Pitts Special
The Pitts Special biplane — Curtis Pitts's iconic American aerobatic mount that dominated unlimited-aerobatic competition from the 1960s through the 1980s — captured as a sport-scale RC model.
About
The Pitts Special is the work of Curtis H. "Curt" Pitts, who designed the original Pitts S-1 in 1944 and refined the design across multiple variants over four decades. The Pitts S-1 was a small, single-seat aerobatic biplane built around a simple recipe: short coupled, light, with high power-to-weight ratio, oversize control surfaces, and the kind of brutal directness of handling that made the type the dominant unlimited-aerobatic biplane from the 1960s through the 1980s. The two-seat S-2 variant introduced in the 1960s gave dual-instructor capability and turned the Pitts into the standard advanced-aerobatic trainer at flying schools across the United States.
Pitts Specials racked up an extraordinary competition record — Bob Herendeen, Charlie Hillard, Mary Gaffaney, Tom Poberezny, and a generation of other American aerobatic pilots flew the type through World Aerobatic Championship circuits in the 1960s and 1970s. Aviat Aircraft of Afton, Wyoming continues to manufacture the S-2C variant of the Pitts today, more than seventy years after Curt Pitts first built the prototype.
The unmistakable Pitts silhouette — short, fat fuselage; bottom wing slightly forward of the top; classic 1940s-styled tail group — is one of the most-modeled aerobatic biplane subjects in modern RC scale flying.
In the simulator
A demanding biplane aerobatic mount with the characteristic short-coupled, twitchy handling of the real airframe. A natural sibling of the U32Pitts_3d (CV Planes Pack 7) — same airframe at a different scale.
