STAGGERWING - ALREADY OLD WHEN NEW

The Staggerwing was the climax, and the end, of an era.

- PETER GARRISON

LATE IN 1932, the newly formed Beech Aircraft Company flew its first product, a five-seat biplane with a 420-hp radial engine and fixed landing gear enclosed in huge fairings. Walter Beech gave it model number 17, since the last model built by the Travel Air company, which he had founded in 1925 with an all-star cast of Clyde Cessna and Lloyd Stearman and sold in 1929 to Curtiss-Wright, had been its 16th.

The United States was in the midst of the Great Depression, and buyers for the big biplane were hard to find. In a reckless moment Walter Beech decided to advertise that it was also available with a 690-hp Wright Cyclone engine. In fact, none had been built and flown with that engine, and the factory was actually heading in the opposite direction, developing a tamer retractable-gear version powered by a 225-hp Jacobs. But as luck would have it the offer came to the attention of Robert Fogg, the company pilot of the Goodall Worsted Company of Sanford, Maine, creators - somewhat ironically, given the geography - of the popular "Palm Beach Suit". Goodall ordered one.

Beech reinforced the empennage and stuffed the big heavy Cyclone as close to the firewall as it could go, giving the aeroplane the squashed face of a pug dog. The short-coupled, narrow-geared A-17F was claimed, somewhat implausibly, to be capable of 217 knots, but it turned out to be quite a handful to fly, and in due course Goodall sold it. It flew in a couple of transcontinental Bendix Trophy races, but with disappointing results.

In 1936 the landing gear collapsed under a heavy fuel load before the plane got into the air. On the next try, the engine quit a little short of the finish.