North Canton, OH — “It walks! It swims! It flies!” says a 1940s Goodyear Aircraft advertisement about the company’s four-seat amphibious airplane, the Drake. Now the last surviving Goodyear Drake teaches, too, as a new permanent exhibit at MAPS Air Museum at Akron-Canton Airport. The recently restored plane — repainted in its original yellow and blue Goodyear colors — will be dedicated at 1 p.m. today with a ceremony at MAPS.
“When I look at it, I’m amazed at the work they did on it,” said Kim Kovesci, executive director, noting that the crew chief for the restoration was MAPS member Wayne Noall. “It jumps out. It really pops.”
A LITTLE HISTORY
Goodyear designers began building the Drake in the middle of the 1940s and the amphibious plane program extended into the 1950s program, said MAPS member Don Block, who has a personal connection to the aircraft.
“I was at Goodyear when they were doing it, and I knew the people working on it,” said Block, who worked in the lighter-than-air department — blimps — of Goodyear Aircraft at a time when the company wanted also to build heavier-than air products.
Goodyear first made a smaller two-seat version of the Drake, a prototype it called the Duck, whose number was the GA-1. A three-seat Duck, the GA-2, followed, and the company constructed 15 of those planes, none of which still exist.
“They got into the GA-22 in the 1950s,” said Block. “Only two of those were built, the GA-22 and the GA-22A. This one is the 22A.”
The GA-22s had four seats and a larger engine. Advertising by Goodyear billed them as a perfect “post-war personal aircraft.”
“At the end of the war, they felt that all the pilots would want to keep flying and would buy small planes, said Kim Kovesci, MAPS executive director. “What really happened was there were so many training planes left over that they bought those from surplus.”
SOLE SURVIVOR
After testing, designers dismantled the GA-22. The company used the GA-22A for corporate business and executive retreats, most notably flying to a lake in Canada to go fishing.
“This was the sole survivor, the only one running of any of the Ducks and Drakes,” said Block, who added that the plane flew until early in the 1960s.
Eventually, the aircraft made its way to the Experimental Aircraft Association in Oshkosh, Wis., which is where Noall discovered it while on a trip there in 2010.
Goodyear’s Drake becomes a MAPS Air Museum exhibit