From Glendale to London with Peace, Pingpong Balls, and the Ritz

Meet Lady Peace, a grand dame of a plane with some incredible stories that have all but been forgotten about. Seventy-nine years ago today, she left on a flight that was intended to set a new round-trip trans-Atlantic speed record.

GLENDALE, CALIF. - Heading for New [York] and their round-trip flight to London within a few days, Harry Richman, night-club singer and aviator, and Dick Merrill, transport pilot, this afternoon took off from Grand Central Air Terminal in their Vultee monoplane, "Lady Peace". The two flyers plan to fly to London over the Great Circle course by way of Newfoundland. They hope to complete the round trip in 32 hours. Just before taking off they accepted their course charts from Lieut. Commander Clarence Williams, mapmaker for Amelia Earhart and Clyde Pangborn. Their low-wing all-metal plane has a cruising speed of 235-miles per hour, and is powered by a 1000-horsepower motor. Fully loaded with 1002 gallons of gasoline the plane weighs 13,300 pounds, Richman said, and has a cruising radius of 4000 miles. Innovations include a buoyant wing and tail space lining of 30,000 table tennis balls to float the craft in the event they are forced down in mid-ocean. PHOTO SHOWS: Vultee transport plane bearing Harry Richman and Dick Merrill to New York, for the start of their projected round-trip flight to London. The plane is shown as it took off from Glendale, California today. 8-17-36 (photo from Wide World Photos, Los Angeles Bureau)

Back in January, 2013, we ran a post featuring a couple photos of American Airlines's Vultee V1-As, and told the story about how the plane came to be, and pretty much left off with American dumping the planes when the Bureau of Air Commerce banned single-engine airliners. The forced early retirement was only the beginning of the story for NC-13770, which was the eighth V1-A off of Vultee's Glendale assembly line. (And yes, it's properly "V1-A", not V-1A like may sources mis-write it).

American Airlines had been attracted to the Vultees because they were fast and, for their time, had long legs. Retirement didn't slow them down. Enter Col. (H) George. R. Hutchinson, who had a dream of establishing the first trans-Atlantic freight operation which he named the New York, London, Moscow Airlines (and yes, that was the proposed route). The new company "nominated", or sponsored Hutchinson and NR-13770 as an entry in the speed portion of one of the biggest air races of all time, the MacRobertson Race from Mildenhall, England, to Melbourne, Australia, which started on October 29, 1934. Hutchinson was to be the pilot, with Peter Redpath as navigator and co-pilot and Donald H. Vance as radio operator. Unfortunately, the Vultee is listed as "Failed to Start" - and that outcome pretty much also describes what happened to the proposed airline. (A second V1-A, Race 64, had also been entered in the MacRobertson, to be flown by H. W. G. Penny, but it too failed to start.)

Our Vultee next found a home as a corporate transport for Shell Oil, where she was piloted by Jimmy Doolittle. On January 15, 1935, Doolittle, along with his wife Josephine and Shell Oil executive Robert Adams, took off from Burbank and headed for Floyd Bennett Field in New York, with three California oranges on board. The flight set a transcontinental record of 11 hours, 59 minutes, and Doolittle flew most of the portion from Colorado to Virginia on instruments (they were also forced off course by 300 miles by the inclement weather). The oranges were delivered to Newark Mayor Meyer C. Ellenstein.

Not to be outdone, Doolittle's brother-in-law Leland Andrews took the controls of NR-13770 on February 21st and flew the same route, shaving 25 minutes off of the time, which included a stop in Washington D.C. where he delivered some orchids to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Andrews later set another record, Los Angeles to Mexico City in 8:08.

Meanwhile, singer and night-club owner Harry Richman had found that aviation was a great hobby to spend his excess cash on. Richman had hit the big time by singing the previously unknown Irving Berlin showtune "Putin' on the Ritz" in the 1930 movie of the same name (Clark Gable and Fred Astaire would also sing it in later movies). Richman had learned to fly and then began to seek a way to fulfill his dream of becoming the first person to fly the Atlantic round-trip. Along the way, he purchased a Sikorsky and set several records in it.

Henry T. "Dick" Merrill had the same dream, but as the chief pilot for Eastern Airways, he didn't have the financial resources to make it happen. The two met while Merrill was on an Eastern Airlines layover in New York, and visited Richman's club. Of course the conversation turned to flying, and the idea of not just an Atlantic crossing, but a trans-Atlantic round-trip, to be accomplished, ideally, within a total of 48 hours.It was later famously reported that Richman told Merrill, "take the plane to Europe...gas her up and fly her back. It’s never been done."

Richman agreed to purchase Shell's Vultee and sponsor the modifications needed, as well as other expenses of the flight, the total bill being in the neighborhood of $360,000. The 700-horse Pratt & Whitney was removed and replaced with a 1,000-horse Wright Cyclone giving a 215 mph cruising speed. Extra fuel tanks were fitted, and Richman had insisted that, as a safety measure, empty spaces throughout the plane be filled with the thousands of ping pong balls (the RAF had tested this little trick, with some success; the number of balls is uncertain - contemporary sources such as the caption for our photo list 30,000, while different modern websites have numbers approaching 41,000; following the flight, Richman for years sold autographed balls as a way of raising money for charity; if you watch, you can sometimes see signed balls show up on eBay).

The plane was ferried from Glendale, California to New York on August 17, 1936, and then after some final preparations and a lot of media coverage, the pair left for the Atlantic crossing on September 2nd.

The original caption pasted to the back of this Acme press photo reads: "BOUND FOR EUROPE: Dick Merrill, veteran air line pilot, and Harry Richman, nightclub entertainer, roared away from Floyd Bennett Field, New York City, September 2,  in a 1,000 hp monoplane on a projected round-trip flight to London. Their plane, the "Lady Peace", is pictured passion over Long Island a few minutes after takeoff."

Flying a Great Circle route, all went quite well until about 600 miles from their destination, when the Lady Peace encountered some rather nasty weather. After battling the elements for a good four hours, Merrill and Richman finally found themselves over the UK, but short on fuel. The decision was made to land at Llandila, in South Wales, about 175 miles shy of London. Even so, at 18 hours, 36 minutes, they'd set a record for the fastest Atlantic crossing to that date. The overnighted at Llandila and then flew on to London the following morning, September 4th.

Their goal of a 48 hour total round-trip was out the window, unfortunately, and with that pressure off, they took their time getting ready to head back west. Finally on September 14th, the left, taking off from the beach near Southport Pier, England. Again, all was going relatively well, until they encountered some very stiff headwinds. What happened next is a bit controversial, and the story varies depending on what source you read.

One story is that Richman was at the controls, and panicked in the face of the headwinds, and, dumped about 500 gallons of gas in order to lighten the plane. Another version is that Merrill was flying and had no idea why there was less gas onboard than there was supposed to be, and that it was only after Eddie Rickenbacker, a close friend of Merrill's, joined them at the scene that it was noticed that the emergency fuel dump valve was stuck partially open. So was this an intentional rookie-mistake dumping, or an accident of a stuck valve?

In any case, the bottom line was there wasn't enough gas to make it to New York. Merrill picked what looked like an open field near Musgrave Harbour, Newfoundland, but when they touched down, it turned out to be a fairly soft bog, and the Vultee ended up on its nose and suffered some minor damage. The relationship between the pilots also suffered a fair bit of damage. [Editorial commentary: I find the reference below to the helpful local Newfoundlanders as "surrounded by natives" - as if they were some exotic tribesmen - to be quite amusing.]

The caption for this Acme press photo reads: "ROUND TRIP COMPLETED: Surrounded by natives, the "Lady Peace", which bore Harry Richman and Dick Merrill safely across the Atlantic twice, is shown where it cracked up in a bog at Musgrave Harbor, Newfoundland. While Captain Eddie Rickenbacker speeds to the spot, relations between Richman and Merrill are strained because of differences which arose while they were winging westward across the Atlantic. 9/16/36."

After several days of repairs, just enough fuel was loaded on to make the short hop to Harbor Grace, since the ground was so soft and they didn't want to risk making the plane any heavier. More waiting was needed to overcome strong winds, and finally Lady Peace, escorted by Eddie Rickenbacker in a DC-2, finally returned to New York City on September 21st. But their problems weren't over yet. Merrill happened to get the wheels off the edge of the runway at Floyd Bennett, where they sank in soft mud. The plane had to be then towed to the ramp.

A trip that had been originally envisioned to take only 48 hours ended up consuming 19 days. And there's a possible explanation for why, if like some pilots of that era, you're superstitious (Merrill, as a devout Christian, wasn't, it must be noted). Merrill and Eddie Rickenbacker were close family friends, and ten-year-old William Rickenbacker looked up to Merrill as to a bigger-than-life hero. But, the boy was ill and thus unable to see the Lady Peace off on her trans-Atlantic journey. So instead, William, in a bedside farewell, gave Merrill something that he thought would bring them luck: his favorite Ace of Spades playing card, completely unaware that most pilots of that era considered that to be a strong omen of bad luck. Eddie's wife Adelaide was terribly upset by what her son had done, however. When the fliers finally returned, Merrill greeted William with a jubilant bear hug, but Adelaide began making vocal and profuse apologies for the gift her son had given him, to the point that poor young William was mortally embarrassed and the event was reportedly ruined for him, creating a long-lasting emotional scar.

In a very odd twist of irony, the Lady Peace next went to war. With hostilities breaking out in Spain, American planes were bought up in record number and shipped to Europe to join in the fighting. Vultee V1-As, with their speed and durability, were thought to make idea light bombers and ground attack aircraft, and most of the ex-American Airlines planes saw combat. Lady Peace was included, being sold with the other Vultees by an aircraft broker to the Republicans, in what became known in the press as the "Vimalert Affair", which led to President Roosevelt demanding that Congress to impose an embargo against shipments to Spain.

However, the ship that the Vultee and the other planes were on, the Mar Cantabrinco, left before the embargo was imposed, and was instead intercepted by Franco's navy in the Bay of Biscay, and thus the planes were taken over by the Nationalists. Lady Peace was re-christened Capitan Haya, after Captain Carlos de Haya González de Ubieta, one of their hero pilots who had been killed in action. Unlike the Vultee's namesake, the plane survived the war, and continued in the service of the Spanish Air Force, until being unceremoniously scrapped in 1953.

In 1937, a Hollywood film about the flight of the Lady Peace was produced and released under the name Atlantic Flight...and it starred none other than Dick Merrill as himself. Merrill went on to set a number of aviation records, including logging one of the highest totals of flight hours of any pilot in history (a nice mini-bio can be found here).

Only one Vultee V1-A survives, a special custom version built for William Randolf Hearst. Eventually, it was acquired by the Virgina Aviation Museum, of which Dick Merrill was a co-curator. The plane was restored and rechristened Lady Peace II, and for a time was flown at airshows by Merrill.

Amelia's First Speed Record (of Sorts)

Vega NC-538M somewhere over the San Fernando Valley

4/19/2015-This post was originally published on August 9, 2013, but has been rewritten and updated.

During the famous 1929 Women's Air Derby, billed by the press as the “Powder Puff Derby”, Amelia Earhart flew the only Lockheed Vega (NC-31E, c/n 36) that had been entered entered to a respectable third place, which garnered yet more positive media publicity for Lockheed.

Following the Derby, Earhart flew her race Vega back to Los Angeles, and there stayed with friends Jack and Helene Maddux (of Maddux Airlines and subsequently T-A-T Airlines fame). While in LA, she decided to visit Lockheed and shop for an upgraded Vega, taking several test flights in Wasp-powered Vega 5A Executive NC-538M. Earhart recorded in her logbook that on November 18, while test flying the plane over a closed course, she flew one leg at a blazing 197 mph. “Hooray!” was her commentary.

In the Derby a few months before, Louise Thaden had won the race. Thaden also happened to hold the women’s speed record, at a paltry 156 mph. It occurred to Earhart that in the Vega, she could easily beat that. On November 21, Earhart flew the one mile course set up at the Los Angeles Metropolitan Airport - what is now known as Van Nuys Airport – with Detroit Aircraft’s chief test pilot, Lt. Carl Harper, to confirm the potential. Lockheed recognized a great publicity opportunity when they saw it, and offered to loan her the plane for the record attempt.

NAA rules specified a 24-hour notice for any record attempt, and Earhart fulfilled this obligation, indicating that on the following day she’d attempt to break Thaden’s record.

The NAA sent their official timer, a Mr. Joe Nikrent, and over four laps Earhart’s average speed was 184.17 mph, with one lap clocked by Nikrent at 197.8 mph. And yet, despite the use of the official timer, who used two calibrated chronometers, the NAA refused to recognize the achievement as an official record. The reason? The NAA informed her that the FAI did not have a category for the one-mile straightaway. They only recognized the 3-kilometer closed course, and only for absolute world records, meaning there wasn’t a separate women’s record to be claimed for that distance.

Frustrated, Earhart continued shopping for a new plane, settling on serial number 22, NC-7952 (she also took a ride in the Sirius, serial 140, that had been custom built for Lindbergh). She also began petitioning the FAI to establish a category for women’s speed records, and at length they acceded. Finally, on July 5, 1930, flying another borrowed Vega (serial 94, NC-974H), Earhart set the 3-km closed course speed record at 181.18 mph. It still took another year of fighting the FAI to get them to officially recognize the attempt as an official record, but in the end the determined Earhart prevailed.

Meanwhile NC-538M stayed on with Lockheed, who used it as a demonstrator aircraft. On October 14, 1931, the Vega crashed in Greencastle, Indiana. Supposedly, at least one of the wings was later used to rebuild another Vega, s/n 99.

The photo itself is back stamped "Grand Central Air Terminal Photo Services", and came from R.C. Talbot's camera.

A Busy Day at Glendale

For a few magical years before World War II, Glendale's Grand Central Air Terminal was the hub of the aviation scene in Southern California, and so there was always something going on. On this day, probably sometime in 1932 or 1933, Goodyear's Type TZ airship Volunteer descends steeply for a landing while T&WA's Fokker F-32 NC-333N taxis up to the terminal. Just another day at Glendale....

The Volunteer (and the registration NC-8A) was actually a series of airships that all utilized the same gondola or "car", but which were equipped with progressively larger envelopes. Our photo most likely shows the Volunteer III, which first flew on September 5, 1931.

Also visible in the photo is Roscoe Turner's Gilmore Oil Lockheed Air Express (NR3057), a parasol-wing variant of the venerable Vega, and just beyond it, the window line of a Lockheed Orion, probably one of Varney Air's Northrop Delta (several folks, including Tim Kalina and John Underwood, wrote to correct me on this one!).

Although Volunteer wasn't based at Glendale, she was a frequent visitor. The photo below comes from the Archive's R.C. Talbott negative collection and features California Governor James Rolph getting a ride on the Volunteer; there's no way to tell whether this was on the same day as the photo above, or another visit by the airship.

Glendale had its own "pet" dirigible, the City of Glendale developed by Slate Aircraft (see our post from August 20, 2013, for a history of this ill-fated project). In the overhead photo below, the City of Glendale pokes its nose out from its hangar. Both photos in today's post come from a small collection that was saved from UPI's San Francisco bureau office just before the vast bulk of their old photo archive was discarded after the office closed.

In the view below, from Google Earth, I've tried to get the same approximate angle as in the one above.

Lindbergh and Tingmissartoq

When Charles Lindbergh finished his national tour in the Spirit of St. Louis, following his famous trans-Atlantic solo flight, he donated the now-iconic Ryan N-Y-P to the Smithsonian in April, 1928. To replace it, Ryan provided him with a B-2 Brougham, and that year he flew a number of other aircraft as well, but none of those really met his needs.

At the 1929 National Air Races, Lindbergh met Jerry Vultee of Lockheed, which had just been acquired by Detroit Aircraft Corp (which also would acquire Mahoney-Ryan the following year). Lindbergh described his ideal high-performace aircraft, and Vultee came up with some quick sketches, and the two planned to continue the discussion after the airshow. As it turned out, what Lindbergh was looking for was quite similar to the Lockheed Explorer, which Vultee and crew were developing for Harold Bromley"s planned trans-Pacific record attempt, and based on an earlier experiment started by Jack Northrop.The plane which ultimately came from the project was the Lockheed Model 8 Sirius, a two-seat, low-wing design that utilized the same molded plywood fuselage as the wildly successful Vega line.


Lindbergh's black and orange Sirius was the first of fifteen the Lockheed would build.  Originally intended to be an open cockpit aircraft, Lindbergh himself came up with the sliding canopies which he called "Coupe Tops".

On April 20, 1930, Charles and Ann Lindbergh set a transcontinental speed record from Los Angeles (presumably Glendale) to New York in 14 hours and 45 minutes. It is quite possible that our photo was taken during the preparations for that record flight.

Our photo was taken at Glendale's Grand Central Air Terminal and is an original Ray Talbot print. It appears to be one of at least two that were taken within moments of each other, the other being featured in the November 1930 edition of Popular Mechanics Magazine (the position of Lindbergh and the man he's talking to is slightly different in the two images). The accompanying article describes some of the experimentation Lindbergh participated in with the Lockheed engineers in developing the NACA cowling for optimal engine cooling.

With all the hecticness of life after his record flight and the touring the ensued, Lindbergh was ready for a break, and he and Ann decided to take a vacation which, as he described it, had "no start or finish, no diplomatic or commercial significance, and no records to be sought." That led to the couple modifying the Sirius with floats and flying to Asia in 1931. A second trip, in 1933, explored potential airline routes for Pan Am across the north Atlantic. It was during this trip that an Inuit boy in Greenland called the plane "Tingmissartoq", meaning "one who flies like a big bird". At the end of the trip, Lindbergh donated the plane to the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and it is now at NASM.

For further reading:

• An article in the April 1973 issue of American Aircraft Modeler Magazine goes into great detail on the development of the Sirius from the Explorer, and even has a photo of the concrete mold which was used to produce the fuselages for the Vega/Air Express/Explorer/Sirius family.
• Lockheed Martin's history of the airplane.
• As the plane has been preserved at NASM, it's natural that they'd have a web page on it.

Pickwick's Bach Crash

While the Ford was the most well-known trimotor produced, a number of other companies also tried to break into the airliner business with three-engined designs, including L. Morton Bach's Bach Aircraft Corp, which started business at Santa Monica's Clover Field, before moving to the LA Metropolitan Airport at Van Nuys.

Bach built a number of different trimotor models, but one thing tended to differentiate them from other brands: they used smaller nacelle-mounted engines than what was used on the nose. Five ten-passenger model 3-CT-6 Air Yachts were built for Pickwick Airlines, and these used a Pratt 525-hp Hornet on the nose and two 130-hp Comet engines in the outboard nacelles.

The original negative for this image is very badly deteriorated, and a lot of work
was required to restore even this amount of detail.

Pickwick had started as a bus line serving cities up and down the California coast and their "Nitecoach" was one of the most innovative bus designs on the road. On March 29, 1929, they entered the airline business with twice-daily service between Los Angeles (Glendale Grand Central Air Terminal) and San Diego. Soon after, San Francisco was added to the routing, as was Mexico City and Guatemala City (sample timetables can be seen here). In order to publicize the upcoming LA to Central America service, Pickwick hired Pancho Barnes to fly the route, and she then claimed to be the first woman pilot to fly between LA and Mexico City (a claim contested at the time by aviatrix Mildred Morgan, who had been hired to fly the same route by Los Angeles radio station KTM, which ironically was also owned by Pickwick).

The Archive owns several original photos of Pickwick Air Yachts. The one seen above comes from the William Alman collection, and the rest come from the Archive's R.C. Talbot negative collection. On August 7, 1929 Air Yacht NC539E (c/n 7, the third of Pickwick's five Bachs) was being flown by Pickwick pilots John Woods and Elmer McLeod and carrying eight passengers when it lost power only five minutes after takeoff from Grand Central bound for San Diego, and made an emergency landing three miles away, in nearby Los Angeles River bed, overturning in the soft sand. Miraculously, no one was killed, and only moderate injuries were suffered. The official cause off the crash is listed as "engine failure due to gas-line stoppage" (more info and a copy of McLeod's log entry for the crash can be found at the DM Airfield webpage).

Pickwick had grand visions of combined bus/plane service from LA to Chicago, but with the Great Depression settling over the country and the company's inability to win an air mail contract, it was a terrible time to be operating a fledgling airline, and Pickwick's air service only lasted a year, folding in the Spring of 1930. The bus company, though, went on to merge with Northland Transportation Company of Minnesota to become Pacific Greyhound, the forerunner of today's Greyhound Lines (a detailed history can be found here).

Waldo Waterman's Whatsit

This has got to be one of the most creative names of an aircraft: people showing up to see Waldo Waterman's novel flying wing design, they'd invariably ask "What is it?" Whether he was intrigued or annoyed with the constant question isn't clear, but what is know is that Waterman named the plane the Whatsit.

Original Caption: "A New-Type Plane Makes Debut": Because everyone who has
seen it fly has gasped, "What is it?", Waldo D. Waterman, ex-Air Mail pilot and
aeronatuical veteran of Santa Monica, California, named his unique new flying
wing plane just that, "Whatsit". The novel two passenger tailess craft, which
travels more than one hundred miles an hour, powered with a small radial air
cooled engine, appears to be one answer to America's need for a low priced,
simply and economically constructed everyman's flivver plane. Photo shows
Waldo D. Waterman in cockpit of his new plane at the Grand Central Air
Terminal, Glendale. 2/17/34

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, two men, Jack Northrop and Waldo Waterman, were independently working on the concept of a flying wing aircraft design within but a few miles of each other. While Northrop was doing his work at Burbank, Waterman set up shop nearby at the Los Angeles Metropolitan Airport, what is today known as the Van Nuys Airport.

The two designers had very different motives for pursuing such a radical design: Waterman thought that the configuration held promise for a "flivver", a small every-man's airplane, like a car for the sky, and just as easy to operate. Jack was driven by the desire to refine aircraft design to achieve the lowest possible drag, and he saw a tailless wing as the ultimate solution to that problem. Northrop's design first flew in 1928 (we'll be covering that in a future post), and he went on to fame. Waterman's wing flew in 1932, and though his designs evolved over the next few years, he was never able to come up with the breakthrough design that would provide him with fame and the common man with an airplane that would be as ubiquitous as the automobile.

Waterman had worked in various locations around Southern California for years. In 1910, while based at North Island, San Diego, he designed a variation on a Curtiss pusher that included an innovation where a pull of a lever folded the planes wheels out of the way so that it could land on its skids, making it quite possibly the first retractible landing gear in aviation history.

After WWI, Waterman found work in Glendale custom-building first a JN-4 Jenny and then a Packard-LaPere for millionare L. C. Brand. While there was a huge war surplus of hastily-assembled Jennys available on the market, Waterman found a small niche for customized and precision-built - and thus quite a bit more expensive - aircraft. From these, he acquired a reputation for producing aircraft that were highly reliable.

Construction on the Whatsit, NX12272, started in 1929 and included a number of notable design innovations, including the first documented use of "elevons" for both roll and pitch control. A trim plane, which was adjustable on the ground, protruded on short booms in front of the nose. The wings featured a 15 degree sweep, and the tips supported small rudders. Unlike most planes of the era (but just like Northrop's AE-1 wing), the Whatsit used tricycle landing gear complete with a steerable nose wheel.

Work on the aircraft was completed in May, 1932, and Waterman commenced taxi tests at LA Metropolitan. After several abortive flight attempts which ended in several minor incidents with the aircraft, Waterman finally got the plane airborne in July, although he quickly found that it was somewhat unstable in pitch. This was due to the close-coupled vertical relationship between the pusher engine's thrust line and the wing's center of pressure (this relationship affects an aircraft's longitudinal static stability, and while it is less noticable in traditional fuselage/tail aircraft designs, it is especially critical in tailless swept flying wing designs; even modern designs struggle with such problems, and the complex relationships of center of pressure and thrust line, as well as pitch control moment led to the crash of the Lockheed RQ-3 Dark Star, as well as pitch instability issues with Boeing's Phantom Ray, which only flew twice before being relegated to storage).

In October 1932, the aircraft was almost destroyed in an landing accident (Waterman wasn't flying at the time). Discouraged, Waterman shelved the project and took a job as an airmail pilot for Transcontinental & Western Airlines. Then, in late 1933, when the US Bureau of Air Commerce's director Eugene Vidal initiated a competition to encourage designers to come up with safe, reliable and inexpensive aircraft that the average person could fly, essentially Model-Ts of the air. Vidal stated, "that if some manufacturer could produce a foolproof airplane in large quantities and market it at a low figure, a new phase of the aircraft industry could be developed"

Waterman realized that a number of aspects of the Whatsit design fit the requirements of the Bureau's challenge, and so flight testing resumed in Feburary 1934, with only minor modifications. At some point, he landed at Grand Central where this photo was shot (the Whatsit was powered by a Kinner radial engine, and Kinner was based at Glendale). He even received mention in the May 1934 issue of Popular Science. 

However, the pitch instability remained, and it quickly became apparent that such a sensitive aircraft was not consistent with what was needed for a novice pilot. Thus, Waterman completely redesigned the plane, adapting a high-wing design (a change that solved the pitch stability problem by putting the wing's center of pressure more in line with the engine's line of thrust), which became the Arrowplane, produced under a the auspices of the newly incorprated Waterman Arrowplane Corp.

Ultimately, out of the 30 entrants in the Bureau's contest in 1935, the Arrowplane was one of only two that took prizes (depending on the source of information, either a Pitcairn AC-35 autogyro or a Hammond Y was the other prize winner). Later, the Arrowplane was refined into the Arrowbile, and then the Aerobile. However, despite the Bureau's romantic visions of the future direction of the aviation industry, neither of these...or any other "flivver", for that matter...made it into large-scale production. WWII and other modern realities pretty much killed the idea of a flying car in every garage. Waterman himself passed away in 1976, in relative obscurity.

The Whatsit, surprisingly, has survived in the collection of the Smithonian's Air and Space Museum, and what's left of it can be seen here.

A Fokker Chorus Line

Eighteen of the Fanchon & Marco Fanchonettes dance on the wing of WAE's

first F-32.

In 1930, Western Air Express decided to go big...very big. They agreed to purchase and operate the largest airliner then built, and the first four-engined aircraft built in America, the Fokker F-32. (We gave a brief history of the plane in this post, back when the Archive obtained its R.C. Talbot negative collection.)

At the time, WAE's headquarters were still located at Alhambra, and the company held F-32 inaugural celebrations there as well as at Burbank and Glendale. During these gala events, which drew thousands of spectators, one of the highlights was a performance by a chorus line of young, beautiful women stepping and kicking on top of the airplane's wing in almost perfect unison...the glamorous Fanchonettes.

Today, we're featuring two Fokker F-32 photos from the Glendale inaugural event, which came to the Archive as part of the Alman collection, and one of these shows eighteen of Fanchonettes in mid-kick (typical theater performances featured 48 of the girls). The original Alman photo album page doesn't clarify the location, but what identified it to me as Glendale, rather than the other venues, is that this photo was taken at almost the exact same moment as one by R.C. Talbott which is featured in John Underwoods book on GCAT (if you have a copy of the book, it's on page 47; Alman appears to have been standing just to the right and a bit forward of Talbott).

During the 1920s and '30s, F&M was a huge deal in the Los Angeles area (think of them as that era's equivalent of Cirque du Soleil). They produced spectacular vaudeville performances at Paramount Theater Los Angeles as well as at other top are venues. At the Paramount, the live performances were part of a bigger entertainment event...for the price of admission, you would be treated to the live stage show, a news reel feature, a cartoon short and the latest top Hollywood blockbuster movie. When the movie changed, F&M came up with a whole new stage show to go along with it. So to have them help publicize WAE's new "big thing" was a publicity coup for that time. So to have the F-32 turn out to be such a colossal dud after such a spectacular beginning is especially poignant.

There's a great website that details the history of Fanchon and Marco, and I've made inquiries with them to find out if they have additional details on the WAE performances, but as of this writing, I have not heard back.

This article from Air Transport World has a photo of the girls onboard the F-32.

Slate's Strange Dirigible

The Archive recently had the opportunity to acquire seven original press photo prints of the Slate dirigible built at Glendale. In researching the history of this unusual airship, I found lots of tidbits in various places around the internet, but no one comprehensive history. I also became fascinated with Slate's mis-guided ideas of aerodynamics. All of that came together in this post...I hope its length doesn't produce too much tedious reading...

The Slate hangar under construction at Glendale, with a Curtiss JN-4 Jenny, which
probably belonged to the Wilson Brothers, whose hangar is just out of view on the
right. This image is a part of the Archive's Glendale negative collection, was probably
taken in 1927 and is believed to have been shot by prolific Glendale-based
aviation photographer Ray C. Talbott.

To say that Thomas Benton Slate was an interesting character is a bit of an understatement. Many inventors have a flair for the flamboyant, as it helps them gather backers for their improbable schemes, but Slate was one of those rare ones who had actually managed to turn one of his ideas into a commercial success.

Styling himself as "Captain" Slate for the media (what he was captain of, other than the dirigible, I can't find any record of), the inventor made his fortune by developing a commercially viable method of producing frozen carbon dioxide, and his company came up with the name that we all know it by, "Dry Ice". He then turned around and essentially lost that fortune on Slate Aircraft Corp and his dirigible project, in which he combined a host of technologically radical "better ways" together in one doomed effort. Slate received four patents for various aspects of the airship's concepts.

This photo's original caption read: "The all-metal "City of Glendale", which will
take off in a few weeks on its first flight. Revolutionary ideas have been embodied
in the building of this dirigible by Capt. T.B. Slate. It will be driven by steam, and
will not use mooring masts - elevators instead will raise and lower the passengers,
of which there will be 40." The print is date Dec 19, 1929, but the small tail surfaces
and lack of the engine in the aft end of the car indicate that it was taken several
months earlier.

What Slate envisioned was a fleet of airships that were efficient, affordable, larger, smoother, safer and more convenient than contemporary dirigibles. Slate knew how to work the media, and pandered to the local well-to-do by offering to let them invest in his project, which was sure, he promised, to change the future of transcontinental air travel. To further make nice with local civic leaders, he declared that he would name the prototype ship City of Glendale. Thinking far beyond the Glendale, Slate conceived of fleets of even larger dirigibles plying transcontinental air routes, with coast-to-coast times of 36 hours. To develop his project, he looked at other airships of that era, idenfied the various shortcomings of their designs, and came up with what he thought of as innovative solutions. Interest in his project wasn't just confined to the Glendale aviation community...representatives from at least one European cruise line visited the project, interested in seeing whether the airship could be used to transfer passengers to and from ships at sea.

Slate started the aircraft company in 1924 along with his brothers Grover C. and Frank P. Slate. He
leased land at the southeastern corner of Glendale Airport (it wasn't yet known as the Grand Central Air Terminal), dug a big trench and started to build the airframe in 1925. Twice, Santa Ana winds destroyed the partially built frame-work. He then built a large hangar (our first image, above) to better protect the project.

In an era when non-flamable helium supplies were tightly controlled and flammable hydrogen was readily available, Slate supposed that he could make the dirigible "fireproof" - keep in mind, this was 6 1/2 years before the Hindenberg disaster - by constructing the shell, or "envelope" from duralumin (the contemporary trade name for the age-hardened copper-aluminum alloy most commonly used in early airship and aircraft construction). The metal was formed into long strips that were interlinked and then riveted together to produce a gas-tight structure, one of the features he patented. To save weight, Slate designed the envelope to be a monocoque structure, with no underlying framework to carry the loads.

An early advertisement for Slate's dirigible. If you were
a snazzily-dressed high society type, would you be willing
to get into this elevator?

The cabin, or "car", was 80 feet long and could accommodate a crew of five plus 30 (some sources said 40) passengers in relatively luxurious comfort. Plans included sleeping accommodations plus a dining salon.

Another of Slate's patented "innovations" was a passenger elevator system. With it, Slate claimed that the Glendale would not have to land to off-load and take on passengers. Slate envisioned a network of hotels and "stations" across the country where his transcontinental airships would make passenger stops, the first of which was built on the roof of the Glendale Hotel.

To get the passengers up and down, an "anchor", which doubled as a reserve fuel tank, would be lowered from the car on a cable. At the same time, the ship could be refueled while floating high overhead. Once the anchor and cable were secure on the roof of the station, a small, one-person "elevator" would then descend, attached to the anchor cable so that it wouldn't be blown in the wind. Slate's advertisements showed only a single elevator, while the actual patent featured a more complex dual elevator system, with both running up and down independently.

The original caption is missing from the Archive's copy of this press photo,
which is date stamped Jan 10, 1929.

Slate designed the airship's dimensions very specifically, building it in a teardrop shape (as opposed to ovoid) and making the diameter much larger in proportion to its length than standard, because of how he perceived the aerodynamics would perform in conjunction with his propulsion scheme. The length of his airship was 212 feet and the diameter was 58 feet. In comparison, the Hindenberg was 804 feet long and 135 feet in diameter, and for a more modern comparison, the current GZ-20 class of Goodyear blimp is 192 feet long and 50 feet wide. The structure weighed about 14,000 pounds (Slate claimed his design weighed up to half as much as that in other comparable airships), and when filled with hydrogen, it had a useful load of 7,000 pounds. The shape, Slate believed, would prevent a vacuum from forming behind the airship as it moved through the air.

The Glendale outside on a test float. The photo is date stamped Oct. 8, 1929.
The only a fragment of the original caption remains with the print. Presuming
that this photo was actually taken sometime during early October, note that the
airship, at this date, still retains the small tail surfaces.

But it was the "air displacement" propulsion system that Slate believed set his airship apart from the rest. The inventor came up with the idea of mounting a high-speed centrifugal blower at the nose of the dirigible which would pull air from in front of the airship and direct it out perpendicular to the axis of the ship. He believed that if the blower spun fast enough (Slate claimed that the 4 foot 10 inch blower fan would run at 4,000 to 6,000 rpm), it would produce a propulsive force through two effects: one, the air pulled into the blower would create a low pressure area in front of it and the ship would move forward to fill it, and second, the airflow exiting the blower would move along the surface of the airship at initial speeds of up to 300 miles per hour, with the velocity creating a lower pressure on the front skin than felt at the aft of the ship, so again it would move forward much in the same way that a wing experiences pressure differentials which create lift. Slate claimed that wind tunnel tests performed at New York University had proven that this would work, and that the airflow would somehow "stick" to the surface of the envelope all the way back to the tail, retaining enough velocity that the tail surfaces could be of minimal size and still have control authority. Slate believed that this system would give the Glendale an 80 mph cruise speed and a 100 mph top speed. (We'll look at the aerodynamic realities that this scheme faced a bit later in the article.)

Orginal caption: "The boiler, at left, which will furnish steam to  dirve the 5-bladed
"blower" propeller held by Chief Engineer L.R. Hawkins. The blower will be installed
in the nose of the ship, and is expected to push away the air in front of the liner,
causing a vacuum which will allow a speed of 100 miles an hours."

To power the blower, Slate first considered using a 400 hp steam turbine, claiming (ridiculously) that it would be so efficient that only six gallons of water would be needed for a transcontinental flight. Later, he switched to a petroleum-powered engine. Another of his patents dealt with how the fuel was stored...some of it in liquid state, some of it in lighter-than-air gaseous state, so that the net "weight" of the fuel could be adjusted positive or negative, depending on the flight needs at the moment (this, among other things, eliminated the requirement for ballast). Eventually, though, Slate abandoned the steam idea and settled on a 150 hp gasoline engine for the nose blower, plus a 90 hp engine driving a standard propeller in the back of the car. Slate's reasoning for the cabin-mounted engine was to overcome the asymetric drag created by the car.

This photo is dated 12/20/29, a day before the formal first flight. The caption
reads: "The new all-metal airship, designed by Captain Thomas W. [sic] Slate
at Glendale, Calif., being walked from its hangar at the Grand Central Air Terminal
preparatory to a series of test flights after a final adjustement of motors and
controls. The dirigible is propelled by a blower in the nose, which, according
[to] its designer, will create a vacuum into which the ship will be pulled. The
auxiliary motor seen at the rear of gondola is used to overcome the down-ward
drag of the cabin when the ship is in flight. An important feature of the tests
will be an effort to determine definitely whether the small tail members are of
sufficient area to control a dirigible of this size."

It's interesting to note the reference to the size of the tail surfaces, since by this
point in the ship's development, they have clearly been redesigned and enlarged.
Also note that the ground has been filled in, compared to the third photo above.

A number of times during 1929, the Glendale was pulled out of its hangar for "test floats", starting in January, and it never failed to draw a crowd. The media followed the progress breathlessly, and the reputable magazine Flight published an article on the Glendale  in February 1929. As such testing continued through the year, the final touches were put on the ship. One of the design elements that changed were the tail control surfaces, which were enlarged, but clearly still not large enough.

Finally, on December 19, 1929, the Glendale was pulled from the hangar for final checks, and on the 20th, a crowd of several thousand gathered to watch the pride of the city take flight for the first time. It was a rather warm first day of winter in Southern California, and the sun on the aluminum shell quickly began to heat the hydrogen, which naturally expanded. Slate had expected this, and designed pressure relief valves, but on this day, they stuck. As the giant airship finally began to rise, the pressure inside exceeded the structural strength of the envelope, and rivets began to pop, sounding to some like gunfire; the crowds scattered. As the hydrogen escaped, the Glendale ingloriously settled back to the ground. One aspect of Slate's goals was achieved, however: despite the rupture, the craft did not catch fire.

It's December 21, 1929, and the first day of winter in Southern California clearly
isn't very cold. Note the men ballasting the ship by hanging from the bottom of
the car. Also note the relative smallness of the blower in proportion to the size
of the airship.

The original caption reads: "Slate Dirigible Not Yet Off Ground --
The new all-metal type airship designed at Glendale, Calif., by Captain Thomas
Slate has been beset by minor mishaps, previous to actual flight tests under its
own power. The latest, the bursting of a seam in the gas bag, will require nearly
a month for repairs. Photo shows the dirigible just after it was pulled from its
hangar for what was to have been its maiden flight. Note small blower on nose
of ship, by which  Capt. Slate believes the ship successfully will be propelled by
creation of a vacuum ahead of it. The craft is equipped with no other means of
propulsion, except a small auxillary motor at the rar [sic] of the gondola, designed
chiefly to overcome the downward drag of the cabin and keep the ship on an even
keel."

Initially, Slate told the media that it would take at least a month to repair the problem. A few weeks later, Slate's team had looked over the damage and came to the conclusion that because of how the individual duralumin strips were interlinked with each other, there was no practical way to access the damaged area in order to make repairs. The hull was a total loss. Slate met with his investors to see if he could get them to pony up the cash needed to rebuild the shell. While I can find no mention on how much was initiall spent for the ruined airship, one tidbit that came from Slate's son was that an airship equivalent to the Glendale would cost $1 million in 1932 dollars. Unfortunately for the inventor, the incident occurred only two months after Black Tuesday, the worst of the 1929 stock market crashes. And while the market had actually rebounded a bit, investors of all stripes were becoming extra cautious with their portfolios, and the mood for bankrolling such a risky endeavor, no matter how 'glamourous', just wasn't there. Undetered, Slate continued to try to resurrect the project. An article in the July 4, 1930 edition of the Berkeley Gazette (buried on page eleven, and full of other errors, so I don't consider it terribly reliable) indicates that some rebuilding was attempted and that a subsequent test flight was to be tried. However, there are no records that this actually came to fruition.

A comparison of the tail surfaces from January 1929 (left) to December 1929.

Two years after the City of Glendale's disappointing debut, its scrap value, and that of the hangar, were all the assets left to Slate. The company filed for bankrupcy in 1931 and the assets sold off; the buyer (not mentioned in any references I could find) supposedly employd some of the Slate staff and family members to continue some of the engineering work and to promote the idea of a metal airship with air-displacement propulsion. It came to nothing, though. Finally, with members of the media watching, Slate stood on a catwalk above the airship, and ceremoniously dropped a 50-lb sandbag onto the airship's shell. Without the pressure of hydrogen inside, the shell crumpled and collapsed in upon itself. Later, the hangar was disassembled in sections and shipped to Arizona, to become hay barns. Several years later, Slate's son Claude was still trying to generate interest in the concept, as described in this proposal he wrote to Congress. Slate himself moved to Oregon where he continued to come up with new inventions (for instance, he received a patent for a peculiar flying boat in 1946), until he passed away in 1980 at the life-well-lived age of 99.

In an ironic twist, ten months after the failure of the Glendale to achieve her maiden flight, one of Slate's engineers, A. H. Watkins (who filed Slate's UK patents) was serving as a crew member on the British airship R101 when it crashed and burned; Watkins was one of 48 killed and his body was never identified.

But if the Glendale hadn't come apart at the seams, would it have actually worked? For the rest of this article, we'll dive a little deeper into the technical and engineering aspects of Slates designs, as described in the actual patents (so if you're not an engineer, you just might find the rest a bit boring...you've been warned!).

The patent for the propulsion system, which Slate filed in July, 1925, includes a couple of interesting drawings of how he envisioned the "Air Displacement" propulsion system to work. To introduce his idea, Slate wrote, "It is...my object to provide in this type of propulsion a novel and efficient means of applying the power directly to the displacement of air completely over the forward end of the ship and replacing it from the point of largest diameter of the ship back to the tip or tail end of the ship without producing a vacuum at the rear of the ship. With this system of propulsion the fan does not function in the manner of the usual propeller and does not pull on the ship directly by its shaft, and [thus] power is not concentrated at one point on the ship but the propelling means or force is applied completely over the exterior surface of the ship's hull from one end to the other."

Slate said the blower would take "a great volume of air in at its forward open end and discharge it in a solid radial sheet at the periphery of the fan...so that the rear surface of the of the current of air...comes in contact with the surface of the nose of the ship. The fan is open at both ends, and a suction from the rear end of the fan pulls the radial flow of air tightly against the surface...at the point of contact and thus seals the passage, the current of air following the contour of the ship."


Slate went on to describe his aerodynamic propulsion concept by stating, "The tendency of a great volume of air discharged from the fan at high speed is to cause a less than atmospheric pressure between the surface of the ship and the air flow, causing the ship to move toward the radial air stream at a speed goverened by the velocity given to the radial air stream by the fan." Low pressure in front, normal pressure in back, the ship should move forward, as Slate saw it.

To aid in this effect, Slate believed his idea would reduce the ship's form drag, which he described as the "vacuum" behind the craft. He said that "The great volume of air thrown around the nose of the ship and past its largest diameter at high speed, then loses its velocity and begins to replace immediately behind the ship the space occupied by that portion of the ship, thus allowing the ship to travel on without producing a partial vacuum behind the ship. This result relieves the power plant of the burden of pulling a volume of air behind the ship for replacement."

Close-up view of the impeller as it was seen in January, 1929.

Slate believed that the "solid radial sheet of air" would bend back along the surface of the envelope, and besides the direct result of producing propulsion, would also have some additional benefits. The first of these was that the airflow would eliminate the problem of parasite drag (the drag imposed on an object as it encounters and pushes out of the way the static air ahead of it). "The remaining volume of air in front of the ship that does not flow through the fan will be entrained into the stream of air flowing from the fan at high velocity and will follow the contour of the ship without building up pressure on the nose of the ship, and will pass the volume of air for the ship's displacement past its largest diameter at high speed. Consequently, pressure on the ship's hull is relieved."

The impeller configuration in January 1929 is shown on the left, while the final
configuration in December is shown on the right. Slate had to abandon his idea
of a steam turbine, and settled on a gasoline engine, and from this photo, it
appears that he used a radial engine, which resulted in the impeller being mounted
much farther forward than what Slate's concept called for in his patent.

Another aspect of this method was large in Slate's mind, protecting the airship from turbulence, and in the patent narrative, was actually listed as the first benefit of this method: "It is the objective of my invention to provide a novel means of propulsion...adapted to relieve the frame of the ship of air pressures due to a high velocity through the air and due to storm conditions in bad weather." He went on to say, "It is also an object...to increase the factor of safety in storm conditions through wrenching cross currents of air and which will also provide a heavy covering of air flowing completely around the ship and longitudinally with the ship to protect it from cross currents of air...which otherwise would tend to wrench the ship in storm conditions [but] would not be able to strike the ship until after they have first come in contact with the flowing air [which] has a cushioning effect on cross air currents."

He was obsessed with the ship's stability in "cross currents". "Complete replacement [ie, complete elimination of the turbulence created by form drag] of the air following the passage of the ship tends to hold the rear end of the ship steady and will not allow it to swing around from one side to the other of the area displaced by the ship. If a ship is forced through the air by the ordinary means and has to draw its displacement from the surrounding atmosphere it will bring it from the course of least resistance and if the atmosphere is at all disturbed by wind or storm conditions this course of least resistance is liable to be from any direction, causing cross currents over the rear of the ship where the rudders are located."

Granted, in the era when Slate was working, the sciences of aerodynamics and fluid dynamics were still very immature, so it's not surprising that concepts which seem obvious to engineers today were relatively unknown then. Slate had shown his knowlegebility over the years for engineering refridgeration concepts (besides the commercial dry ice manufacturing process, Slate held numerous patents for refridgeration-related inventions), and while these deal in manipulating fluid pressures, he certainly does not seem to have had any formal training or professional experience in aerodynamics.

Thus, it seems that Slate made some fundamental mistakes in his understanding of airflow, thinking that the blower would produce a "solid sheet" of air that would produce the pressure drops and the cushioning effects that he imagined. With the impeller completely unducted, all that would be produced in front of it would have been turbulent, circular airflow as the output swirled around and compensated for any low pressure that might be present from air being pulled into the fan. In addition, Slate never seemed to account for the turbulent interaction between his supposed sheet of air and the ambient air, an interaction that would all but eliminate any flow all the way to the widest part of the hull, much less all the way to the tail. Finally, while the concept of laminar flow hadn't been enumerated in Slate's time, the hull of the ship, with protruding-head rivets, would not have been conducive to the laminar flow needed to produce the kind of pressure differences that Slate imagined.

In a way, then, the structural failure due to the faulty valves was a really a blessing in disguise, as it saved Slate from the embarrassment of the ship making lots of noise but going nowhere, and publicly finding out that the propulsion concept was a complete dud.

Lucky Air Mail Route 13

Obviously this was staged, as they guy doing the "painting"
clearly can't keep his brush in the lines!

The PR department at Western Air wasn't afraid to play with superstition when it came to flying (in contrast, next time you're on a modern airliner, look for row 13!), issuing this rather fun press release photo on May 13, 1934. The location of this photo is not specified, but it could well have been taken at Glendale, California. The caption read:

Airline Employees Not Afraid of "13" Hoodoo

Designated as U. S. Mail Route 13 by the Post Office Department under new contracts, the Western Air division of General Air Lines defied superstition by waiting until May 13 to paint it on ship tail surfaces. Employes [sic] of the company consider the symbol lucky. When private mail carrying was resumed May 6, General Air Lines transported 13 pounds on its first load. There were originally 13 employes on April 17, 1926; 13 emergency landing fields mark the Los Angeles-Salt Lake City route; 13,000,000 miles have been flown without serious injury to 110,000 passengers; Ship 113, oldest in company's service, has flown 800,000 miles without even a punctured tire, and 13 pilots are now employed by the line.

The original caption, pasted on the back of our 8x10 glossy

NC584K was a Fokker F-10A trimotor, construction number 1045, and was originally operated by West Coast Air Transport before that company was acquired by Western Air Express in 1929; it was one of 25 F-10/F-10As operated by WAE. At the behest of the Postmaster General, Western merged with Transcontinental Air Transport to become Transcontinental and Western Airlines, the forerunner of TWA.

But to understand the real significance of this photo and press release, we need to digress for a moment and look back at the history of how air mail was contracted in the early 1930s. As air mail routes were consolidated at what later became known as the "Spoils Conference" following the Air Mail Act of 1930, T&WA became one of only three airlines (along with American and United) granted air mail contracts (otherwise known as CAM routes).

This led to allegations of fraud and collusion, resulting in a Congressional investigation and what was termed the "Air Mail Scandal". As a result, an angry President Roosevelt cancelled all commercial air mail contracts immediately, and the job of hauling airmail was assigned to the Army Air Corps. The Army initially used P-12 fighter planes, which could only carry 50 pounds of mail each. Later observation aircraft and even B-2 Condor bombers were used.

The Army was ill-equipped to do the job that commercial air mail pilots had been doing, and disaster ensued. Because air mail was so lucrative, companies that had been carrying airmail had pushed the technological development of commercial aviation hard, to the point that the industry was far ahead of the military technologically in areas such as intrument flying. As luck would have it, severe blizzards greeted the Army pilots on the first day of operations, and that was only the beginning of the Army's problems. In the first three months of operations, the Army suffered 66 accidents with the loss of twelve pilots. The public was outraged and President Roosevelt was quite embarassed.

The government had to do something, so the Black-McKellar Bill, aka the Airmail Act of 1934, gave the contracts back to commercial airlines, but under some very restrictive regulations. The chief of these was that any airline and any airline executive that had been involved in the previous contracts was barred from bidding on the new ones. Which meant that T&WA was out of the running. What to do? Work around the rules: in May 1934 the assets of the old Western Air Exress were severed from the larger corporation and operated as the Western Air division of General Airlines until December of that year, when they took on the name Western Air Lines. As a "different" company, Western could apply for their old Los Angeles to Salt Lake contract, now designated Route 13, which they won. Of course, this was with a wink and a nudge...even the language of the caption above makes it sound as if this was just the continuation of the previous airmail carrier's work, not a separate company that had not been involved in the previous contracts.

The public sentiment surrounding the Army's disasterous performance would have been very fresh on the minds of the readers of our featured photo caption, which puts the celebratory humor used here in a much clearer light.

And yes, this was intentially posted on Tuesday the 13th.

Legends: Grand Central and the First DC-3

Sometimes, even staged publicity photos capture really remarkable moments in time. Such is the case with today's photo, an 8x10 glossy press print officially issued by Americn Airlines in 1937. Shown is American Airlines' Flagship Texas, which many consider to be the very first Douglas DC-3. If this photo looks familiar to Glendale enthusiasts, it is because it is a very similar view to the photo used on the cover of John Underwood's seminal book Grand Central Air Terminal. However, a glance at the aircraft in the background shows that this was taken on a different day.

The caption accompanying this press photo reads, "With the crew in place, all that remains are the passengers, shown boarding the Flagship for an overnight flight to New York. The plane is ready for the take-off from Grand Central Air Terminal Glendale, Los Angeles terminal for American Airlines, Inc." The photo is stamped "American Airlines" and was received and filed in the reference department of the National Editorial Association on November 3, 1937. A close look shows the nose number to be A-115, the Flagship Texas.

Only, this wasn't exactly a DC-3. The visual give-away are the small slit-like windows above the normal passenger windows, and the note in the caption about this being an overnight flight to New York: this is the first Douglas DST-144, the Douglas Sleeper Transport. A couple of years ago, posts here recounted how the DC-1 and DC-2 came into being at the behest of TWA's Jack Frye, and so it's fitting that we follow with the similar story of how the DC-3 was born.

American Airlines was enjoying moderate success with the idea of adapting Pullman railroad-style sleeping berths to air transportation with their Curtiss T-32 Condor, but those aircraft became instantly obsolete when the DC-2 took to the air. With Boeing selling the 247 exclusively to their sister company, United Airlines, American's C.R. Smith and his engineers took a look at the DC-2, but it didn't have as much power as they would have wanted, and more importantly, the fuselage was too narrow for the sleeper berths. So American's chief engineer, William Littlewood, sat down with his engineering staff to see if they could come up with a redesign of the DC-2 that would meet their needs. With notional sketches in place, Littlewood then approached Douglas' chief engineer, Arthur Raymond with the concept, and Raymond refined the drawings and authored an internal report the outlined the logical follow-on to the DC-2 design.

Then it was up to Smith to pitch the idea to Donald Douglas himself. Douglas initially said no. Now, TWA had started the DC-2 production with an unheard-of order of 25 aircraft, and the Douglas plant was in full swing cranking these out, as well as DC-2s for other customers. It was clearly a successful design - even though it didn't meet Smith's requirements - and in those times (remember, this is only five years or so after the start of the Great Depression, a time when capital investment by corporations was severely limited), Donald Douglas was understandably reluctant to divert resources from such a successful program and invest in something new and speculative. It was not until Smith upped the ante with an offer to order at first 10, and then 20 of the new, bigger aircraft that Douglas saw the financial benefit of pursuing the design. Smith financed the development of the design with a loan from the Reconstruction Finance Corp., a government entity set up to jumpstart the nations economy.

American and Douglas engineers worked together as one team to come up with the detailed design for the DST. American loaned Douglas a Condor so that the berth design could be improved on...and one detail that the engineers noticed during the time they spent in the upper berth of their mockups was that it was easy to feel claustrophobic there, so they added the small slit windows (a photo of the berth configuration can be seen here). Since the standard-seat DC-3s don't have these berths, they understandably don't have the slit windows.

What resulted was essentally a larger, wide-body version of the DC-2, and ultimately used very few parts in common with the -2. But once Donald Douglas embraced the design, he didn't just stop at the sleeper version, but saw that there would be a ready market for a version that had only traditional seating, a version he designated as the DC-3. Eventually, Smith modified the order so that it consisted of eight DSTs and twelve DC-3s A total of 40 DST and DST-As were produced, but over 10,000 DC-3s and related civilian and military variants were built in the US, and another 5,000 were license built in Russia. (A much more detailed history of the development of the DST can be found here.)

The first DST, NX14988 (Douglas c/n 1494), took to the air on her maiden flight on December 17, 1935, a mere 32 years to the day after the Wright Brothers' first flight, and only seven months after Raymond's original report had been written! The crew consisted of Carl Cover, Fred Collbohm and Ed Stinemann. After initially serving as a flight test aircraft, the plane was finally delivered to America with an NC registration and became their nose number A-115 and was named Flagship Texas. The Texas was formally accepted by American on April 29, 1936 and "Flagship Service" with the new planes was kicked off on June 26, 1936, with inaugurations featuring the Flagship New York at Newark NJ and Flagship Illinois at Chicago. By the end of 1936, Donald Douglas' gamble had paid off, and American had possession of their twenty aircraft, and ten more had been delivered to other carriers.

As for our plane, the Texas, in 1940 it was converted to standard 32-passenger DC-3 configuration. It was later sold to TWA to be used in flying Army cargo contracts, and then later sold to the War Department and the Army Air Corps (as serial 42-43619) and assigned to the 24th Troop Carrier Squadron. Unfortunately, it it crashed and was destroyed on 15 October 1942 during bad weather near Knob Noster, MO.

This photo is incredibly clear, and so in a high-resolution scan, the planes in the background can be clearly identified. It is thus fitting that one of them, the fartherst away from the camera, is the DST's predecessor, the DC-2, here in TWA colors.

In the foreground is another American Airlines aircraft, though one seemingly from a different era, NC482W, a Stearman 4-CM-1 Senior Speedmail. American had purchased a dozen of these sturdy biplanes from Stearman in 1930 to serve on airmail routes in the midwest. To see one at this late date on the west coast, and still in American colors, is a bit intriguing. In the middle is a Lockheed 10C Electra with Mexican registration. From the photo, though, it is difficult to distinguish whether this is XA-BEO or XA-BEQ...what I think may be the tail of a "Q" could merely be a shadow. BEO (which was originally NC14260) crashed on November 1, 1937 at Playa Vicente, and BEQ crashed at Tuxlax Volcano a year later on November 7, 1938.

On the left side of the background is a parked WACO cabin-class biplane. Because WACO offered so many models and variations in their cabin class line, it's tough from this photo for me to determine exactly what type is shown here.