During the 1970s and 1980s, the Beech Aircraft Corporation served up the E90 and F90 King Air using special ingredients drawn from their library of recipes. As the decade of the 1970s arrived, the Beech Aircraft Corporation had built more than 1,300 King Air business and military airplanes since the introduction of the Model 90…
Never content to rest on its laurels, in 1966 the Beech Aircraft Corporation launched a series of upgrades to the new King Air that drew increased sales from business aviation and military customers. By 1965, Beechcraft dealers and distributors were selling the Model 90 at an accelerated pace. Not only was the turboprop-powered airplane proving…
As the decade of the 1960s unfolded, business aviation in America was poised to make a major transition from piston-powered to turbine-powered airplanes. Beech Aircraft Corporation would lead that transition by introducing the Model 65-90 – the first King Air. In 1961 Olive Ann Beech listened intently to her loyal corps of vice presidents and…
After six years of tremendous success designing, manufacturing and selling airplanes, the Travel Air Company and its leader, Walter H. Beech, became cogs in the aeronautical wheel of fortune known as the Curtiss-Wright Corporation. Late in 1929, only months before the stock market collapse on Wall Street, an organization was formed by the merger of…
Cessna Aircraft Company’s experimental C-106, P-7 and P-10 were designed and developed amidst the fury of World War II but failed to progress beyond the prototype stage. During the winter of 1940, western Europe was quiet. Poland had fallen to the Nazis, part of Finland was under Soviet control and a brief but tranquil three-month…
Boeing Aircraft Company’s Wichita division created the X-100, X-120 and X-90 monoplanes that were state-of-the-art in their day, but whose wings were clipped by the frenetic pace of wartime combat aircraft design. The invasion of Poland by Germany in September 1939 gave the world its first glimpse of the bludgeoning power of the Nazi Blitzkreig…
At the National Air Races in September 1929, the Travel Air Type “R” monoplane turned the world of air racing upside down by conquering its military opponents, much to the delight of Walter H. Beech. Douglas Davis climbed aboard the Type “R” racer and squeezed into the small cockpit. Time was of the essence as…
At the 1929 National Air Races in September, Walter H. Beech unleashed the Travel Air Type “R” monoplane that crushed the competition and ended dominance of the military biplane. The relentless heat of a Kansas summer was in full force during August 1929 in Wichita – the self-proclaimed “Air Capital of the World.” The city’s…
In 1930 America’s economy was in a tailspin when the Stearman Aircraft Company introduced the Model 6 biplane – a rugged design but one that found few commercial buyers and was rejected by the military as a primary trainer. The “Roarin’ Twenties” had been good to Wichita’s airframe manufacturers. In 1928, for example, the city’s…
Cessna Aircraft Company’s commercial Model T-50 was designed for airlines and air taxi service but evolved into one of the best twin-engine military trainers of World War II. In June 1939, officials of the Cessna Aircraft Company announced a major expansion of facilities that would allow for increased production of the single-engine Airmaster and the…