Archived Issues Of The Sportsman Pilot Magazine, Popular With Aircraft Restores And Homebuilders, Can Now Be Accessed Online

Sportsman Pilot magazine was published for 30 years by well-known aviation writer and editor Jack Cox. Longtime EAA members may recall that Jack was an editor for EAA’s Sport Aviation Magazine from 1969 until 1999.

In 1981, Jack and his wife Golda started their own publication known as Sportsman Pilot. The magazine quickly caught on with aircraft restorers and homebuilders. Freed from space restrictions Cox was able to delve more deeply into the various historic and technical aspects of aircraft construction, restoration, and aviation history. Each issue was packed with details unavailable anywhere else, and the material was rounded out with content on air races, fly-ins, book reviews, and personal profiles.

Cox continued to publish Sportsman Pilot after retiring from EAA in 1999 until he passed away in 2011. Back issues of the publication continue to be available for many issues, but many are also out of print. Fortunately Golda Cox has kindly given permission for issues that are out of print to be digitized and made available publicly online.

Jim Cunningham, Digital Projects Librarian at Illinois State University, obtained a grant from the Wolf Aviation Fund to accomplish this and is pleased to announce that 20 issues of Sportsman Pilot are posted online for anyone to read or download. The issues are also keyword searchable when downloaded as PDF files.  To access them, go to www.archive.org, click on the magnifying glass icon, and enter “Sportsman Pilot” in the search box.

The contents of Sportsman Pilot are timeless; people who build or restore airplanes will find the material invaluable whether they are doing the work in 2015 or 2050…or beyond. Cunningham hopes to identify other timeless aviation materials to digitize and make available online in the future.

The link below goes directly to the Sportsman Pilot archive.

(Image from the Sportsman Pilot archive)

FMI: Sportsman Pilot