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(More customer reviews)Lloyd Stearman established one of the more famous airplane manufacturing companies in Wichita, Kansas. After a series of biplanes were designed and put into production the company built the primary trainer, (10,346 of them) that was used by the Army Air Corp in World War II. This detailed book is the complete story of Stearman and the aircraft that they produced.
It's also the story of the advances in aviation. It begins with fabric covered wooden biplanes powered by the War Surplus Curtis OX-5 engine. From there the story progresses to metal framed designs, and eventually to all metal monopplanes. As the depression deepened, the Stearman Company was merged into United Aircraft and Transport Corporation, which owned among other companies, Boeing. Unlike most companies, Boeing used the low prices during the depression to expand. When World War II started the company had the capacity to build not only the primary trainer, but 750 gliders, 1,769 B-29's and subsequently 1,390 B-47 and 467 B-52 jet bombers.
The book has an amazing collection of photographs, including pictures of just about every type of airplane built there. The final section of the book has several pages of color photographs showing the colorful paint schemes sported by Stearmans. You can still buy a Stearman in perfect flying condition for about $125,000.
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The history of the Stearman Aircraft Company is about American entrepreneurship, aeronautical innovation, and the sheer determination to design and manufacture custom-built airplanes that set a standard for the competition to follow. In his new book Stearman Aircraft, author Edward Phillips follows the career of Lloyd Carlton Stearman from his work on the New Swallow biplane to the expansion of Stearman facilities into Boeing Airplane Company plants. In between was the Travel Air years, out of which came the Model A, B, CH, CW, BW, and Type 5000. The book also pays special attention to Stearman's rare C1 and C2 biplanes, as well as later upgraded C2s, the C3 series, the M-2, the LT-1, the luxurious CAB-1, the Model 6 Cloudboy, and others. During World War II, Boeing's sprawling facilities churned out thousands of Kaydet biplanes to train fledgling aviators, more than 1,600 B-29 Superfortresses heavy bombers to pound Japan into submission, and a steady stream of critical airframe assemblies for the famed B-17 Flying Fortress to reduce Hitler's Third Reich to rubble. For its work on these great aircraft, Boeing's Wichita Division earned six Army-Navy "E" awards for excellence in manufacturing and production.
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