Rare Pitcairn Gyro Makes Its Last (?) Flight

The historic Pitcairn PCA-2 Autogyro "Miss Champion" is in its new home -- the Pitcairn hangar at EAA's Pioneer Airport in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Steve Pitcairn had meant to have the historic aircraft at Oshkosh for Airventure, but family matters prevented it.

Instead, he had the machine trucked to Oshkosh. He reassembled it Wednesday morning, and after a test-hop, flew it from Wittman Regional over to Pioneer Airport.

As these words were being written, he was wrapping up an hour of display passes for EAA videographers, before Miss Champion goes into the hangar for good, alongside a Pitcairn PA-7S Sport Mailwing biplane and a later PA-39 Pitcairn gyro -- both of which were also donated to the EAA Museum by Steve Pitcairn.

Before there were helicopters, those rotary-winged heroes of the present hour, there were autogyros. Invented by Spanish entrepreneur Juan de la Cierva, and licensed in the USA and Japan, the autogyro solved the problems of rotary-winged flight, becoming the first truly stall-proof heavier-than-air aircraft. All that was left was to power the rotors (one of those technical problems that's really simple to define and really hard to solve).

Autogyros were ubiquitous before World War II. Cierva licensed his technology to Harold Pitcairn (Steve's father) in the USA, and to the Kayaba Corporation in Japan, among others. Gyros from Pitcairn and Kellett in the USA flew airmail from tall buildings, and landed on the White House lawn (not far from where Marine One picks up and drops off the President today).

The military was intrigued by their ability to fly extremely slowly without stalling, to descend vertically over a single point on the ground, to land with zero rollout and to make a jump take-off, and considered using them in lieu of light liaison and artillery-spotting planes.

"The Autogiro could clear a 15-meter (50-foot) obstacle from a dead stop in only 76 meters (250 feet) of horizontal travel - a feat unmatched by any airplane of the time," the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum notes.

During the war, the Japanese flew gyros on antisubmarine patrol (and built the only gyroplane carrier in naval history), the Germans used a gyro-kite as a lookout "tower" for surfaced submarines, and the British flew PA-39 gyroplanes on the mundane but vital wartime task of radar calibration.

After helicopters were developed, gyroplane development lay fallow until the 1950s, when Dr Igor Bensen developed lightweight, inexpensive gyros based on the technology of the wartime German gyro-kite. Many experimental, ultralight and light-sport gyroplanes today owe their existence to Dr Bensen's example, but the tube-frame tractor configuration of the Cierva gyro and its licensees is making a comeback.

But all rotorcraft today are the descendants of Cierva's first autogyro -- and Miss Champion, while a successful aircraft in her own right, is significant because of her closeness to the initial creation of successful rotorcraft -- you might say, Eve to Cierva's gyro's Adam, and you wouldn't be too far off the mark.

Miss Champion's designation -- PCA-2 -- stands for Pitcairn-Cierva Autogyro, Model 2. A Pitcairn PCA-1A, the oldest surviving US-built gyro can be seen at the National Air and Space Museum, as can the first gyro to fly in the USA, the Cierva C.8W. But while Miss Champion may be destined for static display, the friendly, accessible atmosphere of Pioneer Airport is a far cry from the NASM's facility on the Mall or its Udvar-Hazy Center at Dulles, where historic aircraft are stuffed and mounted like big-game trophies.

FMI: www.eaa.org  www.airventuremuseum.org/flightops/pioneerairport/