Machine-History.Com

$2,500,000 Worth of Planes a Day

By ANDREW R. BOONE

ONE  afternoon in the early summer of 1909, only six years after the Wright brothers were catapulted from Kill Devil Hill into the world's first heavier-than-air  flight,  a slender youth named Donald Wills Douglas hurried over from Washington to Fort Meyer, Va., to catch his first glimpse of an airplane. For an hour, the famous brothers tossed wisps of dust up to test the breeze. At last they roared out over the corral, their chattering engine and beat­ing propeller frightening men and horses.
Chance got the wide-eyed youth his op­portunity to be in near the birth of aviation. He had received an appointment to the U. S. Naval Academy, subject to a bit of surgery, and had gone to Washington a few days earlier to enter a hospital. A few weeks after observing the demonstration, he became a plebe, and celebrated by launching from a dormi­tory window a model plane put together by his own hands. The plane promptly smacked into an admiral's cap as that officer strolled along a walkway outside.
Thirty-two years later, the same Donald Doug­las on an early summer afternoon walked diffi­dently from a hangar at Clover Field, near Santa Monica, Calif., heard four powerful engines ticking methodically on the larg­est airplane ever built. The great bird was the B-19, a bomber capable of carrying a huge load of bombs across an ocean and returning home again. For miles in all di­rections, 100,000 people jammed the highways for a glimpse of another historic flight. Shortly, the pilot gunned the engines, and the B-19 soared into the sky. Cloudster
Between Fort Meyer and Clover Field, Donald Douglas in three decades has achieved world eminence in aviation. From the time he set out to build an airplane, in 1921, until today he has never experienced failure. His passenger liners span the na­tion on 17 airlines, serve 52 foreign coun­tries on another 18 lines; cargo and troop carriers, dive bombers, medium bombers, and huge four-engine bombers from his factories are fighting for Uncle Sam and his allies. Every day a million dollars' worth of new airplanes roll from his assembly lines.
Although his designs have revolutionized commercial aviation and added mightily to our aerial defense, Douglas has everlastingly avoided the spotlight. He'd rather lose a tooth to the dentist's forceps than make a speech. Bronzed by frequent week-ends off the California coast on his racing sloop, he spends long days at a large desk in a small office where he devotes his engineering and business genius to planning new planes to fight our enemies.
As an engineer, he has won the coveted Collier and Guggenheim awards. From the business angle, his enterprises have shown a profit ever since he became a builder of airplanes 20 years ago, from the two-place Cloudster, a biplane which introduced new techniques in streamlining, to his A-24 dive bomber, so good that Army authorities de­clared two squadrons "out-Stukaed the Ger­man Stukas" in the recent large-scale war games down in Louisiana.
Douglas is a "pilot's designer." Above and beyond his engineering skill, however, you find a single-mindedness rare in manufac­turers. When he left the Naval Academy in 1912, his mind was focused on wings and skies. That autumn he enrolled in the Mas­sachusetts Institute of Technology, graduat­ing two years later and receiving immediate­ly a year's appointment as assistant in aeronautical engineering. Salary, $500 per  annum.
Young Douglas moved rapidly during the next few years.   At M. I. T. he helped build the first wind tunnel.    Next year found him at the Connecticut Aircraft Co., building the first constructed in the United States, the D-1. Shortly Glenn L. Martin brought him to his firm as chief engineer, and young Douglas' skill entered into the design of the famous twin-engine Martin bomber, a landmark in military aviation.
Now only 25, he already had won national recognition. Another jump land­ed him in Los Angeles, "approximately broke" but blessed with boundless con­fidence in his ability. On the West Coast Douglas met a wealthy young man named David R. Davis, who owned a small ma­chine shop and wanted to get into aviation. Douglas sold Davis on the idea of building a reconnaissance- type plane, streamlined and equipped with instru­ments. A few months later
From his quiet office, Douglas looks into a future in which he foresees a vast market for com­mercial planes to take the place of ships and other transport facilities destroyed in the war the Cloudster, conceived on drawing boards hugging the wall of a small barber shop, was perfected.
I talked to Eric Springer, test pilot for Douglas and Davis when the Cloudster was born and today manager of the El Segundo plant, building A-24's for the Army and their counterpart, the SBD, for the Navy and Marine Corps.  "Doug knew where he was headed then, and he's never given us a chance to forget. You can think of the Cloudster, or any of the 150-odd models since, as a cocktail. It's got to have the right proportion of all in­gredients before it's served to a customer.
"Every Douglas ship," Springer contin­ued, "represents a compromise. Not the fastest, maybe, nor the highest-flying, no will it carry the heaviest load possible. But it'll be a pilot's airplane, combining speed, economy, and loadability."
Springer and Davis took off from March Field, the Army flying base in Southern California, early on the morning of June 25, 1921, hoping to make the first transconti­nental nonstop flight. They reached El Paso ahead of schedule, when one bank of the timing gears failed just as they roared over Fort Bliss. Springer slid down to a dead- stick landing, and the attempt was written off as a failure when Lieutenants Kelly and Macready made the flight in a single-en­gine Fokker monoplane a short time later.
The failure was only apparent, however, for the Navy shortly requested specifica­tions for a torpedo plane, inviting both American and European companies to par­ticipate. The ship was to fly from pontoons, and be powered with a 400-horsepow­er Liberty engine.  From the data perfected in building the Cloudster, Douglas turned out the winning design, of which the Navy bought 61 copies.  This led to development of a new series with which U. S. Army officers in 1924 succeeded in flying 25,000 miles around the world.
In 1932 the airlines, just crawling up from the depression, faced the necessity of increasing their speed, providing greater comfort for day passengers and beds for those flying at night, and cutting operating costs.

Early in 1933, TWA officials decided speed must be upped 50 miles an hour, that other characteristics of safety and power must be provided. Douglas and four other manufacturers received requests for bids, one re­quirement being that the plane accepted must be able to fly from any regular airport in the country on one engine, proceed to the next scheduled stop, and have a legal reserve of gas remaining in the tanks on arrival. TWA awarded the contract to Douglas, and a new era in American air transport began.
Douglas built the DC-1 for peacetime fly­ing. The ship upped cruising speed from 100 miles an hour to 150. With a few changes, the production model became the DC-2. Shortly, improvements were incorporated in a third model, the DC-3. Whereas 186 DC-2's were built, more than 1,500 DC-3's will have been constructed by early next year for the air lines, and for the U. S. Army for employment as troop and military cargo carriers.

The DC-3 series gave world travelers their first taste of real flying comfort, and as they drew increasing numbers of passengers into the air, brought the lines out of the red. To­day these 25,200-pound planes, after five years without a major structural change, are still standard equipment.

Sitting at the hub of a large engineering and manufacturing organization, Douglas can't poke his finger into every detail, but he guides the preliminary design of any new ship, whether transport or bomber. He leaves details to his experts. Seated in the quiet of his paneled office, we might have been a thousand miles from the clatter of riveting and roaring of test engines just beyond the soundproof walls when I asked him to look into the future.
"Let's start with invisible bombing," I said. "How high will the bombers fly?" "Some of our plans must remain military secrets," he warned, "but I can go this far: Recently we have completed a 'cold room,' where the thermometer drops down to about 105 degrees below zero.  In that room we're testing oxygen apparatus, paints which we hope will not chip and flake in extreme cold, metals, and men."  The "cold room," whose temperatures fall below those flyers experi­ence at the highest levels, any plane today can reach, is the laboratory where he's get­ting ready for stratospheric bombing.
Douglas considers the fabulous B-19 to be the guidepost which may usher in an era of superbombers of which no more than a half dozen fighting airmen dared dream as recently as a year ago.
"Suppose," he said, "we're asked to jump from our 30-ton bombers to a machine of 200,000 pounds. The big fellow might fail unless we know where we're heading. The B-19 gives us fine supporting evidence on which to build a 100-ton bomber. She is a point from which we may embark on designs for planes capable of carrying much heavier bomb loads out of sight in the stratosphere for long distances."
But Douglas also has his eyes fixed on the needs of peace. He sees, first, shipyards taxed to capacity turning out freighters. For several years, in his opinion, few pas­senger liners will be built. This leaves an opportunity for a tremendous aviation con­struction program. "Low fares," he suggested, "should open up tremendous ocean trade for both pas­sengers and freight. Trans-oceanic flying is receiving its impetus now, and the long- range bombers will furnish the designs from which we may turn our assembly lines to long-range seagoing land planes."
Engineer, salesman, executive, financier - Douglas is all these. But first he is a builder. From his El Segundo assembly line attack bombers, A-24 and SBD, move on to the Army and Navy.  The Santa Monica factory assembles DB-7 Havocs for the British and A-20's for Uncle Sam (similar to but better than Havocs), plus Army troop-cargo car­riers. The new blackout plant at Long Beach turns out more troop-cargo ships, and mighty B-17E bombers developed by Boeing for the Army Air Corps.
Soon after the newest plant at Tulsa, Okla., was dedicated in October, Consolidated B-24 bombers, fabricated and subassembled by the Ford Motor Company, were taking wing.
Today Douglas employs 32,000 men and women. By June there will be 75,000 persons on his payroll, working in plants spread over 5,000,000 square feet.   As I write, armies and navies, with such civilian customers as priorities permit, have swamped him with a backlog of $654,579,973.26, enough to keep him going at top speed for many months.

ONE  afternoon in the early summer of 1909, only six years after the Wright brothers were catapulted from Kill Devil Hill into the world's first heavier-than-air  flight,  a slender youth named Donald Wills Douglas hurried over from Washington to Fort Meyer, Va., to catch his first glimpse of an airplane. For an hour, the famous brothers tossed wisps of dust up to test the breeze. At last they roared out over the corral, their chattering engine and beat­ing propeller frightening men and horses.
Chance got the wide-eyed youth his op­portunity to be in near the birth of aviation. He had received an appointment to the U. S. Naval Academy, subject to a bit of surgery, and had gone to Washington a few days earlier to enter a hospital. A few weeks after observing the demonstration, he became a plebe, and celebrated by launching from a dormi­tory window a model plane put together by his own hands. The plane promptly smacked into an admiral's cap as that officer strolled along a walkway outside.
Thirty-two years later, the same Donald Doug­las on an early summer afternoon walked diffi­dently from a hangar at Clover Field, near Santa Monica, Calif., heard four powerful engines ticking methodically on the larg­est airplane ever built. The great bird was the B-19, a bomber capable of carrying a huge load of bombs across an ocean and returning home again. For miles in all di­rections, 100,000 people jammed the highways for a glimpse of another historic flight. Shortly, the pilot gunned the engines, and the B-19 soared into the sky.
Between Fort Meyer and Clover Field, Donald Douglas in three decades has achieved world eminence in aviation. From the time he set out to build an airplane, in 1921, until today he has never experienced failure. His passenger liners span the na­tion on 17 airlines, serve 52 foreign coun­tries on another 18 lines; cargo and troop carriers, dive bombers, medium bombers, and huge four-engine bombers from his factories are fighting for Uncle Sam and his allies. Every day a million dollars' worth of new airplanes roll from his assembly lines.
Although his designs have revolutionized commercial aviation and added mightily to our aerial defense, Douglas has everlastingly avoided the spotlight. He'd rather lose a tooth to the dentist's forceps than make a speech. Bronzed by frequent week-ends off the California coast on his racing sloop, he spends long days at a large desk in a small office where he devotes his engineering and business genius to planning new planes to fight our enemies.
As an engineer, he has won the coveted Collier and Guggenheim awards. From the business angle, his enterprises have shown a profit ever since he became a builder of airplanes 20 years ago, from the two-place Cloudster, a biplane which introduced new techniques in streamlining, to his A-24 dive bomber, so good that Army authorities de­clared two squadrons "out-Stukaed the Ger­man Stukas" in the recent large-scale war games down in Louisiana.
Douglas is a "pilot's designer." Above and beyond his engineering skill, however, you find a single-mindedness rare in manufac­turers. When he left the Naval Academy in 1912, his mind was focused on wings and skies. That autumn he enrolled in the Mas­sachusetts Institute of Technology, graduat­ing two years later and receiving immediate­ly a year's appointment as assistant in aeronautical engineering. Salary, $500 per  annum.
Young Douglas moved rapidly during the next few years.   At M. I. T. he helped build the first wind tunnel.    Next year found him at the Connecticut Aircraft Co., building the first constructed in the United States, the D-1. Shortly Glenn L. Martin brought him to his firm as chief engineer, and young Douglas' skill entered into the design of the famous twin-engine Martin bomber, a landmark in military aviation.
Now only 25, he already had won national recognition. Another jump land­ed him in Los Angeles, "approximately broke" but blessed with boundless con­fidence in his ability. On the West Coast Douglas met a wealthy young man named David R. Davis, who owned a small ma­chine shop and wanted to get into aviation. Douglas sold Davis on the idea of building a reconnaissance- type plane, streamlined and equipped with instru­ments. A few months later
From his quiet office, Douglas looks into a future in which he foresees a vast market for com­mercial planes to take the place of ships and other transport facilities destroyed in the war the Cloudster, conceived on drawing boards hugging the wall of a small barber shop, was perfected.
I talked to Eric Springer, test pilot for Douglas and Davis when the Cloudster was born and today manager of the El Segundo plant, building A-24's for the Army and their counterpart, the SBD, for the Navy and Marine Corps.  "Doug knew where he was headed then, and he's never given us a chance to forget. You can think of the Cloudster, or any of the 150-odd models since, as a cocktail. It's got to have the right proportion of all in­gredients before it's served to a customer.
"Every Douglas ship," Springer contin­ued, "represents a compromise. Not the fastest, maybe, nor the highest-flying, no will it carry the heaviest load possible. But it'll be a pilot's airplane, combining speed, economy, and loadability."
Springer and Davis took off from March Field, the Army flying base in Southern California, early on the morning of June 25, 1921, hoping to make the first transconti­nental nonstop flight. They reached El Paso ahead of schedule, when one bank of the timing gears failed just as they roared over Fort Bliss. Springer slid down to a dead- stick landing, and the attempt was written off as a failure when Lieutenants Kelly and Macready made the flight in a single-en­gine Fokker monoplane a short time later.
The failure was only apparent, however, for the Navy shortly requested specifica­tions for a torpedo plane, inviting both American and European companies to par­ticipate. The ship was to fly from pontoons, and be powered with a 400-horsepow­er Liberty engine.  From the data perfected in building the Cloudster, Douglas turned out the winning design, of which the Navy bought 61 copies.  This led to development of a new series with which U. S. Army officers in 1924 succeeded in flying 25,000 miles around the world.
In 1932 the airlines, just crawling up from the depression, faced the necessity of increasing their speed, providing greater comfort for day passengers and beds for those flying at night, and cutting operating costs.

Early in 1933, TWA officials decided speed must be upped 50 miles an hour, that other characteristics of safety and power must be provided. Douglas and four other manufacturers received requests for bids, one re­quirement being that the plane accepted must be able to fly from any regular airport in the country on one engine, proceed to the next scheduled stop, and have a legal reserve of gas remaining in the tanks on arrival. TWA awarded the contract to Douglas, and a new era in American air transport began.
Douglas built the DC-1 for peacetime fly­ing. The ship upped cruising speed from 100 miles an hour to 150. With a few changes, the production model became the DC-2. Shortly, improvements were incorporated in a third model, the DC-3. Whereas 186 DC-2's were built, more than 1,500 DC-3's will have been constructed by early next year for the air lines, and for the U. S. Army for employment as troop and military cargo carriers.
The DC-3 series gave world travelers their first taste of real flying comfort, and as they drew increasing numbers of passengers into the air, brought the lines out of the red. To­day these 25,200-pound planes, after five years without a major structural change, are still standard equipment.
Sitting at the hub of a large engineering and manufacturing organization, Douglas can't poke his finger into every detail, but he guides the preliminary design of any new ship, whether transport or bomber. He leaves details to his experts. Seated in the quiet of his paneled office, we might have been a thousand miles from the clatter of riveting and roaring of test engines just beyond the soundproof walls when I asked him to look into the future.
"Let's start with invisible bombing," I said. "How high will the bombers fly?" "Some of our plans must remain military secrets," he warned, "but I can go this far: Recently we have completed a 'cold room,' where the thermometer drops down to about 105 degrees below zero.  In that room we're testing oxygen apparatus, paints which we hope will not chip and flake in extreme cold, metals, and men."  The "cold room," whose temperatures fall below those flyers experi­ence at the highest levels, any plane today can reach, is the laboratory where he's get­ting ready for stratospheric bombing.
Douglas considers the fabulous B-19 to be the guidepost which may usher in an era of superbombers of which no more than a half dozen fighting airmen dared dream as recently as a year ago.
"Suppose," he said, "we're asked to jump from our 30-ton bombers to a machine of 200,000 pounds. The big fellow might fail unless we know where we're heading. The B-19 gives us fine supporting evidence on which to build a 100-ton bomber. She is a point from which we may embark on designs for planes capable of carrying much heavier bomb loads out of sight in the stratosphere for long distances."

But Douglas also has his eyes fixed on the needs of peace. He sees, first, shipyards taxed to capacity turning out freighters. For several years, in his opinion, few pas­senger liners will be built. This leaves an opportunity for a tremendous aviation con­struction program. "Low fares," he suggested, "should open up tremendous ocean trade for both pas­sengers and freight. Trans-oceanic flying is receiving its impetus now, and the long- range bombers will furnish the designs from which we may turn our assembly lines to long-range seagoing land planes."
Engineer, salesman, executive, financier - Douglas is all these. But first he is a builder. From his El Segundo assembly line attack bombers, A-24 and SBD, move on to the Army and Navy.  The Santa Monica factory assembles DB-7 Havocs for the British and A-20's for Uncle Sam (similar to but better than Havocs), plus Army troop-cargo car­riers. The new blackout plant at Long Beach turns out more troop-cargo ships, and mighty B-17E bombers developed by Boeing for the Army Air Corps.

A Douglas Plant 1942
Soon after the newest plant at Tulsa, Okla., was dedicated in October, Consolidated B-24 bombers, fabricated and subassembled by the Ford Motor Company, were taking wing.
Today Douglas employs 32,000 men and women. By June there will be 75,000 persons on his payroll, working in plants spread over 5,000,000 square feet.   As I write, armies and navies, with such civilian customers as priorities permit, have swamped him with a backlog of $654,579,973.26, enough to keep him going at top speed for many months.

 From article in March 1942 Popular Science