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THE CALDWELL COLLECTION AT MUSTANG FIELD
1930 Great Lakes 2T-1A
Specifications
Length
20 ft 4 in
Wingspan
26 ft 8 in
Seats
2, Tandem Open Cockpit
Engine
Warner Super Scarab 165 HP
Maximum Speed
120 MPH
Cruise Speed
105 MPH
1930 Great Lakes 2T-1A:
The One I'd Been Looking For
We'd been looking for a Great Lakes for four or five years. Not just any Great Lakes—there are quite a few of them out there if you count the 1970s Champlin-built reissues and the homebuilts that followed. Today the Waco company of Michigan is building them again. What we wanted was an original antique, a factory-built airplane from the golden age, with a real history behind it. We wanted a radial engine. And we wanted a great example—one that had been properly restored, not just patched together. Serial Number 83, N822K, checks every one of those boxes.
Last Christmas it popped up on Barnstormers. I called Megan Harrison that same day, and we had a wonderful conversation about the airplane and her family's fifty-year history with it. The Collection agreed to purchase it over the holidays, and we waited for spring to bring it home.
The Great Lakes Aircraft Corporation was founded in Cleveland, Ohio in 1929, and it produced the 2T-1 Sport Trainer through about 1932—roughly 264 aircraft in all before the Depression forced the factory doors closed. About 200 were the 2T-1A model, originally powered by a 90 horsepower American Cirrus ACE engine. In its day, the Great Lakes was considered one of the finest aerobatic sport trainers in America. It has remained popular for nearly a century. Even after the original company folded, homebuilders kept the design alive, and a succession of manufacturers have produced new ones. But surviving originals are among the most prized aircraft in vintage aviation. This airplane, Serial 83, was manufactured in June 1930, placing it squarely in the middle of the production run. It is believed to be the oldest Great Lakes still flying today.
The Warner Conversion
Robinson removed the original American Cirrus Mark III inline engine that had been with the airplane since it left the Cleveland factory—43 years and approximately 819 flight hours on that one engine. In its place he installed a Warner Super Scarab 165 horsepower, a seven-cylinder air-cooled radial that gave the Great Lakes a completely different personality. He fabricated a new engine mount from 4130 chromoly steel, replaced the firewall, installed a Curtis-Reed aluminum propeller, added a Maule steerable tailwheel, and fitted Stearman plexishields. The FAA approved the conversion on September 27, 1974, and the airplane received a Standard Airworthiness Certificate that same day.
The Warner makes this airplane something special within the Collection. We have a nice collection of Warner-powered biplanes but this is the first Warner that isn't a "greaser" engine—the big, smooth radials that define the sound and feel of golden-age aviation. The Warner Super Scarab 165 is a different animal. It's more powerful, easier to work on, and lots easier to keep clean since it doesn't throw grease all over the airplane.
Fifty Years with the Harrisons
In 1976, Ted Robinson sold the airplane to Art Harrison, who brought it to Ames, Iowa. That began a remarkable fifty-year run in one family's hands. 1976 was the year I graduated from high school.
Art Harrison had learned to fly in 1947, and the love of airplanes set the course for his business interests. As a private pilot he logged more than 25,000 hours with no commercial or military flight time. Through the years Art owned nineteen different aircraft, and the Great Lakes was his favorite. He was meticulous in his attention to detail, record-keeping, and care of the airplane. He registered it under his family corporation, Field of Dreams, Inc., and operated it out of Field of Dreams Aviation Services at the Ames airport.
On the initial trip from Washington to Iowa, Art and his son Greg crashed and severely damaged the aircraft in the mountains of Eastern Washington while landing at an abandoned mountain airstrip. No serious injuries were sustained. The aircraft was trucked to Ames and rebuilt once again into a beautiful antique airplane. The rebuilt airplane supported many hours of pleasure flying over the next thirteen years.
In 1988 the original fabric on the lower fuselage failed to test airworthy. The airplane sat in several restoration shops with little progress until 2002, when Roy Redman of Rare Aircraft in Owatonna, Minnesota agreed to restore it to museum quality. It was a restoration done right, by someone who understands these airplanes at a level very few people do. Redman repaired and rebuilt the fuselage frame, fabricated a new stainless firewall, replaced the boot cowl, rebuilt all wing panels with new wood referencing original Great Lakes factory drawings, rebuilt the ailerons, fabricated new interplane and cabane struts from the original patterns, built a new fuel tank and oil tank, and covered the entire aircraft in Ceconite fabric. He also upgraded the wheels and brakes to Cleveland assemblies, installed a Jasco alternator, and added modern avionics including a Garmin SL-40 com radio and GTX 320 transponder.
Art Harrison passed away. His son Greg—an A&P aircraft mechanic at the Winterset Airport, a private pilot, and owner of Winterset Aviation—inherited the airplane. Greg dedicated his career to ensuring the safety and performance of countless aircraft. He was also an avid photographer, specializing in aviation and sporting events. The beautiful sunset photographs of the Great Lakes on this page were taken by Greg in 2012 and 2013, when he was entering several photography competitions. Outside of work, Greg made numerous trips to Haiti as a volunteer for Water for Life. He was a man of adventure: in 2000 he flew a 1955 Beech Baron to Munich, Germany and back via the North Atlantic.
Greg Harrison also passed away, during COVID. Despite having been restored for fifteen years, the airplane had fewer than twenty hours on the airframe. It was last flown in 2021 by Greg's best friend, Chet Barnhard. Greg's daughter Megan kept the airplane in the family until last Christmas, when it found its way to us.
Ninety-Five Years in the
American West
The history of this airplane reads like a map of the American West itself. A.W. Newberry of Colorado Springs, Colorado purchased it from the Great Lakes Aircraft Corporation factory on June 20, 1930, officially signed by Mr. Stratton, Vice President of GLAC, on July 2, 1930, for $3,890. The CAA assigned the registration N822K on June 18, 1930, and the original Certificate of Airworthiness was dated July 6, 1930. In 1931 the factory sent a new tail—the unique one that is still on the airplane today—comprising rudder, elevators, and fin, installed March 29, 1931 at a company in North Beach, New York. It appears the entire aircraft was recovered at this time.
From Colorado Springs the airplane moved to the vast ranching landscape of Montana, passing through the hands of Beverly Butterfield Davis—a rancher whose son later recalled that growing up on the family spread, they didn't have running water or electricity, but they had an airplane. That's the kind of owner this airplane attracted.
It traveled through Great Falls, Butte, Helena, and Townsend—small Montana towns tied together by a network of Depression-era aviators who traded airplanes among themselves the way other men traded horses. By 1941 it had reached Portland, Oregon, where it was briefly based at Swan Island Airport—the city's legendary first municipal airfield, where Lindbergh had landed the Spirit of St. Louis at its 1927 dedication. From Portland it moved to Eugene, where a partnership held it through the entirety of World War II, no small feat given wartime restrictions on civilian flying.
After the war, the airplane worked its way through the Pacific Northwest—Coburg, Redmond, Corvallis, Seattle, Issaquah, Bremerton, Tacoma—moving among a tight-knit community of aviation enthusiasts on Puget Sound. In its first thirty years it had seven owners. It was during this period, in 1968, that Ted Robinson of Olympia, Washington acquired it and began the work that would define the airplane's modern character.
Why a Great Lakes?
Before founding the Collection I was mostly interested in finding Waco biplanes, the big, beautiful, quintessential open-cockpit sport planes of the 1930s. But though I love Wacos, the antique aircraft I have an eye for are almost endless—until you actually want to acquire one. Some of the most beautiful or capable airplanes of the 1920s and 1930s were market failures, so not many were built and fewer survive. The Great Lakes is luckily one of the airplanes that was reasonably successful as well as capable. It was built as a sport aircraft and designed to do aerobatics well. It is much smaller than a typical Waco biplane and the cockpits were definitely built for much smaller people than today. The pilot's cockpit is a tightly confined, intimate space, where the panel sits just in front of your face. The wings look like you could touch the tips with your hands while sitting in it. It's not the smallest airplane in the Collection, but it's definitely small.
But start the motor and taxi to the runway and hang on for a ride in a nearly hundred-year-old thrill machine. It does everything well and it's a pilot's airplane through and through. Nimble, reliable, and a joy to fly.
The Great Lakes 2T-1A holds a unique spot in the history of open-cockpit biplane flight and in the Collection. It took a long time to find, but it was worth the wait.
