Three names on one sign

Few companies have had founders like these. In January 1925 Walter Beech and Lloyd Stearman, who had walked out of the Swallow Airplane Company in Wichita when its president rejected a steel-tube fuselage, joined Clyde Cessna to form the Travel Air Manufacturing Company. All three would later have aircraft companies named after them. Cessna was the first president. Stearman left in 1926 to start his own firm in California, and Cessna left after about two years, at odds with his partners over his preference for monoplanes. Beech stayed and ran the company to the end.

The Wichita Fokker

Its first aircraft, the Model A designed chiefly by Stearman, set the pattern: a welded steel-tube fuselage, two open cockpits and, on most versions, overhanging balanced ailerons and rudder that made it look like a Fokker D.VII. Hollywood noticed. The Travel Air 2000 and 4000 biplanes were known in the film industry as Wichita Fokkers and played German fighters in Wings, Hell’s Angels and The Dawn Patrol. With WACO they were the most widely used civil biplanes in America in the late 1920s, and in 1928 Travel Air was the largest-volume aircraft manufacturer in the United States.

Across the Pacific to Hawaii

Cessna’s monoplane idea produced the Travel Air 5000 of 1926, which National Air Transport ordered for its mail routes. In July 1927 Ernie Smith’s 5000, City of Oakland, became the first civilian aircraft to fly from California to Hawaii, crash-landing on Molokai. A month later Art Goebel won the Dole Air Race to Honolulu in another 5000, Woolaroc, a contest in which most of the entrants were killed or lost at sea. The larger 6000 cabin monoplane, of which about 150 were built, became the first airliner of Delta Air Service, and in 1933 Jimmie Angel was flying one when he sighted Angel Falls.

The Mystery Ship

In 1928 the designers Herb Rawdon and Walter Burnham worked unpaid in their spare time on a low-wing racer with a NACA cowl and wheel spats, in a factory whose windows were painted over to keep the press out. The local paper called it the Mystery Ship. On 2 September 1929 Doug Davis flew it in the Thompson race at Cleveland and won at 194.9 mph, beating the military entries even after circling one pylon twice; it was the first time a civilian racer had outrun the Army’s best fighters. That August, Louise Thaden had won the first Women’s Air Derby in a Travel Air.

Into Curtiss-Wright, out came Beechcraft

The Mystery Ship’s victory came weeks after Travel Air’s independence ended. In August 1929 it merged with the Curtiss-Wright Corporation, with Beech as a vice-president, and its types were renumbered as Curtiss-Wright models. Production moved to St Louis and faded in the Depression. In March 1932 Beech resigned, went back to Wichita, took over the empty Travel Air factory and started the Beech Aircraft Company. Its first design, the Model 17 Staggerwing, carried the number that would have gone to the 17th Travel Air model. Estimates of total Travel Air output range from about 1,200 to nearly 2,000 aircraft.

Factories

• West Douglas plant · Wichita, Kansas — First four Model 5000 airliners built here
• East Central factory · Wichita, Kansas — Newly built in 1927; later taken over by Beech Aircraft in 1932

People

• Clyde Cessna · co-founder and first president — Designed the 5000 monoplane; left after about two years to found Cessna
• Walter Beech · co-founder and last president — Became a Curtiss-Wright vice-president; founded Beech Aircraft in 1932
• Lloyd Stearman · co-founder and chief designer — Designed the Model A; left in 1926 to found Stearman Aircraft
• Herb Rawdon and Walter Burnham · designers — Created the Type R Mystery Ship in their spare time
• Louise Thaden · pilot — Won the 1929 Women’s Air Derby in a Travel Air

Records and firsts

• Largest-volume aircraft manufacturer in the United States in 1928
• First civilian aircraft to fly from California to Hawaii, Travel Air 5000 City of Oakland, 14–15 July 1927
• Winner of the Dole Air Race to Hawaii, Woolaroc, August 1927
• First civilian racer to beat military aircraft, Type R at the 1929 Thompson Trophy
• First successful steam-powered aircraft flight, a converted Travel Air 2000 flown by the Besler brothers in 1933