The ace with one leg

On his very first combat mission in 1915, a young Russian naval pilot named Alexander Prokofiev de Seversky was shot down by anti-aircraft fire over the Gulf of Riga. His own bombs exploded in the crash, killing his observer; doctors amputated Seversky’s leg below the knee. The authorities declared him unfit to fly; Seversky disagreed, went back to the front on an artificial leg and became one of Russia’s leading naval aces. Posted to the United States as an assistant naval attaché in 1918, he chose not to go home to a Russia torn apart by revolution. In 1931 he founded the Seversky Aircraft Company on Long Island, and he staffed it with fellow exiles from the old empire — among them a quiet engineer from Tbilisi called Alexander Kartveli.

Thrown out of his own company

Seversky was a brilliant salesman and a hopeless accountant. His P-35 won the Army Air Corps fighter competition of 1936, and a racing version swept the Bendix Trophy three years running. But he sold aircraft to Sweden and Japan as freely as to Washington, and by April 1939 the company had lost $550,000. The board, steered by the financier Paul Moore, voted him out and installed W. Wallace Kellett as president. In September 1939 the company was reorganised and renamed Republic Aviation Corporation. Seversky fought the decision until 1942, then turned his energy to writing. His 1942 book Victory Through Air Power became a Walt Disney animated film the following year, with Seversky himself on screen.

A sketch on the train

Republic’s early fighters, the P-43 Lancer and the P-44 project, were light machines for a war that turned out to need something else. When the Army told Kartveli that the P-44 would not be bought, because what it now wanted was a long-range fighter that could escort bombers deep into Germany, he knew the design could not be stretched to fit. On the train home to New York he began to sketch a new aircraft around the biggest engine he could get, the 2,000-horsepower Pratt & Whitney R-2800. The Army refused to pay for development, so Republic paid for the mock-up itself. The prototype XP-47B flew on 6 May 1941, weighing far more than any single-engine fighter before it.

Fifteen thousand Jugs

Pilots called it the Jug. It was huge, rugged and armed with eight .50-calibre machine guns, and it could come home with damage that would have killed lighter fighters. The orders forced Republic to quadruple the Farmingdale plant and lay three new runways, and in November 1942 the Army authorised a second factory at Evansville, Indiana. When production ended in November 1945, 15,660 P-47s had been built, more than any other American fighter of the war. Francis Gabreski and Robert S. Johnson scored their victories in it; Hubert Zemke’s 56th Fighter Group flew it to the end and was the top-scoring group in the Eighth Air Force. Republic ranked 24th among American corporations by value of wartime contracts.

The amphibian nobody bought enough of

Peace brought a bet on the private flyer. A former P-47 test pilot, Percival Spencer, persuaded the board that thousands of returning airmen would want a light aircraft of their own, and Republic built the RC-3 Seabee, an all-metal four-seat amphibian sold for as little as $3,500. The company planned on 5,000 a year. Most returning pilots never flew again, and Republic sold 1,060 Seabees in two years before giving up — a respectable figure at a time when many small makers built a handful and went bankrupt, but nowhere near the dream. The fast four-engine XF-12 Rainbow reconnaissance aircraft, also offered as an airliner, never found a buyer at all.

Thunderjets, Thunderstreaks and the Thud

The jet age saved Republic. The straight-wing F-84 Thunderjet first flew on 28 February 1946 and became the US Air Force’s main strike aircraft in Korea, flying 86,408 missions. The swept-wing F-84F Thunderstreak and RF-84F Thunderflash re-equipped half of NATO. Then Kartveli designed the F-105 Thunderchief, a single-engine fighter-bomber so large it could carry more bombs than a four-engine bomber of the Second World War. It became the main ground-attack aircraft over North Vietnam, and paid for it: of 833 built, 397 were lost. Its crews called it the Thud, and two-seat F-105F and F-105G Wild Weasels became the first dedicated hunters of surface-to-air missile sites.

The last Thunder

The F-105 was Republic’s last design of its own. A licence-built Alouette II helicopter and a joint vertical take-off project with Fokker went nowhere. Sherman Fairchild’s company quietly bought up Republic stock and took control in July 1965; by September Republic was a division of Fairchild Hiller. Yet the name refused to die. In 1972 the Farmingdale team flew the A-10 Thunderbolt II, the tank-buster still in service half a century later. And in 1987 the parent company destroyed Republic’s corporate archives. A Long Island museum curator invited for a last look slipped out with a single document: the 1940 contract for the first 225 P-47Bs.

Fábricas

• Farmingdale works · Farmingdale, Long Island, New York — Headquarters and main plant, quadrupled in size for the P-47; site now home to the American Airpower Museum and Republic Airport
• Evansville plant · Evansville, Indiana — Authorised November 1942 to build P-47s; the P-47 is Indiana’s state aircraft since 2015

Pessoas

• Alexander P. de Seversky · founder, 1931–1939 — Born in Tiflis 1894; naval ace who lost a leg in 1915; author of Victory Through Air Power
• Alexander Kartveli · chief designer — Born Aleksandre Kartvelishvili in Tbilisi, 1896; designed the P-35, P-47, F-84 and F-105; died 1974
• W. Wallace Kellett · president from 1939 — Installed when the board removed Seversky
• Percival Spencer · test pilot, Seabee designer — Former P-47 test pilot who sold the board on a postwar amphibian

Recordes e pioneirismos

• Seversky racers won three consecutive Bendix Trophy races from 1937
• XP-84 set a US national airspeed record of 607 mph in September 1946
• XF-91 Thunderceptor: first US fighter to exceed Mach 1 in level flight, December 1951
• F-84F flew Los Angeles to New York in 3 h 44 min 53 s
• F-105B set a 100 km closed-circuit world speed record of 1,216 mph on 11 December 1959