Page 25 - Volume 14 Number 7

involved in the planning and executing of a transition from wartime to peacetime production.
In his speech at the Newcomen Society, Hedrick summed up the situation: “With Japan’s surrender, total United States industry faced a grim and uncompromising assignment: the transition from military to civilian production. Time was of the essence – time to solidify dormant civilian markets, time to reestablish product lines and time to let the economic laws of supply and demand adjust to a climate of peacetime coexistence.”
Walter and Olive Ann Beech needed that time to pull together their company’s resources, both material and personal, before launching two airplanes that had been quietly designed and developed during 1944 and 1945 – the Model D18S and the Model 35 Bonanza. The two company co-founders believed both aircraft would put the company back on a firm commercial footing.
In October 1945, only two months after Japan’s capitulation, Walter Beech had his engineers and production managers, including Frank Hedrick, focused on manufacturing the Model D18S and the Model 35.
One other airplane, the Model G17S, a postwar upgrade of the venerable Model D17S biplane, was offered in limited numbers and only 20 were eventually built. It is worthy of mention that the D18S was the first postwar commercial airplane to receive an Approved Type Certificate.
Meanwhile, in addition to building new airplanes, Beech Aircraft management “sought out several avenues of diversification” to keep the company solvent and skilled workers on the payroll. Among these “avenues of diversification” was the manufacture of prefabricated homes. In the wake of the war there was an enormous shortage of housing – a shortage so severe that some experts claimed demand could not be met until the mid-1950s.
According to Hedrick, “So it was that Beech Aircraft temporarily entered the fringes of the real estate industry with a prototype of [an] all-metal house.” He was referring to a design created by famed inventor and architect, R. Buckminster Fuller. Dubbed the Dymaxion House (shown on page 21), it was developed chiefly to
JULY 2020
KING AIR MAGAZINE • 23