Biographical Sketches

FRED ERNEST WEICK

Born: July 14, 1899    In: Berwyn, IL
Died: July 8, 1993    In: Vero Beach, FL

An aeronautical engineer who has had a profound effect on light aircraft development, Fred E Weick graduated from the University of Illinois in 1922 and began an engineering career with the Air Mail Service, where led one of the survey teams that established emergency landing fields in the Midwest for their day-and-night, coast-to-coast service. In 1924 he joined the Navy Bureau of Aeronautics and became their propeller designer.

In 1925 he joined NACA to helped design and construct its full-scale propeller wind tunnel and became the first head of that facility. One project was to design a low-drag, long-chord cowling for the new air-cooled radial engines, for which he won the 1929 Collier Trophy for the NACA. Weick’s definitive book on propeller design was published in 1930 by McGraw-Hill. At the same time he created the concept of the "50-ft obstacle clearance" as a measure of aircraft take-off performance, which remains a standard measure today.

Sparked by a series of light aircraft design seminars, with some co-workers he designed a home-built airplane, the Weick W-1 in 1931 (qv), incorporating some of the technology gained from his research at NACA. The simple-to-fly, two-control, high-wing pusher would not stall or spin, could land on a dime, and would not nose over or ground loop. Excellent ground handling came from its tricycle landing gear, which sported the world’s first steerable, stable castering nose gear. He then Henry Berliner at ERCO in 1936 to develop the W-1’s concepts into a marketable lightplane, the popular Ercoupe.

When the post-war lightplane market went into a slump, Weick joined Texas A&M in 1948 as a professor and research engineer. There, he worked on the design and development of the Ag-1 crop duster, and designed the Ag-3, predecessor to Piper’s PA-26 Pawnee series. He went with Piper in 1957 as director and chief engineer of their development center in Vero Beach, Florida, remaining there until his retirement in 1969 at age 70. In addition to the Pawnee, Weick co-designed Piper’s Cherokee line of personal and business lightplanes with John Thorpe and Karl Bergey. He remained active in aeronautics, assisting in design studies for Beech Aircraft and undertaking private projects relating to aircraft trim and control.

From the Ground Up; autobiography (Smithsonian 1988)

Denotes an individual known to have soloed an aircraft prior to December 16, 1917, whether they were members of the "Early Birds of Aviation" Organization or not.