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was worth more than $800,000 and was the largest order the resurrected company had received up to that time.
The AT-8 was one of the first airplanes built for the U.S. Army Air Corps for training pilots to fly multi-engine aircraft. It was nearly a direct copy of the commercial T-50 except for the addition of small windows in the cockpit roof, and replacement of the Jacobs engines for nine-cylinder Lycoming R-680 powerplants, each rated at 290 horsepower and equipped with two-blade Hamilton-Standard constant-speed, non-feathering propellers. In addition, government furnished equipment (GFE) such as radios, headsets and instrumentation were included, along with an overall aluminum color paint scheme.
As Great Britain reeled under the might of Germany’s Luftwaffe, it needed pilots by the thousands to carry the war to Adolph Hitler. As a result, England, Canada and Australia formed the British Commonwealth Air Training plan designed to pool resources of the three countries. Foremost among these was Canada – a continent-sized airbase that stood little chance of being attacked. In the summer of 1940, just as the Battle of Britain was heating up, the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) sent a
contingent to Wichita to evaluate the T-50 as a potential advanced trainer. It appealed to the RCAF for a number of important reasons: Cessna’s twin was a modern design, well suited to the task, possessed economy of operation, was manufactured of non-strategic materials, could be easily repaired in the field and, most important of all, it was ready for mass production. Convinced that the T-50 was the right airplane for the job, the RCAF soon issued a contract for 180 airplanes designated Crane I. These ships featured 225-horsepower Jacobs engines, wood, fixed-pitch propellers and special cold weather equipment.
During the autumn of 1940, the Cessna Aircraft Company held an order backlog worth more than $5 million but lacked insufficient floor space to build airplanes. Making matters worse, the Army Air Corps expected its first AT-8 before December 31 and the RCAF wanted the first Crane I by Christmas.
In September, the company announced a second expansion program to build a final assembly building 400 feet in length and 200 feet wide to be completed before Thanksgiving. As the manufacturing campus expanded, so did the workforce. The payroll increased
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SEPTEMBER 2020
KING AIR MAGAZINE • 23