Second only to General Motors

During the Second World War, Curtiss-Wright built 142,840 aircraft engines, 146,468 electric propellers and 29,269 aeroplanes. It employed 180,000 people and ranked second among American corporations in the value of wartime contracts, behind only General Motors. Its P-40 flew with Claire Chennault’s Flying Tigers in China; its C-46 Commando hauled supplies over the Hump of the Himalayas. And within four years of victory it had stopped building aeroplanes altogether.

Two feuding names under one roof

The company was formed on 5 July 1929 by combining twelve companies grouped around the Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company of Buffalo and Wright Aeronautical of Dayton, the descendants of Glenn Curtiss and the Wright brothers, once bitter rivals in the patent wars of early aviation. With 75 million dollars of capital it was the largest aviation firm in the United States, and it soon bought Travel Air and the Moth Aircraft Corporation. It ran three divisions: aeroplanes, Wright engines and Curtiss Electric propellers.

Warhawk, Commando, Helldiver

Curtiss-Wright’s engines carried it through the Depression, and in 1937 the P-36 brought the largest peacetime aircraft order the Army Air Corps had ever placed. Its successor, the P-40 Warhawk, first flew on 14 October 1938 and 13,738 were built, the Tomahawk and Kittyhawk among them. The C-46, 3,181 built, and the SB2C Helldiver, 7,140 built and nicknamed the Beast by crews who disliked its handling, followed. The Wright R-1820 Cyclone was built almost 120,000 times.

Defective engines and missed jets

There were shadows. From 1941 to 1943 the Wright plant at Lockland, Ohio, pushed out engines that failed inspection, and investigators later found that company officials had conspired with inspectors to pass them. The company also put little effort into research during the war, and lost the jet age to North American, Lockheed, Northrop and others. When the XF-87 Blackhawk lost to the Northrop F-89 in 1948, Curtiss-Wright closed its aeroplane division and sold the assets to North American.

Actuators, reactors and Davidson

It tried again with the X-19 tiltrotor of 1963 and licensed the Wankel rotary engine, but the future lay elsewhere. From the 1960s Curtiss-Wright reinvented itself as a maker of actuators, valves, sensors and surface treatments, and of equipment for naval nuclear reactors and submarines. Now headquartered in Davidson, North Carolina, it reported sales of about 3.5 billion dollars in 2025 with about 9,100 employees.

Factories

• Buffalo plants · Buffalo, New York — Main P-40 and C-46 production
• Columbus plant · Columbus, Ohio
• St. Louis plant · St. Louis, Missouri
• Louisville plant · Louisville, Kentucky — Built 438 C-46s
• Lockland engine plant · Lockland, Ohio

People

• Guy Vaughan · president from 1935

Records and firsts

• Largest peacetime aircraft order placed by the US Army Air Corps, P-36, 1937