Thorp Air Command - T18.net

Did anyone notice the article in the June Kitplanes by Ron Wanttaja about homebuilt numbers? The bottom line number of Thorps they have listed in the US is 238 as of last year. I thought Lee had more than that.
Cubes

Could be that many, such as mine, are registered by the builder's name and not as Thorps or Sunderlands.

_________________
Bob Highley
N711SH
SN 835
KLAL

Looking at the registry, there are maybe 52 Thorps listed and I am sure not all of those count so someone did some digging to get 238. Looking for ”Sunderland” only revealed one.

_________________
Thorp T18
O-320-B3B (160 HP)
68x74 Sterba Propeller

"The joke in aviation is, 'If you want to make a million, you'd better start with £10m.' " -Bruce Dickinson

I just checked the latest registry .. 400+ Thorps in the US (some of which are Sky Scooters so subtract whatever % you think that may be), that does not include those that are registered as something else ... (ex: Doe T-18, Sunderland S-18, Sunderland T-18 ...)

_________________
Lee Walton
Houston, TX
N51863,N118LW
KEFD

Lee, what did you use as a search criteria? I just tried “T-18” and got over 400 hits but several on the first page didn’t apply (gliders, Lockheed AT-18, balloons...).

_________________
Thorp T18
O-320-B3B (160 HP)
68x74 Sterba Propeller

"The joke in aviation is, 'If you want to make a million, you'd better start with £10m.' " -Bruce Dickinson

T-18 alone is not reliable ... people can call they're own creation whatever the want (ex: Don Doubleday's 'TS-18CW')

I loaded the FAA aircraft registry into a local relational database then ran SQL queries with any variation of 'Thorp', 'Thorpe', 'Sunderland', 'S-18','T-18','S-1%','T-%' then visually scanned the results and eliminated anything that was obviously not actually a T-18 or variant of.

_________________
Lee Walton
Houston, TX
N51863,N118LW
KEFD

Sounds like your method will be the most accurate, Lee. I imagine it is not possible to find out world wide numbers. That article got me thinking about number completed versus number of plan sets issued.
Cubes

565 "Thorps" listed on this page: https://www.airport-data.com/manuf/Thorp.html. 37 Are listed as T-211s, 14 are listed as S-18s and the rest are T-18s.

Spanky

Cubes
If you are looking to fill the world wide list of Thorp's here are the current New Zealand Thorps:-
ZK-MBY S18T (flying)
ZK-VMS T18C (flying)
ZK-TOP T18CW (flying)
ZK-ROD T18 (stored)
ZK-EDF T18 (flying)
The following destroyed
ZK-KID T18
ZK-WMT S18
If you are looking at the Aussie scene then John Groth (Grothy) was running a spread sheet which I think also included the NZ aircraft.

Cheers
Tony Schischka
ZK-VMS
T18C (#867)