Re-Creating A Lost Aircraft Masterpiece Highlights EAA's Wright Brothers Memorial Banquet Dec. 13

The effort to re-create one of aviation history’s most beautiful but unproven designs will be the highlight presentation as EAA commemorates the birthday of powered flight at the annual Wright Brothers Memorial Banquet on Friday, December 13, at the EAA AirVenture Museum in Oshkosh.

The annual EAA gala commemorates the anniversary of the Wright brothers’ first successful powered flight on Dec. 17, 1903, in Kitty Hawk, N.C. Over the past decade, the EAA banquet has featured some of the most impressive speakers in the aviation world. 

EAA member Scotty Wilson of Tulsa, OK, will describe his quest to build a full-size, flyable Bugatti 100P Racer replica. The only example of the aircraft, which is currently part of EAA’s museum collection, was designed by Ettore Bugatti, who is renowned as one of the world’s leading automobile designers. It was Bugatti’s only aircraft design, built in 1938-39 for an attempt to set the world speed record. As World War II began in Europe, the aircraft was hidden in France to keep it from falling into the Nazi’s possession and never flown. Bugatti died in 1947, having never seen his creation fly.

The original, futuristic-looking aircraft passed through several owners and coming to the United States before it was donated to EAA in 1994. It went on permanent display in the EAA AirVenture Museum in 1996 following an exterior restoration.
 
Wilson, a retired U.S. Air Force pilot, began the re-creation project in 2009 by measuring the original Bugatti 100P on display in Oshkosh. His Bugatti100p Project team then started a painstaking reverse engineering process to uncover the process and technology used by Bugatti in the original design, which had an estimated top speed of 500 mph. There are no known plans from the airplane’s construction and only a few relevant drawings that exist.

The project team has completed much of the construction and is counting the days until the first test flight, anticipated by early 2014. It serves as attempt to re-capture a unique, lost aircraft that some consider the most elegant airplane design ever.

(Image used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. Image credit FlugKerl2 via Wikipedia)

FMI: www.eaa.org