Bellanca C-27

About

The Bellanca C-27 Airbus and its civilian sibling the Aircruiser were built by the Bellanca Aircraft Corporation of New Castle, Delaware, the company founded by Italian-American aviation pioneer Giuseppe Bellanca. The first Bellanca Airbus was built in 1930 as the Model P-100, and the line went on to demonstrate something unusual for its era: a single-engine high-wing transport that outperformed contemporary multi-engine designs from competitors. In the mid-1930s, the Aircruiser could carry 4,000-pound payloads at 145 to 155 mph — a performance envelope that the multi-engine Fokkers and Ford Trimotors of the same era simply could not match.

The U.S. Army Air Corps took notice. In 1933 the Air Corps purchased four Bellanca Model SP-200 airframes, designating them Y1C-27, and followed the same year with an order for ten more, designated C-27A. In 1934, thirteen of these airframes were re-engined with Wright Cyclone radials and re-designated C-27C. The C-27 served as a single-engine military transport in a role usually given to multi-engine designs, and Bellanca's airframes earned a reputation for efficient cargo work that outlasted their relatively short Air Corps careers.

The unmistakable Bellanca silhouette — high-wing, externally braced with the company's signature airfoil-shaped lift struts, single radial up front — is one of the more historically significant golden-age scale subjects in RC modeling, even if it isn't as widely produced as the more famous transport airframes of the era.

In the simulator

A friendly scale subject with the slow, stable handling of a high-wing single-engine transport. The Bellanca C-27 in our sim flies the way the real airframe was reputed to — predictable, willing on the controls, with the kind of deliberate energy management that suits a payload-class aircraft. Use it for relaxed scale flying, low passes down a grass strip, and the unhurried pattern of a 1930s transport mission. Pairs well with grass-strip and golden-age field landscapes.