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Appendix: History and Specifications of the J-3 Piper Cub
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282 The story of the J-3 Piper Cub began in 1926 with C. Gilbert and Gordon Taylor, brothers and partners in the very small Taylor Brothers Aircraft Company of Rochester, New York. Onetime barnstormers, the Taylor brothers had designed, and were attempting to market, a two-seat monoplane they named the Chummy, when Gordon was killed in a crash. Gilbert Taylor then moved the operation to Bradford, Pennsylvania, where community leaders, anxious to promote new local industries, provided $50,000 to capitalize the new Taylor Aircraft Company. One of the stockholders was a Pennsylvania oilman named William T. Piper, who was interested in aviation but believed that the Chummy was too expensive and inefficient a design. Piper offered to sponsor the development of a small plane to sell for half the Chummy’s $3,985 price tag. The resulting aircraft, designated the E-2, was completed in late 1930 and fitted with a twenty-horsepower, two-cylinder Brownbach “Tiger Kitten” engine. The airplane was named the “Cub” to go along with the Kitten engine. The diminutive motor proved too weak to fly the airplane and was soon abandoned, but the name “Cub” stuck. In 1931, with no suitable engine available for the Taylor Cub, the company was forced to declare bankruptcy. Piper bought up the assets, —Appendix— hIstory And specIfIcAtIons of the J-3 pIper cub TOM BAKER A three-view diagram of the Piper Cub airplane. To view this image, please refer to the print edition of this book [44.222.161.54] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 15:07 GMT) 284 appendix retaining C. G. Taylor as chief engineer. Continental Motors Corporation provided a solution to the engine problem that same year when it came out with the thirty-seven-horsepower A-40 aircraft engine, and the Taylor E-2 Cub was placed on the market with it. Piper sold twenty-two Cubs that year, with sales growing tenfold by 1935. In 1936, William Piper hired a young aeronautical engineer named Walter Jamouneau, who redesigned the airplane (hence the J in J-3), among other changes, rounding off its square wings and tail. The irascible C. G. Taylor had been quarreling with William Piper over various matters anyway, and to him the unwelcome redesign of his Cub by Jamouneau was the last straw. Taylor quit the company to establish the competing Taylorcraft Aviation Company in Alliance, Ohio. When the Piper plant at Bradford burned down in 1937, W. T. Piper moved his manufacturing equipment and more than two hundred employees to a roomy, abandoned silk mill in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, and resumed production under the name Piper Aircraft Corporation. By the end of that year, the company had built 687 Piper Cubs. ln 1938 Piper introduced the improved J-3 Cub, powered by fortyhorsepower Continental, Lycoming or Franklin engines, which sold for $1,300. Engine horsepower was soon raised to fifty, and by 1940 it reached sixty-five (which it would retain throughout World War II, with the Continental engine). Piper also standardized a color scheme; just as Henry Ford’s Model Ts were all black, so William Piper’s Cubs were all bright yellow with black trim. When Piper began producing Cubs for the Army during World War II (see the introduction), the Cub was designated the L-4 (L for liaison) and received extra Plexiglas panels at the rear of the cockpit for better visibility, along with an olive-drab color scheme. Minor modifications resulted in such designations as L-4A (the original model), L-4B (no radio), L-4H (improved brakes and tail wheel), and L-4H (adjustable-pitch propeller). Immediately before the U.S. entry into World War II, sales of the Cub were spurred by the government’s Civilian Pilot Training Program, organized to develop a pool of pilots for the U.S. military. Seventy-five percent of all pilots in this program were trained in Cubs, many going appendix 285 on to more advanced training in the military. In 1940, 3,016 Cubs were built, and peak wartime production saw a new L-4 emerge from the factory every twenty minutes. Between 1941 and 1945, the Army procured nearly six thousand Cubs, and they were flown in all theaters of the war. These L-4s (also known as the Army O-59 and Navy NE-1) rendered invaluable service training pilots, directing artillery fire, evacuating wounded, carrying and dropping supplies, and doing courier service, aerial photography, and frontline liaison. Production of...