AirVenture Crowds to Get a Peek at Classic Racer Plane

EAA Chapter 252 has just finished up work on their non-flying display version of Wittman’s Buster racer using a combination of newly manufactured and classic parts.

The effort to resurrect a classic racer honors some of Oshkosh, Wisconsin’s own aviation pioneers, drawing on local talents to build a replica from the ground-up. Steve Wittmann’s design, ‘Chief Oshkosh’, was brought back from a wreck and entered into the National Air Races at the hand of Bill Brennand, a first-time competitor. He arrived with a splash, taking home 1st place at the first post-war races in 1947. Buster continued to race and evolve with the sport, later joining the Smithsonian collection where one resides today.

Now, coming up on a century after Wittmann’s heyday, the Buster comes to the fore once more, only a handful of years after Brennand passed in 2017. Mike Butler, Jim Casper, and Jim Cunningham had befriended Brennand in his twilight years, and promised they would help further honor Wittmann’s efforts in those early years of aviation. His presence has been commemorated in some ways, like his name on Wittmann Regional Airport, but it’s easy for kids to forget the details unless they see his work in-person. Brennand casts a similar shadow in the modern era, despite his career being decades separate from his race plane’s designer–his lakefront property is what turned into the EAA AirVenture Seaplane Base, and the nearby Brennand Airport celebrates his career, too.

Butler & Casper worked hard on the Buster replica, digging up period info to make sure they could create a true-to-life image of the classic racer. Chapter 252 even procured some of the relics of old Buster aircraft, digging the wings, cowl, and an assortment of baubles from storage. Without plans to rebuild the aircraft, the team had to do some good old-fashioned measuring, making outlines on the floor and figuring out the dimensions from scratch.

“It’s not like building something with a kit,” Butler said. “We did this with sketches and photos of the original structure. The pictures helped with basic dimensions. There have been a lot of little things. We want it to look exactly like the original Buster.”

“We started working on it a couple of days a week until this year,” Casper added. “Then we needed to really concentrate on this work.”

The Buster replica will be displayed in the homebuilders’ area at EAA AirVenture, and afterwards will be moved into the air racing gallery at the EAA Aviation Museum.

FMI: www.eaa.org