The Fleetwings Sea Bird

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Event address:

 

The Fuge
780 Falcon Circle
Warminster, PA 18974

 

The lecture will be held in “The Lab” on the 1st floor of the Fuge. Enter the building from the Tranquility Brewing Co. entrance and proceed down the hallway ahead of you to the Lab door on the left. If you reach the circular hallway with the white marble floor, turn around and the door to the Lab will be on your right, past the restrooms.

 

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Join us for an unusual story of early aerospace innovation in Bucks County, PA, told by the son of Henry A. Liese, a mechanical engineer who helped build a prototype airplane known as the Sea Bird.

The Sea Bird was an amphibious utility aircraft designed by Fleetwings, Inc., of Bristol, Pennsylvania in the mid-1930s.

The Sea Bird was unusual because of its construction from spot-welded stainless steel, an innovation of its day. Intrigued with the possibility of building a strong, efficient airplane of stainless steel, Fleetwings experimented for several years to perfect fabrication methods, and the design of structural members best suited for the unusual properties of stainless-steel sheet.

The Sea Bird was a high-wing, wire-braced monoplane with its engine housed in a nacelle mounted above the wings on struts. The pilot and passengers sat in a fully enclosed cabin. Fleetwings initially planned to manufacture 50 production units, but at a price approaching $25,000 during the Great Depression, there proved to be no sustainable market.

The journey of the Sea Bird from prototype to eventual use in the oil industry, restoration to flight status following a crash and its final resting place at the Mid-America Flight Museum is another compelling part of its story.

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About the speaker

Arthur C. Liese is the President and managing Director of the Sporting Gallery and Book Shop, Inc. Founded in 1933, in New York City, it is the oldest Gallery of this unique specialty in this country. He is the leading expert on 20th Century American Sporting Art during the Golden Era of Sport (1927-1941). He is an appraiser and well published author and lecturer on this specialty subject.

Arthur is also a licensed pilot and has a deep appreciation for aviation history which was inspired by his father's own personal and professional aviation interests that inspired his later engineering and pioneering manufacturing work in aviation. Airplanes and flight had fascinated Henry since his youth on Long Island watching airplanes take off (including Charles Lindbergh!) and landings at Roosevelt Field.