Piper J-3 Cub
light aircraft family
The Piper J-3 Cub is an American light aircraft that was built between 1938 and 1947 by Piper Aircraft. The aircraft has a simple, lightweight design, which gives it good low-speed handling properties and short-field performance. The Cub is Piper Aircraft's second most-produced model after the PA-28 Cherokee series (>32,000 produced) with over 20,000 built in the United States. Its simplicity, affordability and popularity invoke comparisons to the Ford Model T automobile.
The aircraft is a high-wing, strut-braced monoplane with a large-area rectangular wing. It is most often powered by an air-cooled, flat-4 piston engine driving a fixed-pitch propeller. Its fuselage is a welded steel frame covered in fabric, seating two people in tandem.
The Cub was designed as a trainer. It had great popularity in this role and as a general aviation aircraft. Due to its performance, it was well suited for a variety of military uses such as reconnaissance, liaison and ground control.
“Piper J-3 Cub” enters the record as light aircraft family. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Piper, light and aircraft can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1162019. The Library of Congress control number is sh2001001792. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1938 and 1947.
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This entry incorporates text from “Piper J-3 Cub” 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.