Curtis Pitts, Betty Skelton, and the Little Biplane That Taught the World to Roll

The Pitts Special is a tiny, purpose-built aerobatic biplane designed by Curtis Pitts in 1944, and it changed aerobatic flying forever. Light, twitchy, and dramatically overpowered for its size, it proved that a small home-built airplane could out-fly the heavy war-surplus biplanes of its day. In the hands of pilots like Betty Skelton, it went on to win world championships and become the most influential aerobatic aircraft ever built.

Who Was Curtis Pitts?

Curtis Pitts grew up in Florida during the 1920s and 1930s, in an era when a single airplane passing overhead was enough to make a whole town stop and look up. He caught the flying bug early, and he didn’t stop at flying. He built airplanes, repaired them, and took them apart to understand exactly what made them work.

Pitts had a specific frustration. In those years, the airshow world ran on big, heavy biplanes - surplus military trainers designed to teach cadets, not to dance. You could throw them around the sky, but it took enormous physical effort, and they responded slowly to every input.

So Pitts asked a different question: what if an airplane wanted to do aerobatics? Something small, light, with short wings, a huge control throw, and more engine up front than the airframe had any business carrying - an airplane that rolled the instant you touched the stick.

What Is the Pitts Special?

Pitts built the first one in 1944, in the middle of World War II, when aluminum, engines, and nearly every material were spoken for. He welded up a steel-tube fuselage and stretched fabric over wood ribs to create a single-seat biplane with a wingspan under 20 feet - small enough that you could nearly pick it up and carry it.

He called it the Pitts Special, and there was nothing else like it in the sky. It was tiny, it was sensitive, and in the wrong hands it could bite. But in the right hands, it did things no light airplane had ever done.

Pitts never stopped refining the design. He would fly it, land it, and immediately go change something. Over the decades the single-seater improved steadily, and he later built a two-seat version so instructors could teach the demanding art of aerobatics without sending students up solo on day one.

Who Was Betty Skelton and Her “Little Stinker”?

Betty Skelton was one of the finest stick-and-rudder pilots the United States ever produced. She learned to fly as a teenager in Florida and soloed before she was legally old enough to do it alone - a detail that tells you exactly what kind of pilot she was.

In 1948, Skelton got her hands on a Pitts Special. She painted it in a distinctive cream and red scheme and named it Little Stinker. With it, she won the national aerobatic championship for women three times.

Her signature maneuver made headlines across the country: the inverted ribbon cut. Crews would string a ribbon between two poles, roughly 12 to 15 feet off the ground. Skelton would roll Little Stinker onto its back, hang inverted in the straps just a few feet off the grass, and fly through the gap - cutting the ribbon with the airplane’s vertical fin. It was flying that forgave no mistakes, and she made it look effortless.

Why the Pitts Special Matters to Homebuilt Aviation

The story isn’t only about one airplane and one pilot. It’s about how a homemade design from a Florida shed became the airplane that still fills the sky at airshows today.

The key move was simple: Curtis Pitts sold plans. For the price of a set of drawings, anyone could build a Pitts Special in their own garage - and people did, by the hundreds and eventually the thousands. Welders, machinists, airline mechanics, and farm kids with a dream spent their evenings assembling these biplanes rib by rib.

That is the founding idea behind the Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA) and its annual EAA AirVenture gathering at Wittman Field in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, the busiest week in aviation. Paul Poberezny and the early EAA built a movement around the belief that an amateur could construct a genuine, capable airplane and go fly it. The Pitts Special was living proof - a home-built biplane that beat the factory airplanes and war-surplus iron at their own game.

Through the 1960s and 1970s, American teams flew Pitts Specials at the world aerobatic championships and consistently landed on the podium. A home-built biplane, born in a wartime shed, carried the United States to the top of the aerobatic world and held it there for years.

What Is It Like to Fly a Pitts Special?

You don’t so much climb into a Pitts as put it on. It’s snug. You sit low between the short wings, and the big round engine up front blocks most of your forward view - so on the ground you S-turn back and forth to see around the nose, the way any good taildragger pilot must.

The controls are extraordinarily quick. The roll rate is so fast that a pilot coming out of a Cessna or a Cherokee will over-control it badly at first, chasing the airplane across the sky because every input they’ve ever learned is suddenly twice too much.

Once you relax and let your fingertips do the talking, the airplane becomes an extension of your body. You point your chin at a spot in the sky and the airplane goes there. Ask for a roll and it rolls instantly, stopping dead on the point. It rewards precise flying and exposes lazy flying - which makes it one of the best teachers of what an airplane can truly do.

The Legacy of Curtis Pitts and Betty Skelton

Decades later, Pitts Specials still perform at airshows - not out of nostalgia, but because the design still works. A biplane drawn up during World War II remains one of the finest aerobatic aircraft a pilot can strap into. Even the modern carbon-fiber aerobatic monoplanes that followed owe a debt to that little Florida biplane. Curtis Pitts drew the map by proving that light and small beats big and heavy.

Betty Skelton’s life kept expanding after she left airshow flying. She set land speed records in automobiles and became one of the first women to undergo elements of astronaut testing during the early space program.

Her original Little Stinker - the very airplane, restored to its cream-and-red scheme - now hangs in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, displayed nose-down as if diving at the crowd. A home-built biplane, preserved in the national collection alongside the Wright Flyer and the Spirit of St. Louis.

Key Takeaways

• Curtis Pitts built the first Pitts Special in 1944, a single-seat biplane with a wingspan under 20 feet, designed specifically to excel at aerobatics.
• Betty Skelton flew a Pitts named Little Stinker to three national women’s aerobatic championships (starting in 1948) and was famous for her low-level inverted ribbon cut.
• Because Curtis Pitts sold building plans, thousands of amateurs built their own Pitts Specials, making it a cornerstone of the homebuilt aircraft movement and the EAA.
• American teams flew Pitts Specials to world aerobatic titles through the 1960s and 1970s, proving a home-built design could beat factory aircraft.
• Little Stinker is preserved today in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, and virtually every modern aerobatic airplane traces its lineage to Pitts’s design.