EAA Sport Aviation - October 2011

Stits Skycoupe

EAA members restore a 1950s design

BY KENT MISEGADES, EAA 520919; CARY, NORTH CAROLINA; PRESIDENT, EAA CHAPTER 1114

WHEN A MEMBER OF our chapter, Tom Hall, called me this spring with the news that his friend wanted to donate a Stits SA-7D Skycoupe to the chapter, my first reaction was, “Sure!” My second reaction was, “What’s a Stits Skycoupe?” Since then, we’ve learned that the SA-7D was one of 15 designs from Ray Stits, EAA 136. Ray was an early icon of the homebuilding movement; co-founder of EAA Chapter 1 at Flabob Airport in Riverside, California; and inventor of the Stits fabric-covering method we all know today as Poly-Fiber.

Thanks to the online archive of past issues of EAA Sport Aviation, we quickly collected almost all of the information that has ever been written on the Piper Colt look-alike. We were surprised to learn that not only was it one of the most common homebuilts in the early 1960s, but also the design proved so popular that Ray and his business partners took it through certification. The FAA granted the type certificate for the Stits Model SA-9A Skycoupe in December 1961 after four years of exhaustive testing.

Our SA-7D Skycoupe is of typical construction for aircraft of the late 1950s: welded chromoly steel tube fuselage, wooden wing, fabric covering, and a 125-hp Lycoming O-290-D engine converted from a

Thanks to the online
archive of past issues of

EAA Sport Aviation, we
quickly collected almost all
of the information that has
ever been written on the
Piper Colt look-alike.

military ground power unit. As an aside, not only did Richard “Van” VanGrunsven choose the same engine for his prototype RV- 3, but his first airplane, the RV- 1, was actually a modified Stits SA-3A Playboy with an all-metal, cantilevered wing.

Our Skycoupe, discovered in the back of a forgotten hangar south of Raleigh, North Carolina, had seen only two careful builders during the five decades since the early 1960s. We retrieved the restoration project in May, which coincided with our annual chapter picnic, where the chapter’s many builders were able to have a closer look at it. When our two technical counselors, Jack Phillips (whose award-winning dark-green Pietenpol was parked at the Brown Arch during AirVenture 2011) and Terry Phillips, gave the aircraft a thumbs up, we formed the Bear Creek Aero Club as a separate entity that owns and will operate the aircraft once it’s flying.

Technical counselor Terry Gardner generously lent us his well-equipped hangar shop at the Eagle’s Landing residential airpark near Pittsboro, North Carolina. The hangar has one very important feature: a large, air-conditioned loft where we’re nearing completion of the wooden wings, in comfort, despite the sultry summer weather typical of the Carolinas. It is the goal of the Bear Creek Aero Club to rescue projects such as this Skycoupe from the scrap heap, provide area builders with an excellent means to gain skills, and offer flying opportunities at rock-bottom prices. And we’ll do our best to keep the Skycoupe and future projects LSA compliant.