Word: aircrafters
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Formidable was to be the name of a 23,000-ton aircraft carrier standing ready for launching on the ways of a Belfast shipyard last week. Formidable, indeed, was the launching. As if sensing the pressure under which the had been built, anxious to get into the water as soon as possible, H. M. S. Formidable waited only for a crowd to gather, a band to tune its instruments and Lady Wood, wife of Britain's Secretary of State for Air, who was to christen the ship, to clear her throat, before slipping its poppet, breaking a cradle, careening...
...flying business a successful forced landing is one you can walk away from. In 1932 big Detroit Aircraft Corp. made a landing that was distinctly not successful. No investor aboard walked away with his pocketbook intact. One of Detroit Aircraft's subsidiaries was Lockheed Aircraft, absorbed in 1929. Although its sleek Vegas and Orions were the fastest commercial jobs in the air, Lockheed had to go into receivership. Grass grew around its two-acre plant at Burbank, Calif., and the factory had only one employe-a watchman who had started working for Brothers Alan and Malcolm Loughead (later changed...
...smart young men who prowled around among the aviation industry's crack-ups in 1932, looking for a wreck to repair and fly, was Harvardman Robert Ellsworth Gross. After a venture in 1928 with Stearman Aircraft Corp. (which he sold to United Aircraft and Transport Corp. within a year after he bought it) and another with Viking Aircraft, which had a not-so-happy ending in the 1929 crash, he had plenty of ambition but little money in his pocket when he learned that Lockheed was for sale...
...When aircraft companies published their reports on the business of 1939's first half, Lockheed's was one of the most interesting. Three of the big makers-Curtiss-Wright, Douglas and North American- showed net profits ranging from 27% to 200% over the first six months of 1938. Boeing, still charging off development expense on its big four-motored jobs, showed a net loss of $183,550. Martin, slowed up in production while it tooled its factory for a 215-plane French bomber order, netted $967,624 (31.7% under 1938's first half) but looked forward...
...flashed word of the enemy approach to the fields where pilots stood ready to gun the 1,000-h.p. engines of 800 quick-climbing Spitfire and Hurricane fighters. The Territorial Army probed cloudbanks with searchlights, traced the paths of the invading bombers with the long snouts of their anti-aircraft guns. In London balloon barrage crews, on the alert 24 hours a day, inflated their tricky sausages and let them up 700 feet-far lower than would be needed to entangle a real enemy. Defending fighters signaled contact with the raiders by flashing lights, which were checked by staff observers...