Background info

Hello reader,

Here's a little background info on my story with my Pitts. I am a fairly inexperienced Pitts owner/pilot. This is only my personal experience and I do not pretend any of the content of this blog to be applicable to all Pitts owners/pilots. Everybody have different experiences and different approaches in owning, maintaining and flying an airplane. I share part of my experience here because I received a lot of help from members of the aerobatic/biplane community and felt I had to share my humble experience of owning a Pitts.

I bought my airplane in 2013. I've been lurking single seat Pitts for 2 years and actively searching one for 3 months before I bought mine. Heard all sorts of stories about how hard it is to land and some almost discouraged me of buying one. When I bought it, I already had a share on a Citabria with about 150h of tailwheel time, but still, I was a little scared of those stories. With my Citabria time and an intensive training on an S2B completed, I finally got to fly my Pitts for the first time. My dream came true.

It is a different airplane for sure and I can hardly imagine anybody flying one without proper training. I did not find it unpredictable or unstable. It's just very different from any other airplane I flown, mainly for its lack of forward visibility and its surprisingly nervous flight controls. It is some work, but extremely rewarding. There's nothing like it. Flying a single seat, 17ft wingspan biplane is an experience I can hardly describe.

My Pitts was built by Jim Killough in the late 70s. I heard from the last owner that it is apparently his 7th Pitts built! I cannot confirm this information but so far I am aware of three other S1's built by him before mine and the dates seem to match up. It has been fitted with a 200 hp angle valve IO360 engine since day one according to the logs. With the impressive amount of incidence on the vertical fin, I think Jim had this engine in mind early in the building process. The airplane had a major rebuild in 2002 and the top wing was rebuilt and recovered by Joe Flood in 2008. Here are other items my airplane was equipped with when I bought it:

• Plywood leading edge and 4.2 gallon aux tank in the top wing
• Spring gear
• Header tank
• Airflow Performance FM-200 injection system with purge valve option
• B&C starter, alternator and spin-on oil filter
• Cross-over exhaust
• Christen inverted oil

Here's a picture from an air-to-air photoshoot I organized with friends a few months after I bought it:

I hope you will enjoy reading my posts! They are intended to be rather technical; this post being probably the least. Feel free to provide comments or questions on any of them!