Francis H. Dean

Francis "Diz" Dean's interest in aviation started early with his father having been an Army Air Service cadet in World War I, and visits to airports at an early age. At age 17 he entered MIT to pursue a degree in aeronautical engineering, this to be interrupted by service in the Navy in World War mostra altro II as an electronics technician. He received his college degree in 1948 and started work at the Curtiss Propeller Division of Curtiss Wright Corporation. The division was busy working on new propellers for both civil and military applications such as Convair, Douglas, and Lockheed airliners, and B-36 and B-50 bombers as well as advanced turboprop installations. After about ten years working in various Propeller Division departments, including design, aerodynamics, structures, and advanced design areas, Diz joined a group being formed to work on propeller driven vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, and led the air vehicle preliminary design group. He was intimately associated with all the VTOL efforts. Curtiss VTOL Systems Group, later a separate division, built a sucessful two place X-100 concept demonstrator aircraft that broke the helicopter speed record on its transition flight to 500 feet and return. The next six place VTOL was initiated as a Corporation X-200 project but Curtiss was shortly given a military Tri-Service contract for two X-19 aircraft. Unfortunately the first X-19 crashed in 1965 on its 50th flight when a nacelle casting failed at 1000 feet. Shortly thereafter, due primarily to immediate military financial needs of the Vietnam War, all US VTOL development contracts, including the X-19, were cancelled. During the period 1958 to 1965 many preliminary design studies of larger advanced Curtiss VTOL aircraft were made and are discussed. Diz left Curtiss and moved to Boeing Vertol to work on studies of advanced VTOL aircraft and helicopters, including some on the early Bell-Boeing V-22 Osprey type. He concluded his engineering career in 1986, and then launched a new career of writing aviation books for Schiffer Publishing Ltd. including America's Hundred Thousand, a detailed study of U.S. World War II production fighter aircraft, America's Army and Air Force Airplanes, a historical/pictorial review, and America's Navy and Marine Corps Airplanes, in the same theme for those services. He also acted as technical editor for the Report of Fighter Conference at Patuxent River, Md. October, 1944. Diz is currently working on a new book about Curtiss airplanes. He lives in Concord Township, Pennsylvania with his wife, Evie, and near his son, Bob, and daughter in-law, Carol mostra meno