Page 32 - Volume 13 Number 10

Sportster!
In 1933 the Stearman Aircraft Company unveiled the Model 80 and Model 81 – transtional designs that represented the ultimate biplane at the dawn of the monoplane age.
by Edward H. Phillips
In 1932, the halcyon days of the “‘Roarin’ Twenties” were nothing more than painful memories for the American people. Wall Street was still in shambles three years after the horrendous stock market crash of October 1929, and President Herbert Hoover’s policy of laissez-faire did nothing to help spark the economic recovery the United States so desperately needed. The election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in November 1932, however, saw a major shift from Hoover’s Republican “let do” attitude to FDR’s democratic “let’s do” agenda. During the next year the gradual implementation of his “New Deal” program resurrected the banking system, restored the public’s confidence in the economy and began to put Americans back to work.
Despite Roosevelt’s efforts, by July 1932 the Dow Jones industrial average had plummeted from a high 350 in 1929 to about 50 in July 1932. Interpreted another way, the stock market hit bottom after losing 89 percent of its value during a three-year plunge. Beginning in 1930 and continuing into the early 1930s, the once thriving
aircraft industry in Wichita, Kansas, had come perilously close to annihilation. Many of its small companies had quickly succumbed to the Great Depression, and even the Travel Air Company, the city’s first truly successful airframe manufacturer, fell silent in 1931 followed by the Cessna Aircraft Company one year later. The Stearman Aircraft Company was hanging on by a thread, thanks to being part of the giant aeronautical conglomerate, United Aircraft & Transport Corporation (UA&TC). These three Wichita companies had built and delivered nearly 900 new airplanes in 1928 alone, and for 1929 local executives Walter H. Beech, Clyde V. Cessna and Lloyd C. Stearman had been confident that numbers would double.
It is important to mention that soon after an order for 12 Model 4CM Junior Speed Mail biplanes had been
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The sole Model 80 “Sportster” was built as a custom biplane to specifications stipulated by businessman John Vette, Jr. He flew the airplane on cross-country trips promoting a new fastener called the Huck rivet that was designed for metal airframe structures. The handsome Stearman was delivered in 1933 and represented the zenith of biplane development by the company.
(Courtesy Kansas Aviation Museum)