A BLAST FROM THE PAST Reprinted from FLYINGMODELS August 1978
Snyder-McReady Baby Bomber
It makes a neat little Scale CO2 design. A fun bird indoors or out / Joe Johnson
TEXT AND PHOTOGRAPHY: DOC MATHEWS T
he “Baby Bomber” was developed by O.H. Snyder beginning in 1921. Pow-
ered by a two-cylinder, fifteen horsepower Indian motorcycle engine, it was one of the few practical and proven designs available to the home builder in the early 1920s.1 One should remember that no Federal reg- ulatory body even existed until the 1930s
to dictate the safety of design and materi- als used in aviation. Consequently, many homebuilt designs existed but precious few were flyable and/or safe. The “Baby Bomber” spanned twenty one
feet, seven inches, had a three-foot, nine- inch chord, and weighed a whopping 314 pounds empty and only 500 pounds full.
Needless to say, pilot weight was critical with only 176 pounds available in useful load including fuel. A problem similar to the experience of Doug Bianchi and his Santos Dumont Demoiselle reproduction made for “Those Magnificent Men” arose when the reproduction refused to leave the ground until someone discovered that San- tos Dumont weighed only 110 pounds drip- ping wet! Joan Hughes, a petite lady pilot, was hired and the Demoiselle flew quite nicely as the movie demonstrated.2 The use of a converted motorcycle engine
was not novel to the “Baby Bomber” al- though it was one of the few successful applications. The drive shaft was placed
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