Famous for being the company behind the P-51 Mustang, North American Aviation was one of the largest and most respected aircraft manufacturers in the world at its height. Yet a minor blunder by one of its subsidiaries brought everything down.
Aside from its famous aircraft – the P-51, F-86, X-15 – North American Aviation also designed the Saturn V rocket, the Space Shuttle orbiter and the command and service module (CSM) for the Apollo Project.
Background
In 1916, Canadian-born university lecturer-turned-investment advisor, Clement Melville Keys, was asked by Glenn Curtiss (a friend of one of his former students) to help restructure his financially troubled company.
Duly helping to restructure the Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company, Clement Melville Keys had only one stipulation: he was to become an unpaid vice-president for the company, something a grateful Curtiss was more than happy to do.
Using his newfound power within the company, Keys waited for the company entered financial difficulties once again. Knowing the exact reason for this, and having gained the knowledge to stop it, Keys acquired the company in 1920.
Quickly restoring it to profitability, the company grew enormously under his ownership, producing aircraft like the wildly successful Curtiss Falcon, Robin and P-1 Hawk, as well as engines like the V-1570.
In July 1929, Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company (and its associated companies) merged with Wright Aeronautical (and its associated companies) to form Curtiss-Wright, with Keys as its new president.
When former Assistant Postmaster General, Paul Henderson, needed financing for his new airline – National Air Transport – in 1924, Keys was the one who gave him the $10,000,000 in startup capital he needed, receiving a share in the company.
In 1928, Keys founded Transcontinental Air Transport (T-A-T) with the help of Charles Lindbergh and provided it with the money it needed to get off the ground so to speak.
T-A-T later merged with Western Air Express to become Transcontinental & Western Air, later known as Transcontinental World Airways (TWA) after Howard Hughes acquired the airline in 1939.
By 1928, Clement Melville Keys had an aviation empire only rivalled by William Boeing’s. Yet, all of his companies were personally owned by him, with Keys longing to bring them all under one umbrella.
Foundation & Early Years
To that end, Clement Melville Keys formally incorporated North American Aviation on December 6 1928 as a holding company for his various aviation-related ventures.
In June 1929, Keys acquired Pitcairn Aviation for $2.5 million (about $40 million adjusted for inflation) and sold it two weeks later to North American at a substantial personal loss, later remaining the company Eastern Air Transport.
Three years later, in 1932, the North American board discovered that he had embezzled company funds to pay off personal debts incurred from his speculation on the stock market (which had collapsed in October 1929), and forced him out of the company.
Fortunately, they allowed him to save face by citing health reasons as his reason for leaving the company.
In 1933, he sold his stake in the company to General Motors, who merged it with their General Aviation Manufacturing Corporation, but retained the North American name.
Sadly, 1934 wasn’t a good year for aviation holding companies like North American.
In light of the 1930 Air Mail Scandal, Congress had started an inquiry into the entire industry, bringing to light the existence of companies like North American, who owned both airlines and aircraft manufacturers.
Believing this was bad for business, Congress passed the Air Mail Act of 1934, which broke up such companies.
With this, North American became an aircraft manufacturer first and foremost, but retained ownership of the newly renamed Eastern Air Lines until 1938.
A New Start
Wanting a chief executive who had hands-on experience designing aircraft to lead the new company, the North American board went out searching for young, yet relatively experienced engineers to lead the company.
The two men they found for the job were James Howard “Dutch” Kindelberger, then the chief engineer at Douglas and his longtime collaborator J. L. “Lee” Atwood.
Hiring them both in 1934, Kindelberger assumed the positions of President and CEO, whilst Atwood assumed the role of chief engineer.
Given near full authority on how the company was run, North American soon moved from Dundalk, Maryland to Los Angeles, California, who allowed for year-round flying thus making it easier for the new company to compete for contracts.
Not long after the move to Los Angeles, the company began work on two aircraft: a single engine trainer known as the NA-16 (which first flew in April 1935) and a single engine observation aircraft known as the O-47 (which first flew in November 1935).
Entering service not too long after, both became extremely popular, primarily with the US Army Air Corps (USAAC), but also other services too, selling 1,935 and 239 times respectively.
Family of Trainer Aircraft
By the standards of the time (and today for that matter!) both the NA-16 and O-47 were incredibly popular, with the NA-16 being one of the most built aircraft in the USAAC’s fleet.
Realizing that whilst there were plenty of companies looking to build fighters and bombers, there was almost no one building trainers. Seeing an opportunity to make a lot of money, North American Aviation began producing its family of primary trainers.
Developed from the NA-16, North American unveiled the NA-19, better known as the BT-9, in April 1936. Produced for both the USAAC and US Navy, North American built over 260 BT-9s, who served alongside the NA-16s well into the 1940’s.
Although it wasn’t as successful as its predecessor, North American Aviation knew it had potential and quickly developed the BT-9 into the BC-1, the first member of the T-6 Texan family.
Selling 177 times in less than a year, the BC-1 was developed into the Harvard, which sold over 400 times and was exported to countries within the US-aligned Commonwealth, namely Britain, Canada and Australia.
Further developments of the BC-1, known as the AT-6 (known as the T-6 after 1948) and the SNJ for the USSAC and US Navy respectively, followed shortly after and similarly became quite popular.
Wanting to start a new family of trainers fit for the 1940’s (as opposed to the T-6 Texan family which was firmly in the previous decade), North American developed the NA-35, though this was later cancelled to focus on other projects.
The final installation of the T-6 Texan family was the NA-64 Yale, released in 1940 and built 230 times.
Undoubtedly popular before the war, when WWII broke out, sales for North American Aviation’s T-6 family skyrocketed, and they ultimately produced well over 20,000 trainers between 1936 and 1946.
Even today, the T-6 Texan is the most widely used trainer in history!
WWII
In 1936, North American designed the XB-21 “Dragon” bomber (given the internal designation of NA-21). Evaluated against the Douglas B-18 Bolo, the Air Corps found that the XB-21 would be more expensive to produce for an inferior aircraft.
Whilst by all means a failure for the company, when the Air Corps solicited designs for a range bomber in 1938, the company developed the NA-40 from the XB-21, but it was passed over in favor of the A-20 Havoc and Martin Maryland.
Though it had poured a fortune in to both the XB-21 and NA-40, when the Air Corps needed a new medium bomber in 1939, North American Aviation once again developed the NA-40 into a new aircraft, this time the NA-62.
Successful in this endeavor, the NA-62 became the B-25 Mitchell. First flown in August 1940, it entered service in 1941 right before the US’s entry into WWII, where it gained fame for being the primary aircraft used on the 1942 Doolittle Raid.
During the war, North American Aviation produced almost 10,000 B-25s, which combined with their over 20,000 trainers from the T-6 family and the 15,000 P-51s, making it so that North American produced the most aircraft of any aircraft manufacturer during the war!
Going from only one factory (its Inglewood factory near Los Angeles) and a line of only a few trainers in 1939, by 1945 the company was producing almost 10 different aircraft and had dozens of factories dotted around the country.
By far the most famous of these factories were the ones in Dallas, Texas, Kansas City, Kansas and Columbus, Ohio.
Enter The P-51 Mustang
In the buildup to WWII, Britain began acquiring more and more aircraft in preparation of what was about to come.
Already supplying the Harvard to them, Britain and North American Aviation had a pre-existing relationship and Britain asked Dutch Kindelberger if his company could build Curtiss P-40 Warhawks under license for them.
However, Curtiss and North American were longtime rivals and Kindelberger instead told the British that his engineers could build a better aircraft, at a cheaper cost, in a faster time period than they could a license-built P-40.
Interested in the idea, the British signed off on it and Kindelberger assigned lead engineer Edgar Schmued to the project, who quickly returned with what he called the NA-73X. Today, we call it the P-51 Mustang.
First flown on October 26 1940, it entered service with the RAF in 1942, where it served alongside other fighters of the day – namely the Spitfire and Hurricane. It entered with the USAAF (the successor to the USAAC) not long after.
During the war, the P-51 Mustang gained a reputation for being one of the most formidable Allied fighters, regularly engaging (and often defeating) German Messerschmitt BF 109s in the European Theater and Mitsubishi Zeros in the Pacific Theater.
Not long after its introduction to RAF, the P-51 was developed into the A-36 Apache (also known as the “Invader” or “Mustang”) ground attack/dive bomber for the USAAF, where it served in Europe and the Pacific from 1942 until 1944.
Postwar Decline
At least for military contractors like North American Aviation, WWII was the best thing that could’ve ever happened.
Orders piled in, they were hiring new employees left, right and center and their names were know across the world. Simply put, their lives couldn’t be better if they tried. But as they say, all good things must come to an end.
And the end came with Japan’s surrender.
On VJ Day – the day Japan surrendered in 1945 – North American Aviation had a backlog of 8,000 orders, mainly from the US military, but also from other Allied militaries too, and a total of 91,000 employees split over a dozen sites.
Whilst everyone was celebrating the end of the deadliest conflict in human history, those militaries were busy cancelling their unfulfilled wartime contracts and retiring entire squadrons of fighters, trainers, bombers and cargo aircraft.
Though necessary (as wartime production had only increased by so much to win the war), the cancellation of these contracts financially ruined companies like North American, who were forced to lay off huge swathes of their workforce.
Going from a wartime high of 91,000 employees in mid 1945, the company had only 5,000 employees by 1946. Its backlog of 8,000 orders was reduced down to a meager 24, mostly for experimental aircraft.
As an aircraft manufacturer whose only clients were militaries (primarily the US military) – who’d all just cancelled their contracts, suffice it to say, finances quickly became tight for the company, even after laying off their employees and scaling themselves back.
Expansion
Having to accept that these contracts were gone and they were never getting them back, North American Aviation relied heavily on financial support from its parent company, General Motors, to design a new series of military aircraft.
During the war, North American had been working on the F-82 Twin Mustang – a twin-engine, twin fuselage derivative of the P-51 Mustang. But it wasn’t just a design on paper, North American had built and test flown a prototype with great success.
Realizing that they were going to need to protect their bombers in the case of another war, the F-82 was ordered by the newly formed USAF, becoming the last piston-powered aircraft ordered by them.
This emboldened the company to design the NA-145, otherwise known as the North American Navion, a piston-powered fighter designed to be the P-51’s successor.
Yet the postwar dumping of near-brand new P-51s (and other fighters) on the open market meant that North American had to sell the Navion at a huge loss just to sell it.
Not surprisingly, when Ryan Aeronautical contacted them about acquiring the Navion’s design from them, North American couldn’t sell it to them quick enough!
Yet, the company also got with the times and entered the jet age too.
Designed specifically for the US Navy, the FJ-1 Fury incorporated several design elements from the P-51 (such as its tail surfaces, wing and canopy) and more importantly, became the first operational jet aircraft used by the US Navy.
As time progressed, and jet engine technology got more advanced, the concept of a jet bomber became more and more realistic, and North American aimed to capitalize on that.
Having begun development of the B-45 Tornado strategic jet bomber during the war, the remaining development was completed after the war and North American had a working prototype by early 1947.
First flown on March 17 1947, the B-45 Tornado entered service with the USAF on April 22 1948, where it became the USAF’s premier bomber (and the first jet bomber used by the US military), even in spite of early engine problems!
However, designing these aircraft wasn’t cheap and placed a huge financial burden on General Motors (especially given that the Navion and the FJ-1 never turned a profit), who later sold their stake in the company by listing it on the stock market.
Korean War
Continued Expansion
Vietnam War
Other Businesses
Atomics International
Autonetics
Rocketdyne
Rockwell Merger
Though North American’s Rocketdyne subsidiary was integral in helping the company maintain its competitive advantage, and just as vital to national security, it wasn’t free from problems.
Having been the primary contractor for the Apollo 1 mission, the company was viewed as one of the most important defense contractors in the US at the time, up there with the likes of Lockheed, Boeing and Convair.
Yet, during a rehearsal test launch on January 27 1967, a cabin fire erupted killing the three crew and destroying the command module.
Wanting to know how it happened, why it happened, and more specifically who was at fault, Congress launched an investigation into the incident. What resulted was both devastating for North American and Congress as a whole.
During the investigation, Senator Walter Mondale leaked an internal NASA document, now known as the Phillips Report, that firmly placed blame on North American, alleging that the company hadn’t performed quality control tests before shipping it to NASA.
Understandably, the public were calling for the heads of North American’s leadership and the report damaged North American’s reputation considerably. As such, when Rockwell-Standard came looking to merge, North American were quite receptive.
Valued at $922 million (roughly $7.6 billion adjusted for inflation), talks began in March 1967 and finally concluded in September 1967, with the two companies merging to become North American Rockwell.
Continuing to expand its interest in aviation, North American Rockwell acquired Collins Radio in 1973 and formally changed its name to Rockwell International that year, reflecting the new global reach of the company.
In 1969, the company began studying designs for what would eventually morph into the Space Shuttle program and won the contract for it in 1972.
Though this made Rockwell the largest NASA contractor of the 1970’s, 1980’s and 1990’s, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 caused the company to divest itself of what was formerly North American Aviation.
Selling it to Boeing in December 1996 for $3.2 billion, they briefly revived the North American name – naming it Boeing North American – before merging it into Boeing Defense, Space & Security (BDS).
Whilst the rest of what was formerly North American remains as a part of BDS, Rocketdyne was sold by Boeing to Pratt & Whitney in 2005. Rocketdyne was later merged with Aerojet (a subsidiary of GenCorp) in 2013, to form Aerojet Rocketdyne.
Legacy
Do you remember North American Aviation? What was their best aircraft? Tell me in the comments!
Featured image courtesy of Joolsgiff via Flickr.