Bucket List: Bücker Jungmann
Taking flight in the Bücker Jungmann is pure time travel... without need for a flux capacitor
My first hands-on aerobatic flying was in 1996 with Chris Smisson, the late, great aerobatic pilot of West Georgia who ended up adopting me as his airport kid. I was 15-years-old. Before my real flight instructor had taught me to land, Smisson taught me inverted turns along a road and around a point. What normally makes an airplane climb, makes an inverted airplane dive. In an upright airplane, you move the stick the direction you want to go. In an inverted aircraft, you push the stick to the outside of the turn. I’ll give you a minute to think about those maneuvers and where they rank in the pat-your-head-and-rub-your-belly hierarchy.
The Zlin I was flying was a rarity in America, but a staple of aerobatic flying in the rest of the world. Renowned for its nimble, balanced handling, people who know aerobatic planes long to fly a Zlin. They look like a poor man’s World War II fighter plane, with bubble canopies, retracting tailwheel landing gear, and a long snoot filled with an inverted inline engine that snapped and barked like a tiny Merlin or Daimler engines from the warbird crowd.
In other words, I grew up spoiled. Absolutely rotten.
Airborne and climbing fueled by 100LL avgas and a decade of daydreams
But Smisson and the crowd knew that the Zlin 526s weren’t the end-all when it came to beautiful flying machines that looked good, too. He used to tell me that the Zlin flew almost as good as a Bücker Jungmann. He called it the Stradivarius of aerobatic ships. There was one nearly in the backyard, the whole time, and I never did capitalize on the opportunity. Until now.
The comparison was more than just a thin connection – the Zlins and Bückers are kissing cousins. Karl Büker helped set up SAAB in Sweeden, then he came home and decided he could do the same thing on his home turf. In six months, he and a few other players designed and built the Bü-131 “Jungmann” which saw service in the early 1930s as a two-seat aerobatic training aircraft. The later models Bü-133 “Jungmeister” and and Bü-181 “Bestmann” evolved into a single-seat aerobatic beast and a two-seat touring aircraft, respectively. The Bestmann was built under license by the Czech in a town called Zlin, and it’s of little doubt where the lines found in the Zlin -26 series found their inspiration. In fact, many assemblies such as landing gear bits, seats, and control system fitments can be interchanged between the two.
Back to the Jungmann, though. Smisson always told me I had to go fly a Jungmann. Yesterday, I finally did just that.
Enter Gordon Clement. He’s a Gulfstream pilot for a big company here in Atlanta, and he owns N1947G, A Jungmann with a history. This airplane was converted to single-seat configuration for the late Jim Moser, a large Floridian whose frame didn’t fit the teutonic mold cast by most German Luftwaffe pilots of the 1930s and 1940s. He made it a big man’s airplane, and modified it for the air show business. Moser died of cancer in 2002. Gordon bought the Jungmann, and promptly spent a boatload of money undoing much of Moser’s mods. It’s not that he’d made a bad plane of the Jungmann, at all. He’d added horsepower and that’s usually a good thing. But he’d also nixed the bird’s ability to haul a passenger along.
The grin is still there as I write.
Right now I want to thank Gordon for shelling out the bucks to un-modify his plane, which allowed Amy and I to be signatures 124 and 125 on the list of people who’ve gone for a ride with him. Wingwalking was never a hobby of mine, and I’m glad I didn’t have to start that in order to go up with him.
Taxiing out, I recognized many of the sights from the Zlins: clusters of small steel tubes made structures that seem intricate and delicate by contemporary American standards. (Remember, this airplane was the European contemporary of the Stearman, a giant box-kite in comparison). The way the upper fuselage tubing angles in and goes under the corners of the instrument panel is identical to that in the Zlins I’m so used to. It felt very familiar, except for the place where my left arm came to rest: the throttle pushrod. I found that if I scunched down, either to give Gordon a better view, or under increased G-loading, that the power eased back. It’s something I’ll have to learn to deal with!
To answer the question right out front: No, I didn’t solo it. I didn’t even get to wring it out. Sadly, my stick and rudder skills have decayed so far in 4 years of airline flying, that all I could do was a couple of tight turns, a roll or two, and a half-Cuban-eight.
Rolling circles in the Zlin were sort of “My” maneuver. I WANT SO BADLY to do one in the Bücker but I’d have just embarrassed myself yesterday had I tried.
It was like getting the nod from Scarlett Johansson, then getting it stuck in your pants zipper. There was some heavy petting and a little kissing, enough of a test drive to let me know I’ve got to have one, someday. After I’d flopped around the sky, frustrated at my lack of ability to handle a rudder anymore, I handed her back to Gordon. He pulled right up into a hammerhead turn, reversed direction and slowed back to what felt like a crawl, and we flicked around in the most graceful snaproll I’ve had the pleasure of riding through. A stock DeHavilland Chipmunk tries to shake every pane of glass out of the canopy. Zlins buffet pretty aggressively. The Jungmann yawned, as if to say, “well, if you insist,” then flew the aerobatic figure that has made her a star for nearly 70 years. This is where the artsy types would use the Stradivarius reference. Alas, most folks can’t play the fiddle and have no appreciation for what a fine piece of kit that a Stradivari axe really is. So…
Flying the Jungmann is, to me, the embodiment of all the flying dreams we have. One doesn’t dream of buffets, shudders and having to gear my brain to mesh into an airplane’s automation. One dreams of the bovine-scented air rising up from the pasture off the end of the runway, the swish of air around a flying helmet, and of the horizon tumbling round in a perfect, gentle snap roll.
Now the Bücker can’t hold up against the modern aerobatic steeds in terms of numbers, and I don’t mean to let on that it could wow the Xbox-desensitized-crowds of teens and tweens today. But they’re honest airplanes with the best control harmony I’ve felt. And I’ve flown a bunch of airplanes. You think about where you want to go, and you get there. There is no difficulty communicating inputs to the airplane – you become one in short order.
Gordon, Amy and I.
Reading list:
Budd Davisson takes 1947G for a spin, 31 years ago: http://airbum.com/pireps/PirepJungmann.html He’s a better storyteller than I’ll ever be.
