Page 27 - Volume 15 Number 1

Following the end of flights tests at Wright Field, the XA-21 returned to Wichita late in April 1939. During that summer, the bomber underwent modifications to convert the large, glass nose section into a more conventional configuration featuring a stepped windshield design. The Air Corps eventually purchased the airplane and it was delivered on the same day that Germany invaded Poland – Sept. 1, 1939. The Boeing bomber, along with Martin’s XA-22, were flown as experimental test platforms for more than two years before the United States entered World War II in December 1941.1
Although the XA-21 failed to win any contracts from the Army Air Corps, loss of the competition was not a major disappointment to the Boeing Aircraft Company that conceived it nor the Stearman Division that built it. Both entities were swamped with orders for primary trainers and the B-17 heavy bomber and more orders were imminent. On September 16, 1940, the Stearman Division was handed a contract worth more than $6 million for hundreds more primary trainers, plus spare parts, for the Air Corps.
The Stearman factory, however, was not the only Wichita company to benefit from the latest tidal wave of
Harold W. Zipp (left) was among the engineers that designed the X-100 as well as other designs that originated at Boeing’s Wichita Division. C.F. Schlatter (right) served in the Army Air Corps. The two men posed for the camera beside a factory-fresh PT-13A. (Kansas Aviation Museum)
JANUARY 2021
KING AIR MAGAZINE • 25