Art Scholl, the Pennzoil Special Super Chipmunk, and the Flying Professor Who Turned the Inverted Flat Spin Into an Art Form

Art Scholl was a college aeronautics professor from Rockford, Illinois who became one of the most beloved airshow pilots in American history by mastering the inverted flat spin in a heavily modified de Havilland Chipmunk. Known as the “Flying Professor,” he rebuilt an ordinary post-war trainer into the bright-yellow Pennzoil Special Super Chipmunk and flew it with a precision rooted in his doctorate-level understanding of aerodynamics. He died on September 16, 1985, at age 53, while flying camera work for a Navy fighter film off the Southern California coast.

Who Was Art Scholl?

Arthur Scholl was born on Christmas Eve, December 24, 1931, in Rockford, Illinois. What set him apart from most airshow legends of his era wasn’t just his hands on the stick - it was his mind.

Scholl earned a doctorate and taught aeronautics at San Bernardino Valley College in California. His students called him Dr. Scholl. Airshow announcers called him the Flying Professor.

Most great airshow pilots of that generation came up hard - barnstormers, crop dusters, military washouts. Scholl came up through the classroom. He could stand at a blackboard, write out the equations of a spin, and explain exactly why an airplane departs controlled flight and what happens to the airflow over the wing.

Then he could walk to the ramp and fly the maneuver he’d just drawn - lower, slower, and more precisely than almost anyone alive.

What Was the Pennzoil Special Super Chipmunk?

The airplane everyone remembers was a bright-yellow racer with Pennzoil painted down the side. Many assume it was a purpose-built aerobatic machine. It wasn’t. Underneath the paint, it was a de Havilland Chipmunk - one of aviation’s great honest airplanes.

The de Havilland Canada DHC-1 Chipmunk was a primary trainer designed after World War II to replace the Tiger Moth. It had tandem seats, a bubble canopy, and a little Gipsy Major engine producing roughly 145 horsepower on a good day. The Royal Air Force trained a generation of pilots in it. It was gentle, forgiving, and sweet-flying - never meant to hang off its prop in front of a hundred thousand people.

But Scholl saw the bones of something more, and in pure homebuilt spirit, he built it himself:

Clipped the wings, cutting a chunk off each wingtip so it would roll faster and take more punishment
Replaced the Gipsy Major with a 260-horsepower flat-six - nearly double the power
Reworked the landing gear so it would retract
Beefed up the structure to handle loads the factory engineers never imagined

He called it the Super Chipmunk. Pennzoil put its name and unmistakable yellow paint on it, and it became one of the most recognized airplanes on the American airshow circuit. Scholl built more than one over the years, but the shape never changed - that long, tapered, clipped-wing silhouette coming over the fence inverted, trailing smoke.

What Made the Inverted Flat Spin So Difficult?

Scholl’s signature maneuver was the inverted flat spin, and to understand why it mattered, you have to understand what’s happening.

In a normal spin, the airplane stalls, a wing drops, and it autorotates downward in a nose-low corkscrew around a vertical line. Now flip that upside down. The airplane is inverted, belly to the sky, and instead of spiraling nose-down it spins flat, rotating around a point beneath the pilot’s back - skidding around the sky like a record on a turntable someone flipped over.

The forces are brutal and backwards. Everything the body knows about which way is up is wrong. Scholl would set the spin up high, let the crowd watch it develop, ride it down through thousands of feet of rotation, and recover clean and level - low enough that you could see him grinning in the cockpit.

He understood that spin the way a surgeon understands an incision. Not as a daredevil rolling the dice, but as a professor who had done the math, knew exactly where the edges were, and chose to live against them, show after show.

The Legend of Aileron the Cat

Old-timers still mention this detail with a smile: Art Scholl had a cat named Aileron. The stories say the cat would sometimes ride along, and that Scholl flew so smoothly and so coordinated through parts of his routine that Aileron would sit calmly on the glareshield as if nothing were happening.

How much of that grew in the retelling is anyone’s guess - that’s how hangar stories work. But the legend endures because it captured something true. Scholl was so precise, so at home in that airplane, that a calm cat felt believable.

That precision is what separated him from the thrill-selling barnstormers of the 1920s. When Scholl cut a ribbon inverted, 10 to 15 feet off the grass, that wasn’t luck or nerve alone. It was a man who had computed the sight picture and earned his own trust through ten thousand repetitions. Other pilots loved him because airshow flying is a small, tight world where everyone knows who’s genuinely good and who’s merely brave. The professor could fly.

Art Scholl’s Hollywood Career

Being the best inverted-spin man in the country doesn’t pay all the bills, so Scholl built a second career that put his airplanes behind some of the most famous flying footage ever shot. He became one of Hollywood’s premier aerial cinematographers and camera pilots.

He flew the aerial work for the Robert Redford film about a 1920s barnstormer - The Great Waldo Pepper - that romanticized the whole gypsy-flyer world. He shot sequences for television, commercials, and feature films, running a California operation built around a fleet of specially rigged aircraft with camera mounts he engineered himself.

The same brain that clipped the Chipmunk’s wings was now figuring out how to bolt a movie camera where it had never gone and fly the shot smooth enough to use. By the mid-1980s, Scholl stood at the top of two demanding professions at once - the showman crowds came to see, and the craftsman the studios called when the flying had to be real.

How Did Art Scholl Die?

In the fall of 1985, Scholl was flying camera work for a major Navy fighter film - the kind of movie that sends a generation of kids to the recruiter’s office. He wasn’t flying the yellow Chipmunk. He was flying a Pitts biplane rigged as a camera platform, tasked with flying aerobatic maneuvers himself to capture the spinning, tumbling point of view that puts audiences in the cockpit.

On September 16, 1985, off the coast of Southern California over the Pacific, Scholl took the Pitts up to film an inverted spin - the very maneuver he owned, the one he’d flown more times than any man alive.

This time it didn’t recover. The airplane stayed in the spin, down and down. The last transmission anyone heard from Scholl was calm and professional: he reported that he had “a real problem.” Then the Pitts went into the ocean and took him with it. Neither the airplane nor Scholl was ever recovered.

To this day, no one knows for certain what went wrong - a mechanical failure, a shifted camera mount that upset the balance, something no amount of skill could answer. He was 53 years old.

That fighter-pilot film was released the following summer, in 1986, and became one of the biggest movies of the decade. In its closing credits runs a dedication: “In memory of Art Scholl.” Millions read that name without knowing they’d just watched some of the last work of one of the finest airshow pilots America ever produced.

Why Art Scholl’s Legacy Still Matters

Scholl’s real legacy isn’t in the Pacific - it’s on every airshow flightline. He looked at an ordinary airplane and saw more in it. He did the work himself, understood it down to the rivets, and married book learning to stick-and-rudder feel - proving you never have to choose between the two.

Walk a vintage aircraft ramp today and you’ll see Chipmunks: original ones in RAF trainer colors, and hot-rodded clipped-wing versions with big engines and smoke systems, direct descendants of what Scholl dreamed up. And when a modern aerobatic pilot hangs a machine off the prop and rides a flat spin toward the numbers, that’s Scholl’s grammar they’re speaking. He helped write the language of the modern airshow, and every performer owes him something - whether they know his name or not.

Key Takeaways

Art Scholl (born December 24, 1931, Rockford, Illinois) was a doctorate-holding aeronautics professor turned airshow legend, nicknamed the “Flying Professor.”
His famous Pennzoil Special Super Chipmunk was a de Havilland DHC-1 Chipmunk he rebuilt himself with clipped wings, a 260-hp flat-six engine, and retractable gear - up from the trainer’s original ~145-hp Gipsy Major.
His signature maneuver, the inverted flat spin, showcased precision grounded in his deep academic understanding of aerodynamics.
Scholl was also a leading Hollywood aerial cinematographer, flying camera work for films including The Great Waldo Pepper.
He died on September 16, 1985, at age 53, filming an inverted spin in a Pitts camera plane off Southern California; the Navy fighter film he was shooting was dedicated to his memory upon its 1986 release.