Taylorcraft
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| Corporation | |
| Industry | General Aviation |
| Founded | Bradford, Pennsylvania 1935 |
| Headquarters | Brownsville, Texas |
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Key people
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C.G. Taylor, founder |
| Products | Light aircraft |
| Website | www.taylorcraft.com |
Taylorcraft Aviation is an airplane manufacturer that has been producing aircraft for more than seventy years in several locations.
The company builds small single-engined airplanes. The Taylorcraft design is a conventional layout: high-wing, fabric-covered, two-seat aircraft. The basic design has remained unchanged since 1936, and this design is sold as a personal sport aircraft today.
The designer, Clarence Gilbert Taylor, a self-taught aeronautical engineer from Nottingham, England, can be called the father of private aviation in America, as he designed the original Taylor Cub in 1931 at Bradford, Pennsylvania. Taylor, along with his brother Gordon, formed Taylor Brothers Aircraft Corporation - slogan; "Buy Your Airplane Taylor Made" - in Rochester, New York in 1926, offering a two-seat high-winged monoplane called the "Chummy", priced at $4,000. The Chummy failed to sell, and after Gordon died flying another Taylor design in 1928, Clarence moved to Bradford, Pennsylvania, where the townsfolk had offered him a new factory at the local airfield plus $50,000 to invest in the company. One of the investors was William Thomas Piper, who had made his money from oil wells.
Meanwhile, a disastrous factory fire brought production of the Cub J-2 to a halt, and Piper bought the company out. It was placed back in production as the Piper J-3 Cub, becoming the iconic aircraft of general aviation in the 1930s and 1940s. Piper operated out of a new facility in nearby Lock Haven, Pennsylvania.
Taylor vowed to build a personal aircraft superior to the Cub. Taylor formed his own company in 1935 as Taylor Aircraft Company, renamed Taylorcraft Aviation Corporation in 1939.
In 1936 Taylor rented facilities at Pittsburgh-Butler Airport and first manufactured the "Taylorcraft" plane. That summer, the firm moved to Alliance, Ohio when the city offered the use of the former the Hess-Argo biplane (28 built between 1929–32) factory rent free for a period of six months with an option to buy for $48,000.
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Wikipedia