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Welcome to our web site!
The Brodhead Pietenpol Association is a "type-club" for owners, pilots, builders, and simply aficionados of
the ubiquitous Pietenpol aircraft design. In 1929, young Bernard Pietenpol (Peet-n-pole) of Cherry Grove, Minnesota, designed
and built a two-seat open cockpit airplane powered with a Ford Model-A automobile engine. The editors of Modern Mechanics
magazine saw the airplane and published some working drawings in their magazine. With Model-A engines being cheap and easy
to modify, and builders getting their materials from local lumber mills, airplanes were built in garages and barns across
the country.
Pietenpols became a phenomenon, as the first real homebuilt personal airplanes to take to the skies in any number. After
WWII, John Grega, an airplane mechanic in Bedford,Ohio, drew up plans for a Piet "look-alike", using surplus Piper
Cub wings and landing gear. Today the Piets and Grega GN-1s fly side-by-side using many different engines. The most popular
engines are the Ford, Corvair and Continental.
It was only natural that in Ohio, where many Piets were being built and flown, that a club was formed called the Buckeye
Pietenpol Association. The members started a quarterly newsletter in 1963 and had several excellent editors over the years.
In 2000, with the site of the largest annual Pietenpol fly-in firmly established in tiny Brodhead, Wisconsin, the name of
the organization became the Brodhead Pietenpol Association. Both the organization and the newsletter carry on the same "homey"
tradition today with their quarterly newsletters and annual reunion fly-ins.
There is a certain charisma and charm wherever a Pietenpol shows up. With a continuous history since 1929, the airplane
is as unique as the people who build them, and the pilots who take them to the air. The friendliness of Pietenpol people is
legendary, but what would you expect when everyone starts with a back-home type smile? The Piet just seems to do that to
people.
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