SpaceWalker First Flight

In the small town of Henderson, North Carolina, lives a man who has been quietly designing and selling his homebuilt designs for several years now. His J-3 Kitten won Best New Design at the 1983 Sun-'N-Fun EAA Fly-In. He won a Grand Champion Prize at Oshkosh in 1984 with his J-4 Sportster, and in 1985 at Oshkosh, his J-6 Karatoo won the Outstanding New Design
award. This prolific designer then decided to build himself a personal fun plane and in 1986 it flew for the first time. That airplane was named the SpaceWalker and the designer of all of these prize-winners was Jesse Anglin.
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The general layout of the SpaceWalker (low-wing, open-cockpit taildragger) was inspired by a ride that Jessie had in a PT-19 years ago. Power is provided by a 65 h.p. Continental with it's cylinders hanging in the breeze like a cub. Even though it was meant to be a personal airplane, public reaction has convinced him to market the plans and sell component parts through his company, Country Air, Inc.

The classic lines of the SpaceWalker remind most aviation enthusiasts of Pete Bower's Fly Baby or the Ryan trainers. One writer even thought at first glance it was a Les Long creation of the Great Depression era. This is exactly the kind of feeling that Jesse wanted to evoke with this design. With ultra-efficient, gas-sipping, cross-country machines dominating the homebuilt industry today, it is strangely refreshing to see a brand new airplane designed solely for the pure pleasure of flight.

The SpaceWalker fuselage is a welded steel tubing structure with wood formers and stringers in the turtledeck to give it some shape. The wing is fully cantilevered with a massive center section main spar and box spars in the outer wing panels. Drag loads are handled by diagonal compression trusses between the spars. The wing ribs are routed out of 1/4" plywood and the wingtips are molded fiberglass. The tail surfaces are simple welded steel tubing. Jesse sells plans for the SpaceWalker as well as many component parts, including the completely welded fuselage frame.
When Maxey Hester (then Vice-President, Sig Mfg. Co.) saw a picture of the SpaceWalker in the EAA magazine (Sport Aviation), he decided that a model of this airplane would be the perfect showplane for his new four-cylinder O.S. Pegasus engine. In December '86, he and Hazel Sig visited with Jesse Anglin and returned to Montezuma with a full set of plans for the full-scale SpaceWalker and announced that they were going to build one! After waiting many months to receive all of the component parts from Jesse, work on the full-scale bird commenced here at the Sig factory. With much help from Dorothy and Burnis Fields of Interlachen, Florida, Maxey had his airplane finished and ready to fly in twelve weeks! It was the first
SpaceWalker, other than Jesse's, to be finished and flown.