You Can Buy An Awesome Plane For Half The Price Of The Average New Car - The Autopian (2024)

There’s no real way around it: flying gets expensive quickly. Almost everything about being a pilot is expensive, including training and renting an aircraft, let alone owning one. But it doesn’t have to be a hobby reserved for those with six figures or more to play with. In fact, you can get an awesome plane for less than half of the price of the average new car. This is the Aeronca Chief, a real piece of history and a beloved aircraft that can be had for an affordable price.

I recently received my latest issue of Sport Aviation, the magazine for members of the Experimental Aircraft Association. Most issues tell the story of some sort of rare aircraft as well as what’s new in aviation plus, some heartwarming enthusiast stories, too. The May 2024 edition of Sport Aviation caught my attention for one of its cover stories.

Sport Aviation says you can fly affordably by choosing a ready-to-fly aircraft for $35,000 or less. That’s still a lot of money, but as the magazine rightfully points out, the average new car sold in America did hit $48,000. There is a strong draw to the idea of buying an entire flying machine for less than what people are spending on their next crossover. The Sport Aviation article is beginning to sound like something we’d write over here!

I can tell you firsthand that flying gets expensive in no time flat. Currently, it costs me about $500 for two hours of flight lessons. That gives me the rental of the aircraft, fuel, and the instructor. Ideally, you want to fly at least once a week, which means you’ll blow through $2,000 a month. You need at least 40 hours for your license, which will cost you around $10,000. Some people pay up to $20,000 before they finally get their license. Then you’re going to want to keep flying. Rentals are cheap enough, but if you plan on flying a lot, those rental costs are going to escalate quickly.

A Cessna 172, a popular training aircraft and practically the flying Toyota Corolla, will still cost you $70,000 or more – and that’s for one that rolled off the line in the 1950s. This is where Sport Aviation’s list of cheaper aircraft comes in. There are lots of great choices on the list and I’ve even written about the MirocopterSCH-2A helicopter in it, but I’m going to highlight what sounds like a decent deal.

Getting Americans On Wings

While Aeronca is hardly a household name today, in the years before and immediately after World War II the company was a serious player in general aviation.

Aeronca’s story starts in 1906 when Frenchman Jean Roche arrived in New York with his family at 12 years old. This was just three years after the Wright Brothers flew into the history books and just about everyone was obsessed with aviation. Roche was no different and he loved to tinker with model aircraft, propellers, and gliders. As the American Aviation Historical Society writes, Roche’s model aircraft were award-winning and aviators loved his propellers enough to pay him to make some. Roche is said to have spent a lot of time on Long Island, where he got to mingle with aviation pioneers like barnstormer John B. Moisant and engineer Gieuseppe Bellanca.

Just five years into his new life in America, the Smithsonian Magazine writes, Roche applied for what would be just the first of 20 patents. That would be enough accomplishments for any person, but Roche pushed forward, earning an engineering degree from Columbia University. It wasn’t long before Roche graduated from model aircraft to designing the real deal. Later that year, Roche found himself with the U.S. Army Signal Corps Aviation Section at McCook Field in Ohio. As the Smithsonian Magazine writes, Roche found himself busy at McCook Field working in America’s first center for military aviation.

There, Roche joined forces with fellow engineer John Q. Dohse to create a personal aircraft with automatic stability. The Roche-Dohse Flying Flivver weighed around 400 pounds and measured just 20 feet from prop to tail and had wings spanning 36 feet.

This aircraft was delightfully simple. Its fuselage was draped in cotton and the aircraft had a distinctive razorback type of shape. Wires kept the wings in shape both when the aircraft was flying and when it was parked. The Roche-Dohse Flying Flivver didn’t have a windshield, brakes, or even a tailwheel. That’s right, this aircraft slowed after landing by having the pilot reach out with a gloved hand to drag a tire to a stop with friction. At first, the aircraft didn’t even have an engine and the builders attempted and failed to get the aircraft to fly with a four-cylinder Henderson motorcycle engine. The aircraft had its first engine start in 1923.

When that engine didn’t work, the Flying Flivver got 29 HP two-cylinder engine and the aircraft took flight in 1925. Around 200 test flights were conducted before this engine was destroyed in 1926. Its replacement engine would be a 26 HP 107-cubic-inch two-cylinder engine built by Army engineers Robert Galloway and Roy Poole.

It would take until 1928 before Roche and Dohse caught a big break with their personal plane. That year, several businessmen, including Dow Chemical and Drug Company executive I.C. Keller plus Robert A. Taft, the son of former U.S. President William Howard Taft, formed the Cincinnati Aeronautical Corporation. This was only a year after aviation was on the minds of Americans once again thanks to Charles Lindbergh’s successful trans-Atlantic solo flight in 1927. The Cincinnati Aeronautical Corporation would later be known as the Aeronautical Corporation of America, shortened to just Aeronca. There was just one problem, this company didn’t have an aircraft to sell!

The new Aeronca took the Roche-Dohse Flying Flivver, which evolved into the Roche Original, and used the aircraft as its first place. The company added some windows before calling the aircraft the Aeronca C-2. Magellan Aerospace, the current owner of Aeronca, explains what happened after:

Aeronca was the first U.S. Company to produce and market a truly light airplane for the general aviation market. The Aeronca C-2 opened up flying to the public and helped make the company a major force in the general aviation market.

The company, which moved operations to its current location in Middletown, Ohio in 1940 and changed its name to Aeronca in 1941, continued to grow. During WWII Aeronca provided the military with versions of several of its popular aircraft. The Aeronca Grasshopper, a light liaison and observation monoplane saw extensive duty in all theaters of operations. Aeronca also manufactured hundreds of trainers and gliders for the war effort.

Aeronca would see a boom after World War II. Post-war Americans were obsessed with flying and countless people took to the skies. It was a good time for companies like Aeronca. Unfortunately, the good times wouldn’t last and the company ceased building light aircraft in 1951. Still, despite a relatively short existence in general aviation, Aeronca produced over 17,000 airplanes spanning 55 models. Aeronca is still around, but nowadays it’s known more for its components for military aircraft, missiles, and contributions to spacecraft.

The 11-Series Chief

Post-World War II Americans wanted to get up into the sky and the nation’s aircraft manufacturers were quick to deliver aircraft that were easy to fly and love. Aeronca decided to send new aircraft into the market that fit this purpose. Among them were the Model 7 Champion and the 11-Series Chief. While the Chief was a name Aeronca used for a comfortable personal aircraft launched before the war, this one would be a new clean-sheet design from Chief Designer Ray Hermes.

The new Chief also wouldn’t be designed entirely on its own. The development of the Chief occurred alongside the development of the Champion. Both aircraft would be designed with forgiving dynamics and training in mind, but the Champion was Aeronca’s direct answer to the popular Piper J-3 Cub. The Champion would have tandem seating while the Chief would have a side-by-side seating arrangement. A pilot of a Champion had a stick while the pilot of a Chief had a yoke.

Aeronca streamlined the manufacturing and design of the two aircraft by having them share 70 percent to 80 percent of their parts. An 11-Series Chief and a Model 7 Champion share ailerons, wings, tail surfaces, landing gear, and engine. A mix of wood and steel is used in the Chief. The fuselage consists of welded steel tubing and plywood formers. Meanwhile, the high-mounted wings are wood spars and aluminum ribs. Fabric covers the aircraft’s structure. This was a fairly typical arrangement for aircraft back then and thankfully, you do get brakes and a real tailwheel.

Production of the 11-Series Chief began in 1946 and while both the Chief and the Champion were considered trainer aircraft, the Chief was marketed as a step up. Occupants got to enjoy a comfortable interior featuring flocked taupe sidewalls and a zebra wood grain on the panel.

There were a handful of versions of the Chief. The base model was the 11AC Chief, which had a Continental A-65-8, a 171 cubic inch flat-four making 65 HP. The middle of the range was the 11BC Chief, which had a Continental C-85-8F, a 188 cubic inch flat four pumping out 85 HP. Then there was the 11CC “Super Chief,” which had the same Continental engine, but upgrades to the interior, brakes, and elevator.

A modern test in Pilot magazine suggests that the Chief is an easy way to fly, but with some caveats. The review describes the process of moving around on the ground:

For a vintage taildragger, the Chief is a relatively easy aircraft to taxi, as long as it isn’t too windy. If it is windy it can soon become a bit of a game, as the big fin turns it into a perfect weather-vane. Still, at least S-turning is unnecessary, as visibility over and each side of the nose is quite good, due to the lower cowling line. The steerable tailwheel is linked to the rudder via springs and works well. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said about the brakes, which are probably the worst facet of the Chief (although, in its defence, most aircraft of a similar type and vintage are no better).

These are ghastly heel-operated cable actuated drum units. The pedals are overly large and attached to the rudder pedals (weirdly, on the Champ they’re tiny and set into the floor) and their geometry relative to the brake pedals is not good for the ankles. With such simple systems, the pre-takeoff checks are very straightforward and I roll out onto the runway, line up with the centreline and open the throttle. The ambient conditions are a density altitude of about 650ft and less than 10kt of wind straight down the runway.

As well as flying the Chief:

In common with most of its contemporaries, the Chief is very much a ‘rudder aeroplane’ and possesses a significant amount of adverse yaw. Furthermore, the harmony of control is not perfect, as the relatively weighty ailerons are actually slightly heavier than the elevators.

The roll rate is as leisurely as you’d imagine while the field of view in the turn (and most phases of flight) is typical of this type and vintage: not great but acceptable. Moving onto the stick-free stability, the standard checks confirm that it is?unsurprisingly?very stable around all three axes, being strongly positive longitudinally, positive directionally, and essentially neutral laterally.

In fact, while checking the spiral stability to port it is so steady (and the air so calm) that we hit our own wake! The directional stability is not quite as strong as I’d anticipated, bearing in mind that the fin is quite big. Nevertheless, it is very stable around all three axes, proof that (in common with most American designs of this period) the emphasis was much more on stability than control. However, that’s not to say that the controls are inadequate.

The pilot, Dave Unwin, goes on to describe both arrival and departure stalls as non-events. He goes on to describe that if you stall in a turn, the aircraft will roll itself back to wings level, making recovery much easier. If you don’t fly, a stall isn’t when the engine quits, but when your angle of attack is so excessive that the wings can no longer produce enough lift. While stalls at slow speeds, such as during approach or departure, are common, you can cause a stall at high speeds, too.

An aircraft that is easy to recover from a stall is generally considered better for learners and the casual pilot. It would appear that Aeronca achieved its mission with the 11-Series Chief as by accounts, it is an easy plane to fly.

A Cheaper Way To Fly

Sadly for Aeronca, the post-war aircraft boom was short and sales tanked. The similar Champion outsold the Chief 4 to 1. Despite that, over 2,300 examples were built between 1946 and 1950. There’s more good news, too. Since the Chief shares 70 to 80 percent of its parts with the far more popular Champion, aviators are still keeping these aircraft alive today. The EAA mentions that the Aeronca Chief and Champion both have strong enthusiast communities.

Yet, because the Chief isn’t as popular as its sibling, you can find them for bargains. The EAA’s Sport Aviation magazine says that you can find a good Chief for around $20,000. Some searching around the web suggests that EAA is right on the money. A decent example can be had for $20,000 or for a few stacks under while a really nice example is still around $30,000. If you fancy yourself as a plane rescuer, projects can be had for under $10,000!

Now, I won’t say that this is a totally cheap way to fly because nothing in aviation is truly cheap. However, if you’re willing to fly a piece of history, you really can own a plane for half of the cost of the average new car in America. Either way, if you’re sitting on the fence, unsure if you want to hop into that pilot seat, I’d say you should do it. Flying is an experience unlike any other and it’s a total blast no matter your age. And it’s always good to know that you don’t have to spend a million bucks to enjoy it.