Aeronca 11 Chief - Production History

Production History

The model 11 Chief was designed and built by Aeronca Aircraft Corporation. While it shared the name "Chief" with the pre-war models, the design was not a derivative. Rather, the post-war 11AC Chief was designed in tandem with the 7AC Champion ("Champ")—the Chief with side-by-side seating and yoke controls, and the Champ with tandem seating and joystick controls. The intention was to simplify production and control costs by building a pair of aircraft with a significant number of parts in common; in fact, the two designs share between 70% and 80% of their parts. The tail surfaces, wings, ailerons, landing gear, and firewall forward—engine, most accessories, and cowling—are common to both airplanes. The Chief and the larger Aeronca Sedan also share selected parts, the control wheels, some control system parts, rudder pedals and control systems, so parts passed from plane to plane to save costs. Production costs and aircraft weights were tightly controlled and Aeronca was among the first to use a moving conveyor assembly line, with each stage taking about 30 minutes to complete.

The 11AC Chief entered production at Aeronca in early 1946, with upgraded versions introduced as the 11BC (also called the "Chief") and 11CC "Super Chief," in June 1947 and 1948, respectively. Aeronca was at the time headquartered at Middletown, Ohio, but production facilities there were heavily utilized with the 7AC Champion line; because of this, the model 11 aircraft were assembled at the Dayton Municipal Airport in Vandalia, Ohio. While the Vandalia location was first used only for the assembly of parts fabricated at Middletown, activities there later expanded to include some fabrication work. Only later, toward the end of production did the Chief line return to Middletown.

Aeronca ceased all production of light aircraft in 1951. Production of the Chief, which had been outsold by its sibling the Champ by a margin of nearly 4 to 1, had already ended by 1950, with only a few planes produced in 1948-1949. This marked the last time the Chief design was built in the United States.

The design was sold in the mid-1950s to E. J. Trytek, who held the design until the late 1960s or early 1970s. The HUL-26 Pushpak, built by Hindustan Aeronautics between 1958 and 1968, was very similar to the Super Chief. Some sources say that the Pushpak was produced under license from Trytek, while others suggest that the Pushpak design resulted from reverse engineering. The Pushpak can be identified by the smaller rudder surface which is squared off at mid-fin and the larger vertical tail that is found on the 11CC.

Ownership of the Chief design passed to Bellanca Aircraft Corporation in the early 1970s, around the same time they acquired the 7 series Champion/Citabria and its derivative designs. In 1973 Bellanca considered producing an updated version of the Chief for flight training, but the aircraft never entered production. The model 11 designs are currently owned by American Champion Aircraft Corporation, which acquired them sometime before 1991. Ownership of the design in the period between Bellanca's liquidation in 1982 and the American Champion acquisition is unclear.