#clutton fred

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Part 2 is up!

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Mike Loehle remembers Eric Clutton

While Eric Clutton sadly passed away in 2022, it has been something of a tradition on this site to wish him happy birthday each year, and today Eric would have been 97 years old.

When Eric left the UK for the USA to seek greener pastures and bluer skies, he ended up in Tennessee, where he was involved in various ways with the development of a number of homebuilt and ultralight aircraft. One fixture of the light aviation community in Tennessee is Mike Loehle, and I'll let him take it from here:

I took this photo years ago here at my airstrip back in the 1980’s. Eric worked for us back then at Ritz Propeller Company and later Loehle Aircraft in our “5151” Mustang prototype days and then I moved him to our prop shop. Eric travelled to airshows with us too. I wish I could find his great book on having an English Morgan three-wheel car! Such a funny book, lost mine somewhere in our office, I guess. I’m bad about loaning books, so who knows…? My airstrip in Wartrace is the home of my former Ritz Propeller Company, Loehle Aircraft, and now Loehle Coatings. There we developed the Loehle “5151” Mustang RG, Loehle P-40 Flying Tiger, Loehle Sport Parasol, Loehle Spad XIII, Loehle Fokker D-VII, Loehle SE5a, Loehle Spitfire Elite, Loehle KW-909 and Loehle Fun Machine, and Loehle Aeroplane XP. Some of our kits were experimentals and several were ultralights. Eric helped us with many of our kit designs and in our prop shop. As I run across more photos of our “colorful” Eric, I will forward them to you. Many more photos exist in my closed factory office.

Photo of Eric Clutton and the original prototype FRED taken at the 1800' grass airstrip at The Aviation Valley (6TN4) in Wartrace, Tennessee courtesy of Mike Loehle.

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First in a series about restoring Clutton FRED G-BISG...this one includes getting the engine running, unfolding the wings and rigging the tail, and a walk around the plane including the cockpit.

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G-BISG is being brought back to life! More to follow....

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FRED is 60 years old today! November 3rd, 2023 is the 60th anniversary of the first flight of Eric Clutton's Flying Runabout Experimental Design aka FRED. I filmed this little clip when I visited Eric in Tullahoma, Tennessee back in 2012. Sadly, Eric passed away in February 2022 but his simple, practical, affordable, safe and fun little aeroplane soldiers on. That FREDs continue to be built and flown here and there all over the world is a fitting tribute to, as Eric liked to joke, "Stoke-on-Trent's other aeroplane designer". (R.J. Mitchell of Supermarine Spitfire fame grew up in the same town.) Here's wishing blue skies to all the FRED builders, pilots, and fans out there on this special day!

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FRED’s 59th birthday!

Today marks 59 years since the first flight of Eric Clutton’s FRED on November 3rd, 1963. Sadly, it is also the first such anniversary since Eric passed away in February of this year. Nonetheless, thanks to avid aviation photographer Derek Heley, a Londoner by birth but a Geordie by choice, here are some great shots of various FREDs spanning three decades.

Photos courtesy of Derek Heley and used by permission

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FRED plans and Eric Clutton’s books are available again!

Benjamin Mehalic, winner of the First Annual Eric Clutton Memorial Swap Meet & Fun Fly at the Coffee Airfoilers Radio Control Club in Tullahoma, Tennessee, smiles in a May 21, 2022 photo by Jonathan Holt.

While Eric Clutton passed away on February 6, 2022, he left instructions for his friend Jonathan Holt to continue selling his books and FRED plans to benefit the local model aircraft club Eric loved so much.  Plans and books are once again available and you can find the details at https://cluttonfred.info/plansbooks.  I’ll let Jonathan tell the rest:

We had the First Annual Eric Clutton Memorial Swap Meet & Fun Fly that weekend.  Our Club President, Don Cleveland, came up with the idea of “Buy It & Fly It”, which is buy the aircraft at the swap meet and fly it at the fun fly.  I came up with a criteria for judging which included content from the swap meet, effort it took to make it fly and doing it on the least amount on money.  Benjamin won the judging on all aspects.  It was fitting that it was won with a British fighter and a new generation of RC pilot to carry the torch.  It really is a perfect situation.

The young man is a club member that had only seen Eric in passing.  Eric was always gracious with his time and advice with young people in the hobby.  I’m guessing that may have came from his career as a school teacher.  I know you knew Eric from the full-scale aircraft world and so did I somewhat, but in the model aircraft world Eric was all about swap meets and building models from scratch.  He, like myself, took a lot of pride in being able to do that in as frugal a way as possible.  He would have really liked this event.

I agree completely that this is a fitting tribute to Eric in a way that would have made him smile.  Hats off to Jonathan and the Coffee Airfoilers!

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Sadly, I have to report that Eric Clutton, designer of the Flying Runabout Experimental Design (FRED) homebuilt plane, passed away last night at the age of 93.  He was hospitalized little more than a week ago following a stroke. Here he is less than a year ago smiling at home in Tullahoma, Tennessee holding a scale model Short Sterling in a photo by Jonathan Holt . Behind him you can see a framed original drawing of the prototype FRED by artist Dave Black of Albuquerque, New Mexico that Dave and I presented to Eric on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of FRED's first flight. Blue skies, Eric!