Fifty aeroplanes for a dollar each

In 1927 the United States Congress decided that a young aircraft maker in Buffalo had earned excess profits of $300,000 on its Army trainers. Refunding the money would simply have sent it into the Treasury. So Consolidated offered the Army 50 more trainers for one dollar apiece instead, and the Army, which got the aeroplanes, was delighted. It was a typical Reuben Fleet answer: quick, commercial and slightly cheeky. Within fifteen years the same company would be building the most-produced bomber in history, and the man who had haggled with Congress over trainers would be selling his stake for more than ten million dollars.

The major who ran the air mail

Fleet was born in Montesano, Washington, in 1887, made his money in timber and real estate and became the youngest member of the state legislature in 1915. In 1917 he joined the Army’s aviation section, earned Junior Military Aviator wings No. 74 at North Island, San Diego, and in May 1918 was put in charge of the first scheduled US air mail between New York and Washington. The famous Inverted Jenny stamp was misprinted on his watch. After a spell as the Air Service’s chief contracting officer at McCook Field he resigned in November 1922, joined Gallaudet, and on 29 May 1923 formed Consolidated by renting Gallaudet’s Rhode Island factory and buying Dayton-Wright’s trainer designs from General Motors. The name said exactly what it was.

Trainers, flying boats and a record over the Pacific

The first product was the Dayton-Wright TW-3, sold to the Army as the PT-1 Trusty; 221 were built, and the Navy took a float version, the NY. In 1924 the company moved into the government-built Curtiss plant in Buffalo. It went public in 1929, set up Fleet Aircraft to sell civil trainers and bought Thomas-Morse. Then came the flying boats. The 20-passenger Commodore carried the New York, Rio and Buenos Aires Line down to Argentina from February 1930, and in January 1934 six Navy P2Ys flew non-stop from San Francisco to Pearl Harbor, 2,399 miles, a straight-line distance record and a record for formation flying.

Sunshine for seaplanes

Buffalo winters were no place to test flying boats, and Fleet had fallen for San Diego back in 1911, when his National Guard unit was sent south to keep an eye on labour agitators. In late 1935 he moved the whole company west. Building 1, a 247,000-square-foot continuous-flow factory beside Lindbergh Field, opened on 20 October 1935 and some 30,000 residents came to watch. His operating head, Lawrence Bell, stayed behind and started Bell Aircraft in the old Buffalo plant. In San Diego, chief engineer Isaac Laddon’s XP3Y-1 became the PBY, and in 1937 the Navy ordered 60 of them for $22 million, the largest single military aircraft order since the First World War.

No thank you, Boeing

The Catalina went on to find the battleship Bismarck in May 1941 and to spot the Japanese fleet approaching Midway in June 1942; with licence production more than 3,300 were built. But the bigger break came when the Army asked Consolidated to build Boeing’s B-17 under licence. Fleet and his executives visited Seattle and came home with a different idea: a bomber of their own, combining David R. Davis’s long, slender, high-efficiency wing with the twin tail of the Model 31 flying boat. The contract came in March 1939 and the XB-24 flew on 29 December 1939, about nine months later, with a tricycle undercarriage that was new on so large an aircraft. France ordered 60 of them sight unseen.

Forty-five thousand people

The Liberator became a production phenomenon: roughly 18,500 by September 1945 from five plants, including Ford’s Willow Run, where at peak a bomber left the line every 59 minutes. Consolidated’s own San Diego works built 6,726, and a new government plant at Fort Worth opened in 1942. By late 1941 Consolidated was San Diego’s biggest employer with 25,000 people, and by 1942 it had 45,000; in 1943 four in ten were women. Yet Fleet himself was gone. In November 1941, three weeks before Pearl Harbor and under pressure to retire, he sold his 34 per cent stake for about $10.9 million to Victor Emanuel’s Aviation Corporation, which already owned Vultee.

Becoming Convair

The logic of that sale played out on 17 March 1943, when Consolidated and Vultee formally merged as Consolidated Vultee Aircraft, soon known simply as Convair. Several Consolidated designs finished their stories under the new name: the PB4Y-2 Privateer, the B-32 Dominator, which flew the war’s last American air combat mission on 18 August 1945, and the giant B-36, which the company had decided in 1942 to build at Fort Worth. That Texas plant still builds fighters, the F-16 and the F-35, for Lockheed Martin. Fleet lived until 29 October 1975 and is remembered in San Diego by the science centre that carries his name.

Factories

• Gallaudet factory · East Greenwich, Rhode Island — Rented at the founding in 1923; left in 1924
• Buffalo plant · Buffalo, New York — Government-built Curtiss plant, 1924–1935; Bell Aircraft later started there
• Building 1, Lindbergh Field · San Diego, California — 247,000 sq ft continuous-flow factory opened 20 October 1935; built 6,726 B-24s
• Fort Worth plant (Air Force Plant 4) · Fort Worth, Texas — Government-owned, opened 1942 for the B-24; later B-32, B-36, F-16, F-35
• New Orleans plant · New Orleans, Louisiana — Built for the P4Y Corregidor, switched to PBY production

People

• Reuben H. Fleet · founder and president, 1923–1941 — Ran the 1918 Aerial Mail Service; sold control three weeks before Pearl Harbor; died 1975
• Isaac M. Laddon · chief engineer — Directed the XP3Y-1 that became the PBY; later executive vice president of Convair
• Lawrence D. Bell · operating head, 1929–1934 — Stayed in Buffalo and founded Bell Aircraft
• David R. Davis · wing designer — His high-aspect-ratio Davis wing made the B-24
• Edgar Gott · vice president — Credited with securing the B-24 contract
• Victor Emanuel · president, Aviation Corporation (AVCO) — Bought Fleet’s stake in 1941 and engineered the Vultee merger

Records and firsts

• Six P2Y flying boats flew San Francisco to Pearl Harbor non-stop on 10–11 January 1934: 2,399 miles, a straight-line distance record and a formation-flying record
• The 1937 Navy order for 60 P3Y-1 (PBY-1) flying boats, $22 million, was the largest single military aircraft order since the First World War
• The P-30 was the first Air Corps fighter with retractable landing gear, an enclosed heated cockpit and an exhaust-driven turbo-supercharger
• The B-24 holds the records as the most-produced bomber, heavy bomber, multi-engine aircraft and American military aircraft in history
• A Model 28 Catalina flown by Richard Archbold made the first flight around the world at roughly the equator in 1938–1939
• A US Navy Catalina was credited with the first American air-to-air kill of a Japanese aircraft, on 10 December 1941