Betting on war

Standard Aircraft was founded at Plainfield, New Jersey, in 1916, a year before the United States entered the First World War, when the country was still officially isolationist. It grew out of the Sloane company, whose designer Charles Healy Day stayed on, and almost at once became one of the earliest suppliers to the US Army Signal Corps, delivering Day’s Sloane H as the Standard H-2 and H-3 and a floatplane H-4H to the Navy.

The trainer nobody trusted

Its big programme was the J-1 trainer, a stopgap to supplement the Curtiss JN-4. Standard built roughly 800 of the type itself, and with Dayton-Wright, Fisher Body and Wright-Martin delivered 1,601 between June 1917 and June 1918. The four-cylinder Hall-Scott engine was unreliable and shook badly, and in June 1918 every J-1 was grounded. Contracts for more than 2,600 more were cancelled, and many later aircraft never left their crates. Standard’s last design, the E-1 fighter, served instead as an advanced trainer.

Handley Pages at Bayway

In 1918 Standard ran a large factory and airfield at Bayway, near Elizabeth, where it assembled and tested 107 Handley Page O/400 bombers with Liberty engines, mostly for shipment to Britain. A plan to fly them across the Atlantic was dropped, and an order for 1,000 more evaporated with the Armistice. Charles Day later co-founded Gates-Day, renamed the New Standard Aircraft Company, in 1927. With the barnstormer Ivan Gates he built the Gates-Day D-24 and the New Standard D-25 for civil and military customers.

Fabrieken

• Plainfield works · Plainfield, New Jersey
• Bayway factory and airfield · Elizabeth / Linden, New Jersey — O/400 assembly and testing, 1918

Mensen

• Charles Healy Day · chief designer — Designed the Sloane H and Standard J