Don Burt’s Groundbreaking Boss-T

Revisiting a design to which many modern RC gliders can trace their roots.

I want to offer deepest thanks to my friend Steve Kerry, without whom this project would have not existed. He was the one who picked up on a casual mention of the Boss-T in one of my previous articles, and through his tireless efforts was able to reconstruct an original set of the Superior Flying Models’ plans, as shown above. So who’s will be the first in the air, Steve? — TCG

So what was your first RC glider? For me and my brother Patrick, it was the Superior Flying Models Boss-T. Perhaps it was the ‘Simply Spectacular!’ on the one page, photocopied brochure or that ten foot wingspan or all of those hard chines, but Pat and I were smitten from the very moment we first laid eyes on it. We simply had to have it.

And have it we did, and we put it together over the next few months, taking time out from the project only for school and to mow another of the neighbours’ lawns to help pay for it all. Or at least some of it, with the balance being provided by very understanding parents.

Left: The dog-eared brochures that started it all. | Centre: My brother’s and my ‘building site’ for the Boss-T — a corner of our shared bedroom. | Right: Guess who? And can you guess how tall I was at the time?

We did manage to finally get it into the air and it flew beautifully. It was a handful, though, what with flaps, ailerons, rudder and elevator, the movement of which was co-ordinated by an obscenely complex mixing mechanism and pushrods running everywhere.

It’s not that the Boss-T didn’t have its setbacks. More than a couple of times we broke various parts of the structure. The most spectacular of these crashes was precipitated by a wicked stall after it popped off the hi-start prematurely. It wiped out the nose right back to the leading edge. But never mind, I thought, I’ll construct a replacement out of fibreglass. And on it flew.

Left: The beast flies! | Centre: Joe Cool and my friend George Chiu with the re-animated Boss-T. The demolished nose has been replaced with a homemade fibreglass retrofit. | Right: The Boss-T hurled into the sky by my Dad with me at the controls. Cousin Mark and the family dog ‘Quits’ are supervising. All photos taken on the playing fields located at the University of British Columbia in the late 1970s.

It was only much later in life I began to learn the importance of Don Burt’s design. Arguably, many of the sophisticated glider designs today can trace their lineage back to the seminal aircraft of this period. In one of the many articles which Bob Dodgson has reprised in the New RC Soaring Digest, he made mention of the Boss-T as being roughly contemporaneous to his designs. Bob had been designing straight wing multichannel gliders since 1969 and his classic Todi predates the Boss-T. So there is a pretty good chance Don incorporated at least some of Bob’s ideas into the Boss-T. Bob, picks up the story:

Don Burt, a Scot, and full-size plane pilot, was a model free-flight competitor in Scotland where he obtained an aerodynamic engineering degree. Boeing paid to fly him over to the US to work for them. When I met him in about 1969 or 1970 he was flying his own polyhedral designs and he had scratch-built a beautiful scale KA 6 which flew very well on the slope. We were both just doing slope flying at the time. In about 1970 I had come up with my first flaperon multichannel glider. Don continued to develop polyhedral gliders and we did battle on the slope to see whose designs could stay up in the lightest lift and still fly well in high winds on the slope.

Sandy and I socialized with Don outside flying and went to his house numerous times as well as got to know his mother from Scotland who would come and visit him. She was a dear little lady who always referred to our young daughter as “a wee bonny lass” and liked that we had named her “Heather” which Mrs. Burt said was a good Scottish name. Don was always doing something thoughtful for us like making some of his mother’s Scottish desserts for us as gifts at Christmas.

Don designed the T2 and the Boss-T and later the Bunny which was named after his wife of later years. Don was actually the inspiration for my kitting my designs. I was in a state of disbelief when Don told me he was going to kit some of his designs and began to do so and started selling a few kits. Seeing Don making it happen I figured if Don could do it, so could I and I began to kit the Todi in 1972. Thus began my 25-year career of kitting model sailplanes.

I want to humbly thank Bob for taking the time to write-up his thoughts for this article.

So where do we go from here? I’m not entirely sure, but perhaps if the editorial duties of RCSD eventually allow the time, I’ll begin to trace out the parts and get building.

If I do, you’ll be the first to know.

©2022 Terence C. Gannon

Resources

• Reconstructed Boss-T Plans (V1) — mostly through the efforts of Steve Kerry (with just a little extra tweaking by me), these are the first version of reconstructed Boss-T plans. Whether they are useful to you or not is up to you, and we offer no guarantee in that regard. However, Steve and I thought we would make them available in their current state to anyone interested. If and when we refine them over time, we will post new versions. If you do the same, perhaps your refined version can also be made available for download.

Although it is not certain, there is a fairly good chance this is Don Burt’s original Boss-T pictured here at the Seattle RAMS show in the late 1970s. This picture accentuates the sweep back which was another innovation in this particular design.

All photos by the author unless otherwise noted. Read the next article in this issue, return to the previous article in this issue or go to the table of contents. A PDF version of this article, or the entire issue, is available upon request.