#clutton fred

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.

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.

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.