 17 took wing in late 1932, and it absolutely walked away from its nearest competition, cabin class Waco biplanes in cruise. Engines over the years ranged from 300 […]

Owning an aircraft isn’t always about practicality, but it’s understandable if you can’t justify a single-seat homebuilt where there’s not even a roof to keep the rain off your head when you park. How about a fast two-seater with a more common setup? The GP-4 is an all-wood, two-seat traveling machine that looks like it’s […]

What’s that? Another wooden-winged, single-seat taildragger that begins as a pile of raw materials? There are a few similarities to be noted between a Fly Baby and a Cassutt, but that’s about where they end. The Cassutt is a classic Formula One race design that has circled the pylons at air races for more than […]

In 1957, the Experimental Aircraft Association announced a contest for designers to enter easy-to-build, affordable aircraft. The rules were vague and took a while to firm up, but one of the qualifiers was that the designs had to feature folding wings—allowing owners to keep their airplanes at home, tucked into a barn, garage or shed. […]

When Curtis Pitts’ scrappy biplane took to the air in 1945, it was a vastly different machine from the aerobatic competitors and airshow performers of today. With two ailerons fitted to flat-bottom wings and a C-85 on the nose, it flew well, but in a familiar pattern of bigger-faster-more powerful, the Pitts grew over the […]

There are few names going farther back in aviation with designs you can still fly today than Bellanca. The Super Viking was the culmination of a long line of designs attributed to Giuseppe Bellanca, who designed and built a long line of pioneering aircraft, including the first enclosed cabin monoplane, as well as the WB-2, […]

If you had to look twice because you thought you saw a Cessna 182 pictured in a listing of wooden aircraft, don’t feel bad. It caught us off guard as well. The Aeropilot Legend 600 mimics the lines of Cessna’s venerable Skylane, scaled down to a two-seat LSA. In fact, this design looks more like […]

Designed in 1934, the WACO YMF would normally belong in the antique section at a fly-in, but after a redesign and production reboot in 1986 by WACO Aircraft Corporation, the design soldiers on, with a few nods to modern advances in aviation. Powered by a 300-horsepower Jacobs radial engine, the WACO YMF features doublewide seating […]