page_title: Aeronca 11 Chief
section_title: Production history
hierarchical_section_title: Aeronca 11 Chief / Production history
caption_attribution_description: Aeronca 11AC Chief (G-IVOR), built in 1940, at the Great Vintage Flying Weekend (a gathering of vintage light aircraft) at Kemble Airport, Gloucestershire, England. Photographed by Adrian Pingstone in May 2009 and released to the public domain.
context_page_description: The Aeronca Chief is a single-engine, two-seat, light aircraft with fixed conventional landing gear, which entered production in the United States in 1945.
  Designed for flight training and personal use, the Chief was produced in the United States between 1946 and 1950. The Chief was known as a basic gentle flyer with good manners, intended as a step up from the 7AC Champion which was designed for flight training.
  Like many classic airplanes, it has a significant adverse yaw, powerful rudder and sensitive elevator controls. It had a well-appointed cabin, with flocked taupe sidewalls and a zebra wood grain instrument panel. There was never a flight manual produced for the 11AC or 7AC series airplanes, as a simple placard system was deemed enough to keep a pilot out of trouble.
context_section_description: The model 11 Chief was designed and built by Aeronca Aircraft Corporation. While it shared the name "Chief" with the pre-war models, the design was not a derivative. Rather, the post-war 11AC Chief was designed in tandem with the 7AC Champion ("Champ")—the Chief with side-by-side seating and yoke controls, and the Champ with tandem seating and joystick controls. The intention was to simplify production and control costs by building a pair of aircraft with a significant number of parts in common; in fact, the two designs share between 70% and 80% of their parts. The tail surfaces, wings, ailerons, landing gear, and firewall forward—engine, most accessories, and cowling—are common to both airplanes. The Chief and the larger Aeronca Sedan also share selected parts, the control wheels, some control system parts, rudder pedals and control systems, so parts passed from plane to plane to save costs. Production costs and aircraft weights were tightly controlled and Aeronca was among the first to use a moving conveyor assembly line, with each stage taking about 30 minutes to complete.
  The 11AC Chief entered production at Aeronca in early 1946, with upgraded versions introduced as the 11BC (also called the "Chief") and 11CC "Super Chief," in June 1947 and 1948, respectively. Aeronca was at the time headquartered at Middletown, Ohio, but production facilities there were heavily utilized with the 7AC Champion line; because of this, the model 11 aircraft were assembled at the Dayton Municipal Airport in Vandalia, Ohio. While the Vandalia location was first used only for the assembly of parts fabricated at Middletown, activities there later expanded to include some fabrication work. Only later, toward the end of production did the Chief line return to Middletown.
  Aeronca ceased all production of light aircraft in 1951. Production of the Chief, which had been outsold by its sibling the Champ by a margin of nearly 4 to 1, had already ended by 1950, with only a few planes produced in 1948–1949. This marked the last time the Chief design was built in the United States.
  The 11 series design was sold in the mid-1950s to E. J. Trytek of Syracuse, NY, who held the design until the late 1960s or early 1970s. The HUL-26 Pushpak, built by Hindustan Aeronautics between 1958 and 1968, was very similar to the Super Chief.  Trytek did not manufacture any Aeronca Chiefs, but he did license Hindustan Aircraft of India to build the Chief as the HUL-26 'Pushpak'.  154 'Pushpaks' were built from 1958 to 1968.  The Pushpak can be identified by the smaller rudder surface which is squared off at mid-fin and the larger vertical tail that is found on the 11CC. Several examples are still flying, especially in the United Kingdom.
  Ownership of the Chief design then passed to Bellanca Aircraft Corporation in the early 1970s, around the same time they acquired the 7 series Champion/Citabria and its derivative designs. In 1973 Bellanca considered producing an updated version of the Chief for flight training, but the aircraft never entered production. The model 11 designs are currently owned by American Champion Aircraft Corporation, which acquired them sometime before 1991. Ownership of the design in the period between Bellanca's liquidation in 1982 and the American Champion acquisition is unclear.
caption: 1946 model Aeronca 11AC Chief cockpit
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