In only five years a Tennessee farm boy transformed Wichita’s Travel Air Manufacturing Company from humble beginnings into one of America’s leading builders of private, business and commercial airplanes. Late October 1926 the Travel Air Manufacturing Company lost its chief engineer, Lloyd Carlton Stearman, who had resigned to start his own company in California. Worse…
For more than 30 years the Model 200-series King Air and its predecessors have carved out an impressive niche in the demanding and increasingly competitive market that characterizes Special Mission aircraft. The term “Special Missions” had its origin as early as World War I and has evolved during the past 50 years to encompass a…
Beech Aircraft Corporation tightened its grip on the twin-engine turboprop market by introducing the Model 200 Super King Air – an airplane that quickly established itself as the crown jewel of the company’s product line. Previously published in part in the Sept./Oct. 2012 issue of this magazine. In 1973 as Beech Aircraft Corporation approached the…
In its ongoing quest to develop improved versions of the highly successful King Air platform, Beech Aircraft Corporation once again dipped into its “recipe” book and blended the best of the Model 90 and the Model 99 to create the Model 100 – flagship of the Beechcraft fleet. By the late 1960s, Olive Ann Beech…
During the 1970s and 1980s, the Beech Aircraft Corporation served up the E90 and F90 King Air using special ingredients drawn from their library of recipes. As the decade of the 1970s arrived, the Beech Aircraft Corporation had built more than 1,300 King Air business and military airplanes since the introduction of the Model 90…
Never content to rest on its laurels, in 1966 the Beech Aircraft Corporation launched a series of upgrades to the new King Air that drew increased sales from business aviation and military customers. By 1965, Beechcraft dealers and distributors were selling the Model 90 at an accelerated pace. Not only was the turboprop-powered airplane proving…
As the decade of the 1960s unfolded, business aviation in America was poised to make a major transition from piston-powered to turbine-powered airplanes. Beech Aircraft Corporation would lead that transition by introducing the Model 65-90 – the first King Air. In 1961 Olive Ann Beech listened intently to her loyal corps of vice presidents and…
After six years of tremendous success designing, manufacturing and selling airplanes, the Travel Air Company and its leader, Walter H. Beech, became cogs in the aeronautical wheel of fortune known as the Curtiss-Wright Corporation. Late in 1929, only months before the stock market collapse on Wall Street, an organization was formed by the merger of…
Cessna Aircraft Company’s experimental C-106, P-7 and P-10 were designed and developed amidst the fury of World War II but failed to progress beyond the prototype stage. During the winter of 1940, western Europe was quiet. Poland had fallen to the Nazis, part of Finland was under Soviet control and a brief but tranquil three-month…
Boeing Aircraft Company’s Wichita division created the X-100, X-120 and X-90 monoplanes that were state-of-the-art in their day, but whose wings were clipped by the frenetic pace of wartime combat aircraft design. The invasion of Poland by Germany in September 1939 gave the world its first glimpse of the bludgeoning power of the Nazi Blitzkreig…