ERCO Ercoupe
1937 general aviation aircraft by the Engineering and Research Corporation
The ERCO Ercoupe is an American low-wing monoplane aircraft that was first flown in 1937. It was originally manufactured by the Engineering and Research Corporation (ERCO) shortly before World War II; several other manufacturers continued its production after the war. The final model, the Mooney M-10, first flew in 1968 and the last model year was 1970. It was designed to be the safest fixed-wing aircraft that aerospace engineering could provide at the time, and the type continues to enjoy a faithful following.
Design and development
Fred Weick
In 1931, aeronautical engineer Fred Weick was assistant chief of the aeronautics division of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). In 1934, he asked permission to build an aircraft based on the 1931 Stout Skycar using fabric instead of aluminum covering and control modifications based on NACA research. Weick and a group of co-workers designed and assembled the experimental aircraft in their spare time and paid for it themselves. The resulting aircraft, known as the W-1, featured tricycle landing gear, a parasol wing, and a pusher propeller configuration.
Fred Weick listed the W-1 design goals that were tested in later seminars:
Tricycle landing gear with castering nosewheel, steerable if desired
Suitable longitudinal and lateral stability with limited up-elevator deflection, to prevent loss of control due to stalling and spinning.
A glide-control flap
Two-control operation using controls for pitch and roll.
“ERCO Ercoupe” enters the record as 1937 general aviation aircraft by the Engineering and Research Corporation. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what ERCO, Ercoupe and general can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2031561. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1937, 1968, 1970 and 1931.
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This entry incorporates text from “ERCO Ercoupe” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.