While the name Rawdon isn't exactly a household word in most of the aviation world, Herb Rawdon exerted a great deal of design influence at Travel Air, Douglas, Beech and Boeing.

Al Mooney always numbered his designs with an M- prefix, and when he moved to St. Louis in 1935 to work for the Monocoupe Corp. he was ready to lay the lines down for the M-10.

Not every bright new idea from Wichita or Lock Haven has made it to the market.

Making jet aircraft acceptably quiet can be a dirty job. Owners don't want to spend the money, engine makers don't want to compromise their products' efficiencies, and airport neighbors are rarely happy with the results.

Ten years after the end of World War I, the American public had become enchanted with the romance and excitement of the noisy, speeding machines that locked in aerial battle around racing pylons.

Pushed by relentless necessity, it entered a U.S. Army competition to design and produce a small, light observation and liaison airplane.

The Mooney M-18 "Mite" could be described as the most efficient airplane ever built. With 65 hp, it could reach speeds of 140 mph, and designer Al Mooney once flew it on a 1,300-mile trip from Brownsville, Tex. To Watertown, S.D. and averaged 35 miles per gallon.

In the boom years since World War II, Cessna has designed, manufactured and marketed scores of airframe designations. But there was also an equal number of ideas that seemed awfully good at the time, but which for one reason or another you may not have ever seen at your local airport.

The concept of powered, manned flight was only eight years old when 34-year-old Kansas farmer-turned auto salesman Clyde Cessna paid $7,500 for an American-built copy of the Blériot XI and taught himself to fly on the broad expanse of a salt plain in northern Oklahoma.