Bird of a different feather

Model Airplane News, Apr 2004 by Davisson, Budd

With fabric feathers and 200hp in its beak, the Eagle II was Californian Frank Christensen's idea of what a two-place, good-time flying machine should look and fly like. A slicked-up city cousin of the Pitts Special, the Eagle has a following of enthusiasts who are every bit as rabid about their airplane as the Pitts Special crazies are about theirs.

The truth is that the Eagle owes more than a little to the S-2A Pitts because in the early 1970s, Christensen bought a bare Pitts S-2A airframe from the factory to modify it to his own liking. He was a serious aerobatic pilot, but more than that, he was the epitome of the entrepreneur; in fact, he became a millionaire right out of college because of a few electronic gadgets he invented while in school. So, as he began to modify the Pitts, his mind took off in another direction, and he decided the homebuilt world needed a new two-place biplane design. The Eagle concept and Christen Industries were born.

Christensen hung his modified Pitts on the wail of his well-equipped workshop and never finished it. The resulting Eagle homebuilt kits (now among Aviat Aircraft's offerings) are still the standard against which all other kits are measured.

His design work was aimed at avoiding all the Pitts's shortcomings. Christensen is a pretty big guy, and the first thing on his gotta-be-changed list was the cockpit: he widened it slightly, moved most of the instruments to the front panel and almost eliminated the rear panel altogether. He also eliminated the cockpit sheet metal above the longerons; this traditionally curved inward and made the pilot and passenger feel like prairie dogs peeking out of their burrow. He capped the entire thing off with a wide, high, bubble canopy. The result was greatly increased creature comfort and better in-flight visibility.

The Pitts has an undeserved reputation for being pretty snaky on the ground, and Christensen's approach to that was to replace the super-stiff bungee landing gear with a more modern, spring-type gear. The new gear softened the swerving, and that reduced the airplane's ability to scare the devil out of the pilot by making it more mannerly on the ground. The sleeker gear legs also got rid of a lot of aerodynamic drag.

Christensen had a good eye for design as well as performance, and he laid out an entirely new cowl that works with the cleaner landing gear to make the Eagle a solid 15 to 20mph faster than the S-2A with the same engine.

Of course, an Eagle without the distinctive multicolored feather motif wouldn't be an Eagle. Christensen always paid attention to marketing, so he had a paint scheme designed that few would even attempt to duplicate on anything but an Eagle; in fact, he copyrighted it, and those who put the same scheme on another airplane could count on a "nastygram" from Christen Industries' legal department.

From a pilot's point of view, the Eagle II is exactly what Christensen wanted it to be: a slightly more civilized Pitts with no performance compromises. High-time Pitts pilots will point out that there is a subtle difference between the two in that the Pitts has a more "dense" feel it to it and grooves through maneuvers better, but you're splitting hairs at that level of performance.

Even now, 25 years after it was introduced, the Christen Eagle has to be one of the more recognizable-and one of the best flying-airplanes ever built.

-Budd Davisson