Page 34 - Volume 13 Number 10

these workers would play a pivotal role in the fabrication and assembly of two special, custom-built biplanes that would be the last of their breed for the Stearman Aircraft Company.
Within weeks Schaefer’s recruiting efforts were paying off handsomely. He needed a minimum of 100 workers and he had no trouble filling those positions. The factory was soon humming with activity, filled with the sights, sounds and smells of workers building flying machines. In addition, the Boeing deal ensured that the band of employees would be kept on the payroll well into 1933. Although the company was not producing its own airframes, only components and assemblies for Boeing, it was playing a vital role in the manufacture of airline transports that would help launch Boeing on a path to become the world’s premier supplier of piston- and jet- powered airliners.
Simmons, a Stearman distributor based in northern California, had spearheaded the sale after teaching Vette to fly at the Boeing School of Aeronautics in San Francisco.
The airplane Vette wanted did not exist within the company’s existing inventory of designs. It would have to be engineered and built according to Vette’s specifications, and was exactly the type of challenge that chief engineer Short and his team were eager to tackle. Vette intended to fly the airplane as part of a nationwide promotion tour extolling the features of a new fastener for joining metal structures. The fastener, called a Huck rivet, had been designed by his brother-in-law Louis C. Huck. Once details of the contract were settled between Vette and Schaefer, Short and his engineers began the massive effort of making Vette’s biplane a reality, and the contract stipulated that delivery had to be made no later than March 1933.
As workers manufactured parts and assemblies for the
Boeing 247, it seemed as though the Stearman Aircraft
Company would never build another design of its own.
In late December 1932, however, a young businessman
named John D. Vette, Jr., contacted Schaefer to discuss
construction and pricing of a special-order biplane for his
personal use. Schaefer quickly fired off a reply reassuring
Vette that the company was still in the business of
building airplanes and was fully capable of complying
with every aspect of his custom-built Stearman. Virgil RPM. It would turn a two-blade, Hamilton-Standard
The engineering department was soon busy working long hours on the two-place, open-cockpit design, which Short dubbed the Model 80 “Sportster.” It would prove to be the company’s last hurrah in a long line of purely commercial aircraft produced by the company. To power the biplane, Vette had specified a Pratt & Whitney supercharged, nine-cylinder Wasp Jr. T3A static, air- cooled radial engine rated at 420 horsepower at 2,200
32 • KING AIR MAGAZINE OCTOBER 2019