Hydro deserves more of the credit than I do, because his Storch guess was the key. After that, it was just a matter of looking for a radial-engine Storch-like plane from Japan or Italy, and there it was. If he's willing, I'll let him do the next quiz.
Anybody know whether the Stella was as mechanically complicated and as hard to fly as the Storch? I think of the Storch as the symbol of what was wrong with German design at the time. All that effort and expense to make an airplane that had great performance figures but was complicated and hard to repair and needed a skilled pilot. Better to buy Cubs, paint them green, and have guys who had minimal pilot training fly them. And they could be repaired by pretty much any American farm boy. The Storch was great engineering but absurd economics.
Last edited by Top_Gunn; 05-25-2020 at 07:05 AM.