THE PIPER CUB FORUM

An old thread on the message board asked if there were any truth in the stories of a Piper Cub's being launched from a tether. More recently, an alert reader points to a story in the December 1981 issue of Popular Mechanics. It still strikes me as an aviation myth, but here is the artist's conception from the magazine. Make of it what you will.

Curiously, that article was to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Piper Cub, but by my understanding it was six years early. As Clyde Smith notes in Cub Clues, it was in 1937 that William Piper moved his aircraft business (still known as Taylor Aircraft) to Lock Haven, Pennsylvania. That October, a new model was rolled out to replace the underpowered Taylor E-2. Thus did the Taylor J-2 come into the world, soon to be modified as the immortal J-3 Piper Cub. In a telling commentary on what we have done to the once-almighty dollar, most J-2s and J-3s today sell for more than ten times their retail price in the 1930s and 1940s. Seventy-five years old and going strong! Indeed, the pretty yellow bird will almost certainly outlast me.

I've maintained the Piper Cub Forum for twelve years now, which pretty much parallels my love affair with the pretty yellow bird from Lock Haven. I made my first flight in March 1998, when I was sixty-six; last November, I turned eighty. That, plus a close encounter with a runway light last summer, persuaded me that it was time to ground myself in the interest of public safety. So: no more solo flying for me, and correspondingly less in the way of active involvement in this website. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford