Steve Wittman, Chief Oshkosh, and the Air Racer Whose Name Is Painted on the Field Where the Whole Show Lands

Wittman Regional Airport in Oshkosh, Wisconsin - home to the world’s busiest week of aviation - is named for Sylvester “Steve” Wittman, a self-taught air racer who was legally blind in one eye. Over a flying career spanning more than 70 years, Wittman out-engineered better-funded racing teams, managed the Oshkosh field for roughly four decades, and designed the spring-steel landing gear still found under thousands of Cessnas today. This is the story of the man whose name is painted on the field where the whole show lands.

Who Was Steve Wittman?

His name was Sylvester Joseph Wittman, but no one called him Sylvester. He was Steve. Born in 1904 in Byron, Wisconsin, he arrived just months after the Wright brothers first flew at Kitty Hawk - part of the very first generation of humans who could look up at a flying machine and imagine themselves in it.

Remarkably, Wittman was legally blind in one eye and had poor vision his entire life. By modern standards, that eyesight would have grounded him before he ever touched a control stick. But in an era of cheap avgas and open airspace, a determined young man could teach himself to fly - and that is exactly what Wittman did.

How Steve Wittman Made His Name in Air Racing

Wittman didn’t just want to fly. He wanted to fly fast. In the 1920s and 1930s, that meant air racing - the golden age of pylon racing at events like the National Air Races in Cleveland, where homebuilt airplanes flew wingtip to wingtip, low over the crowd.

Wittman was one of the men building racers in a shed with his own hands and his own ideas. He built a small, low-wing racer he named Chief Oshkosh, after the Wisconsin town and the Menominee leader it was named for. Flying it with his one good eye, he beat competitors with twice the horsepower and twice the money.

He won through cleverness, not cash. Wittman understood drag and streamlining instinctively at a time when much of that was still guesswork. He would shave, file, cowl, and fair his airplanes until they slipped through the air with minimal resistance, making small engines outperform larger ones.

The Racing Airplanes Steve Wittman Built

Wittman built a string of famous racers over the decades:

Chief Oshkosh - his early low-wing racer named for the town.
Buster - one of the smallest competitive racing airplanes ever built, a midget racer now hanging in the Smithsonian.
Bonzo - a larger, faster machine that competed against military ships and well-funded teams on the closed course.

Just as striking as what he built was how long he kept at it. Wittman was still air racing and cutting pylons in competition into his seventies and eighties - an age when most pilots have long since retired.

The Cessna Landing Gear You Use on Every Flight

Look at the main landing gear on a Cessna single - a 150, 172, or 182. The main gear legs aren’t complex struts filled with oil and springs. They’re a single tapered rod of spring steel, one clean curved leg that flexes to absorb the landing.

That design came from Steve Wittman. He worked out that a simple tapered spring-steel gear leg could take the repeated punishment of landings - flexing and rebounding without a complicated oleo strut. It was simple, light, cheap, and reliable. Cessna adopted a version of it and put it under thousands of aircraft.

Every time a student pilot greases on a landing - or doesn’t, and that flexing gear leg saves the day - Wittman’s engineering is absorbing the blow. His fingerprints remain on airplanes rolling out of hangars today.

Why the Oshkosh Airport Is Named Wittman Field

In 1931, during the Depression, the city of Oshkosh hired Steve Wittman to run its small airport. He effectively was the airport for the better part of 40 years - repairing airplanes, teaching people to fly, running operations, and building and winning races in between.

He managed the field until around 1969. When he stepped back, the community named the airport in his honor: Wittman Field, now Wittman Regional Airport - the field aviators fly into every year.

The EAA, Oshkosh, and the Poetry of Wittman Field

Around 1970, the Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA) went looking for a new home for its annual fly-in. It had outgrown its previous site in Rockford, Illinois, and moved north to the field in Oshkosh - with its long runways, wide grass, and the name of an old air racer on it.

There’s poetry in that. The EAA and the homebuilt movement celebrate the individual building a flying machine with their own hands and ideas. That gathering - the largest gathering of airplanes on Earth - found its home on a field named for the original builder in the shed. Wittman was homebuilding and out-thinking factory teams three and four decades before there was an EAA to celebrate it. In the early years of the Oshkosh fly-ins, he was still a fixture on the grounds, still flying, still one of the homebuilders’ own.

How Steve Wittman’s Story Ended

Wittman flew right up to the end. In 1995, in his early nineties, he and his wife Paula were flying one of his own designs in the South when the airplane came apart in the air. Investigators attributed it to a structural failure in the wing covering. Both Steve and Paula Wittman were lost.

It’s a hard way to lose a legend, but there’s another way to see it. Wittman flew for more than 70 years - born just after Kitty Hawk, flying into the age of glass panels and jet airliners. He never quit and never sat in the rocking chair. He died doing what he loved, in an airplane he built himself.

His designs outlived him. Buster hangs in the Smithsonian. His Tailwind - a fast, efficient little homebuilt - is still being built and flown today, and examples can be found parked on the homebuilt rows at Oshkosh. Sixty and seventy years on, Wittman’s ideas are still leaving the ground.

Key Takeaways

Steve Wittman (1904–1995) was a self-taught air racer from Byron, Wisconsin, who competed despite being legally blind in one eye.
He designed the tapered spring-steel landing gear used on thousands of Cessna aircraft.
He built famous racers including Chief Oshkosh, Buster (now in the Smithsonian), and Bonzo, and raced into his eighties.
He managed the Oshkosh airport for roughly 40 years (1931 to about 1969); it was later named Wittman Regional Airport in his honor.
The EAA moved its fly-in from Rockford, Illinois to Wittman Field around 1970, fittingly bringing the homebuilt movement home to the field of aviation’s original builder-in-a-shed.