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Aviation History

Many a Wichita aircraft firm crashed during the depression

By Stan Finger
The Wichita Eagle

The warning signs began appearing during the summer of 1929.

Just a few months after posting an all-time record in airplane sales, Travel Air - the undisputed king of Wichita aircraft manufacturers at the time - was forced to lay off workers because of a sales slump.

There was a lot of belt-tightening going on as aircraft companies in Wichita responded to a lull in the sales market. But everyone in the business, from the largest firms to the tiniest of aircraft manufacturers, was convinced that the boom days of the '20s would return.

The boom they got instead - the shock waves from the stock market crash that October and the Depression that followed - nearly wiped out the aviation industry in a city that already was touting itself as the air capital of the world.

"They didn't pay attention to the signals, and they were there," said Ed Phillips, author of "Travel Air: Wings Over the Prairie" and a Beech historian. "Sales had begun dropping even that summer. But most of them, they were still in a producing euphoria. They had no intention of slowing down. They continued to go full bore, even though people were already beginning to get cautious."

The stock market crash that began on Black Thursday, Oct. 24, 1929, didn't take long to be felt halfway across the country.

Within a week, aircraft companies in Wichita began feeling the squeeze, and by early 1931, a city that at one time boasted as many as 29 aircraft manufacturers had barely a handful still operating. The relatively small but thriving plane manufacturing centers became industrial graveyards almost overnight.

"Lord, there was vacant buildings everywhere," said Clyde Belden, who was a welder for various Wichita aircraft companies during the Depression.

The small companies were the first to go. More than a dozen of the aircraft companies in Wichita at the time of the crash were the products of men with money who wanted to be a part of the exhilarating world of aviation.

"For men who had a lot of money to spend, aviation was the thing to get into," said Walt House, president of the Wichita Aeronautical Historical Association. "Most of them didn't have money for long."

Mildred Burnham remembers the lure aviation had for moneyed men of the era. Her father, C.V. Snyder, helped finance a pair of companies. Neither one of them, Yunker and Knoll, ever really got off the ground, and they took Snyder's fortune down the drain with them.

"They thought that aircraft was the coming thing," said Burnham, who lives in Wichita. "I can remember the enthusiasm they had. I think he was just like all the rest of them. They just didn't want to give up. They were in it, and they had to stay in it."

There were various reasons why names like Yunker, Bowlby, Imblum or Gessell never became household names, House said. Most of the aircraft companies never built more than a handful of planes. And some existed only on paper. What it boiled down to, House said, was that most of these firms had neither the money nor the product to survive.

Some firms' purse strings were so tight that one plane crash could literally wreck the company. The Hilton Aircraft Co. went bankrupt when its one plane spun into the ground while performing for a Sunday afternoon crowd in February 1930.

It wasn't from a lack of effort that some of the companies went under. A company would try almost anything to spur sales. Al Mooney remembers flying a plane from Burbank, Calif. to Fort Wayne, Ind. to drum up business for his Wichita-based Mooney Aircraft Co.

"That's a helluva long ways," said Mooney, who now lives in Texas. "We were trying to make enough noise to scare up some more money to keep going. We would have been successful, too, except for the fact that some

. . . newspapers got a hold of it and made a big noise about it being a do- or- die attempt from Burbank to New York.

"The engine pooped out on me just beyond Fort Wayne, and I had to land in a field, and the newspapers and radio called it a failure. That ruined us. We kept it goin' for a little while, but not long after that."

The crash didn't spare the Big Four of 1920s Wichita aviation: Travel Air, Cessna, Stearman and Swallow.

An incredible stroke of good fortune helped Walter Beech escape financial ruin in the bleak days of October. That August, he had sold controlling interest of Travel Air to the Curtiss-Wright Corporation of St. Louis. But one of the best-known instances of good timing in the business resulted from luck, not insight into the nightmare to come.

"They realized that the market was getting unstable, but that is not the reason he sold out to Curtiss-Wright," Ed Phillips said. "He needed the money to keep expanding."

But the expansion plans were not completed before the October crash, and Beech was spared.

The other large companies were not as fortunate. Within a week of the stock market collapse, the flying school that had contracted all of Cessna's production folded. The bottom fell out at Cessna, and on Jan. 31, 1931, the plant doors were padlocked.

Bob Phelps still remembers the day he put the locks on the plant.

"That big building was just setting there, empty," Phelps said. "I laid off 300 people there in one day, just lowered the boom on them. I was feeling pretty low that day. Everybody was."

About 1,000 people lost their jobs as the aircraft plants closed their doors one after the other, most of them from Travel Air and Cessna. But the city, then sporting a population of 114,000, hardly blinked at news of the shutdowns.

The city's relative indifference to the plight of the aviation industry during the depression would change in coming years, but during the 1930s word of a business closing down wasn't unusual. All over the city, in all types of businesses, workers were losing jobs and leaving town to find new ones. Between 1930 and 1935, more than 11,000 people left Wichita in search of better conditions.

Most people, however, couldn't afford to leave. Clyde Cessna and his son, Eldon, rented out space in an abandoned Travel Air plant - which was closed down in 1930 - and scraped out a living by building speed planes and entering them in races around the country.

Cessna also kept afloat by renting out its plant to whoever could pay money to use it. A pair of fledgling aircraft companies rented plant space in

1932. One of them, called the Straughan Aircraft Co. built only a few planes before being purchased by an Oklahoma City firm and fading into history.

But the other firm stuck around. Beech Aircraft Corporation, formed by Walter Beech in April of 1932, was destined to become a landmark in the aviation industry. In opening his company, Beech was defying incredible odds. The year Beech Aircraft opened its doors, there were less than 600 commercial aircraft built in the United States - a figure Travel Air could top all by itself in six months during the peak days of the late '20s.

But the dogged Beech remained, and the Beech Model 17 "Staggerwing" biplane he would introduce later that year would carry the company through the depths of the Depression.

Cessna, too, would eventually rebound. Eldon Cessna and an aeronautical engineering graduate fresh from the University of Wichita named Dwane Wallace spearheaded a drive that acquired enough proxy votes to re-open the Cessna plant on Jan. 10, 1934.

It would be late 1934 before the aircraft economy would begin stirring again, thanks in large part to government contracts. Contracts awarded that year by the military would save Stearman Aircraft, which had avoided shutting its doors by paring its staff to a handful of employees that did little more than keep an eye on the plant grounds.

©The Wichita Eagle

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