“Super Sport” Waco S3HD HD Acrylic Print 20 x 24 in

“Tailfeathers” , 2017 – Photographer: Jessica Voruda Archival Pigment Print on Metallic Photo Paper Face-Mounted to Optically Clear Acrylic 20 x 24 in / 51 x 61 cm A view most photographers never take: the Waco S3HD “Super Sport” NC14048 from directly behind, its yellow horizontal stabilizers spread wide like the tailfeathers of a bird, the high-gloss black fuselage catching the light of a late summer afternoon. From this angle the aircraft’s bones are visible. The welded steel tube fuselage beneath its taut fabric skin, the bracing wires running across the empennage, and the fabric-covered control surfaces all trace the construction methods that defined American biplanes in the 1930s, before sheet metal and stressed skins rewrote the rules. This is the rearmost view of the rarest Waco. The S3HD is the sole surviving example of the thirteen D-series aircraft built between 1934 and 1938, and the only one delivered as a civilian sport plane rather than as a military export fighter for the air forces of Latin America. Despite its fighter pedigree, current owner John Ricciotti describes the aircraft as honest and easy to land, settling onto one wheel in a crosswind and staying nowhere near the handful its size and power might suggest. Nearly a century after leaving the Waco factory in Troy, Ohio, NC14048 continues to fly to antique fly-ins across the Midwest, where photographers who know what they are looking at tend to linger behind it just as long as they do in front.