A camera that needed an aeroplane

Sherman Fairchild was a photographer before he was an aircraft maker. The only son of a co-founder and first chairman of IBM, he invented a synchronised camera shutter and flash as a Harvard freshman, then built aerial cameras for the Army. His survey company mapped Newark and Manhattan from a war-surplus Fokker D.VII, but no existing aircraft flew steadily enough for his cameras. So in 1925 he founded Fairchild Aviation to build an aeroplane around a camera. The FC-1 had a fully enclosed cabin, the first in an American aircraft, and its successor the FC-2 flew with Byrd to Antarctica and carried the first international airmail from Key West to Havana.

Trainers and Flying Boxcars

Fairchild bought the Kreider-Reisner company of Hagerstown, Maryland, in 1929 and moved there in 1931. The town became Fairchild’s home for half a century. The little Fairchild 24 cabin monoplane sold more than 2,200 copies, and in 1939 the PT-19 won an Army trainer contest; more than 7,700 were built and thousands of American pilots made their first solos in one. During the war came the C-82 Packet, a twin-boom freighter whose hold matched a railway boxcar, and from it the C-119 Flying Boxcar of 1947, of which 1,183 were built. The C-123 Provider followed, infamous in Vietnam for spraying Agent Orange in Operation Ranch Hand.

Catching film from space

The strangest job a Fairchild ever did came on 19 August 1960, about 360 miles south-west of Honolulu. A specially modified C-119 trailed a hook through the parachute of a film capsule falling back from the Corona spy satellite Discoverer 14 and caught it at 8,000 feet. It was the first recovery of an object returning from Earth orbit and the first film ever retrieved from an orbiting satellite. Fairchild cameras were on the Moon missions too: its Lunar Mapping Camera, carried on Apollo 15, 16 and 17, photographed about a fifth of the lunar surface.

Fairchild Republic and the Warthog

In the 1960s the company bought its way into a bigger league. It licence-built the Fokker Friendship as the F-27 and FH-227, acquired Hiller helicopters in 1964 and Republic Aviation in 1965, makers of the Thunderbolt and Thunderchief. As Fairchild Republic it designed the A-10 Thunderbolt II, a slow, heavily armoured tank-killer built around a huge 30 mm cannon, which first flew on 10 May 1972 and beat the Northrop YA-9. A total of 716 were built, and the aircraft universally known as the Warthog remained in front-line service half a century later. After Sherman Fairchild’s death in 1971 the group was renamed Fairchild Industries.

Metroliners, Dornier and the end

The A-10 was the high point. The T-46 trainer, meant to replace the Cessna T-37, was cancelled in 1988 after only three were built, and aircraft production at Hagerstown ended in 1984. The commuter line, bought with Swearingen of San Antonio, lived on: more than 600 Metroliners were built. In 1996 Fairchild took over Dornier’s civil business as Fairchild Dornier and built 110 Dornier 328JETs, but the venture failed and in 2003 its assets were bought by M7 Aerospace of San Antonio, which no longer builds aircraft and was sold to Elbit Systems in 2010.

Factories

• Farmingdale · Farmingdale, Long Island, New York — First home; later Fairchild Republic’s A-10 plant
• Hagerstown · Hagerstown, Maryland — Headquarters and main works 1931–1984; C-82, C-119 and C-123
• Burlington · Burlington, North Carolina — Former rayon mill that built the AT-21 Gunner
• San Antonio · San Antonio, Texas — Former Swearingen plant; Metroliner production; M7 Aerospace
• Fairchild Aircraft Ltd · Longueuil, Quebec, Canada — Canadian subsidiary, 1920–1950

People

• Sherman Fairchild · founder — 1896–1971; founded more than 70 companies; IBM’s largest individual shareholder; National Aviation Hall of Fame 1979

Records and firsts

• FC-1: first US aircraft with a fully enclosed cockpit and hydraulic landing gear
• C-119: first aerial recovery of an object returning from Earth orbit, Discoverer 14, 19 August 1960
• FC-2: first international airmail from Key West to Havana