Ping-pong balls over the Atlantic

In 1936 the singer Harry Richman and the airline pilot Dick Merrill set off to fly from New York to London and back, an attempt at the first Atlantic double crossing. In case they had to ditch, they filled every empty space in their Vultee V-1A with ping-pong balls. That same year two Soviet airmen flew another V-1A on floats from Los Angeles to Moscow, and Jimmy Doolittle had already set a transcontinental record in one, the Lady Peace. For a few years the Vultee was the fast way to go anywhere.

Jerry Vultee and the V-1

Its designer was Gerard Vultee, a Brooklyn-born Caltech graduate who had already drawn the Lockheed Orion. In 1932 the car tycoon Errett Lobban Cord set up the Airplane Development Corporation so Vultee could build his single-engined airliner. The V-1 first flew on 19 February 1933 and American Airlines bought 11 of the eight-passenger V-1A, but government doubts about single-engined airliners killed further sales. Republican Spain bought 16, ten of them from American, and armed them for the civil war.

Death near Sedona

Under the AVCO holding company the firm became the Vultee Aircraft Division in 1936, absorbing Lycoming and Stinson. Its V-11 attack bomber sold to Turkey, China, Brazil and the Soviet Union. Then, on 29 January 1938, Jerry Vultee and his wife Sylvia, daughter of the Hollywood art director Max Parker, were killed when the Stinson he was flying hit Wilson Mountain near Sedona, Arizona, in a snowstorm. A natural sandstone arch there is named Vultee Arch.

The Vibrator

Vultee became independent in November 1939, and the war made it big. Its chief engineer Dick Palmer produced the BT-13 Valiant basic trainer, 9,525 built, the aircraft on which a generation of American pilots progressed from primary to advanced training. Cadets called it the Vibrator. The V-72 Vengeance dive bomber, 1,931 built, was not used in combat by the Americans but fought with the RAF and the Australian and Indian air forces in Burma and the Pacific. The P-66 Vanguard, ordered by Sweden, ended up in China.

Into Convair

On 17 and 18 March 1943 Vultee merged with Consolidated, which AVCO had bought in 1941, to form Consolidated Vultee Aircraft, soon known as Convair. Vultee’s managers resigned. Its last design of its own, the strange pusher XP-54 fighter, had flown in January 1943 and was built only twice. During the war, Vultee was among the pioneers of employing women on the assembly line.

Fabrieken

• Grand Central Airport works · Glendale, California — V-1 completed here in 1933
• Downey plant · Downey, California

Mensen

• Gerard F. Vultee · designer and founder — 1900–1938
• Errett Lobban Cord · backer
• Richard Palmer · chief engineer after 1938 — Designed the BT-13

Records en primeurs

• Jimmy Doolittle, transcontinental record in the V-1A Lady Peace, January 1935