This year we celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Piper J-3 Cub, one of the few cultural icons in light aviation and without much argument the single most identifiable and imitated model in general aviation history.
As with many anniversaries, pinning down the exact date of the Cub is a bit of a semantic exercise. While the “birth” of the J-3 model specifically can be traced to 1937, the Cub itself — in the form of the Taylor Cub, created not by anyone named Piper but by a self-taught Pennsylvania airplane designer named Clarence Gilbert Taylor — is at least several years older than that. William T. Piper, who gets name credit for the Cub, was more of a money man, and unlike most aviation outsiders who run airplane companies, he wound up making some excellent calls, including encouraging one of his designers to improve Mr. Taylor’s Cub, creating a new light airplane that would be designated the J-3 Cub, an airplane Piper Aircraft would build for about the next decade.
