American Aviation Historical Society

     Herb Rawdon sat patiently as Walter Beech paoor, pipe in hand. The president of Travel Air wasn’t too happy about the past racing season’s success. 
     Walter Beech was always out to win. But Travel Air hadn’t won much in 1928. There were victories, but there were defeats, too. Defeats handed down by the military and competitors’ airplanes. Defeats that Beech didn’t like.
     Both men knew that the hottest thing at Travel Air was a J-5 Model 4000 with Speed Wings. Good, but not good enough. The subject turned to company affairs and the 1928 racing season faded away.
     Perhaps Walter Beech let it fade away, but Herb Rawdon didn’t. Within his engineering, innovative mind an idea was forming: a concept for victory on the race circuit in 1929. Rawdon remembered Beech’s lament. There was a solution, an avenue to success, which Travel Air could pursue. Rawdon believed an airplane could be designed, built and flown that would defeat the crop of souped-up, slicked-up biplanes being raced by the military establishment. And, he believed his "concept racer" could be a winner without 600 hp and the usual aerodynamic refinements employed by the competition.
     One thing Herb Rawdon knew for certain: the genesis of such a ship was now, not two months before the 1929 racing season started.
     He could expect little or no company assistance. The Travel Air production line was humming with activity, cranking out Model 6000 monoplanes and the ubiquitous biplanes at the rate of nearly 25 ships per week!
     One year separated defeat and victory for Travel Air, and Rawdon knew every bit of those 12 months would be needed to make his concept a reality. But he also knew he couldn’t do it alone. Help was found in Walter Burnham, another engineer at Travel Air who Rawdon trusted and enjoyed working with.
     Burnham listened to Herb’s idea to build a racer. It was certainly a challenge both men wanted to tackle, but they agreed to keep the project quiet and work on it at home. From that evening forward for the coming year, both the Burnham and Rawdon families saw much less of their husbands and fathers.
     A pattern of design was emerging from Rawdon’s mind. He had always admired the sleek, powerful float-equipped Schneider racers, particularly Reginald Mitchell’s Supermarine designs. The Schneider ships set the pace for others to follow in speed and sheer power.
     But it was aeronautical design that Rawdon believed could turn the tide in Travel Air’s favor. A carefully planned and executed airframe, utilizing minimum frontal area and possessing low drag and light weight could, when mated to an engine of sufficient horsepower, provide excellent performance.
     Monoplane configuration was essential, as was fixed landing gear and room for only the pilot. Wire bracing . . .

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     On the misty, wet morning of October 20, 1946,Waterman Airlines’ (WAL) new Douglas DC-4, NC33691, lifted off from Andrews Army Air Force Base in Washington, D.C., bound for the war-torn city of Frankfurt, Germany.
     The North Atlantic that October day promised the usual - cold and windy with a forecast of rime icing, an unforgiving ocean for any airplane, and in that distant year largely devoid of other airliners. 
     This was Waterman’s third transatlantic crossing in October. It would culminate a series of ambitious and challenging charters to postwar Europe for the fledgling air arm of Waterman Steamship Co. of Mobile, Alabama.(1)  The departure from Andrews AAFB was occasioned because their charter was for a quasi-government agency with the longish title United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRA). Since this was two years before the U.N. was formed, the title was apparently coincidence. In any case, UNRA, founded in 1943, was a European-based entity supported by the allied powers (the Soviets noticeably absent). Their humanitarian mission was to assist in handling the massive numbers of displaced persons (DP), civilian, and military who were left homeless in the wake of the war. A large portion of UNRA’s charges were persons from all across Europe who had been used in forced labor for German war production. They were essentially abandoned without passports or means of sustenance. This was a major problem for the occupation forces and clearly UNRA had the backing of the U.S. government. Waterman’s contract was to return American workers who had stayed on after the war to assist UNRA. They were a mix of military and civilian, male and female. Frankfurt was the destination because of its proximity to the German town of Aschaffensburg where UNRA had their principal refugee camp. Their mission was ending and they were closing the camp. The DPs were apparently being sent to their home countries, finally.
     The date, October 1946, was an inauspicious time to be going to Europe. The world was beginning to recover from seven long years of conflict. Germany, bombed into rubble, was a dark and unsettled country, filled with displaced persons including former combatants now dissolving into the civilian population.
    Waterman Airlines’ previous charters in their first four months operating the DC-4 had been to familiar destinations of Puerto Rico and Hawaii. With the Germany trips they were now making their first "foreign" flights and going into a devastated country as  . . .

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      As I look back over the past 30 years, in which I have continuously been engaged in the aviation industry, I am forced to conclude that I was born at one of the most propitious times for the pursuit of such a career. I vividly recall the airplanes used in WWII, and I have lived to see airplanes of my own design surpass 2,000 mph.
     I remember in the 1920s, following in the Sunday supplements, the experiments of an eccentric called Dr. Robert Goddard, and I have lived to see his inventions in orbit around the sun, taking photographs of the far side of the moon, and going around the world in the number of minutes (almost) that Jules Verne described fictionally in the equivalent number of days.
     I recall the envy with which I watched my 12-year-old brother taking a ride in the fi rst airplane I ever saw, a WWI "Jenny" flying from a cow pasture in western Oklahoma. It was a great thrill to me in 1930 to be able to inspect at close range at Burbank’s United Airport, the pride of the U.S. Army Air Corps, consisting of huge Keystone biplane bombers, Curtiss Falcons and Douglas observation planes. 
     I remember clearly the suspense of Lindbergh’s 33 hours crossing the Atlantic, and the wild exhilaration at his success, as well as the loss of a number of transatlantic fliers who preceded him, and the highly publicized flights over the North Pole by airplanes and dirigibles.
     I remember clearly the crash of the French dirigible Dixmude off southern France, the crash of the British R-101 dirigible, the heroic final flight of the U.S. Navy dirigible Shenandoah, and the tragic loss of the . . . 

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     With the development of the Boeing Model 80 12-passenger airliner, the airlines needed an all mail and cargo plane. So, Boeing built 25 of the Model 95 as an open cockpit cargo and mailplane. All 25 were delivered between January 18 and May 8, 1929. Twenty were delivered to Boeing Air Transport (BAT), one to National Air Transport (NAT) and four to Western Air Express (WAE). NAT took over many of the 95s from its sister company, BAT. NAT flew them on its Chicago-New York route and WAE operated the 95s on its Los Angeles-Las Vegas-Salt Lake City route. The maximum 1620 pound payload went in the three mail compartments that were in front of the cockpit and one for express cargo aft of the pilot. The mail compartments were of 25, 20 and 35 cubic feet from the front of the fuselage to the rear. Power was from a single nine-cylinder Pratt & Whitney R-1860 Hornet of 525 hp. Normal cruise speed was 120 mph. The first flight of the biplane was on December 29, 1928, and on January 30, 1929, Aircraft Type Certificate (ATC) 106 was issued. The fuel tanks, 105-gallon main and a 25-gallon reserve, were in the center section of the upper wing. The ATC was modified in August 1929 when the fuel capacity was increased from 130 gallons to 155 gallons. The main gear had wheel brakes that were operated by depressing the upper part of the rudder pedals, later known as toe brakes. The 95s were delivered with a steerable tail skid, in later years some had tail wheels installed. In 1929, the advertised price was $24,500 but in quantity they could be purchased for as low as $18,900.
     Boeing Air Transport (BAT) crashed three of their 95s. One crash was due to weather, another had an engine failure and the last resulted from a fuel system failure. In 1930 and 1931, the  remaining ten 95s were sold to National Air Transport (NAT) . . .

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     As usual the Marine Corps was working on a pauper’s budget. That may come as a surprise to people that have never been in the Corps, but it is a fact. For decades, between all of the various wars of the Twentieth Century, the Corps was the only service that consistently returned money to Congress. This occurred despite the fact that we wore leggings rather than boots and we were occasionally issued WWI bayonets rather than the shorter WWII versions.
     In 1947 it was not at all uncommon to chance upon other WWI personal combat equipment, such as cartridge belts that would accommodate the five-round clip for the 1903 rifle rather than the eight-cartridge clip common to the new M-1 rifle. In fact, when the Marines landed at Guadalcanal they were still equipped with the 1903 Springfield. One other point that should be made that may explain some of my other comments is that in 1938 the Marine Corps consisted of roughly 18,000 officers and men. Despite all of the campaigns in which the Corps had been involved in Latin America and for which we had been vilified by the left, there were fewer Marines available in those days than there were New York City cops.
     The story is that the Corps just kept giving the money back, not because they were trying to curry favor with Congress, although that must have been one motivation, but because they felt that they just didn’t need it. After all, the equipment that they had was only 20 years old and was still perfectly serviceable. All of which is to illustrate the fact that the Corps is not wasteful by nature or tradition.
     As the smallest, and the only expeditionary service by law, the Corps had been fighting almost constantly since the turn of the Twentieth Century and had been doing so on the cheap. I’m not whining. That’s just the way it was. Despite this frugality, the Corps was thinking way ahead of the other services when it came to combined arms. That term can mean different things to different people. The Navy used to think that it referred to coastal bombardment, but I’m referring to aviation and ground coordination. Throughout the expeditions in Nicaragua during the 1920s the Corps used airplanes to deliver ordnance in close proximity to the troops. The reason was that our men were usually patrolling through dense jungles and we couldn’t drag artillery through the rough terrain. As our patrols were invariably outnumbered and constantly being ambushed, they often needed instant help. One might conclude that the evolution of close air support was born of dire necessity. Aviation was the answer to the lack of artillery and this was the first real integration of missions between ground and air. 
     The aviators in France during WWI had strafed the trenches and had dropped hand-held bombs, but the distance between the opposing forces was usually six- or seven-hundred yards. Our Army artillery could usually do better than that and accurately and repeatedly brought that distance down to a couple of hundred yards. Regrettably, there were always short artillery or mortar rounds that took the lives of our men. Men were also killed due to human error such as pilots being unfamiliar with the terrain and the sometimes tricky technique of identifying friendly troop positions in hazy conditions. 
     The point is that since we didn’t have artillery, close air support was the only alternative available. The ground marines and aviators set about devising procedures with which to properly and easily identify our troop positions. They also worked on improvising methods of control and coordination. As neither the troops nor the aircraft had radios at that time, achieving coordination could get tricky. By the time WWII . . .

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     This series focuses on sales literature that prompted light aircraft during the Golden Age of American aviation. It will illustrate sales and marketing messages for popular, and not so well known, aircraft from the 1920s and 1930s, illuminating insight into the perspectives associated with the aviation industry of that era.

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