Stunning in scarlett

In 1934, Harry G. Ballance bought a new Stinson SR-5E and flew it home. In 2006, Harry G Ballance bought the very same SR-5E – and flew it home. The key, of course, is that both of the ‘Harry G Ballance’ are different men. Harry G Ballance Senior was the original owner of NC14572. The current owner of the Stinson, now known as Miss Scarlet, is his son, Harry G Ballance Junior. And the 72 years in between tell a good story.

Harry Senior learned to fly in 1928 – the year after Lindbergh set off an aviation mania in the US – and by 1934 was already something of Stinson aficionado. His motion picture distribution business required him to travel extensively throughout south-eastern US and the distances almost prohibited travel by rail or car. After all, his territory was just slightly smaller than France, so flying became essential to the meet-and-greet style of his profession. He began using a Stinson SM cabin monoplane to cover the miles. He chose well.

The Stinson company had been founded in 1925, when movers and shakers in the Detroit business community decided to back a new venture, headed by one of America’s best known pilots, Edward A ‘Eddie’ Stinson and his business partner/promoter William Mara. The Stinson family was prominent in American aviation from almost the beginning. Although Eddie eventually became the highest time pilot of his day, the family name became famous through the efforts of his sisters Katherine and Marjorie. These women, accomplished pilots before WWI, gave flying exhibitions all over the US and Canada, and ventured as far as Japan and China. They also taught hundreds of men, and a few women, to fly – but not their brother Eddie. They considered him to be too fond of drink and ‘loud living’, and although they valued his services as a ‘mechanician’, they didn’t want him anywhere near the cockpit of an aeroplane. He eventually found another instructor.

Stinson had had his fill of freezing in open cockpits, and had seen the toll they had taken on his sisters’ health. He proposed an enclosed cabin biplane, with comfortable seats, an electric starter and a heater. When the first ‘Detroiter’ was built, Stinson was able to demonstrate it to potential clients, even though it was winter in Detroit. After a couple of sales to wealthy individuals, the new company was off and running, becoming one of the best selling marques in the country.

In 1927 the new SM (for Stinson Monoplane), also known as the ‘Detroiter’, replaced the biplane. Supported by a constant-chord, strut-braced high-wing. The cabin was easy to enter (hefty welded footsteps became a Stinson earmark). Power was supplied by any of several radial engines: Curtiss, Warner, Wright, Pratt & Whitney… there was even one with a Packard diesel. The SM line proliferated through a wide range of versions and sizes but all of them retained the ‘straight’ wing.

In 1929 Mr E L Cord entered the picture. After making his fortune selling glamorous and expensive motorcars, Cord decided to spend his way into the business of the future – aviation. One of his holdings was the Lycoming Motor Co. Lycoming produced high-quality, straight-8 engines for Cord cars and was just finishing the development of a nine-cylinder radial aircraft engine, which seemed ideal for the aircraft that Stinson was producing. The merger provided Stinson with the ability to keep prices down, which became essential just a few months later when the stock market spun in, and provided capital to improve the product.

The new model became the Reliant. Known as the SR series, by 1934 it had progressed to the SR-5, with an improved landing gear, a lovely bump cowl covering a 225-240hp Lycoming engine and a complete novelty, ‘speed arrestors’. Now known as flaps, they allowed Bill Mara, who flew many of the sales and demonstration flights, to land in a little over 200ft!

This is where Harry Ballance Sr enters the story.

Having taken his trusty SM to Detroit for service, he left with a spanking new SR-5E Reliant.

“This all happened before I was born,” says Harry Jr “I’ve never been sure of the exact details. Stinson was well known for making it financially easy for buyers, and whether they offered my dad a deal that was too good to refuse, or he saw the aircraft and just had to have it, I don’t know. In any case, he came back in a new airplane and flew it until 1938, when he moved up to an SR-9 Gullwing.”

His father’s flying – and the fact that his mother Marthe became the second woman in Atlanta with a pilot’s licence – must have left a mark on Harry Jr.

In 1963, age 24, he was promoted to First Lieutenant in the US Army and with the pay rise he bought his dream aircraft, a Stearman. (He still owns it and flies it regularly.) After the army he went to work for Delta Air Lines, starting as a second officer on a DC-6. Thirty-five years later, he retired as Delta’s number 2 international captain. Somewhere amid all that experience he started thinking about the Stinson that he’d never met.

“I had a good idea it was still around, because in about 1980 the owner had called my mother and asked about its history,” Harry remembers. “He was looking to sell, but at the time I had a young family and it was just beyond my financial reach. A couple of decades later, when the kids were graduating and I thought I had a secure retirement coming, I figured I could afford another airplane and started searching for NC14572.”

He found it in Baltimore. “I jumped a jet up there, and found the airplane in flyable shape. The owner was willing to sell, but he warned me that the engine was high time and there were things that needed fixing. We made the deal and I started home to Atlanta. It was getting dark as I crossed into Georgia. After 34,000 hours, I’ve made a few rules for myself, and one of them is I don’t fly single-engined airplanes at night. My boss had a hangar in Gainesville, Georgia, so I landed there and put the airplane in the corner. When I checked the oil tank I found it down over four GALLONS on the first leg. I made a trip around the pattern the next day, watching the fluttering oil pressure gauge. The airplane spent the next two-and-a-half years in Gainesville.”

Oklahoma overhaul
The 300hp Lycoming came off and went to Oklahoma for an overhaul. The lead time was a year. While it was off, the engine mount was sent out for restoration. Once the mount was gone, it was discovered that the firewall was soft aluminium – useless for stopping a fire – so a new one was fabricated from stainless steel.

“Once you have the firewall out, you’re more or less at the back of the instrument panel. That was showing its age, and the instruments themselves needed overhauling. I asked my friend Harold Spivey, who’s worked on my airplanes since I bought the Stearman, to build a new panel. He did his usual beautiful job, but you can imagine that wasn’t the end of it.”

While the aircraft rested in pieces in Gainesville, Ballance built a new hangar on the Peach State Airport some 40 miles south of Atlanta. The Stinson rode the back roads from Gainesville to Peach State on a couple of slightly-too-wide trailers and the real work of a total restoration began. Harry knew exactly who he wanted to work on a full-blown restoration and began getting his band together.

“Harold had been working on the airplane all along, but when we got really deep into it, it became a job for a crew. I asked Barry Hutton if he could help,” says Ballance.

According to Hutton, “Harry asked if I could make an aluminium landing gear fairing and I thought I could. That went all right, so I ended up working on the airplane more and more. After I was laid off at my day job, I worked on the Stinson full-time for three years. I can use an English wheel, which came in handy for the sheet metal parts.”

Leo Roberson was a friend from his Delta days. “His fabric workmanship is absolutely the best I’ve ever seen. I managed to entice him into doing the bulk of that, and a lot of other things that nobody never, ever sees, but are beautiful nonetheless.”

One of the interesting things about the men who did most of the restoration work is, when asked about what they did, they all talk about what the others did.

Leo Roberson on Harold Spivey: “Harold is so quiet he’d never brag about his own work, but he is the consummate craftsman. The original trim system in the Stinson was miserable – a crank and endless cable arrangement wound around a pulley – when it reached the end of the available trim movement it started lowering the flaps. If the cable slipped or stretched even a little, you could be left without trim or flaps. Harold designed, drew, built, installed and got FAA approval for a gearbox and drive shaft that works perfectly. A beautiful piece of work.”

Barry Hutton on Leo Roberson: “I ended up painting the airplane, and doing that you get really familiar with the fabric work. Leo is a very meticulous guy and his Polyfiber work was perfect. I never had to fix a thing before the paint went on.”

Harry Ballance on Barry Hutton: “He is so good at metal forming we ended up calling him ‘The Magician’. There’s no fibreglass on Miss Scarlet anywhere. Barry spends a lot of time thinking before he picks up tools, but then he makes beautiful parts that fit the first time. When he finished repairing a part, it would be better than new. We’d call it ‘Barryized’.”

Aluminium tubing
Lots of other people contributed as well. For instance, the wings use a lot of 5/16in square aluminium tubing, something that’s extinct today. The only way to get any is to order a full mill run, which is hugely expensive. But Stinson SR-7 restorer Bob Lindley had done just that for his project, and had enough left for the SR-5. A friend contributed a brand new set of Cessna 195 landing lights and they worked perfectly. The project got a huge boost when Robbie Grove took the time to design and build a custom set of brakes that allowed the use of Goodyear Blimp tyres – the closest modern approximation of the original Goodyear AirWheels.

“I spent a lot of hours on the airplane,” says Ballance, “but really, my role was to make it possible for some very talented people to do what they do. We installed a small sheet metal shield back by the rear roll-down window, signed by people who had worked on the airplane. There’s about 20 names on it. You can walk around the finished airplane, stick your head in the cabin and just FEEL the craftsmanship that went into it.”

Finally, the gleaming red-and-cream Stinson was ready to fly. The grass at Peach State was green and freshly mowed. Harry had re-familiarised himself with the taps and switches. He pushed the throttle home, the Lycoming spun the big silver propeller, and a couple of hundred yards later Harry eased Miss Scarlet into the air for the first time in 12.5 years.

“I knew immediately we’d gotten it right,” Harry says. “The airplane was almost perfectly in trim and the engine was strong. After some basic air work, I got the flaps down and got ready to land. I was very, very aware that the guys lined up in front of the hangar watching me had poured years of their best work into this airplane. I knew my wife Carol hadn’t protested at all when I went deep into our retirement savings to finance the project. I knew my father, and my mother too, had landed this airplane many times before I was ever born… The landing went well and I think we all breathed easier.”

Eighty years on…
As he became more familiar with the Reliant he began to appreciate the crew in Detroit eight decades earlier.

“It’s an honest airplane. I’d describe it as a cross between a DC-6 and a J-3 Cub, although that probably makes no sense to most people. It’s got a full-swivel tailwheel with no steering, and it is very blind forward when it’s on the ground, so you’ve got to pay attention taxying. On take-off, I use a bit of ‘oomph’ to get the tail up and let the rudder bite clean air. Once it’s up, you have good directional control and you can see where you’re going. It’s pretty comfortable. On the way home from Oshkosh our wives were in the back, and they commented on the comfort and the smooth ride. In the air, the visibility is decent and it feels solid. The straight wing doesn’t create that much adverse yaw, but you do have to lead the turns with the rudder. Like a lot of old airplanes, the reaction to control inputs is not immediate.”

Leo has also flown the aeroplane. “When I was flying for this photo shoot, I found that the airplane would do whatever I asked it to,” he says. “But there was always just a tiny lag. If you got impatient and tried something else you’d suddenly get two things you didn’t want. Patience and smoothness are the key.”

Harry adds, “The flaps – I think this airplane may have been the first production airplane in America with flaps – take some getting used to. Since the same hand crank in the cabin roof operates the trim and the flaps, I’ve learned to crank in full nose-up trim and push on that big control column to keep the nose from climbing. As the flaps come down, it comes back into trim and the column stays about neutral.

“I make wheel landings with just a touch of power and concentrate on keeping the landing roll straight, because I know the rudder will lose effectiveness when the tail comes down. With no tailwheel steering it’s important to have it going where you want it when the taiI comes down. I never like using brakes in a taildragger unless I have to, so I’m very gentle with them.”

Since that first flight, Miss Scarlet has transversed much of the same country it did 85 years ago. It’s made a trip to Oshkosh, within one state of its birthplace in Detroit. And every time those blimp tyres lift off the grass at Peach State, two Harry Ballances – and Marthe too – are smiling.