You will never get your money back

William Bushnell Stout was a salesman of genius who preached that all future aircraft would be made of metal. To fund his Stout Metal Airplane Company he mailed leading industrialists a form letter asking for 1,000 dollars and promising just one thing: they would never get their money back. Twenty did it, including Henry Ford and his son Edsel. In 1924 Ford agreed to build an airport at Dearborn and a factory beside it if Stout could persuade all 128 of his investors to sell out. They did, for 500,000 dollars, and on 1 July 1925 Stout’s firm became a division of the Ford Motor Company, with Edsel as its president.

Fire, and the Tin Goose

The first Ford-era design, the three-engined 3-AT, could barely hold altitude; Henry Ford watched it fly, left disgusted and moved Stout to promotional work. On 17 January 1926 a fire destroyed the factory and every aircraft in it. Engineer Tom Towle, with Otto Koppen, John Lee and a young James McDonnell, reworked the design into the 4-AT and 5-AT Trimotor, nicknamed the Tin Goose, an all-metal monoplane skinned in corrugated aluminium even on its control surfaces. It first flew on 11 June 1926. It owed so much to Junkers that the German firm sued successfully when Ford tried to sell one in Europe.

Paved runways, airmail and a flying cow

Ford brought car-industry habits to flying. Ford Air Transport Service, started in 1925, flew the Cleveland and Chicago airmail routes to Detroit and became the first regularly scheduled airmail and air freight operator; in 1927 Ford became the first company to build aircraft on an assembly line. The Trimotor carried Pan American’s first scheduled international flight, Key West to Havana, in 1927, and Transcontinental Air Transport’s rail-and-air coast-to-coast service. On 28–29 November 1929 Richard Byrd and Bernt Balchen made the first flight over the South Pole in the Trimotor Floyd Bennett. In February 1930 one carried Elm Farm Ollie, the first cow to fly and be milked in the air.

The Model T of the air

Henry Ford also wanted an aeroplane for everyone. The single-seat Flivver, designed by Koppen to fit in Ford’s office, was unveiled on his 63rd birthday in July 1926 and flown by his favourite pilot, Harry Brooks, who commuted in it. Charles Lindbergh tried it in 1927 and called it one of the worst aircraft he ever flew. In February 1928 Brooks set a light-plane distance record of 972 miles, then, on 25 February, came down in the Atlantic off Melbourne, Florida. Toothpicks he had put in the fuel-cap vents had starved the engine. He was never found, and Ford stopped light-aircraft work under his name.

Losing interest, then Willow Run

Brooks’s death, the Depression and the arrival of the Boeing 247 ended Ford’s interest. Trimotor sales fell from a peak of 86 in 1929 to two in 1932, the division lost six million dollars, and production ended on 7 June 1933 after 199 aircraft. Trimotors kept flying for decades, one carrying Grand Canyon sightseers for 65 years. Ford returned to aviation in the Second World War, building B-24 Liberators at Willow Run, then the largest aircraft plant in the world, at up to 650 a month, plus 2,418 Waco CG-4 gliders. Stout later said that his greatest service to aviation was getting Mr Ford interested in it.

工場

• Ford Airport and Stout factory · Oakwood Boulevard, Dearborn, Michigan — 260-acre airport; rebuilt factory after the 1926 fire had the largest doors in the world at the time
• Willow Run · Willow Run, Michigan — B-24 plant, the largest aircraft factory in the world in WWII

人々

• William Bushnell Stout · founder of Stout Metal Airplane — 1880–1956; left Ford in 1930
• Henry Ford · owner
• Edsel Ford · president of the aircraft division from 1925
• Tom Towle · chief engineer — Led the redesign of the 3-AT into the Trimotor
• Otto Koppen · engineer — Designed the Flivver; later the Helio Courier
• James S. McDonnell · engineer — Later co-founder of McDonnell Douglas
• Harry J. Brooks · chief test pilot — Killed in a Flivver off Florida, 25 February 1928

記録と初記録

• First flight over the South Pole: Trimotor Floyd Bennett, Byrd and Balchen, 28–29 November 1929
• First aircraft production on an assembly line, 1927
• Flivver: light-plane distance record of 972 miles, Dearborn to Titusville, February 1928
• First cow to fly and be milked in flight, February 1930