Pitts Special

You might have been the first guy to see, to fly over that spot on that day.

That's the sound of an airshow, and Patrick McAleer of Team Extreme Flight flies one of the most energetic ones out there in his Pitts S1S.

But here's what I love.

The second he lands, he pops the canopy and heads straight to the crowd line to meet people.

He was a self-taught designer and mechanic out of the South, working in the 1940s with limited resources and an enormous amount of intuition about how airplanes move.

In 1944, he drew up the basic concept for what would become the Pitts Special.

The idea was simple.

Build the smallest, lightest, most agile biplane you could put a human being into, and then make it strong enough to do whatever that human being wanted.

Every pound you add, every inch of wingspan you extend, every bit of moment arm you increase, you pay for it in every snap roll, every hammerhead, every outside loop.

The early versions of the aircraft spread slowly through the home-built community.

For years, if you wanted a Pitts special, you built it yourself from plans.

Curtis Pitts sold the blueprints and helped pilots who asked for guidance.

Because if anybody's put Lift's gear through a genuine stress test, it's him.

[plane roaring] Patrick McAleer flies the Pitts S1S, the Blue Demon, for Extreme Flight.

And if you've seen his high-energy solo aerobatics anywhere on the airshow circuit, there's a good chance you've seen him do it in a Lift helmet.

I asked the obvious question, why wear one at all when plenty of pilots don't?

Yeah, biplane racing.

Raced about five seasons in the biplane class, a little Pitts S1C.

Found out that aerobatic competition is a lot of time and a lot of money, but the air races was paying 2,000 bucks for dead last place, and they were desperately seeking biplane racers because the biplane racing class was being dominated by those biplane racers like Sundancer and Sorceress.

So we all just flooded the place with a bunch of pit specials and just had a ball camping out and racing and coming home with a bucket of money and Everybody lived to tell about it and it was a great experience and a great networking experience Does it go backwards the guy in the middle The little guy That's my buddy Dan.

Low-wide, but plain, short wingspan.

He first flew the Pitts Special in 1944, and it looked nothing like what was winning competitions at the time.

Most aerobatic aircraft of that era were adapted from training planes.

Things that did loops and rolls, but weren't designed from the ground up for what precision aerobatics actually demands.