In 1959, Donald Wills Douglas, Sr. wrote that, for most of the preceding forty years, his time and energy had been devoted to the design and manufacture of commercial and military aircraft. He also observed that in 1921 none of the Douglas Aircraft family watching the take-off of the Douglas “Cloudster” on its maiden flight could have predicted the scores of marvellous designs that would roll from their assembly lines in the years to come. “A few of our designs attained some degree of fame, and one of them, the DC-3, has become almost legendary. It seems to go on forever. More than ten thousand of these transports were built, several thousand remaining in service today, and representing a twenty-five year span of service. It is fairly safe to predict that a few of these hardy veterans will be flying twenty-five years from today.” It was. Today, nearly fifty years after his prediction, many DC-3s continue to earn their keep in private hands, hauling passengers and cargo, as flying reminders of the impact the DC-3 has had on the world since that first flight on December 17, 1935, the thirty-second anniversary of the Wright brothers’ controlled powered flight at Kittyhawk in North Carolina.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, on April 6, 1892, Douglas was, from an early age, excited by the achievements of the Wright brothers and other aviation pioneers. When, in 1904 at the age of twelve, he read an account in Aeronautical Journal, of the Wrights’ flight, it set him on course to become one of those pioneers himself.
The summers of his childhood were spent at his family’s home on Long Island Sound where he learned to sail. Sailing became a life-long passion for Douglas, and he would probably have made a career in the U.S. Navy were it not for his father taking him to the National Museum at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, where he was fascinated by an exhibit on the Langley Experimental Aircraft Engine. From then on it was flying machines that held his interest. Douglas was witness to many of the Wright brothers’ experimental flying exercises at Curtiss Field on Long Island. Many years later he told friends that it was this link to the Wrights that firmly fixed him on course to his aviation career. Ironically, a book on flying machine construction appeared in the United States during 1910 containing the quote: “In the opinion of competent experts, it is idle to look for a commercial future for the flying machine.”
Donald Douglas emerged from prep school in 1909 and, in deference to his father, entered the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis in Maryland. He had little spare time as a lowly midshipman, but what he had he spent watching the further experimentation of the Wright brothers with their aeroplanes, then at Fort Meyer, Virginia.
After trying unsuccessfully to persuade the school officials to institute a course in aeronautical studies, he resigned from the Naval Academy and enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which had just established such a curriculum. There he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in only two years. After graduating he worked for a year with Jerome Hunsaker, his mentor at M.I.T. and the man who had developed the aeronautics course there. With Hunsaker, Douglas created an early wind tunnel device for evaluating aircraft design performance. He went on to his first job in the fledgling aircraft industry, working on the DN-1, the first dirigible for the U.S. Navy, with the Connecticut Aircraft Company at Trumbull Airport, Groton-New London. From there he met and went to work for Glenn L. Martin, for whom he designed the Model S “hydro-airplane.” But the First World War was about to begin and Douglas soon felt compelled to leave Martin to accept an appointment in Washington as chief civilian aeronautical engineer for the U.S. Army Signal Corps. Douglas: “I think I can truly lay claim to being one of the very first of the aircraft engineers. Until that time, there was no formal engineering. It was all done by judgment. If the airplane flew, the judgment was good. If it didn’t, the judgment was bad.” In less than a year, however, Douglas had become so frustrated by Army red tape and procedural delay that he resigned and returned to the Martin Company who were delighted to have him back.
With the Martin design team, Douglas began to flourish as his work on the revolutionary MB-1 Martin Bomber quickly confirmed the superiority of his design over that of any American or European competitor. In the war years, Douglas created the Martin MB-2 as the standard Navy and Marine bomber of the next ten years, leading to the beginning of strategic air power for the United States. In the MB-2 Donald Douglas envisioned something beyond its military application: an airframe that, without any important structural changes, could easily carry twelve passengers or a ton of mail. Douglas: “Speed is the most outstanding present-day advantage of the airplane. I rank passenger-carrying first in importance. Correspondence or the telephone cannot supply the complete satisfaction of actual personal contact. Where any great distance separates the subject and his objective, present-day express train service often proves too slow. Commercial operators must take the risk. One way or another they must carry passengers on schedule, comfortably, and without a mishap for a reasonable period. Where speed is of the very quintessence of transportation, the airplane will have a definite field and a profitable one.”
Donald W. Douglas;
Arthur Raymond
The Douglas Park, Santa Monica site of the first Douglas factory in California, now a lawn bowling green.
But in the early 1920s, the United States lagged behind Britain which, by 1920, had already flown more than 4,000 passengers and almost 60,000 pounds of cargo nearly 85,000 miles with efficiency and without injury or loss of goods.
One legacy of the post-World War I years was the expanded knowledge and capability in the field of aircraft design and manufacture. The demanding requirements of weaponry had dramatically accelerated the evolving industry and greatly advanced the state of aircraft technology. The American economy, however, fell into decline as, almost overnight, more than $100 million in government orders for aircraft were cancelled after the armistice ending “the Great War.” The U.S. aviation industry ground to a halt amid stockpiles of 10,000 brand new military aircraft and many thousands of Liberty aero engines. In less than six months, twenty-one of the twenty-four most important aircraft-related companies in America were out of business, affecting some 200,000 of the industry’s skilled workers. The unused aircraft were on the auction block at bargain prices.
Within the economic chaos of the industry, the Glenn L. Martin Company survived, largely due to the clear superiority of the Douglas-designed bomber. Its quality had made the reputation of the company, helping it to prosper even in that toughest of times. And in the gloom, Donald Douglas saw the most significant opportunity of his lifetime. Confident in his capability and design ideas, he left Martin for the second time, and took his young family and meagre savings to sunny Santa Monica, California, and the western end of Wilshire Boulevard, the Pacific Ocean edge of the Los Angeles sprawl. There he would establish Douglas Aircraft which, by the height of the Second World War, would be the fourth largest company in America. In the 1920s, it was a desk in a tiny space at the rear of a southern California barber shop.
The only other aircraft maker on the west coast was William Boeing in Seattle. Boeing’s business had dried up entirely after the war and he was reduced to manufacturing bedroom furniture. Such were the prospects that awaited Douglas on his arrival in the west to pursue his “opportunity.” He faced a major hurdle in his efforts to secure financing and investment in an era of little public interest in the prospects for commercial aviation. Sceptics in the financial community were quick to point out that aviation was immature and had not as yet demonstrated a capacity for safe, responsible, organized operation.
While struggling to find financial support for his new company, Douglas happened to meet a wealthy, adventurous young man named David R. Davis. The two got on well. Davis, who wanted to try for the unattained non-stop cross-country flying achievement, commissioned Douglas to build a new plane for his attempt. With the enormous sum of $40,000 in his pocket, Douglas quickly hired five of his former colleagues at Martin to join him in California on the Davis project. They were all non-plussed when they arrived outside the little barber shop, but most of them would remain with Douglas for the rest of their careers.
The aircraft they designed and built was the Cloudster—a large, two-place wood and fabric bi-plane, thirty-five feet long with a 56-foot wingspan, powered by a 425 hp Liberty engine. It had a range of 2,800 miles and was one of the few aircraft in aviation history capable of lifting a combination of payload and fuel equal to its own empty weight. Former Martin chief test pilot Eric Springer flew the Cloudster for Douglas. With clear sky and a relatively good weather forecast, Springer and Davis took off from Goodyear Field, east Los Angeles, in the early morning of June 21, 1921, bound for Curtiss Field on Long Island, New York.
A mechanical failure forced the pair to land at Fort Bliss, Texas, where the craft was then severely damaged in a passing thunderstorm. After structural repairs, the Cloudster was flown back to California for complete engine repair, and during this delay the trans-continental non-stop record was claimed by a U.S. Army Fokker T-2. The revamped Cloudster would, without the further involvement of Douglas, become his first commercial aircraft. Refitted with ten seats and expensive trim, the plane was operated briefly by T. Claude Ryan, whose San Diego-based aircraft company would later design and build the Spirit of St Louis for Charles Lindbergh. In 1926, the Cloudster came to an ignominious end while hauling a load of beer to Tijuana, Mexico. An emergency beach landing was successfully carried out but the pilot failed to secure the plane properly for the night and by the next morning the high tide had battered it to destruction. David Davis went on to become famed as an aeronautical expert and designer of the revolutionary “Davis Wing,” used in the Second World War by Consolidated Aircraft on their B-24 Liberator bomber and some of their flying boats. The new wing gave the Liberator 20 percent additional lift and enabled it to carry an additional 8,000 pounds of payload.
On August 2, 1932, Donald Douglas opened a letter from his old friend Jack Frye, Operations Vice President for Transcontinental and Western Air Inc (TWA), who asked if Douglas would be interested in building ten or more tri-motored transport planes for TWA. The little Douglas Aircraft company had been keeping busy in the development of some important aeroplane projects. One of them was an aircraft specially designed to make it possible for the United States to be the first nation to complete a flight around the world. This aviation achievement seemed to arouse great public interest.
In 1919, a U.S. Navy NC-4 aircraft had successfully crossed the Atlantic, and in 1922 British airmen John Alcock and Arthur Whitten-Brown had tried without success to circumnavigate the globe in a Vickers Vimy. In the next year a French attempt failed and a second British effort was organized and then abandoned. In July 1923, U.S. Army officials began planning a route for a globe-circling flight to be attempted the following year. Major General Mason M. Patrick was in charge of the operation.
The goal was: “To show the feasibility of aerial communication and transportation between the various continents; to make the people of the world conscious that aerial transportation is able to meet any and all conditions under which it might be forced to operate; and to arouse interest in aircraft as a vital force in the markets of commerce.” The plan called for U.S. Army Air Service personnel to set the specifications and conduct the actual flight and the army came to Douglas for the aircraft it would need. The Air Service ordered four of the planes and a prototype fifth aircraft, and over the course of their design and construction it heavily hyped the flight and the contribution of Douglas Aircraft, raising the awareness, interest, and enthusiasm of the public.
Post cards, posters and other aviation graphics of the 1920s and 1930s.
In order to achieve the goals, the planes had to be designed as either land- or water-type craft and would be called the Douglas World Cruisers: the Seattle, the Chicago, the Boston, and the New Orleans. They had no radios or advanced navigational aids, only the standard instrumentation of the time.
The Air Service had chosen four of its best pilots for the flight: Major Frederick L. Martin, Flight Commander, Lieutenant Lowell H. Smith, Lieutenant Leigh Wade, and Lieutenant Erik H. Nelson. Each pilot had selected a mechanic / co-pilot to accompany him on the flight. In the planning, refuelling and repair sites were established at key locations along the route and the cooperation of the U.S. Navy and the Royal Air Force was secured.
Following successful trials, the four aircraft were lined up at Santa Monica’s Clover Field on March 17, 1924 as thousands of people gathered to watch the 7 a.m. take-off. Unfortunately, a thick fog had rolled in from the Pacific and it was 9:35 before conditions had improved enough for the flight to begin. The planes took off and headed north towards Seattle where the actual round-the-world attempt would start on April 5th. Fog would again prevail and the start had to be deferred until the next morning when the four aircraft departed at 8:47 on their historic journey.
Weather conditions proved treacherous for the flight as rain, snow, sleet and powerful headwinds kept the crews struggling to stay in the air and on course, but over a period of 175 days the flight managed to cover the 27,553-mile route, with an actual flying time of fifteen days, eleven hours, and seven minutes. Two of the four World Cruisers were lost in the effort. The Seattle crashed into a mountainside in Alaska after the crew became disoriented in fog. The aircraft was destroyed but the pilot and mechanic survived. The three remaining World Cruisers crossed the northern Pacific “relatively uneventfully” via Japan, China, Indo-China, Siam, Burma, India, Persia, Asia Minor, the Balkans, and France, where they were welcomed by massive crowds at Paris before proceeding to London. Trouble came early in their North Atlantic crossing, however, when the Boston lost oil pressure, was forced down at sea and damaged beyond repair while being lifted aboard a naval vessel. Again, the crew survived. With only two World Cruisers remaining in the flight, the prototype was summoned to join them at Pictou, Nova Scotia, where it was named the Boston II. The planes then continued on to Seattle where the record flight had begun.
When they finally landed triumphantly back at Clover Field in Santa Monica, more than 200,000 spectators were there to welcome them home. From that moment, the international reputation of Donald Douglas and his aircraft company was made. Today, the restored World Cruiser Chicago is displayed at the National Air and Space Museum, Washington DC, while the New Orleans, the other survivor of the record-breaking flight, is part of the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History.
The accomplishment of the Americans in the round-the-world flight is still appreciated as one of the great feats in aviation history; however, it was not done without significant sacrifice.Two of the four principal aircraft were forced down and destroyed. The crews survived other forced landings, a range of terrifying weather conditions, mechanical difficulties requiring many repairs, indescribable fatigue, and a variety of minor mishaps. But the achievement advanced the cause of eventual worldwide air transport.
The resulting publicity of the flight also advanced the cause of Douglas Aircraft, which almost immediately received a U.S. Army contract for fifty planes based on the World Cruiser design—an award worth $750,000, which was a huge sum at that time. With the business, of course, came major new expenditures, ranging from an increased payroll to larger space for manufacturing. The site chosen by Donald Douglas for his new location was that of an abandoned Santa Monica movie studio on Wilshire Boulevard, now a small urban green space known as the Douglas Park Municipal Bowling Green.
The visionary Donald Douglas moved on from his work for the army, focusing on what he believed to be the pathway to commercial air transport. He designed and built fifty-nine mailplanes for the post office. Of these primitive but well-engineered craft he later stated: “These early structures, designed expressly to carry the mail, were the foundations for the DCs that were to come.” It seemed clear that he was heading in the right direction. Mail delivered by air took half the time taken by the railroads to cover the same distance. But there were problems. The lack of adequate navigational aids and instrumentation meant an inordinately high attrition rate for pilots flying the mail. In 1925, the U.S. Government put the delivery of air mail in the hands of private operators, but by then, thirty-one of the original forty pilots who had started the air mail service in 1920 had been killed in crashes.
The federal Air Mail Act of February 1925 would lead to the advent of true commercial air transport service. By making it possible for the fledgling air carriers to offset most of their expenses through the carriage of mail, the Act opened the door a crack to the potential of air passenger travel. Douglas: “I built mailplanes because I couldn’t sell people on the dream I had from the beginning. I knew the day was coming when everybody would want to travel by air but I had to wait.”
The next major action along that pathway to commercial air transport was the passage of the Air Commerce Act in May 1926. This groundbreaking legislation provided regulations for the examination and licensing of pilots, aircraft, communications, enforcement, and accident investigation. The age of flying purely by luck, skill, and the seat of one’s pants was coming to a close as improvements in instrumentation, communication, and safety devices introduced a new level of responsible operation that was intended both to protect and impress the travelling public. It brought with it the new Department of Air Commerce, a forerunner of the Federal Aviation Authority. Public trust and enthusiasm for flying was further enhanced a year later with the first solo flight across the Atlantic, when Charles Lindbergh, a young air mail pilot, flew the Ryan-built Spirit of St Louis from Roosevelt Field, New York, to Le Bourget, Paris. The popular Lindbergh became known as “Lucky Lindy” and “The Lone Eagle,” inspiring Americans and others around the world to want to fly.
By the time Lindbergh flew the Atlantic, Donald Douglas had outgrown the Wilshire Boulevard building and was looking for larger facilities in the area. Clover Field was only about a mile away and there was land for sale on the site. Douglas found the acreage he needed on the north boundary of the field, purchased it and began construction of a large new factory. Those were boom times with many people riding high on a wave of prosperity—a wave that was soon to break. By 1928, the young airline industry had confidently grown to more than forty companies offering scheduled flights in various parts of the U.S. The Air Commerce Act was two years old and air transportation was burgeoning. Unfortunately, so too were airliner crashes—twenty-four of them with fatalities. Fifty-three such aircraft had been destroyed in accidents of various kinds, and in 1929 alone, the year of the great stock market crash, there were fifty-one airliner crashes with sixty-one fatalities. The glamorous adventure of air travel had lost much of its glitter by the end of the decade. Even so, Douglas kept his work force busy in the turbulent recession years, and managed to turn a profit. His company’s reputation for building exceptionally sound, well-constructed aircraft continued to grow. With his move to the new Clover Field facility, he was employing an engineering staff of more than 200. The company was grossing $2 million a year and, within the aviation industry, was second in value only to the much larger United Aircraft conglomerate.
With the passage of the McNary-Watres Act in April 1930, the U.S. Postmaster General was able to establish an integrated airline industry. The individual airlines were paid at a fixed rate for their cargo space to carry air mail and that rate would gradually diminish over the next five years to require the airlines to wean themselves from the subsidy and generate self-sustaining profit through the carriage of passengers. The Act further enabled the Postmaster General to combine or extend airline routes when doing so was deemed to better serve the public interest. Walter F. Brown was serving in that capacity at the time and shared with Donald Douglas the view that airlines in future should primarily be carrying passengers rather than putting their priority on mail. The problem was that no existing aircraft operated by the airlines was capable of carrying a full load of passengers as well as enough mail to be in profit within the existing rate schedule. This was the circumstance in which the first of the Douglas line of commercial airliners was conceived.
One further event served to accelerate the coming of the commercial air transport revolution. On March 31, 1931 a TWA Fokker tri-motor transport crashed in a Kansas wheat field after abruptly ending communication with a ground station. The two pilots and the six passengers, including Knute Rockne, the revered football coach of Notre Dame University, were killed. An investigation was opened but rumours quickly spread about the cause of the crash which had cost the life of the celebrated, high-profile Rockne. Public confidence in the young airlines of America was badly shaken. The aircraft design of the renowned Antony Fokker was suddenly controversial and, within a year, the major airlines had scrapped their Fokker aircraft.
TWA replaced their Fokker planes with nineteen Ford Tri-Motors beginning in November 1932, but was operating the Fords so extensively that the aircraft were rapidly wearing out and needing replacing after an average of 3,200 flying hours.
In Seattle, the Boeing Company was showing signs of recovery from its worst days in the 1920s, having designed and produced the XB-9 for the army, a well-received bomber. To enter what he saw as the promising market for civilian air transport, William Boeing had a B-9 bomber modified as a comfortable, modern airliner. The Boeing 247 was carpeted, heated, and well-insulated to greatly reduce the noise level in the passenger cabin from that of the Fords and Fokkers. The new twin-engined all-metal, stressed-skin 247 was seen as a vast improvement for passengers and a powerful tool for recapturing the disenchanted air travelling public. The safer, better-instrumented airliner performed impressively—about 20 percent better than its Ford predecessor.
The first customer to buy the $68,000 247 was United Airlines, who shrewdly tied-up Boeing’s production of the new plane by ordering sixty of them, thus eliminating direct competition from other major airlines wanting their own 247s. Boeing would not be able, for example, to provide 247s to United’s competitor TWA for at least two years, until the United order was completed. Desperate for new and competitive airliners, TWA could not wait for such long-delayed delivery from Boeing, and it was then that Jack Frye, the TWA vice president for operations, wrote to Donald Douglas to ask if Douglas Aircraft would design and build a minimum of ten new tri-motor transports for his airline.
