1933 Fairchild 22 C7E

A Kreider-Reisner factory demonstrator that taught Civilian Pilot Training Program students aerobatics in the year before Pearl Harbor. One of eleven C7Es built, and one of two left.

The bridge

Sherman Fairchild built open biplanes and he built cabin monoplanes, and the Fairchild 22 is the airplane in between. In 1929 Fairchild bought the Kreider-Reisner Aircraft Company of Hagerstown, Maryland, a biplane builder, and its designer George Hardman drew up a two-seat parasol monoplane: a strut-braced wing over two open cockpits, a welded steel-tube fuselage, and wood-and-fabric wings. It was approved in March 1931 and sold into the worst years of the Depression as a sport and training airplane a person of modest means could own. Hagerstown built 127 of them through 1935, and the design led straight to the Fairchild 24 cabin monoplane.

The model letters followed the engine. The C7E was the first Fairchild 22 with a radial engine, the 125-horsepower Warner Scarab, and only eleven were built.

The factory’s own airplane

Serial 1605 was finished at Hagerstown on October 26, 1933. Lewis Reisner, the Reisner of Kreider-Reisner, swore out its application for a registration number the same day, with S. M. Fairchild listed as president. Then it waited. When it was finally licensed in April 1934 it had an hour and fifty minutes on it, and its owner of record was the factory: serial 1605 began life as a Kreider-Reisner demonstrator.

Its first private owner was James F. Tracy of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, who had just earned his pilot’s license. Tracy ran a garage, ran the projector at the town’s theater for thirty years, and chaired the town government; in 1941 he bought the Great Barrington airport itself, and the field still operates today.

It taught men to fly upside down

In 1936 the airplane went to Michigan, where it would stay for twenty-five years. For fourteen of them it belonged to Hartung Aircraft Corporation, which ran Gratiot Airport outside Detroit, one of the first commercial airports in Michigan. Howard Hartung’s company owned it, repaired it, and flew it hard. It was damaged four times between 1936 and 1941, and every time the same shop and the same mechanic, John Hudolin, rebuilt it. The paperwork from those rebuilds survives right down to the mill certificates for its steel tubing.

Its own federal file records what it was doing in 1940 and 1941. It was a Civilian Pilot Training Program secondary trainer, logging three hundred hours of flight instruction in a single year. The secondary course was the aerobatic stage, where civilian students were screened toward military flight training, and it needed a strong airplane. This one carried two parachutes in its placarded load and had a spin strip fitted to its rudder. Very few surviving Fairchild 22s can show a dated wartime training role in their own records.

Fifteen owners, ninety-three years

After the war it went through the hands of young pilots building time, including a future Continental Airlines captain, and in the 1960s through owners in Tulsa and Kansas City. In 1965 Leavenworth Flying Service at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas rebuilt its wings from the original Fairchild drawings and covered it in Santa Fe Red. From 1975 it belonged to John Cournoyer of the St. Louis area, and from 1987 to Michael Barron of St. Louis, who kept it for thirty-eight years. Its ownership runs unbroken across fifteen owners, back to the men who built it.

How it came home

We found it at Creve Coeur Airport near St. Louis, where its restoration was being finished, and we bought it in September 2026. It is due home at Mustang Field by the end of October 2026. It needs its engine finished and a new weight and balance before it flies. Because that is the promise here: like everything in this hangar, the Fairchild 22 will fly.

History drawn from the airplane’s FAA registration and airworthiness files, read page by page, and from its logbooks. Full provenance report available on request.