Uppercu-Burnelli Corporation was also involved in building small sport aircraft. The firm produced the Aeromarine-Klemm, a German-designed, personal sport monoplane, under license at its Keyport plant for the American market. In 1930, Uppercu-Burnelli also introduced its own floatplane version, called the Uppercu-Burnelli Amphibian seaplane.

Unlike Burnelli’s transports, the seaplane had little that was revolutionary about its design. With a length of 23 feet 5 inches, a wingspan of just over 40 feet and an empty weight of about 1,300 pounds, the design of the small, single-engine, two-seat, low-wing sport monoplane was relatively straightforward. It was essentially the Aeromarine-Klemm with floats added. Nonetheless, the design of the floats, not the aircraft, upheld Burnelli’s reputation for innovation. A set of four retractable landing wheels mounted in the floats permitted the plane to operate on land as well as on water. The plane attracted considerable attention when it made its first public appearance at the Newark, N.J., municipal airport and at Long Island’s Roosevelt Field. Those watching were convinced the seaplane would crash as it attempted to land on an ordinary tarmac runway. Instead, the small sports plane made a perfect landing despite the presence of the large set of floats.

In May 1930, after 10 years of trying, Burnelli received a patent for his transport design. With this assurance, Burnelli and his firm redoubled their efforts to obtain sufficient orders to allow the full-scale production of the UB-20. During 1931 and 1932, advertisements appeared regularly in aviation trade publications touting the advantages of the Burnelli design. Such efforts, however, were doomed to failure in those Depression-plagued years.

Despite their cutting-edge technology, the Burnelli transports were not pretty, so gaining acceptance for such an unusual and revolutionary design was not an easy task. Burnelli himself unwittingly contributed to this problem as well. By insisting upon building the lifting-fuselage design himself, he kept other, larger manufacturers from incorporating his ideas into their aircraft. In addition, the rapid development of more powerful aircraft engines in the 1920s and 1930s also worked to the transport’s disadvantage. The increasingly powerful engines available on the market often more than compensated for the conventional aircraft design weaknesses that gave a performance edge to the Burnelli design.

Still, Burnelli was tireless in his efforts to demonstrate the practicality and efficiency of his planes to the public and the aviation industry. During the 1920s, for instance, the RB-2 became a portable showroom for Essex automobiles. Fitted out to carry eight passengers, a fully equipped office and an Essex coupe, the plane flew a promotional tour of the United States. On another occasion, the Sun Oil Co. wanted to prove that its fuel could start a car even in the cold temperatures found at high altitudes. In an unsuccessful effort to substantiate this claim, the UB-20 flew over Long Island with a Ford roadster suspended beneath the fuselage.

In 1934, Uppercu-Burnelli changed its name to the Burnelli Aircraft Co. Its commitment to perfecting and promoting the Burnelli design never waned. In 1935, a new prototype passenger liner, the UB-14, appeared on the market. The UB-14 retained all the advantages of the UB-20 and Burnelli’s other designs. It is claimed that the cabin space per passenger is much larger than for any conventional type airplane so far built, Aviation magazine, the forerunner of the contemporary Aviation Weekly, said in September 1935.

The UB-14, like its predecessors, failed to attract sufficient orders or the kind of financial backing necessary to put the plane into full production. Burnelli therefore turned more and more of his attention abroad to seek financial backing for his designs from the European aviation industry. Several European companies expressed interest. In July 1936, Britain’s Scottish Aircraft Co. was preparing to build its own version of the UB-14 at its Willesden plant. Holland’s Aviolanda Aircraft Co. had also expressed interest in the design. To capitalize upon that foreign attention, Burnelli decided to send the UB-14 to Europe.

Burnelli first planned to send the plane to Europe in a spectacular transatlantic flight. To fly the prototype, Burnelli obtained the services of Clyde Pangborn, a well-known pilot. Pangborn was a longtime supporter of the Burnelli design and had a long association with Burnelli aircraft. A former World War I aviator and barnstorming pilot, Pangborn first achieved national fame in 1931 when he and his partner, Hugh Herndon, flew their specially designed, high-wing Bellanca Skyrocket monoplane from Tokyo to Wenatchee, Wash., covering the 4,600 miles in 41 hours, 13 minutes.

To extend their plane’s range, Pangborn and Herndon had jettisoned the landing gear soon after takeoff and made an undignified belly landing upon their arrival in the United States. Nonetheless, they became the first men to fly nonstop across the Pacific, and they collected the $25,000 cash prize offered for the feat by a Tokyo newspaper. Clearly, Pangborn was an ideal choice to pilot the Burnelli plane. His previous achievements in the air alone would have been sufficient to attract the attention of the aviation world to the flight.

Although the transatlantic flight eventually fell through, Burnelli went ahead with plans for a European demonstration and had the plane disassembled and sent to Europe by ship. Initially, however, things did not go well for Burnelli’s European enterprise. The British customs service kept the disassembled aircraft in crates for months at Southampton, England. To make matters worse, the Scottish Aircraft Co., which held rights to build the Burnelli design, had gone into receivership before completing its Burnelli prototype.

Eventually, however, Burnelli’s fortunes in Europe began to improve. Finally released from British customs, the UB-14 was reassembled in Holland and, in December 1937, with Pangborn at the controls, made its long-awaited demonstration flight at Hatfield, England.

The flight had the desired effect upon Great Britain’s Cunliffe-Owen Aircraft Corp., a new aircraft firm started by Sir Hugh Cunliffe-Owen of the British American Tobacco Co. The firm undertook to build a European Burnelli transport. The resulting plane, the OA-1 Clyde Clipper, briefly saw production in Europe. Burnelli’s long-sought success, however, was short-lived. Only one plane had been completed when World War II broke out in Europe. With Britain’s aircraft industry devoted almost entirely to military aircraft, no more Clyde Clipper transports were built. The sole British Burnelli aircraft was pressed into service by the RAF and was eventually turned over to the Free French Air Force in Africa, where at one point it served as the personal transport of General Charles de Gaulle. Worn out by its wartime service, the Clyde Clipper reportedly met its end as the centerpiece of a V-J Day (victory over Japan) bonfire.

Throughout his career, Burnelli made several attempts to adapt his lifting-fuselage design to military use. Those efforts, however, fared no better than his civilian designs. Rumors circulated that financial backing from a political opponent of President Roosevelt kept Burnelli from gaining the kind of government support enjoyed by many of his competitors. Whatever the reason, Burnelli did not share in the lucrative military contracts enjoyed by other aircraft manufacturers at the time.

In 1935, Burnelli submitted his design for the two-engine bomber, the A-1, to the U.S. Army Air Corps. The design got no further than the mock-up stage.

In 1943, Burnelli transformed his A-1 bomber design into a lifting-fuselage glider, the XCG-16, which was capable of carrying 40 troops or 4 tons of cargo. Like his powered aircraft, the glider never saw production. Despite excellent test results, only one prototype of the XCG-16 was built.

The war, however, did not keep Burnelli from trying to build his transports. In 1944, Burnelli joined the Canadian Car and Foundry Ltd. of Montreal. The firm worked to adapt the Burnelli design for sale to the Canadian market.

Special problems faced Canadian aviation. Rugged wilderness conditions and primitive facilities were even more common in Canada than they were in the United States. Canadian Car and Foundry sought to utilize the advantage of the Burnelli design to meet the heavy demands of wilderness flying. The fruit of this collaboration was the Burnelli CBY-3.

The plane was typical of Burnelli’s earlier transport designs. With a length of just over 57 feet, a wing span of 86 feet and a gross weight of 27,000 pounds, the twin-tailed liner carried 24 passengers. It was powered by a pair of 1,200-hp Pratt and Whitney Twin-Wasp engines.

The test flight at Montreal in August 1945, with Pangborn at the controls, proved the plane admirably suited to wilderness flying. With approximately the dimensions and performance of such conventional air transports as the DC-3, it is claimed…an air-foil profile enables the plane to carry another ton of payload, reported one newspaper story. Even more important for its wilderness purpose, the plane managed to take off and land within 650 feet, a decided advantage when operating from primitive airfields.

Those years following World War II were boom years for civil aviation in the United States in general, a time of unprecedented growth for both airlines and aircraft manufacturers. In an effort to capitalize on the boom, Canadian Car and Foundry promoted Burnelli’s CBY design in the late 1940s under the name Loadmaster. However, the plane, like Burnelli’s designs of the 1920s and 1930s, never fully shared in the industry’s general prosperity.

Despite their operational advantages, Burnelli’s post-World War II designs faced many problems gaining industry acceptance. Like its predecessors, the Burnelli transport was again hampered by its unconventional design and unusual appearance. More important, however, the designs faced fierce competition. The end of the war left available large numbers of surplus military aircraft. Such planes had proven service records and were inexpensive. Those were difficult circumstances for even the most promising experimental aircraft design to overcome.

But Vincent Burnelli did not abandon his designs. Until his death in Southampton, N.Y., in 1964 at the age of 69, Burnelli remained tireless in his determination to promote his airfoil-shaped-fuselage transport plane. In 1955, he adapted his Burnelli Loadmaster transport to carry an expedition of 20 passengers and 41 sled dogs, along with their equipment, to the North Pole, but the enterprise was canceled. The Loadmaster also flew regularly as a commercial airliner in South America and languished abandoned for some time at Baltimore’s airport in Maryland until it was finally retired to the New England Air Museum in Windsor Locks, Conn., in the late 1960s.

Few figures in the history of American aviation have sparked more controversy than Burnelli did during his lifetime, and the disagreement continues only slightly abated today. Supporters claim that only a shortsighted aviation industry, with a vested interest in preserving conventional designs, kept Burnelli’s ideas from revolutionizing aircraft design. Others claim the advantages of the Burnelli design were overstated.

The argument remains unresolved and is not confined entirely to the past. The disagreement is sparked anew when designs of modern aircraft, and even spacecraft, incorporate Burnelli’s design concepts. Some have suggested that today’s airliners would be safer if they incorporated Burnelli’s lifting-fuselage design. Some even suggest that the lifting body characteristic that keeps the U.S. space shuttle flying after re-entry is a direct application of Burnelli’s lifting-fuselage design.

Aviation magazine, in a 1935 issue, paid high tribute to the design when it said few people have stuck to an idea that seemed to them inherently good as has Vincent Burnelli with his airfoil fuselage. Three more decades of effort by the designers followed that 1930s tribute. But Burnelli’s contribution to American aviation was more than just determination, it was genius as well. Both qualities made Vincent Burnelli a true aviation pioneer.

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Aviation History.

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