“Super Sport” Waco S3HD HD Acrylic Print 20 x 30 in

“Super Sport” , 2017

Photographer: Jessica Voruda

Archival Pigment Print on Metallic Photo Paper
Face-Mounted to Optically Clear Acrylic
20 x 30 in / 51 x 76 cm

A head-on portrait of the Waco S3HD “Super Sport,” NC14048, captured nose-to-nose on a grass field in the American Midwest. The fluted cowling, its nine distinctive bumps sculpted to clear the cylinder heads of the Pratt & Whitney R-985 Wasp Junior radial, dominates the frame. The polished propeller catches the afternoon light, and the splayed steel tube landing gear frames the view like the legs of some great mechanical animal at rest. Behind the cowling, 420 horsepower waits.

Built in 1934 at the Waco Aircraft Company in Troy, Ohio, the S3HD was the only civilian example of the Waco D-series, a line otherwise produced as military export fighters for the air forces of Cuba, Nicaragua, and Uruguay. Thirteen D-series aircraft were built in total between 1934 and 1938, and this S3HD, affectionately called “King of the Waco biplanes” in period literature, is the sole survivor of the entire series. Waco marketed it as a sport aircraft, but the lineage shows: the S3HD is a fighter in civilian clothes, designed from the ground up for the performance its military siblings would carry into Latin American service. After more than nine decades, NC14048 is still flying, now owned and operated by John Ricciotti and appearing at fly-ins across the Midwest.