Bellanca 28-92 Trimotor

Bellanca 28-92 Trimotor			Photo Gallery
The Bellanca 28-92 Trimotor was developed by Giuseppe Bellanca in 1937 for Capt. Alexandru Papana, a 30-year-old Roumanian Air Force ace in which he intended to take off from Floyd Bennet Field, Brooklyn, New York, on a non-stop flight alone to Paris, France and then later on to Bucharest, Roumania. The airplane was powered by two 250 hp (186 kW) Menasco C6S4 engines on the wings and a Fairchild A 420 hp (313 kW) Ranger SGV-770 engine in the nose. Papana was inexperienced with superchargers and inadvertently overboosted the engines during his first test flight in the trimotor. The incident led to a disagreement with Bellanca, and Papana cancelled his order for the aircraft. Neither Papana nor the Romanian government paid for the aircraft and it remained at the Bellanca factory. In 1939 it was entered in Bendix Trophy race piloted by Art Bussy. The aircraft finished second in the Los Angeles to Cleveland race with an average of 244.486 mph (393.462 km/h). Continuing on to New York, the trimotor finished second, averaging 231.951 mph (373.290 km/h) for the total distance from Los Angeles to New York. The aircraft was eventually purchased by the Ecuadorian Air Force and served in South America from 1941 to 1945 and was reportedly abandoned at a small airfield in Ecuador.