Fabric-covered aircraft are certainly not as well known by many modern pilots as the all-metal plane became popular shortly after World War II. There are a number of older fabric-covered planes available for people looking to get into aircraft ownership while still maintaining a reasonable budget. Generally, planes built in the late nineteen forties and even into the early nineteen sixties were for the most part fabric covered and were economical to operate until the fabric was no longer airworthy. Replacing the fabric on an aircraft has been and continues to be an expensive proposition primarily because it is labor intensive. Improvements in the materials and processes used today have done much to reduce the man hours, thus reducing overall cost of re-covering an aircraft originally covered in cotton.
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