Around the World in 8 Days with Winnie

Winnie Mae on display after the first round-the-world flight, but
before the second, sometime between June 1931 and July 1933. 

Note: After this article was posted on Nov. 8, the archive acquired the image on the left, which was taken earlier than the other two, so I'm reposting this update to include the new photo.

There are a few planes from Aviation's Golden Age that are undisputed all-stars, and Winnie Mae is certainly in that category. Because of the fame which its pilot, Wiley Post, brought the Lockheed Vega, much has been written about her, and so besides these previously unpublished photos, there isn't much new that I can contribute through my words here; besides the summary and bits of trivia below, if you want to know the detailed history, check the links at the bottom of this post.

Wiley Post set a number of records in Winnie Mae, a Lockheed Vega 5C (some sources refer to it as a 5B), registration NR105W. On August 27, 1930 he flew non-stop from Los Angeles to Chicago to win the National Air Race Derby. In June 1931, he and navigator Harold Gatty flew the plane around the world in eight days. After that, Post became interested in pioneering new aviation technologies, including the autopilot. He modified Winnie May with one and in July 1933, he again flew around the world, this time solo, and beating his previous time by 21 hours. Post next turned his attention to high-altitude flying, and Winnie Mae became a flight testbed, modified the plane with jettisonable landing gear and wearing a pressure suit that he also developed with BF Goodrich (which ultimately let to the suits worn decades later by the X-15 pilots) he explored flight in the stratosphere, discovering the jet stream and reaching between 50,000 and 55,000 feet (the onboard instrumentation failed, which prevented the flight from being registered as an official world record). This led to a jet stream-boosted high-altitude record-setting flight from LA to Cleveland on March 15, 1935. Shortly thereafter, Post, along with Will Rogers, was killed in the crash of his hybrid Lockheed Orion/Sirius in Alaska.

This photo (and detail below) was taken sometime between the
second world flight in 1933 and the high-altitude LA-Cleveland
flight in 1935, based on the records noted on the side of the plane.

Beyond the basics of Winnie Mae's history, there are a few seldom-mentioned tidbits of the story that I'd like to highlight. When people hear the name "Winnie Mae", they typically think of this plane, NC/NR105W, which has survived and is currently ensrined at the National Air & Space Museum (previously displayed at the Hazy center, she has recently been moved to the Mall facility). However, this is actually the second of three Lockheed Vegas to bear the name, all owned by Oklahoma oil tycoon Florence C. Hall; Hall had a penchant for naming his planes after his daughter, Winnie Mae Fain. Wiley Post had come up working the Oklahoma oil fields as a roughneck, and then took to flying, performing as a parachutist with the barnstorming act Burrell Tibbs and His Texas Topnotch Fliers. In 1928, after having lost one eye in an oilfield accident, he hired on with F. C. Hall as his personal pilot, flying the latest in aviation technology, the Jack Northrop-designed Lockheed Vega.

The first Winnie Mae, Vega Model 5 NC7954, fell victim to the Great Depression, and Hall had to sell it back to Lockheed in May 1929 (with no plane to fly for Hall, Post went to work flying for Lockheed as a test pilot for a short time). Hall's finances weren't troubled for long, though, and in June he picked up NC105W and sponsored Post's entry with it in the 1930 Derby. In a bit of irony, when Post and Winnie Mae #2 won the race, the plane they beat was the original Winnie Mae, flown by Art Goebel (there will be more on Art and WM #1 in an upcoming blog post).

The third WM was Vega 5B NC905Y, also painted white with blue trim, which Hall bought from Ben Wofford in late 1931, after Post and Gatty's around-the-world-in-eight-days record flight. Hall subsequently sold it to the Hal Roach Studios in Los Angeles in 1932. It eventually made its way to Mexico, was involved in a number of crashes, the last in 1945 rendered it beyond repair.

At some point (probably about the time Hall bought Winnie Mae #3 after the first world flight), Hall sold NR105W to Post, and in 1936, after Post's demise, the Smithsonian bought the plane from his widow. It has been restored to the configuration it was in during the high-altitude research period, including a small cabin window on the right side, which isn't present in the above photo.

• This page at Ace Pilots provides a lot of details on the record-setting flights.
• Jim Slade's excellent article, "Eight Days East"
• Aircraf in Focus' Vega page includes a rare color photo of NR-105W showing it with a full set of cabin windows.
• NASM's page on WM.
• The D-M Register's detailed page on Post
• The D-M Register's detailed page on the first Winnie May.
• The D-M Register's detailed page on the third Winnie May.

Fits Like a Glove

Greetings, fellow aviation historians, the Blog is finally returning to (somewhat) active duty! For now, my posts won't be quite as frequent as they once were, but we're back up and running. And as you might expect, the first post back is something of a mystery....

This photo is an original Douglas Aircraft print (stamp on the back says it's from the El Segundo plant), and there's a hand-written notation that reads "Laminar Flow Airfoil Glove". The plane shown, Northrop A-17A serial 35-122, at some point was turned over to NACA for a laminar flow reseearch program, which was operated out of Langley.

Unfortunately, I could find very little information about the test program (and no other photos of the plane in this configuration), and there are only a few snipets of information about it on the web, one of which mentions that the small added propellers were intended to add airflow over the wing. The primary source for information on NACA's history of laminar flow research is the paper A History of Suction-Type Laminar-Flow Control with Emphasis on Flight Research. Written by pioneering researcher Albert Braslow (who has since, sadly, passed away), this paper makes no mention of tests using the A-17A. The paper, on page 3, implies that the first laminar-flow flight tests took place in 1941 and utilized a surplus B-18 bomber. Either Braslow was unaware of the use of the A-17A (improbable, in my view), or this particular part of the larger research effort yielded little or no data of note. Joe Baugher's database indicates that 35-122 was returned to the Army in August of 1943.

If anyone has additional information on the modifications, when the test program took place, and any data that resulted from it, I would very much like to hear from you!

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.

The Packard Ford

The third in a series of three posts featuring some of the Archive's Ford images

With Trimotor production in full swing, the Ford Motor Company understood that the way to stay ahead of the competition was to be continually innovating, so a small group of producition aircraft were held back from sale and used as testbeds to try out new engine combinations. One of these was the sole model 11-AT.

Born as a standard 4-AT-E, (NC-8404; first flight July 10, 1929), serial 66 was used to test Packard's new DR-980 nine-cylinder radial Diesel engine, first designating it a 4-AT-G then 11-AT when the corporate decision was made to offer the configuration for sale. First flight in its experimental configuration took place on April 2, 1930. The engine, designed by Professor Herman Dohner and Captain Lionel Woolson, promised a drastic improvement in fuel efficiency and a power-to-weight ratio - at 550 pounds dry-weight, the 225 horsepower output resulted in a more efficient ratio than some of today's engines. Ford actviely advertised the type as more economical as well as safer, since Diesel fuel is less flammable.

Our photo is an official Ford shot, and the 8x10 glossy period print is so crisp that an enormous amount of detail can be seen by enlarging the scans.

When this engine was installed on a Bellanca CH-300, it set a world unrefueled endurance record of 84 hours, 33 minutes on May 28, 1931, a record which stood for 55 years until being broken by the Rutan Voyager.

However, there were some drawbacks. The engine was a monovalve design, and consequently was very rough running - in some applications, a flexible coupling needed to be installed between the crackshaft and the propeller. For an airliner, this was a show-stopper. Passengers demanded smoothness in their ride. In addition, many people found the smell of Diesel exhaust particularly annoying.

After NX8404's flight test program was over in, Ford dropped the idea of using Packard Diesels, and returned the aircraft to it's stock 4-AT-B configuration with three Wright J-5 R-790 Whirlwind engines (there is some indication that it later had J-6-9s). It was first sold on July 3, 1934 to Mulzer Flying Service of Columbus Ohio, then on January 25, 1936 to Oral K. Southwick of Springfield, Mo. On May 29, 1937 (some sources say it was in March, not May), the plane crashed at Belleville, Illinois, though without killing anyone. The wreckage was taken to Parks College where an attempt was made to rebuild it, but it was ultimately judged too expensive, and the remains were cut up and sold for scrapped.

(Some information for this post was derived from the invaluable book Ford Tri-Motor1926-1992 by William T. Larkins)

Real Men Don't Fly Pink Airplanes

A slightly haggard-looking William "Pete" Knight walks away from X-15A-2
on October 3, 1967, after setting a world record speed of 4,534 mph. 

The visual image that most folks have of the pioneering and record-setting North American X-15 is of a black airplane, mainly for the reason that the skin was largely made of Inconel, which has a natural black color. There were three X-15s built, and were designated A-1 through A-3. The middle ship, A-2, made 53 powered flights, two of which (in addition to four captive-carry flights) were flown with a distinctive white coating, rather the regular bare black skin. Today's featured image is an Associated Press wirephoto dated October 3, 1967, which shows A-2 after one of those historic flights.

The official caption which accompanies the image reads: "EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE, Calif., Oct. 3 -- END OF A RECORD FLIGHT -- Air Force Maj. William J. Knight, left, walks away from the X15 at Edwards Air Force Base in California today after flying the plane at a record speed of 4,534 miles per hour. The new mark for wingee [sic] craft, almost seven times the speed of sound, was 284 miles per hour faster than the 4,250 Knight reached in the X15 last Nov. 18. (AP Wirephoto) (see AP wire story)."

Even though the X-15's Inconel skin is, by nature, quite heat tolerant, the aerodynamic heating that was expected at the speeds that the record flights were to be flown far exceeded even this exotic metal. To deal with this, the engineers decided to cover the rocket plane's skin with an ablative, or heat-resistant coating.

This rubbery, pencil eraser-like material had the unfortunate property of also being bright pink.

An official photo of A-2 from the NASA Dryden website.

Officially, the NASA explanation for the white coating, which was applied over the pink, was that the actual ablative material was not fuel resistant, and thus needed additonal protection against damage that could be caused by fuel spills.

The urban legend, told in the hallways at Dryden, however, is that Pete Knight walked into the coatings hangar after the ablative had been applied, and said, "Like hell, I'm gonna fly a pink airplane!" And shortly thereafter, the white coating was added.

Lockheed's Sluggard XF-90

The first XF-90 sits on the ramp at Edwards AFB.

This is the story of one plane that just didn't have what it takes. In response to a 1945 Air Corps request for a high-performance, long-range bomber-escort fighter, Lockheed adapted some of the design elements of the P-80 Shooting Star into a new, swept-wing design. Initially designated the XP-90, and then XF-90 after the reordering of things as a part of the Air Force's independence, the aircraft competed against McDonnell's XF-88 Voodoo, the forerunner of the F-101. Two XF-90s were built, and the aircraft pictured today, tail number 46-687, was the first of them.

When famed Lockheed test pilot Tony LeVier coaxed the XF-90 into the air for the first time on June 3, 1949, it became readily apparent that Lockheed had missed the mark. Though the plane was built rugged, it was also built heavy. Adding to that, the pair of Westinghouse J34 engines produced a total of only 6,200 pounds of thrust, hardly enough to push the large plane, which tipped the scales at 27,200 pounds when loaded. Underpowered was an understatement. Unless the plane carried only a minimal amount of fuel, it couldn't even take off without JATO rocket assist. For the second aircraft, Lockheed added afterburners, but that only boosted the power to 8,200 pounds of total thrust. The Voodoo easily won the production contract in September, 1950, before the program was cancelled. McDonnell resubmitted a slightly larger design for a subsequent fighter competition, which won to become the F-101.

Unneeded, 46-687 was sent to NACA's Cleveland labs in 1953 were it was subjected to structural testing, in the classic test-to-destruct mode. What was left was scrapped. The second airframe, -688, was used in nuclear weapons testing, and subjected to three different blasts. It survived, in a manner of speaking, and the battered remnants are planned to be displayed at the National Museum of the Air Force in Dayton to show the effects of a nuclear blast.

Another photo taken the same day as ours can be seen in the National Museum's on-line archive, here.

Vanishing Rainbow

For the September issue of AirshowStuff Magazine, I wrote a piece on Mike Machat's new book profiling the remarkable Republic XR-12 Rainbow (you can read it here, it's on page 14), an experimental reconnaissance aircraft from the mid-1940s, a design that was far ahead of its time; only two prototypes were built, and the program was cancelled before it could go into production. Mike, who is a well-known aviation painter, writer and speaker, was wonderfully generous with his time, allowing me a long and detailed interview over drinks and appetizers before he was to make a book-signing appearance. His passion for the history of both the Republic Aircraft Corp and the Rainbow is remarkable and very personal, as his uncle was one of the engineers that helped design the plane.

And then I went home and actually read the book he wrote (World's Fastest Four-Engine Piston-Powered Aircraft: Story of the Republic XR-12 Rainbow, available at a nice discount here), and fell in love with the plane myself. I was also intrigued to find out that the Rainbow actually made at least one airshow appearance, which made it an ideal subject to be featured both in my "Vintage Wings" column in the magazine (it just ran in the November/December issue, on page 6), as well as on this blog. Mike had just the photo, one that hadn't run in the book. The image was taken in October, 1948, at the open house at Wright Field, and shows the second of the two XR-12s that were built. While the first ship was essentially a handling qualities flight test vehicle, the second one had a full interior, including all the reconnaissance cameras and even a darkroom.

This photo, and one from a different angle that was used in the book, are unique. As Mike tells it, "It is very possibly one of the last photos ever taken of the airplane, because one week later it left for operational testing at Eglin AFB, FL, and crashed on only its second test flight there on November 7th." Of the seven-man crew,  only five survived the watery crash.

Mike Machat also generously provided this Republic family
portrait of the first XR-12, shortly after it's rollout together with
a P-47N Thunderbolt and an RC-1 Thunderbolt amphibian, the
forerunner of the RC-3 Seabee, a family-friendly amphibian that
Republic had pinned its hopes on to make big with an
anticipated post-war customer base of ex-military pilots. The
economics just didn't pan out, though.

The aircraft was faster than anything in its class, and Republic had dreams of a variant also being produced as a 40-passenger airliner, the RC-2 Rainbow. Both Pan Am and American Airlines had placed orders, as it was about 100 knots faster than its Boeing and Douglas competition. Unfortunately, it was an expensive project that came about at just the wrong time. With the end of WWII, its mission evaporated, and the Pentagon decided to pass. Without the military version to fund development of the civilian airliner, the price that the airlines would have to pay soared, and both carriers cancelled their orders. It was the end of the Rainbow, and there simply was no gold there.

The Bantam X-Plane

For the next few weeks, the Tuesday mid-week updates will feature old-style PR photos that were released to newspapers. In the years before the digital revolution, newspapers primarily received their black and white photos via wireservices. Wirephotos long pre-dated fax machines, but used the same concept, line-by-line scans transmitted over telephone lines (a fascinating 1937 article in Popular Mechanics on how wirephotos work can be found here). Newspapers typically then filed away 8x10 prints for possible future use. With the arrival of the digital age, some of these have been filtering out into the collector's world, and the MojaveWest archive has been able acquire some.

One of the "forgotten" X-planes from the late 1940s was the Northrop X-4 Bantam, of which two airframes were built. Our photo shows the second aircraft, 46-677, on its maiden flight at Edwards. The photo still has the "ditto" caption taped to the back (for the younger generations who read this, "dittos" were a pre-photo copy means of reproduction...and the smell of ditto fluid is one of those staples from when I attended elementary school). The caption read:

"First Flight of the Northrop X-4, star performer in one of the Air Force's secret projects at Edwards Air Force Base, shows the small Flying Wing-type research airplane streaking over the California desert on a test flight. Northrop pilot Charles Tucker has flown the X-4 repeatedly during the past several months in a test program intended to explore flight characteristics of the high sub-sonic zone. The fourth in a series of 'X' ships ordered by the Air Force, the X-4 will continue research pioneered by the Bell X-1, the first airplane to fly faster than the speed of sound. One of the smallest airplanes ever built for the Air Force, the X-4 measures approximately 25 feet from wing tip to wing tip. The X-4 is patterned after the big Northrop Flying Wing bombers. A single pod houses the pilot and elaborate instrumentation. The unusual tail consists only of a vertical stabilizer and rudder. There is no horizontal stabilizer or elevator assembly. 'Elevons', developed by Northrop for use on the Flying Wings, serve as both elevators and ailerons."

The first X-4, 46-676, took its maiden flight on December 15, 1948, but had a really troubled flight test program, being plagued by seemingly unending technical problems. The second aircraft, 46-677 took to the air in mid-1949 (the photo and caption are undated). When Northrop had completed the initial handling qualities testing and turned the aircraft over to the Air Force in February 1950, the first aircraft was permanently grounded, and was cannibalized for parts to support the second one.

The goal of the program was to evaluate the characteristics of a flying wing's reaction to transonic speeds, and above all else, the X-4 program proved that a flying wing with analog flight controls did not have ideal handling qualities. The Bantam experienced continual pitch oscillations (porpoising) as it approached the speed of sound, and there was nothing the pilot could do to dampen it. In fact, engineers would not be able to overcome these issues until the advent of digital fly-by-wire control, which would allow a computer to fly the plane, leading to the current rash of flying wing designs, including the B-2 Spirit and the X-47B N-UCAS.

Both X-4s survived their era, however. 677 resides at the Air Force museum in Dayton Ohio, and 676 is currently being restored at the Air Force Flight Test museum at Edwards AFB.