Flying Basket

Over Portland, Ore. one day last week buzzed a trim two-motored airplane that outwardly looked like any other U. S. aircraft, but inwardly was as different as a hickory basket from a ship's hull. For while the skeleton of other planes is built up of longitudinal braces, bulkheads and stringers, the framework of this Greenwood-Yates Geodetic Bi-Craft is woven of spruce strips. It resembles nothing more than a woven basket covered with fabric to keep out the breeze, powered with two 50-h.p. engines to pull it through the air. Its structure is called geodetic because the Greenwood-Yates ribbing is laid entirely in curves.*

Builder of the Bi-Craft is 38-year-old George Yates, who last week not only had sold the first plane (to Portland Restaurateur Paul F. Ryan) but had been informed that from now on he will have more financial backing, can soon produce the Geodetics in quantity. After his partner and test pilot Allen David Greenwood, Oregon Aeronautics Inspector, had landed from the flight over town, jubilant Builder Yates announced that a syndicate of Portland citizens would shortly begin construction of a plane factory.

Geodetic construction is used on no other American plane, but Britain's geodetic Vickers Wellesley bombers are among the finest in the world, hold the longdistance flight record of 7,162 miles. By using spruce, of which Oregon has plenty, instead of metal weaving strips, Greenwood-Yates have cut the cost of frame material for a single airplane to $50, are able to build it lighter than with steel.

Advantages of geodetic construction claimed by Greenwood-Yates are that fuselages, wings, other parts, can be woven by unskilled workmen over molds; that construction is cheaper, faster, every bit as sturdy as any other kind; that a woven airplane is less likely to be bashed up by hits from machine-gun bullets, anti-aircraft shell fragments. Aircraft experts predict the average life of an airplane in war service will be only 30 hours, so Greenwood-Yates backers think that bigger Geodetics with larger engines may have a military future. Meanwhile, with a single-engined plane that sells at $1.900, a two-motored job at $3,500 (it would cost $1,000 more in metal), they intend to go after the small plane market.

*A principle of geodesy, i.e., mathematics of the earth's surface, is that on a curved surface the shortest distance between two points is a curve.

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