1931 American Eagle Eaglet 230

Specifications

Length

21 feet 9 inches

Wingspan

34 feet 4 inches

Engine

Szekely SR-3 three-cylinder radial (~45 hp)

Cruising Speed

75 MPH

Max Speed

85 MPH

Passengers

The Thousand-Dollar Dream

Edward Porterfield wanted to build a thousand-dollar airplane. By 1930 his American Eagle Aircraft Corporation in Kansas City had a problem the whole industry shared: the stock market had crashed, and the handsome, expensive biplanes that paid the bills simply weren’t selling anymore. Porterfield’s answer was to go the other direction entirely — to build the cheapest honest airplane he could, something an ordinary person might actually afford in the worst economy the country had ever seen. The story goes that he designed it the old-fashioned way, drawing it out full-size in chalk on the floor of the factory, and the men started welding it up from the lines on the concrete. They put it on the market at $995. He called it the Eaglet.

It is, in the kindest sense of an old aviation word, a flivver — a tiny, light, take-anybody-flying airplane from the era when a dozen little companies were trying to put the common man in the sky. You’ll find its cousins a few steps away in our hangar: the impossibly cute Aeronca C3, Bernard Pietenpol’s garage-built Air Camper, and Porterfield’s own later comeback airplane, the 35-70. (If you know your flivvers, it’s a close relative of the Buhl Pup, too.) The Eaglet didn’t save American Eagle — the Depression was bigger than any one good idea — but it put Edward Porterfield on the path to founding his own company a few years later, which is why his name shows up twice in this Collection. This little airplane is the start of that founder’s arc

Three Cylinders and a Reputation

Bolted to the nose is a Szekely: a three-cylinder radial of about forty-five horsepower, and one of the more colorful engines you’ll meet in this building. The Szekely was cheap and light, which was exactly the point, but it earned a lasting reputation for occasionally letting go of a cylinder in flight — the kind of detail that makes antique people smile and check their seatbelts. It is an unusual engine in the Collection, and keeping one healthy and flying is its own quiet badge of honor. There is something honest about three little jugs hauling a brave little airplane into the Oklahoma sky.

A Genuine Roos Airplane

Here is what makes our Eaglet special beyond its type. When the Depression bankrupted American Eagle in early 1931, the Lincoln people in Nebraska bought what was left and formed American Eagle-Lincoln, run by the restless entrepreneur Victor Roos — the same man whose fingerprints are on Bellanca, Cessna, Swallow, and the Lincoln-Page across our floor. Our Eaglet, serial number 1072, was built and sold new by that merged company at Fairfax Airport in Kansas City in July of 1931. Its first owner was a man named Everett Miller in Huntington, West Virginia. From there it passed through a long line of owners and a hard life — including a 1939 accident that required a complete rebuild — before a Wisconsin craftsman brought it back to flying condition around 1970. Eleven owners over ninety years, and remarkably, it still wears a Szekely. We did not have to borrow a single piece of another airplane’s story. This one earned its own.

Part of the Founders' Arc

The Eaglet is also a key link in the story this museum is built to tell — what we call the founders’ arc. Victor Roos is one of our Seven Pioneers, and his restless career stitches together a remarkable share of early American aviation. He started out alongside Giuseppe Bellanca at the Roos-Bellanca company in Omaha; he managed the Swallow company in Wichita, where Walter Beech and Lloyd Stearman first cut their teeth; he briefly co-founded Cessna-Roos with Clyde Cessna in 1927; and he took the presidency of Lincoln-Page in Nebraska and then, after the 1931 merger, of American Eagle-Lincoln — the company that built this airplane. Through one man and one little Eaglet, the thread runs to Porterfield, American Eagle, Lincoln-Page, Cessna-Roos, the Travel Air cluster, and Swallow all at once.

You can follow the whole network on the founders posters on display here in the hangar, and then stand in front of the airplanes that anchor it: the Lincoln-Page PT-W (another genuine Roos airplane), the Travel Air B4000 (Beech, Cessna and Stearman together), and Porterfield’s own comeback machine, the 35-70. The Eaglet is where Porterfield’s line and Roos’s line meet — which is exactly why we wanted this airplane, and not just any Eaglet.

“I was looking for a Szekely engine. I came home with the whole airplane.”

How it Came Home

We came to own the Eaglet the way the best airplanes always seem to arrive — through people. It started at AirVenture in 2025. I had been wanting to find a Szekely engine for the Collection’s engine display, and I got to talking with Ken and Lorraine Morris, well-known restorers who specialize in the kind of award-winning Cessna 120 and 140 restorations that stop you in your tracks at Oshkosh. Lorraine asked me if I even knew what an Eaglet was. I did — it’s a smaller sibling to our Aeronca C3 and to the Buhl Pup I’ve always admired. She told me she might have an Eaglet for sale one day, with a Szekely on it, if I was interested. I told her that when the time came, I most certainly would be.

Nearly a year later in a phone call with Ken and Lorraine I learned the time had come. They had been restoring another Eaglet to hang in the museum at Poplar Grove, and they were ready to take this one down off display, clean it up, and give it a fresh annual. The airplane had been a long time in one family: the longtime owner was Eugene Morris — Ken’s father — who eventually sold it to the Vintage Wings & Wheels Museum at Poplar Grove, where it was displayed for years.

There’s a small story I like in the handoff. Ken asked whether I planned to fly it home to Oklahoma. I said no it would be safer if I brought it back in a truck. He laughed and told me he’d once flown it down to Texas and back, so this is a well-traveled little cross-country machine, even if cross-country is not remotely what it was built for. But given the Szekely’s honest reputation and the airplane’s near-hundred years, I judged a flatbed the prudent way to bring it the long miles from Poplar Grove, Illinois, down to El Reno. We picked it up after this year’s AirVenture, trucked it home, and reassembled it at Mustang Field.

And here it has found exactly the home it was designed for. The Eaglet flies off our grass — it has a tail skid rather than a tailwheel, so grass is really the only surface it’s happy on, which is a charming reminder of just how old and simple it is. Like everything in this hangar, it flies; that is the promise of the Caldwell Collection. Alongside the airplane, Ken and Lorraine built a Szekely engine for us as a display piece, so visitors can stand next to the Eaglet and see for themselves the clever, spare little design that once promised flight for a thousand dollars. The dream still has wings.