THE PIPER CUB FORUM

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 on March 18, 1998, with Tim Allen in the front seat. When I complained that I couldn't see the instruments, he covered them with his hands. "Don't fly with this sh*t!" he cried. "Fly with what you see outside!" (The Cub was actually an L-4, the much-crashed, much-rebuilt Four One Victor.) I was sixty-six at the time. This 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 much less in the way of active involvement in this website.

As Clyde Smith notes in the current issue of Cub Clues, the "J" Cub will be seventy-five years old in 2012. 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--soon to be the Piper 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. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford