Page 26 - February 2015 Volume 9, Number 2

Selling Walter’s Airplanes
Employing lessons learned during his years at the Travel Air Company, Walter H. Beech forged a chain of dealers and distributors worldwide to sell Beechcraft airplanes in the midst of the worst economic collapse in America’s history
by Edward H. Phillips
In April 1932 when Walter and Olive Ann Beech co-founded the Beech Aircraft Company, they were taking an enormous risk that many of their closest friends considered reckless. The couple, however, did have a number of advantages that would work in their favor. Among the more salient were five years of valuable manufacturing, sales and marketing experience at the Travel Air Company, a skeleton network of ex-Travel Air dealers and distributors that had not yet succumbed to the ravages of the Great Depression, and an excellent reputation both domestically and internationally, for building quality airplanes and supporting the product after the sale.
In the author’s opinion, it cannot be overemphasized how important those years at Travel Air would prove to be for Walter and Olive Ann Beech when they launched their airplane company. It should be made clear, however, that from a purely historical standpoint Travel Air and the Beech Aircraft Company shared nothing in common. They were two independent organizations existing at two different times in history despite being linked together by the name Beech. As a result, Walter was armed with a considerable wealth of knowledge regarding how to create and implement a fledgling network of dealers and distributors designed to operate in a Depression-plagued marketplace.
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It is important to remember that the last few years of the unforgettable “Roarin’ Twenties” proved to be both a blessing and a curse for the aviation industry in Wichita, Kansas. Those raucous years were a blessing because demand for new aircraft swelled the order books, but it was a curse because when the debacle on Wall Street in October 1929 finally struck, it quickly crippled the city’s three major manufacturers: the Travel Air Company, Cessna Aircraft Company and the Stearman Aircraft Company.
Of these, only Stearman would barely manage to survive through the ultra-lean mid-1930s without closing its doors. In fact, had it not become a subsidiary of William Boeing’s famous company, it probably would have disappeared without a whisper. Travel Air had succumbed to the Great Depression by September 1932 and Clyde V. Cessna’s once-busy factory had been locked up by the board of directors a year earlier. In addition, there were other, much smaller companies located in the city that had barely begun operating when the curtain of “Black Thursday” came crashing down on the airplane business.
Despite dire warnings of an impending catastrophe, the infamous stock market “crash” took many aviation industry executives by surprise. They, along with many other Americans, had become desensitized to
FEBRUARY 2015