About Travel Air Manufacturing Company
Images of biplane and monoplane aircraft built by Travel Air (and briefly by Curtiss Wright) are welcome. Please, no Swallows, Cessna, etc.
At the ripe old age of 23 Lloyd Stearman was already making a name for himself. For three years he'd built wings and fuselages at Swallow Aircraft, and then was promoted to chief engineer upon the departure of famed E. M. "Matty" Laird.
Meanwhile Walter Beech was impressing the folks at Swallow Aircraft with his salesmanship while he demonstrated their wood 'n fabric flivvers and cleaned cosmolene from crated Curtis OX-5 engines when he wasn't flying.
Yet when buddies Stearman and Beech proposed a new design with a fuselage constructed from welded steel tubing similar to the famed WWI Fokker D-VII their boss refused. The Swallow looked good in wood, and that was that.
Determined to build and sell their new concept they approached Clyde Cessna, an aviation pioneer and aircraft builder since 1911. With $5000 each from Cessna and Beech, and $700 from Stearman, Travel Air Manufacturing Company was formed in Wichita, Kansas on December 18, 1924.
By 1930, when the company was sold to Curtiss-Wright, almost 1400 Travel Air biplanes and monoplanes had been built (about half of the aircraft constructed in the U.S. during the period) including the famous "Wollaroc," the first non-military aircraft to fly to Hawaii.
http://tailspinstales.blogspot.com/
|
Additional Information
 This is a public group.
- Accepted media types:
- Accepted content types:
- Photos / Videos
- Screenshots / Screencasts
- Illustration/Art / Animation/CGI
- Accepted safety levels:
|
Feed – Subscribe to Travel Air Manufacturing Company discussion threads