Bellanca Skyrocket II

The Bellanca 19-25 Skyrocket II was a prototype light airplane built in the United States in the 1970s by the Bellanca Aircraft Engineering company of Scott Depot, West Virginia, which August Thomas Bellanca, son of Giuseppe Bellanca, formed to develop a design conceived in 1957. It was a six-seat, low-wing cantilever monoplane made of composite materials, with retractable tricycle landing gear and a 435 horsepower Continental GTSIO-520-F engine. In 1975, within months of its first flight, the prototype claimed five world airspeed records for piston aircraft in its class, and NASA studied its aerodynamics to investigate natural laminar flow. Its maximum speed was 331 mph. It never achieved certification or entered production, because plans to build it commercially were scrapped after the downturn in the United States civil aviation market in the early 1980s, and the design later returned as the Skyrocket III kit. The prototype survives at the Bellanca Airfield Museum in New Castle, Delaware.