Eberhart: Somebody else’s airplanes

The Eberhart Steel Products Co. of Buffalo, New York, jockeyed for business during the post World War I slump in military contracts.

Formed in 1918 to make airplane parts, Eberhart gained a U.S. Army Air Service contract in 1922 to rebuild 50 British S.E. 5A biplane fighters, identifying the rebuilds as S.E. 5E models.

The work included skinning the fuselages in plywood and mounting Wright-Hispano engines in the refurbished fighters that served the post-war Air Service as training planes.

Eberhart also contracted to rebuild and re-engine French SPAD S.XIII biplanes in the American Air Service. The SPAD’s original 220-horsepower geared Hispano engine was proving troublesome, so the Eberhart SPAD conversions used 180-horsepower direct-drive Hispano-E motors, with a lower thrust line that necessitated a redesigned nose cowl and radiator for the Eberhart variants, sometimes identified as the Eberhart 13E.

The Eberhart SPADs, even homelier than the original French iteration, gave the nascent Air Service useful trainers into the 1920s.

But just as the Air Service knew these Eberhart conversions were stopgap measures until newer designs could be brought into service, so did Eberhart set its sights on creating something new in the way of aircraft designs. In 1925, the Eberhart Aeroplane and Motor Co. emerged as a subsidiary of Eberhart Steel.

Two years later, the Eberhart Aeroplane enterprise produced an original design, the XFG-1 experimental single-seat biplane fighter. In U.S. Navy parlance of the day, the letter G was assigned to Eberhart to designate naval aircraft it built. The X denoted experimental and the F said this was a fighter.

With Eberhart’s subsequent demise as a company, the letter G was re-assigned several times to other companies before finding a home as the designator for Goodyear-built aircraft.

The Eberhart FG-1, sometimes identified as the Comanche, was a tidy and conventional 1920s design. Its fuselage was built of welded steel tube. The wings featured an aluminum frame.

The original span of the larger upper wing was 28 feet, 9 inches. The upper wing of the FG-1 swept back just over 7°, the lower wing swept forward just over 5°.

Wrapped in silver-doped fabric, the FG-1 and its outgrowth F2G-1 version mounted a single Pratt and Whitney Wasp air-cooled radial engine of 425 horsepower, swinging a Hamilton-Standard two-blade metal propeller. It rested on a traditional landing gear common to that era.

The Eberhart Comanche probably had a top speed around 155 mph. That compares with the contemporary Boeing F2B, which clocked a top speed of 158 mph at sea level.

The FG-1’s arrival on the scene in 1927 dipped it in the air-minded frenzy of the year that Charles Lindbergh flew solo from New York to Paris.

But the Navy did not order Eberhart fighters in quantity, staying with old reliables like Boeing and Curtiss.

Serial number lists compiled by the Navy show only one assigned to Eberhart, A-7944, for the sole XFG-1 of 1927. Evidently it retained this number when rebuilt as the XF2G-1 the following year.

Photos show the biplane with a barely-discernible logo on the fuselage proclaiming it to be the Eberhart Comanche, with apparently a Native American’s profile in the center of the circular badge.

Photos and documentation on the Eberhart fighter are sparse. Some captions associated with the same photograph list it as either the FG-1 or the modified F2G-1.

It is generally accepted that the XF2G was demonstrated in 1928 with a single main float and two small floats near each lower wingtip in an era when the Navy still considered fighters on floats to be viable warplanes.

The XF2G-1 crashed in March 1928 at the Navy’s Anacostia facility in Washington, D.C., ending Eberhart’s adventures in building an original aircraft design.

The company subsequently concentrated on its stock in trade, making metal parts for aircraft produced by other manufacturers.