A boatyard with an aircraft problem

General Dynamics was born because a submarine company had become embarrassed by its own name. By 1952 Electric Boat, the Connecticut yard that had sold the US Navy its first submarine in 1900 and was then building the nuclear-powered Nautilus, owned a Canadian aircraft factory that was growing faster than the boats. Its president, a lawyer named John Jay Hopkins who had joined the company in 1937, argued that “Electric Boat” no longer fitted. So he turned it into a holding company, General Dynamics, with the boatyard and the aircraft maker as its two big subsidiaries. Hopkins, who also founded what became the golf World Cup, had in effect created an aerospace giant out of a shipyard.

Canadair, the bargain in Montreal

The aircraft factory was Canadair in Montreal, which Hopkins had bought from the Canadian government in 1946 for $10 million, although Ottawa reckoned the plant alone was worth more than $22 million. Its production lines were in disorder, so he brought in a mass-production specialist, H. Oliver West, and the North Star airliners began reaching Trans-Canada, Canadian Pacific and BOAC ahead of schedule. Then came the Cold War orders: 1,815 Sabre jet fighters between 1950 and 1958, T-33 trainers, Argus patrol aircraft, 200 CF-104 Starfighters, the CL-44 freighter and the CL-215 water bomber. General Dynamics finally sold Canadair back to the government in 1976 for $38 million.

Convair and the Mach 2 years

The big move came in 1953, when General Dynamics bought control of Convair, the San Diego heir to Consolidated, from the Atlas Corporation; the merger became official on 29 April 1954. Convair ran as a semi-independent division and produced a remarkable run of machines: the F-102 Delta Dagger, the F-106 Delta Dart and the B-58 Hustler, a Mach 2 bomber that set 19 speed records and in 1963 flew from Tokyo to London, 8,028 miles, in 8 hours 35 minutes. Convair also built the Atlas, America’s first operational intercontinental ballistic missile, which went on to launch the Mercury astronauts into orbit.

The airliners that cost a fortune

Not everything flew so well. Convair’s attempt to beat Boeing and Douglas in the jetliner market produced the 880, first flown in January 1959, and the larger 990 of 1961. They were fast, but too few airlines wanted them: only 65 880s and 37 990s were built. General Dynamics lost around $185 million on the 880 alone, by some estimates much more, and walked away from airliners for good. Chicago industrialist Henry Crown became the largest shareholder in 1959, and the board decided that all future aircraft would be built in Fort Worth, in the huge wartime plant that Consolidated had opened for the B-24.

The swing-wing that never pleased everyone

Fort Worth’s first great product was a political argument. In 1961 Defence Secretary Robert McNamara launched the TFX programme to give the Air Force, Navy and Marines a single fighter, and chose General Dynamics over Boeing because its versions shared more parts. The result, the F-111, first flew on 21 December 1964 and pioneered variable-sweep wings, afterburning turbofans and automatic terrain-following radar. The Navy’s F-111B was cancelled after seven were built, and the Grumman F-14 took its place, but 563 F-111s were made. In April 1986 they flew the raid on Libya, a 6,400-mile round trip from England that was the longest fighter combat mission in history.

An accidental first flight

The company’s greatest aeroplane began with a near-accident. On 20 January 1974, during a high-speed taxi test of the YF-16 lightweight fighter, an oscillation made a wingtip missile fin and then a tailplane scrape the runway, and the jet began to veer off. Test pilot Phil Oestricher chose to take off rather than crash, and landed six minutes later. The official first flight followed on 2 February. The F-16, with its bubble canopy, side-stick and the first fly-by-wire system built around relaxed stability, beat Northrop’s YF-17 and was co-produced in Europe by SABCA and Fokker. More than 4,600 have been built, making it the company’s largest aircraft programme by far.

The astronaut who sold the jets

By the end of the 1980s General Dynamics had been through scandal, including a 1985 Navy suspension amid investigations into kickbacks and billing, and in January 1991 the A-12 Avenger II stealth bomber was cancelled, costing it $700 million. The new chief executive was William Anders, the Apollo 8 astronaut who had photographed Earthrise. He sold Cessna, which GD had bought in 1985, to Textron, the missile business to Hughes, the F-16 plant to Lockheed for $1.5 billion and the space division to Martin Marietta. The share price quadrupled. Then, on 30 July 1999, GD returned to the sky by buying Gulfstream for about $4.8 billion in stock.

Továrny

• Air Force Plant 4 · Fort Worth, Texas — Wartime B-24 plant; built the B-58, F-111 and F-16 for GD until sold to Lockheed in 1993
• Convair, Lindbergh Field · San Diego, California — Aircraft, missile and space work; aircraft moved to Fort Worth from the early 1960s; division closed 1996
• Canadair, Cartierville · Saint-Laurent, Montreal, Quebec — GD subsidiary 1946/1952–1976
• Gulfstream · Savannah, Georgia — Business-jet headquarters and main plant since the 1999 acquisition
• Electric Boat · Groton, Connecticut — The submarine yard at the root of the company

Lidé

• John Jay Hopkins · founder, president 1952–1957 — Lawyer who joined Electric Boat in 1937, bought Canadair and Convair; died 1957
• H. Oliver West · president of Canadair — Mass-production specialist who turned Canadair round after 1946
• Henry Crown · largest shareholder from 1959 — Chicago industrialist; the sell-off began after his death in 1990
• David S. Lewis · chief executive from 1970 — Former McDonnell Douglas president; moved HQ to St. Louis
• Phil Oestricher · test pilot — Made the unplanned first flight of the YF-16, 20 January 1974
• William Anders · chairman and CEO from 1991 — Apollo 8 astronaut; sold Cessna, the F-16 business and the space division
• Phebe Novakovic · chairman and CEO since 2013

Rekordy a prvenství

• The B-58 Hustler set 19 speed records, including Tokyo to London (8,028 miles) in 8 hours 35 minutes in 1963
• The F-111 raid on Libya on 14 April 1986, 6,400 miles in 13 hours from England, was the longest fighter combat mission in history
• The F-111 pioneered variable-sweep wings, afterburning turbofans and automatic terrain-following radar in a production aircraft
• The F-16 was the first fighter with a relaxed-stability fly-by-wire control system
• Convair’s Atlas was America’s first operational intercontinental ballistic missile
• A Gulfstream G800 flew 8,303 nm from Melbourne to Moline on 28 June 2026, the longest great-circle flight by a business aircraft