Born in 1899, the son of a blacksmith, he was too poor to go beyond high school. He was four when the Wright Brothers made history at Kitty Hawk and, as long as he can remember, he has wanted to fly. He read voraciously--"every aviation book I could get my hands on." But, because of his modest background, the closest he could get to his goal was as an auto mechanic. Even today, because of his do-it-yourself education, he has trouble explaining his theories to aeronautical engineers. Said one: "Don't worry if he confuses you. Just believe that he knows what he's talking about."

Custer's dream, he's fond of telling visitors, began one day in 1925 when he took refuge in a barn during a violent summer storm. The wind tore the roof off the barn and, for the next 15 years, he wondered why.

"The barn wasn't flying, it wasn't even moving. What made that roof move through the air?"

What evolved, of course, were his theories about moving the air over an object versus moving the object through the air. His first attempt to prove them were disastrous. He bolted an aircraft engine to the floor of his shop and constructed the first of his channels, a ramshackle three-sided affair with square corners. He couldn't afford tooling for a curved channel, so he just bolted three flat surfaces together.

When he started the engine, the propeller began pulling air through the channel. He almost destroyed the shop. But let him tell it, and see if you can follow it:

"I didn't know what I was dealing with. I was dealing with atmospheric pressure. That's 14.7 pounds per square inch at sea level, and 14.7 pounds per square inch is more than a ton of pressure per square foot. Just figure it out--144 inches times 14.7 pounds.

"Why, when that prop started sucking air through the channel, it created a vacuum. Nature abhors a vacuum and wants to fill it up. All that pressure on the outside of the channel crushed it. Not only that, the windows broke and the walls sagged. If I didn't have the door open, the whole shop would have come down."

Translation: It's a law of physics that, when air speeds up, pressure is lowered. The prop speeds up the air through the channel, reducing pressure inside it, while the air outside the channel remained static at a normal 14.7-p.s.i. pressure. The difference in pressure was enough to crush the rinky-dink channel.

"The solution," Custer continued, "was to build the channel strong enough so it wouldn't crush. So, with the vacuum inside it, it would rise like a cork in water."

That was his dream, to produce this "crush-proof" vacuum channel and adapt it to aircraft so they could "rise like a cork in water."

Meanwhile, he had a job and a family to think about. He moved from working on autos to selling them and, with his natural enthusiasm, he became pretty good at it--averaging more than $100 a week during the 1930s when that sum was a mint. But he couldn't shake the dream.

So in 1937 Custer made his last stand. He quit his job and decided to devote the rest of his life to the channel wing. He borrowed some money from friends, ringing doorbells, button-holing people on the street--and making some enemies. Eventually he formed a corporation and sold stock. But, by his own estimate, for nearly 30 years he has been broke "about every six months." He recalls one three-year period when he and his wife and four children ate only what they could grow in the garden behind their home. While former friends crossed to the other side of the street to avoid him, his family stuck with him. They are still with him. A daughter is his secretary, one son is his chief mechanic and the other his test pilot.

They have survived some bitter disappointments. Custer's first full-scale model was demonstrated for the Army Air Corps in 1943. It flew without wings, but the Army didn't believe it and didn't buy it. So about every four or five years after that, after going back to the drawing boards and producing newer and better models, Custer put on more demonstrations, all in vain. About the only major attention he got during this period was from Popular Mechanics (see "The Wing That Fooled the Experts," PM, May, 1947). We put the plane on the cover.

Throughout all his experimenting, remember, Custer was doing his own research, building his own test equipment and creating his own models--with only a high-school education. continue...