Curtis Hardeman Pitts (December 9, 1915 – June 10, 2005) was an American aircraft designer, aircraft manufacturer, crop duster, and airport fixed-base operator. He became widely known and revered in the aerobatics community for his design of the Pitts Special, a series of highly aerobatic biplanes. Pitts Specials dominated aerobatic competition from the 1960's to the 1970's. Though later outclassed by newer monoplane designs, Pitts Specials remain popular as sport airplanes for their excellent flying qualities. The Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC has called Curtis Pitts' design "revolutionary because of its small size, light weight, short wingspan and extreme agility".
Curtis was born in Stillmore, Georgia in 1915 and lost both his parents while growing up, losing his mother at age 9 and his father at age 17. He grew up in Americus, Georgia. Pitts was fascinated with flying as a child and spent much of his free time at the local airfield, watching airplanes and dreaming. He designed and built his first aircraft while still in high school, a Parasol wing craft with a modified automobile engine, but Curtis crashed it during taxi tests. In 1933 he found work as a railroad carpenter in Ocala, Florida and began taking flying lessons.
Settling in Jacksonville, Florida, Curtis met and married Willie Mae Lord. In 1940 he took at job at Naval Air Station Jacksonville as a Naval repair depot aircraft inspector. Curtis continued flying in his spare time, as much as money would allow. Interested in aerobatics, he managed to purchase a Waco F series biplane, but found the performance of the heavy airplane to be dismal, especially in regards to available power vs. weight. Realizing there were no aircraft within his budget capable of the maneuverability he had in mind, he decided to design and build his own airplane.
Designing the prototype Pitts Special S-1, N52650
Pitts visualized something extremely compact and lightweight, with the inherent strength of a biplane, powered by a small and affordable power plant. The result was the first Pitts Special, a tiny single seat biplane that was simple, cheap to build, and incredibly agile. Engineers at the Naval repair depot helped with some elements of the design, but the bulk of it came purely from Curtis' talented mind. He had an uncanny natural sense for aerodynamics and engineering, and despite a limited formal education (high school and an engineering correspondence course), he succeeded beyond his wildest expectations. He later recalled, "When you don't know any better, you can do a lot of things...".
Curtis shared the project with a friend at the Naval repair depot, Phil Quigley, and the two men devoted all their spare hours over several months turning raw materials into an airplane. They finished in the summer of 1945. Carrying registration N52650, Curtis served as test pilot, taking the prototype into the air for its first flight on August 28, 1945. The minuscule airplane had a wingspan just under 17 feet and an empty weight of about 500 lbs. Limited by a 55 hp Lycoming engine, it still delivered exceptional performance, exactly what Curtis had originally hoped.
The small Lycoming soon gave way to a 90 hp Franklin engine. Curtis experimented with his own home-brewed inverted fuel system on the Franklin with mixed results. Both Curtis and Phil Quigley enjoyed flying the prototype Pitts Special over the next four months, putting 40 hours on it. Local Jacksonville pilots took notice and Curtis recalled, "Everybody was kind of in awe of it...it was a little bitty airplane and they just couldn't believe it could do the things that I was doing".
Curtis had borrowed money to buy the Franklin motor, however, and by the end of 1945, the lender wanted payment. He subsequently sold N52650 to a local agricultural pilot for $2,000. The new owner crashed the airplane a few days later after fuel starving the engine while flying inverted. Fortunately, he walked away from the accident, but the airplane was destroyed.
After the loss of the prototype Pitts Special, Carl Stengel of Stengel's Flying Service in Gainesville convinced Curtis to relocate his family from Jacksonville. Stengel planned to finance the building of 10 more Pitts Specials at his facility and Curtis began building a new airplane. However, the financing fell through and only one incomplete aircraft emerged from the deal. Curtis bought out Stengel's crop dusting and FBO operation in the spring of 1947 and worked to complete Pitts Special #2, carrying registration NX86401.
Early fame: The second Pitts Special, "Little Stinker"
Completed at Gainesville, the second Pitts Special S-1 sported several improvements over the lost prototype, including a 90 hp Continental, a longer fuselage, and a working inverted fuel system. Phil Quigley began flying the airplane in airshows and caused a minor sensation in the latter half of 1947 as nothing like the Pitts Special had ever been seen. The airplane appeared on the cover of "Skyways" magazine in December 1947 and interest in the Pitts Special spread nationwide.
In 1948 Curtis sold the airplane to airshow pilot and promoter Jess Bristow. Bristow hired Phil Quigley to continue flying the Pitts Special that summer, and one of Bristow's other airshow pilots, Betty Skelton, was so impressed with the airplane she decided to buy it without even test flying it first. She paid Bristow $3,000 for the airplane in August 1948.
Betty re-registered NX86401 as N22E in 1949 and christened it "Little Stinker", winning competitions and performing in air shows between 1949 and 1951. She crated the airplane and took it to England and Ireland, where she flew in the Royal Air Derby and created international interest in the design. Betty retired from performing in 1951 and sold N22E, but she later reacquired the airplane and donated it to the Smithsonian. "Little Stinker", Pitts Special #2/N22E, hangs today in the Udvar-Hazy annex of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.
In late 1948 airshow promoter Jess Bristow came to Curtis with the idea of marrying a 450 hp Pratt and Whitney 985 radial engine to a scaled up Pitts Special design. In response, Curtis designed and built the Pitts Samson, a 2,200 lb biplane with a 24-foot wingspan that thrilled airshow crowds for several years in the 1950's. Samson was destroyed in a mid-air collision but the pilot survived. In the early 1980s airshow pilot and builder Steve Wolf recreated "Samson" with Curtis' assistance and flew it for several years.
The third Pitts S-1: Caro Bayley's "Black Magic"
In 1949 airshow performer and WASP pilot Caro Bayley had the opportunity to fly "Little Stinker" and persuaded Curtis to build her a similar airplane. The third Pitts Special S-1, carrying registration N8M, was completed in 1950 in Gainesville. It was powered by a 125HP Lycoming O290 and Bayley nicknamed the airplane "Black Magic". She won the Women's Aerobatic Championship in 1951 but quit performing after marrying later that year. N8M languished until being sold in 1953. It was later destroyed in a fire. An accurate replica of "Black Magic" was built by engineer Ted L. Teach of New Carlisle, Ohio over 30 years and successfully flew in 1999.
In the late 1940s, Curtis became interested in monoplane midget racing, so he designed and built the "Pitts Pellet". The aircraft crashed in the spring of 1949 after the pilot encountered a high-speed stall in the propwash of another aircraft. Curtis completed a second midget racer, "Lil Monster", which raced into the early 1950s, but he never built another monoplane race aircraft. Lil Monster survives to the present day.
The 1950s: a change in priorities