A new biplane for the 1990s, which closely resembles the famous Staggerwing Beech of the 1930s, is being designed in a fraction of the time required for the original by making use of a new computerized engineering handbook. In the traditional design department of the 1930s, many aeronautical engineers labored for over a year to size the structural components of a typical aircraft in order to assure an adequate margin of safety while minimizing weight. I performed the same job on the new Starduster Executive, being built by Stolp Starduster, Inc., by myself in less than one year. Using The Desktop Engineer, from Desktop Engineering Int'l Inc., Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey, I calculated areas, moments of inertia, stress and stiffness of structural components, in a minute or two compared to several hours needed for the manual calculations that were used by the original Beech's engineers and are still used by many engineers today.

This project was not exactly my first experience in working with old airplanes. For 28 years, I worked at the U.S. Forest Service Technology and Development Center as the Program Leader for Aviation. I had responsibility for certification and flight testing of the fire-fighting planes used by the Forest Service. The newest plane owned by the Forest Service was built in 1957. When I retired from the Forest Service, I began working as an aeronautical consultant. My primary role is helping aircraft manufacturers with the structural engineering of new designs. I also fly a Zlin Z-50L aircraft, made in the Czech Republic, in air shows.

The Starduster Executive is being produced by Stolp Starduster, Inc. The company, owned by Bill Clouse, builds airplane kits that are assembled by home craftsmen. The Staggerwing Beech that inspired the new plane filled a role in the 1930s similar to that of today's Lear jets.

It was called the Staggerwing because it was one of the first planes to use a negative stagger, meaning that the top wing is slightly aft of the bottom wing. This made the airplane easier to get in and out of. Al Capone was one of the many famous users of this aircraft. Today, many of these planes are still in existence and are so well thought of that they typically sell for over $250,000.

While commercial and military aircraft are normally designed for a specific mission, a home-built aircraft is more of a vision from the heart. The Starduster Executive provides the romance of a biplane with a modern motor, wheels and brakes, and radios that make it a safe and practical means of transportation for about $50,000. It is an open cockpit biplane 28 feet long, with a 38-foot wingspan, that is very easy to fly and capable of mild aerobatics. The estimated weight of the aircraft is 3300 pounds gross and 2200 pounds empty. Like the Staggerwing Beech, the Starduster Executive uses steel tubes as fuselage structural members and wooden wing spars. The aerodynamic contours are defined with wooden stringers and the airplane is covered with fabric. This method of construction is ideally suited for an aircraft that will be built at home because it uses very predictable materials and contains many redundant load paths.

The structural members of the original Staggerwing Beech were designed by dozens of aeronautical engineers using slide rules to calculate moments of inertia, loads and stresses. These engineers spent their time searching through handbooks, such as the Roark "Formulas for Stress and Strain," to find a section that applies to the analysis, selecting a series of formulas, generating equations and then solving them with a slide rule. In many companies, the only part of this procedure that has changed to the present day is replacing the slide rule with a calculator.