Whether traveling by road or by air, the WR-3 made people smile.

I have worked at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum since 1982. Early in my career as a curator in the aeronautics department, I was focused on acquiring fast airplanes for the Museum’s collection. Then, in the late 1980s, someone offered to donate a WR-3, a roadable airplane designed and built by Neal V. Loving, an aeronautical engineer and pilot. The WR-3 flew low and slow, and when I heard that the Experimental Aircraft Association already owned Loving’s much faster racer, Loving’s Love, I declined the WR-3. Years later I regretted my decision. By then, I finally understood how important the WR-3 was to Loving’s incredible story.

Born in Detroit, Michigan, Loving was 11 years old when Charles Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927. “Any doubts I had about the seriousness of my interest in [aviation] were removed by that spectacular event,” Loving wrote in his 1994 autobiography Loving’s Love: A Black American’s Experience in Aviation.

In high school, Loving built a flightless ground trainer that earned a Mechanix Illustrated project-of-the-month award. In 1936, Detroit’s department of recreation hired him to teach the skills needed to build model airplanes. When it came to learning to fly real airplanes, however, Black Americans had to teach each other. “The exclusion of blacks from all aspects of aviation, including white flying schools (even when the applicant had sufficient funds), was not advertised, but no less rigidly practiced,” wrote Loving.

Soon after the United States entered World War II in December 1941, Loving helped form the all-Black Civil Air Patrol squadron 639-5 to train young people in military drill, flight theory and practice, and parachuting. Three years later, Loving was severely injured while flying a glider, and he spent more than six months recovering in the hospital. During the ordeal, his fiancée broke off their engagement.

Doctors had to amputate Loving’s left leg a few days after the accident. “Inwardly I was, of course, deeply disturbed not only by the amputation, but by the negative effect it would have on my career as a pilot,” wrote Loving. “There were times of quiet despair, often difficult and sometimes impossible to overcome.” Attempts to save his right leg failed and it too was amputated below the knee.

Fitted with artificial limbs, Loving eventually recovered enough to return to flying eight months after the crash. He and business partner Earsly Taylor set up the Wayne School of Aeronautics in 1946. Five years later, while flying his homebuilt air racer, Loving’s Love, he became the first Black pilot to qualify to compete in the National Air Races. Loving recalled in his book: “When I stepped out of the racer and the spectators learned that a black, legless designer/builder/pilot was at the controls, they were amazed. My presence inevitably attracted the local news media.”

In 1954, the Experimental Aircraft Association named Loving’s Love (the WR-1) the most outstanding new design of a homebuilt aircraft. Ten years later, Loving donated the single-seat, 215-mph racer to the Experimental Aircraft Association Aviation Museum in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

After graduating in 1961 from Wayne State University in Detroit with a degree in aeronautical engineering, Loving joined the staff of the Flight Dynamics Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. He was the project engineer for the high-altitude clear-air turbulence program, and he later studied the feasibility of constructing military aircraft from carbon-fiber composites.

In 1967, Loving finished building the WR-3, a single-engine monoplane designed to be towed by an automobile between the airport and the home garage. The rudder pedals of the two-seat airplane were fitted with extensions to better accommodate its pilot’s prosthetic feet. Loving crafted the wings to fold back against the fuselage to reduce the wingspan to 94 inches (the maximum width permitted on the highway). In flying mode, the wings spanned 24 feet, 10 inches.

Over a period of 23 years—from 1968 to 1991—Loving logged 697 hours in the WR-3, and he carried dozens of passengers. Years after the first flight, he noted how the airplane “still attracts smiles and stares when I pull it out of the garage, tow it with my Ford Escort to the local auto gas station for a fill-up, and then out to the airport.”

Through lectures he gave at schools, civic organizations, museums, and aviation clubs, Loving hoped to get people interested in working in the aeronautics industry. It was with the WR-3, however, that Loving could accomplish his second goal: introducing non-pilots to the joys of flying in an open-cockpit airplane on a beautiful day.

Fortunately for the Museum and our visitors, Loving’s wife Clare saved the WR-3 when she donated the airplane to the Wings of Freedom Museum in Huntington, Indiana. Some years later, that museum donated the WR-3 to the Hoosier Air Museum. In August 2019, more than 30 years after I was first offered the WR-3, the Hoosier Air Museum contacted the Museum to ask if we were interested in collecting the airplane. This time I said yes!

Russ Lee is the chair of the National Air and Space Museum’s aeronautics department. He is the curator for two collections: Japanese World War II aircraft and recreation aircraft, including homebuilts and sailplanes.