A railway carpenter who wanted to loop

Curtis Pitts was born in 1915 in Stillmore, Georgia, orphaned young, and spent his boyhood at the local airfield. He crashed his first homemade aeroplane while taxiing it. Working as an aircraft inspector at Naval Air Station Jacksonville, he bought a Waco biplane for aerobatics and found it hopelessly heavy, so with his friend Phil Quigley he built his own. On 28 August 1945 he flew the prototype: a wingspan under 17 feet and an empty weight of about 500 lb, on just 55 hp. Short of money, he sold it within months; its new owner crashed it flying inverted.

The Stinkers

The second machine made the name. Pitts sold it in 1948 to the airshow promoter Jess Bristow, and one of his performers, Betty Skelton, bought it without even flying it. She christened it Little Stinker, after the skunk painted on Pitts’s aircraft, won competitions with it and took it to Britain and Ireland. It hangs today in the Smithsonian’s Udvar-Hazy Center. Caro Bayley’s Black Magic, the third S-1, won the 1951 women’s aerobatic championship. Then for most of the 1950s Pitts ran a crop-dusting business at Homestead, Florida.

Plans for the people

Homebuilders would not let the design die. They copied Little Stinker and turned up at Homestead asking for help, until Pitts released proper S-1C plans in the early 1960s. The plans-built Pitts swept the board: in 1966 Bob Herendeen won the US national championship in one. That summer, on 7 July 1966, Pitts flew the two-seat S-2, nicknamed Big Stinker, and set up Pitts Aviation Enterprises on a grass strip at Homestead to sell plans, kits and parts. Nearly killed spin-testing a new symmetrical wing, he cut the wings up with a saw and redesigned them.

Afton and the golden era

In October 1970 Pitts licensed factory production to Aerotek in Afton, Wyoming. The S-2A gained its type certificate in 1971 and the certified S-1S followed; at its peak Afton built four aircraft a month. In 1972 the US team won the World Aerobatic Championships flying nothing but Pitts, and the Red Devils team toured airshows in them. Aerotek built 259 S-2As and 196 of the 260 hp S-2B. Tired of business, Pitts sold his interests in Pitts Aviation Enterprises and Aerotek to his partner Doyle Child in 1977.

After Curtis

The design kept going without its creator. Frank Christensen’s Christen Industries took the rights in 1981, and in the 1990s production passed to Aviat Aircraft at Afton, which still builds the S-2C and S-1T and owns the Pitts name; Steen Aero Lab sells S-1C plans. Pitts kept designing, producing the S-1-11B Super Stinker and the radial-engined Model 12 Macho Stinker in the 1990s. He died at Homestead in June 2005, aged 89.

Factories

• Homestead airstrip · Homestead, Florida — Pitts Aviation Enterprises from 1967
• Aerotek / Aviat factory · Afton, Wyoming — Licensed factory production from 1970; still the Pitts factory

People

• Curtis Pitts · founder and designer — 1915–2005; Aerobatics Hall of Fame 1987
• Betty Skelton · airshow pilot — Flew Little Stinker 1949–1951
• Phil Quigley · co-builder and pilot — Helped build the 1945 prototype
• Doyle Child · partner, later owner — Bought Pitts’s interests in 1977

Records and firsts

• 1972 FAI World Aerobatic Championships won by the US team flying only Pitts biplanes
• Inverted flat spin record, 98 turns, Spencer Suderman, Pitts-derived Sunbird S-1x, 20 March 2016