In The Museum: The Thursday Regulars
- By Rebecca Maksel
- Air & Space magazine, January 2010
An all-volunteer crew works on the Museum’s Junior. From left: George Rousseau (by wing), Karl Heinzel (with cowling), Melissa Courtney (center), Joe Fichera (near tail), and Roger Guest (by prop).
Eric Long
Looks aren’t everything. That’s what curators probably muttered when the Curtiss-Wright Junior first entered the National Air Museum’s collections in 1959. The petite aircraft had been part of an airshow act, its wings and tail sprinkled liberally with large polka dots. The fabric on its fuselage and the engine cowling had been removed, and it bore little resemblance to the sleek blue-and-silver airplane the Curtiss-Wright company had enthusiastically promoted back in 1931.
Over the years, the CW-1 patiently waited in the restoration queue at the Museum’s Paul E. Garber Preservation, Restoration and Storage Facility in Suitland, Maryland, but something always happened to postpone its makeover.
Six years ago the airplane finally got its chance. And on most Thursdays since then, an all-volunteer group has met to restore the sporty monoplane. From the beginning, the project was a challenge. “We started with a bunch of junk and made an airplane out of it,” says Joe Fichera, who is heading the project.
Fichera, who began working for the Museum in 1969 and retired as a shop foreman in 1984, returned as a volunteer in 1996 to work on the Pitts Special S-1C, which took five years to restore.
When Fichera, along with volunteers Roger Guest and George and Cindy Rousseau finished the Pitts, NASM aeronautics curator Dorothy Cochrane suggested the Curtiss-Wright Junior as a successor. “Joe is a master restorer of antique and classic aircraft,” says Cochrane. “It was a natural thing for them to do. Certainly we always knew we wanted to restore it. It really didn’t look like a normal Junior, which was basically used to get people interested in flying.”
The two-seat, dual-control, open-cockpit aircraft was cheap to operate, soon becoming one of the most popular flivver-type airplanes of the 1930s. By June 1931, in just over six months, 125 Juniors had sold, each priced at $1,494 (about $21,000 in today’s dollars). Some 270 were built.
“We wanted to restore it back to the configuration and color to illustrate the popular appeal of the Junior’s design,” says Cochrane. The Junior (donated by Robert E. Maytag of the Maytag Company) “was initially very well received. Then the Depression really gripped the country and all lightplane sales went down the tubes,” Cochrane explains. “The Travel Airs, the WACOs—they’re bigger planes that cost a lot to buy, and they were more than what your entry-level pilot would want to handle. The whole idea of the lightplane movement was to be able to make a plane that appealed to just weekend pilots and sportsmen who didn’t have a lot of money, and who didn’t want to do a lot of training.”
Pilot Melissa Courtney joined the restoration crew in 2003, and Karl Heinzel, a shop foreman who had retired in 2008, recently returned to help. The project must be finished by the end of 2009, when all work at Garber will cease as the shop prepares to move to its new home, at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in northern Virginia.
Comments (1)
spent many hours in the 70s and early 80s in the back of my granfathers cw-1 junior never knew at the time how unusual an airplane i had been lucky enough to fly in. when i turned sixteen i was to heavy at 175 pounds to fly with him since when he did his restoration for second time used grade a covering. thankfully he had a tiger moth and a citabria both of which he flew almost on a weekly basis.this looks like a good place to come a see this plane this summer
Posted by karl ortscheid on February 25,2010 | 03:16 PM