Thurston Teal
1968 utility flying boat family by Thurston Aircraft
The Thurston Teal is a family of two- and four-seat all-aluminium amphibious aircraft designed by David Thurston in the United States and first flown in 1968.
A total of 38 Teals were manufactured.
Development
David B. Thurston established Thurston Aircraft Corporation at Sanford, Maine, in 1966 to produce a lightweight amphibian of his own design, which had the designation Thurston TSC-1A Teal.
First flown in 1968, production began after certification was gained in August 1969; the 16th and subsequent aircraft, which introduced some refinements, were designated TSC-1A1 Teal. In 1972 David Thurston joined the Schweizer Aircraft Corporation, which continued to build the Teal in the form of the TSC-1A2 Teal II before selling the production rights to the Teal Aircraft Corporation of Markham, Ontario, in early 1979.
Thurston Aircraft produced a total of 19, Schweizer built 12 and Teal Aircraft constructed seven.
Design
The Teal design features a high wing with tip floats for lateral stability. The horizontally opposed engine is mounted tractor fashion in a strut-supported pylon above the wing root. The T-tail includes a water rudder and tailwheel that swings up against the bottom of the rudder. Conventional undercarriage includes flat, spring-steel main undercarriage legs that rotate aft for water landings.
“Thurston Teal” enters the record as 1968 utility flying boat family by Thurston Aircraft. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Thurston, Teal and utility 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 Oct 24, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q7799454. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1968, 1966, 1969 and 1972.
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This entry incorporates text from “Thurston Teal” 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.