AVIATION: Fulton’s Folly, New Version

On the banks of the Hudson one day in 1807, crowds gathered to watch Robert Fulton, an artist-turned-engineer, show off his steamboat. They called it “Fulton’s Folly.” Last week in Danbury, Conn, the scene was repeated with variations. The occasion: the first flight of the “Airphibian,” a 150-h.p. light plane which can be bisected into an aluminum-bodied automobile.* The builder & demonstrator: Robert Edison Fulton Jr., an architect-turned-engineer and a descendant (he doesn’t know the exact relation) of steamboat-builder Fulton.

The plane can carry two passengers (and 50 pounds of baggage) 400 miles at 120 miles an hour. With propeller, wings and tail removed (a simple job for one man), it becomes a four-wheeled auto. Price, if & when Fulton’s Continental Inc. gets into commercial production: between $5,000 and $6,000.

New Ventures. Planemaking will be a new venture for venturesome, 37-year-old Bob Fulton. After he graduated from Harvard in 1931, he studied architecture at the University of Vienna, motorcycled from London to Tokyo in 18 months, wrote a book (One Man Caravan, Harcourt, Brace; $3), made a lecture tour of the U.S., worked for Pan American Airways and formed Continental Inc. This last manufactured $6 million worth of aeronautical equipment. Main item: the “gunairstructor,” Navy training device Fulton invented.

Then Fulton learned to fly a light plane, found “no real freedom of transportation.”

But many an airman wondered if entering the light-plane field now might not be regarded as “Fulton’s Folly.” The industry had been pointing its nose towards the ambitious goal of 400,000 planes by 1955. But last week (after producing 26,974 planes since V-J day) the entire industry was losing altitude fast.

New Troubles. Taylorcraft Aviation Corp., one of the largest companies in the field, filed a petition in Cleveland’s Federal Court asking permission to reorganize under the bankruptcy laws. It had overreached itself by optimistically redeeming $320,000 worth of preferred stock and spending $600,000 for plant expansion. Then, when it could not get enough engines to meet its production goal of 40 planes a day, Taylorcraft found itself with a whopping inventory ($800,000 in excess of its needs), and no way of meeting its current debts of $1,030,000. But it still had a backlog of 1,220 orders. Company president Nash Russ hoped that the court would let him continue production under a trusteeship and get Taylorcraft back in the air.

Other planemakers ran into smaller storms:

¶ Engineering & Research Corp., maker of the non-spinnable Ercoupe, shut up shop for 30 days, announced that it would cut production 30% when it reopened because of a flood of cancellations. ¶ Globe Aircraft Corp. cut production of the Swift almost 20% because of “limited demand due to seasonal conditions.”

Although many a planemaker (including Piper, Cessna, Republic) denied it, the stockmarket decline and the slump in the luxury market had cut sales. Those who did admit it usually put the blame chiefly on lack of sufficient airports to take light planes out of the luxury class.

But airphibian-builder Fulton put the blame on the kind of planes being made.

Said he: “Even if we had an airport every five miles, you could still be 2½ miles from your destination when you get to one.”

* Roadable planes have been built before. Examples: auto designer Bill Stout’s “Skylander”; a roadable autogiro; an “Arrowbile”; a “Roadplane”—all experimental.