The wrong Ryan and the Spirit of St. Louis

Ask most people about Ryan and they will mention Charles Lindbergh. That is half right. Tubal Claude Ryan, a Kansan who learned to fly in 1917, started a San Diego flying service in 1922 and an airline in 1925, and his Ryan Airlines built the M-1 mailplane. But on 30 November 1926 he sold his interest, and he was not involved in planning or building the Spirit of St. Louis, a development of the M-1 built the following year. In 1931 he set up the Ryan School of Aeronautics in San Diego, and by June 1934 he and engineers Millard Boyd and Will Vandermeer had built the first Ryan ST. This is the company that became Ryan Aeronautical.

The ST and the Army’s first monoplane trainer

The ST, for Sport Trainer, was a sleek tandem two-seat monoplane with a metal monocoque fuselage. An aerobatic ST-A won the 1937 International Aerobatic Championships. The Army Air Corps bought military STMs, but the Menasco engines proved unreliable and Ryan switched to Kinner radials, ending up with the PT-22 Recruit of 1941. It was the Air Corps’ first purpose-built monoplane trainer, and Ryan delivered 1,048 of them, alongside hundreds of PT-16s, PT-20s and PT-21s, as wartime pilot training exploded. Many survive as prized warbirds.

Half piston, half jet

In 1943 the Navy asked for a fighter that would hedge its bets on early jet engines, which accelerated too slowly for carrier landings. Ryan’s FR-1 Fireball had a Wright Cyclone radial in the nose and a General Electric turbojet in the tail, making it the Navy’s first aircraft with a jet engine. It flew in June 1944, but only 66 were built before orders for more than 1,000 were cancelled on VJ Day. On 6 November 1945 a Fireball whose piston engine failed on approach landed on the escort carrier Wake Island using its jet, though residual piston power may have helped. Structural weaknesses saw the type withdrawn in 1947.

Hanging a jet on a hook

Ryan then became a laboratory for vertical flight. The X-13 Vertijet, a small delta tail-sitter with a Rolls-Royce Avon, took off from a vertical trailer on 11 April 1957, flew horizontally and came back to hang itself on a wire by a hook under its nose. That July it crossed the Potomac and landed at the Pentagon. The VZ-3 Vertiplane, the XV-5 Vertifan and the XV-8 followed; none reached production. In parallel Ryan built 1,240 Navion light aircraft, bought the Firebird, the first American air-to-air missile, and supplied the landing radar of the Apollo Lunar Module.

Lightning Bugs over Hanoi

The real money was in drones. The jet-powered Firebee target, first flown in 1951, became one of the most widely used target drones ever built, with more than 7,000 produced. Its reconnaissance offspring, the Model 147 Lightning Bug, launched from DC-130 Hercules, flew 3,435 sorties over China, North Vietnam and North Korea; one, nicknamed Tom Cat, survived 68 missions. Teledyne bought Ryan for 128 million dollars in 1968, and in 1999 Northrop Grumman acquired Teledyne Ryan, whose drones became the core of its unmanned aircraft business.

Továrny

• San Diego works · San Diego, California — Main plant and flying school

Lidé

• T. Claude Ryan · founder — 1898–1982; aviator who founded several companies bearing the Ryan name
• Millard Boyd · engineer — Co-designer of the Ryan ST
• Will Vandermeer · engineer — Co-designer of the Ryan ST
• Peter F. Girard · chief test pilot — Flew the X-13 Vertijet

Rekordy a prvenství

• FR-1 Fireball: US Navy’s first aircraft with a jet engine
• X-13 Vertijet: jet tail-sitter that took off vertically, transitioned to horizontal flight and landed vertically, 11 April 1957
• Model 147SC Tom Cat: 68 reconnaissance missions by a single drone
• ST-A: winner of the 1937 International Aerobatic Championships