A boy at Fort Myer

In the autumn of 1908 a 16-year-old from Brooklyn talked his mother into taking him to Fort Myer, Virginia, to watch the Wright brothers demonstrate their Flyer to the US Army. Donald Wills Douglas never got over it. He built rubber-band models in his room at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, resigned in 1912 to study aeronautics, and was turned down for jobs by Grover Loening and Glenn Curtiss. So he went to MIT instead, finished the four-year course in two, and in 1914 became the first person to receive MIT’s degree in aeronautical engineering. At 23 he was chief engineer of the Glenn L. Martin Company. In March 1920 he walked away from a $10,000-a-year salary and headed west to California.

The Cloudster and the partner who walked away

Douglas arrived in Los Angeles with an idea and no money. The money came from David R. Davis, a wealthy enthusiast who put up $40,000 to form the Davis-Douglas Company in July 1920. The goal was audacious: the first non-stop flight across the United States. The result was the Cloudster, a big wooden biplane with a 400 hp Liberty engine. It first flew on 24 February 1921 and climbed to 19,160 ft for a Pacific Coast altitude record that March. In June it set off coast to coast — and its engine failed, forcing it down at Fort Bliss, Texas. Davis lost interest. Douglas did not. On 22 July 1921 he founded the Douglas Company in Santa Monica, on his own.

First around the world

The break came first from the Navy, which bought the DT torpedo bomber, and then from a grander Army scheme: the first flight around the world. Douglas proposed a modified DT, and one of his early hires, a young Jack Northrop, designed its fuel system. Four Douglas World Cruisers left Seattle on 6 April 1924. One was lost in fog; another came down in the Atlantic and sank. Two returned to Seattle on 28 September to a hero’s welcome. The company took a motto that sounded like a boast and turned out to be a prophecy: First Around the World – First the World Around. Its badge of aircraft circling a globe survives, much evolved, in the Boeing logo today.

The telephone call that made the DC-3

In 1931 a TWA Fokker trimotor crashed after a wooden wing failed, and the government clamped down on wooden-winged airliners. Boeing’s all-metal 247 was reserved for United, so TWA asked for a three-engined rival. Douglas doubted he could ever sell the 100 aircraft needed to recover the cost, but answered with two engines: the DC-1, flown on 1 July 1933, then the DC-2. What came next began with a marathon telephone call from American Airlines boss C. R. Smith, who talked a reluctant Douglas into a wider sleeper version on the promise of 20 orders. Arthur Raymond’s team designed it, and the Douglas Sleeper Transport flew on 17 December 1935 — the 32nd anniversary of Kitty Hawk. Its day-seat version was the DC-3.

Roller skates and 160,000 workers

The DC-3 could cross America eastbound in about 15 hours, and it was reckoned the first airliner able to make money from passengers alone, without mail or subsidy. Then war turned the company into a city. The Santa Monica works were so large that the mail girls delivered internal post on roller skates. Douglas grew from 68 employees in 1922 to a wartime workforce of 160,000, with plants from Long Beach to Tulsa, Oklahoma City and a field near Chicago that is now O’Hare airport, and built almost 30,000 aircraft between 1942 and 1945 — C-47s, A-20s, A-26s and the SBD Dauntless, the dive bomber that delivered the fatal blows to Japan’s carriers at Midway in June 1942. Counting every military version, 16,079 DC-3s were built.

Heinemann’s hot rods and Mach 2

Peace was brutal: nearly 100,000 workers were let go. Yet the next twenty years were the company’s most daring. Ed Heinemann, a self-taught engineer who had started at Douglas as a draughtsman, designed the Skyraider and then the A-4 Skyhawk, a jet attack aircraft at roughly half the weight the Navy had asked for. The D-558-1 Skystreak set a world speed record of 640.744 mph in 1947; on 20 November 1953 Scott Crossfield took the D-558-2 Skyrocket to Mach 2, the first time any aircraft had flown at twice the speed of sound. The F4D Skyray took the absolute speed record for a carrier aircraft, and in 1961 a DC-8 went supersonic in a dive. Douglas also built Thor missiles, the Saturn S-IVB stage, and the study contract that grew into the RAND Corporation.

Undone by success

The end came not from failure but from too many orders. By 1967 Douglas was struggling to build DC-8s, DC-9s and A-4 Skyhawks fast enough, with quality and cash-flow problems, the cost of developing the DC-10 and shortages caused by the Vietnam War. After almost four years of talks, Douglas merged with McDonnell Aircraft of St Louis on 28 April 1967; McDonnell had bought 1.5 million Douglas shares to meet its immediate financial needs. Donald Douglas Sr. stayed on as honorary chairman until his death in 1981. His name lived on as a division of McDonnell Douglas until the 1997 Boeing merger; the last Long Beach airliner, the Boeing 717, rolled out in 2006, and the last C-17 in 2015. The Fly DC Jets sign still stands.

Factories

• Santa Monica works, Clover Field · Santa Monica, California — Home from the late 1920s after moving from Wilshire Boulevard; DC-1 to DC-7 built here
• Long Beach plant · Long Beach, California — WWII bomber and transport plant; later DC-8, DC-9 and, under Boeing, the 717 and C-17 until 2015
• El Segundo division · El Segundo, California — Former Northrop subsidiary absorbed in 1937; Heinemann’s Navy designs came from here
• Torrance plant · Torrance, California — Wartime facility
• Tulsa plant · Tulsa, Oklahoma — Wartime facility
• Midwest City plant · Midwest City, Oklahoma — Oklahoma City plant; built 5,354 C-47s between March 1943 and August 1945
• Chicago plant · Chicago, Illinois — Douglas Field at Orchard Place; built 655 C-54s; the site later became O’Hare International Airport
• Air Force Plant 6 · Marietta, Georgia — Built the Boeing B-47 Stratojet under licence after the war

People

• Donald Wills Douglas Sr. · founder, president to 1957, then chairman — MIT’s first aeronautical engineering graduate; Collier Trophy 1926, Guggenheim Medal 1939; died 1 February 1981
• David R. Davis · financier, Davis-Douglas Company — Put up $40,000 for the Cloudster, then withdrew in 1921
• Jack Northrop · engineer — Designed the World Cruiser fuel system; ran a Douglas-backed subsidiary at El Segundo before founding his own Northrop company
• Arthur E. Raymond · chief engineer — Led the DC-3 design team; worked on every Douglas airliner from DC-1 to DC-8; founding member of RAND
• Ed Heinemann · chief engineer, El Segundo — Self-taught; designed more than 20 combat aircraft including the SBD, A-20, A-26, A-1, A-3 and A-4
• Carl Cover · chief test pilot — Flew the first Douglas Sleeper Transport on 17 December 1935
• James H. “Dutch” Kindelberger · engineer — One of the early Douglas employees, alongside Heinemann, Cover and Northrop
• Donald Wills Douglas Jr. · president from 1957 — Led the company into the McDonnell merger and stayed as division president
• C. R. Smith · president, American Airlines (customer) — His telephone call and 20-aircraft promise launched the DST and DC-3

Records and firsts

• First aerial circumnavigation of the world, Douglas World Cruisers, 6 April–28 September 1924
• Pacific Coast altitude record of 19,160 ft, Cloudster, 19 March 1921
• World air speed record of 640.744 mph, D-558-1 Skystreak flown by Cdr Turner Caldwell, 20 August 1947
• First flight at Mach 2, D-558-2 Skyrocket flown by Scott Crossfield, 20 November 1953
• First carrier-launched aircraft to hold the absolute world speed record, F4D Skyray, 752.943 mph
• F4D Skyray time-to-altitude record: standing start to 49,221 ft in 2 min 36 s
• First jet airliner to fly supersonic, DC-8-43, 21 August 1961
• First jet-versus-jet night victory, F3D-2 Skyknight over Korea, 2 November 1952
• DC-3 family: 16,079 built including all military and licence versions