jls wrote:
Pete Bowers is an honored immortal
for designing such a great little wooden airplane that can flare 20
feet off the deck and still remain intact.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Without meaning to lessen Pete's abilities as a designer, the praise
for the Fly Baby's strength should probably go to Tony Fokker or
Geoffery deHavilland. They were the first to break away from fuselage
structures using wire-braced hardwood longerons in favor of spruce
longerons and plywood shear-webs, which often weighed more.

The advantage here is rather subtle and was not appreciated until a
number of the 'plywood box' designs survived crashes that would have
reduced a wire & ash fuselage to flinders. The subtleties that had
escaped noticed (even today, in many cases :-) is that the continuous
bond between the load-bearing members allowed the loads to be
distributed in a fairly uniform manner, whereas the pinned and
wire-braced joints tended to concentrate the stress at those points.
With such high concentrations of stress the failure of a single wire or
fitting was enough to precipitate failure of the entire structure.

Once the early designers appreciated the advantage of the one over the
other they moved immediately to true monocoque structures of molded
plywood, welded steel tubing and so forth, but the structural integrity
of the 'box' structures combined with their simplicity of fabrication
makes the method ideal for homebuilders even today.

-R.S.Hoover