Mutual Aircraft's 1929 Blackbird: Biplane in a barn

Flight Journal, Dec 1999 by O'Dwyer, William J

In early 1995, my son, Bill, a master locksmith, was called to open some safes and locks at the Fodor farmhouse in Norwalk, Connecticut. The owners, Ron and Mark Fodor, mentioned that their family's 1860 barn contained a dismantled 1920s-era biplane. Bill and I had scoured many an old home and barn seeking early aeronautical memorabilia for preservation in both military and civilian air museums. When Bill came home that day, he was quite excited to pass along the news about an old biplane he hadn't yet seen. It would be nearly a year before it could be arranged for both of us to see it.

When Ron Fodor opened up the hayloft door on the face of the barn for us, a faint shaft of light barely reached the fuselage section of the airframe perched on the tie beams. The fabric on that part of the frame had been removed. The engine mount was barely visible except when the camera flash went off. The upper wings were on the same beams, hidden in shadow behind the fuselage along with the control wires and tail sections. The lower wings were at the far end of the loft, leaning against the outer wall. My pulse quickened at the sight of a set of jo sticks perched on the trailing edge of a wing bearing the number "X-87-M." The white X was barely visible, yet it meant my son had run into the experimental prototype model of an obscure 1920s biplane.

It was not expected that this probe into an 1860s hayloft and farmhouse would result in the rescue and resurrection of a 1929 biplane built in Kansas City, Missouri, by Mutual Aircraft Service Inc. It was an amazing treasure-trove of hardware, documents, photos taken during construction, photos of the mechanics and the entire firm who created and built it, and nearly half a ream of penciled notes made during ground-school instruction. The original set of plans for two airplanes of that period was also there. One set of plans was for Joe Cubelli's plane designed by Frank Bellanca and built at Bridgeport Airport. The Fodor barn "find" apparently included a full set of new ribs for the Bellanca; they were hidden behind the large vault door that my "safecracker" son opened.

Then, Ron and Mark took us to the shed at Ron's home in which they had stored the properly preserved 1929 Hess "Warrior" 7-cylinder, air-cooled, 125hp radial engine.

The shed also contained the mint condition original wooden Hamilton propeller, its decal as fresh as the day it was put on.

The downside of the discovery was that it was evident the X-87-M had been involved in a crash landing. Newspaper records and a photo date it as occurring on April 13, 1931, in a pasture not far from the Fodor barn. The news photo showed that it had caught a wing during a deadstick landing when it ran out of fuel en route to Detroit from Brooklyn (Floyd Bennett Field, possibly) for an Air Congress meeting. It spun in a ground loop, went up on its nose and fell over on its back. The crash wiped out the right landing gear. The rudder was intact-complete with its Blackbird logo and X number-but was bent on the upper tip.

We know it was a deadstick landing for sure because the original Hamilton prop had been removed and replaced by an aluminum, ground-adjustable, fixed Standard prop. One blade of the prop was bent backward when the plane went up on its nose. All the instruments had been removed and kept in the Fodor farmhouse, along with groundschool and pilot diplomas Ron and Mark's Uncle Andy had earned at Sweeney Aviation School, dated September 18, 1929.

For decades, Ron and Mark had wondered what to do with this aviation treasure. Our job was to find a likely home where it could be enjoyed by all in the coming millennium, for it stood as testimony of those colorful days when private aviation firms ignited a generation of dreamers.

On February 21, 1998, my son passed away from pancreatic cancer, but not before he gained the interest of Old Rhinebeck Museum in Rhinebeck, New York. They accepted the airframe on a temporary basis until we could find someone to restore it.

In December 1998, the Fodor brothers donated it to the San Diego Aerospace Museum (SDAM). By March, it was on its way to Gillespie Field at SDAM's hangar museum for biplanes in nearby El Cajon, 20 miles west of San Diego. It was very exciting to find out we could restore the airframe almost 70 years after it was originally manufactured!

The SDAM will now have Blackbirds from opposite ends of the spectrum because a Lockheed A-12 (Mach 3) Blackbird is perched on a pedestal at the museum's entrance.