The bookkeeper’s idea

At the end of the 1936 Bendix Trophy race, the great coast-to-coast speed contest of the day, the winners climbed out of a Beechcraft biplane. They were Louise Thaden and Blanche Noyes, and they had beaten some of the best male pilots in America. Entering a woman at all had been an inside idea: it came from Olive Ann Beech, the company’s co-founder, secretary and keeper of the books, who reckoned a win would sell aeroplanes. She was right. That pairing — a fast, handsome aircraft and a business brain nobody could ignore — is Beechcraft in miniature. By 1992 the Wichita firm had built its 50,000th aircraft.

Born in a borrowed factory

Walter Beech had built his own glider at 14 and flown for the Army in the First World War. In the mid-1920s he formed Travel Air in Wichita with Clyde Cessna and Lloyd Stearman, and by 1928 it was the biggest-volume aircraft maker in the United States. Curtiss-Wright bought it in 1929 and put Beech behind a desk in New York. He hated it. In 1932 he quit, went home and started again with his wife Olive Ann, designer Ted Wells, treasurer K. K. Shaul and investor C. G. Yankey — in an idle Cessna factory. Even the model numbers carried on from Travel Air: the first Beechcraft, the Model 17 Staggerwing, was simply the next design in the sequence.

Wooden trainers and 14,000 workers

The Staggerwing flew on 4 November 1932. With its lower wing set ahead of the upper one it looked like nothing else, but at US$14,000 to US$17,000 it frightened buyers in the Depression, and only 18 sold in 1933. The twin-engined Model 18 followed in 1937, and then came war. Walter fell ill with encephalitis in 1940, and Olive Ann ran the company, arranging US$83 million in loans for expansion. Beech grew from 235 people to more than 2,000 in a year, and to 14,000 by 1945. It turned out more than 7,400 military aircraft, among them the AT-10 Wichita trainer, built largely of wood in case aluminium ran short.

The V-tail that would not die

Before the war was over, Beech had a peacetime aeroplane ready. The Model 35 Bonanza flew on 22 December 1945, an all-metal four-seater with a distinctive V-tail. It would stay in production in one form or another for nearly eight decades — longer than any other aircraft — with more than 18,000 built. Walter Beech then spent company money, with no military contract, on a trainer based on the Bonanza; the Model 45 flew in December 1948 and became the T-34 Mentor. He died of a heart attack on 29 November 1950. Olive Ann became president and chair, the first woman to run a major aircraft company.

Slowly We Go

Olive Ann was cautious, and proud of it. When Bill Lear’s Learjet appeared across town in 1964, she chose to put turboprops on the Queen Air rather than chase him with a jet. The result was the King Air, first flown on 24 January 1964. It was the first aircraft in its class, it outsold its turboprop rivals combined, and by December 2020 nearly 7,600 had been delivered. Beech also built cryogenic systems for NASA’s Gemini and Apollo programmes. Her Slowly We Go policy, adopted after post-war contracts vanished, had a price, though: Beech came very late to business jets.

Raytheon, the Starship and the jets

In February 1980 Raytheon bought Beech for about US$800 million. Olive Ann stayed on the Raytheon board, but in 1982 she was moved aside, and she replied with her usual dry wit. The boldest Raytheon-era aeroplane was the Starship, a canard pusher built largely of carbon fibre, refined with Scaled Composites. It flew in 1986, sold badly, and production stopped in 1995 after just 53. Beech later swapped owners into other Beech aircraft. The jets came by purchase instead: the Beechjet, bought from Mitsubishi in 1985 and sold to the US Air Force as the T-1 Jayhawk, and the Hawker line, merged in in 1994.

Bankrupt, rescued, absorbed

In 2007 Raytheon sold the business to Goldman Sachs and Onex for US$3.3 billion. The debt was crushing. After the 2008 crash Hawker Beechcraft cut more than a third of its workforce. It filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on 3 May 2012, and a US$1.79 billion sale to Superior Aviation Beijing collapsed. In 2013 it came out of bankruptcy as Beechcraft Corporation without the jets, and Textron bought it for about US$1.4 billion. In 2014 Beechcraft was merged with Cessna, whose empty factory had been its first home. The T-6 Texan II passed 1,000 deliveries in 2022, and in November 2025 Textron said it would end Bonanza and Baron production.

Factories

• Wichita main plant and Beech Factory Airport · Wichita, Kansas — Head office, manufacturing and test-flight runway since the 1930s; Beech began in the former Travel Air and idle Cessna works
• Liberal plant · Liberal, Kansas — Opened in 1963 for Musketeer production
• Boulder division · Boulder, Colorado — Cryogenic systems for NASA programmes including Gemini and Apollo
• Chihuahua plant · Chihuahua, Mexico — Opened by Hawker Beechcraft on 25 October 2007

People

• Walter H. Beech · co-founder and president, 1932–1950 — Born 1891 in Pulaski, Tennessee; co-founded Travel Air; died 29 November 1950
• Olive Ann Beech · co-founder, president and chair — Ran the company during Walter’s illness in 1940 and from 1950 until the Raytheon sale; first woman to head a major aircraft company
• Ted A. Wells · vice-president of engineering — Designed the Model 17 Staggerwing
• Herbert Rawdon · chief engineer — Succeeded Wells and stayed until the early 1960s
• Frank E. Hedrick · president, 1968–1981 — Olive Ann Beech’s nephew
• Louise Thaden · racing pilot — Won the 1936 Bendix Trophy in a Staggerwing with Blanche Noyes
• Vern Carstens · test pilot — Flew the Model 45, the future T-34, on 2 December 1948
• Steve Miller · turnaround CEO, 2012 — Led Hawker Beechcraft into and through Chapter 11

Records and firsts

• Bonanza: in continuous production since 1947, the longest production run of any aircraft
• Model 18: built for 32 years, 1937–1969, a world record at the time
• Staggerwing: won the 1936 Bendix Trophy, flown by Louise Thaden and Blanche Noyes
• Twin Bonanza: first production light aircraft fitted with shoulder belts
• King Air: first aircraft in its class, and it outsold all its turboprop rivals combined
• Super King Air: longest production run of any civil turboprop in its class, since 1974
• AT-7 and C-45 navigation trainers: used to train more than 90 percent of US Army Air Forces navigators and bombardiers
• Five Army-Navy “E” production awards in the Second World War