Planes worth modeling

Model Airplane News, Dec 2000 by Davisson, Budd

Back in what seems like the dark ages of the late 1960s, American aerobatics was enjoying a rapid return to popularity. It had been a decade since Curtis Pitts yielded to pressure from wannabe builders of his little airplane-as made famous by Betty Skelton (Lil Stinker) and Caro Bayley (Black Magic)-and produced plans for the S-1C. Now anyone could build a hyper little jitterbug of an airplane and go out and burst blood vessels to his or her heart's content.

Midway through the decade, however, the World Aerobatic Contests began to show us that maybe we Americans didn't have the world as sewn up as we thought we did. The Eastern Bloc fliers, were routinely kicking our butts in competition, partly because the Czech Zlins and Russian Yaks didn't know right-side up from upside-down. They did outside maneuvers much better than we could with our airplanes. So Curtis put symmetrical wings on the little S-1C, making it the S-1S, and we proceeded to do some butt-kicking of our own. We cleaned the world's clock in 1972 when the Pitts-mounted U.S. pilots took home gold for both the individual men's and women's titles, as well as for the men's and women's team trophies. The message was: don't mess around with

a Pitts.

About this time, it became obvious that having superb single-place aerobatic airplanes had a drawback: there wasn't a'a two-place trainer with similar capabilities in which to train newbie akro pilots. So Curtis went back to his drawing board and came up with the Pitts S-2, a two-place, 20-foot span plane (S-is all had less than 18 feet) powered by a 180hp Lycoming swinging a fixed-pitch prop. He used the same "round wing" technology as was used on the S-1S. He certified the airplane, eventually found partners and financing and put the airplane into production in Afton, WY

The straight S-2 never went into production; instead, it was modified to accept the 200hp IO-360 Lycoming and a constantspeed prop. This was the S-2A. The pure S-2 (a delightful, nimble little machine) lived on only as the S-2E factory-built kit.

The S-2A was produced for barely 10 years: 1971 to 1981, during which 272 airplanes were built before it was replaced by the 6-cylinder S-2B. Approximately one third of the airplanes went overseas immediately, and another third eventually followed that first batch, which left around 80 of the airplanes in the U.S. A delightful little airplane with a definite karma, the S-2B has one of the most pleasing personalities of any airplane ever built. Many airplanes can now outperform it, but they almost always do so at the expense of handling.

Most S-2As cruise at about 135mph and have a redline dive speed of 204mph, which is almost never used, as the airplane doesn't need that kind of speed to perform. With a light load, 170mph gives plenty of oomph for a vertical roll with a hammerhead on the top, and it will outside loop from the bottom at 165mph with no effort.

With approximately 3,000 hours in the airplane, all I can say is, "Thanks, Curtis, for making such a wonderful addition to my life."