Fred Weick and the Piper Cherokee — Vero Beach, Florida

Fred Weick was the engineer Piper Aircraft sent to Vero Beach in 1957 to start a design shop on the municipal airport, and the airplane that came out of it, the PA-28 Cherokee, became the first all-metal four-seater built on Piper's new Vero Beach line. The Piper company timeline gives the 1957 entry in one sentence: Fred Weick joins Piper Aircraft and establishes the development center and manufacturing plant in Vero Beach, Florida.

By then Weick was in his late fifties with a long record in light-aircraft research. The American Aviation Historical Society biography records that he was born on July 14, 1899, in Berwyn, Illinois, and that he died on July 8, 1993, in Vero Beach, the city where he spent the second half of his career and his retirement.

Weick arrived in Vero Beach with three decades of work that shaped the Cherokee. The U.S. Centennial of Flight Commission profile says he graduated from the University of Illinois in 1922, was one of the first engineers hired by the U.S. Air Mail Service, and later worked at NACA's Langley laboratory, where he headed the low-drag engine cowling work that won the Collier Trophy for NACA in 1929. The AAHS adds that he joined the Navy Bureau of Aeronautics in 1924 as its propeller designer before moving to NACA in 1925.

His interest in planes that ordinary pilots could fly easily ran through everything he did before Vero Beach. In 1931 he and co-workers built the W-1, which AAHS says sported the world's first steerable, stable castering nose gear on a tricycle undercarriage. He took those ideas to Henry Berliner's ERCO in 1936 to create the Ercoupe, and the Centennial of Flight profile notes that half of the 6,000 Ercoupes built were still flying at the time of Weick's death. In 1948 he joined Texas A&M, where he worked on the Ag-1 crop duster and designed the Ag-3, predecessor to Piper's PA-26 Pawnee series, the line that brought him to Piper and to Indian River County.

Piper was still a Pennsylvania company in 1957. The AAHS biography says Weick went with Piper that year as director and chief engineer of their development center in Vero Beach, Florida, and stayed until he retired in 1969 at age 70. The Indian River Magazine history of Vero Beach lists the sequence on its timeline: 1957, Piper Aircraft begins research and development in Vero Beach, and 1961, Piper Aircraft moves administrative and operations to Vero Beach.

The Vero Beach shop worked on two quite different aircraft in its first years. The Centennial of Flight profile credits Weick with the Pawnee agricultural plane, which grew out of his Texas work, and with co-designing Piper's Cherokee line of personal and business lightplanes. The AAHS names his Cherokee collaborators as John Thorp and Karl Bergey. A 2003 Flying magazine column by Peter Garrison describes both men as having taken part in the design of the Piper Cherokee, and notes that Bergey went on to become emeritus professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Oklahoma.

The brief was cost. The AOPA Cherokee fact sheet says the Piper design team headed by Fred Weick set out to build a good, simple, four-seat airplane at low cost, and quotes Weick that the project started out as a simple little replacement for the Tri-Pacer. He believed an all-metal airplane could be built as cheaply as a fabric one, a break from the tube-and-fabric designs Piper had made famous in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania.

Weick and Pug (Howard) Piper set the specifications together, AOPA reports. The new airplane, designated the PA-28 or the twenty-eighth Piper model, would be all metal with a low wing, which allowed wider-set landing gear and, in Weick's view, better crosswind handling. It would seat four, use a four-cylinder 150 horsepower Lycoming, ride on tricycle gear with a 10-foot tread and span about 30 feet. To keep it from competing with Piper's own retractable Comanche, introduced in 1958, the company limited the Cherokee cabin to 42 inches wide, two inches narrower than the Comanche.

The wing became the Cherokee's signature. Flying's Garrison wrote that the thick rectangular Cherokee wing gave a new application to the name Hershey Bar, and AOPA's Piper Warrior fact sheet says the same economy-first thinking explains the stabilator, the one-piece pivoting tail used because it was considered more economical to build than a conventional stabilizer and elevator.

According to AOPA, the first PA-28 rolled off the brand-new assembly line at Vero Beach, and output began slowly before climbing to about five airplanes a day by late summer. The standard Cherokee was priced at $9,995, with optional equipment extra. Higher-powered models followed, along with ski and float versions, and in early 1962 Piper delivered its 500th Cherokee only three months after delivering the 250th. The 1,000th Cherokee was delivered in the spring of 1963.

The Vero Beach design kept spawning variants after Weick's retirement. The Plane & Pilot model history says the Cherokee 140 was introduced in 1964 to meet the demand for an efficient low-wing trainer. AOPA's Warrior sheet dates the first tapered-wing Warrior to 1974 and counts 1,898 PA-28-151 sales until 1977, when the Warrior II, the PA-28-161, arrived and went on to 3,374 sales; Plane & Pilot describes that 1977 change as replacing the Hershey Bar wing with a semi-tapered design. Piper's own timeline lists the PA-28 Archer III launch in 1994.

The PA-28 family that began on the Vero Beach drawing boards still carries the Cherokee's basic layout. AOPA lists the Cherokee's direct offspring as the Warrior, Archer, Arrow, Dakota, Pathfinder and Cadet, and notes that later refinements included tapered wings, bigger engines, larger fuselages, retractable gear and turbocharging. Piper's company timeline describes factory tours offered at the Vero Beach headquarters, the same airport where Weick set up the 1957 development center.

Weick wrote his own account of the career that ended in Vero Beach. The AAHS biography cites his autobiography, From the Ground Up, published by the Smithsonian in 1988, and credits him with the 50-foot obstacle clearance measure of takeoff performance, still a standard yardstick. After retiring from Piper in 1969 he assisted with design studies for Beech Aircraft and pursued private projects on aircraft trim and control, AAHS reports, before his death in Vero Beach in 1993.