The
Douglas Aircraft Company was an American aerospace manufacturer, based in
Long Beach,
California
. It was founded in 1921 by
Donald Wills Douglas, Sr. and
later merged with
McDonnell
Aircraft in 1967 to form
McDonnell
Douglas. It is currently a part of
Boeing's Commercial Airplanes
division.
History
The
Douglas Aircraft Company was founded by Donald Wills Douglas, Sr. in July
1921 in Santa Monica,
California
, following dissolution of the Davis-Douglas
Company. An early claim to fame was the
first circumnavigation of the
world by air in Douglas planes in
1924.
It is most famous for the "DC" (Douglas Commercial) series of
commercial aircraft, including what is often regarded as the most
significant transport aircraft ever made: the
DC-3, which was also produced as a military
transport known as the
C-47 Skytrain
or Dakota. Many Douglas aircraft had unusually long service lives,
and many remain in service today.
Douglas created a wide variety of aircraft
for the United
States
armed forces, the Navy in particular.
The company initially built torpedo bombers for the U.S. Navy, but
developed a number of variants on these aircraft including
observation aircraft and a commercial airmail variant. Within five
years the company was turning out over 100 aircraft annually. Among
the early employees at Douglas were
Edward
Heinemann,
"Dutch"
Kindelberger, and
Jack
Northrop (who went on to found
Northrop).
The
company retained its military market and expanded into amphibians
in the late 1920s, also moving its facilities to Clover Field
at Santa Monica. The complex in Santa Monica
was so large that the mail girls used roller skates to deliver the intra-company
mail. By the end of World War II, Douglas had
facilities at Santa Monica, El Segundo
, Long Beach, and Torrance
, California; Tulsa
and Midwest
City
, Oklahoma; and Chicago, IL
.
In
1934 Douglas produced a
commercial two-engined transport, the
DC-2, following it with the famous
DC-3 in
1936.
The wide range of aircraft produced by Douglas included airliners,
light and medium bombers, fighters, transports, observation
aircraft, and experimental aircraft. During World War II, Douglas
joined the BVD (
Boeing-
Vega-Douglas) consortium to
produce the
B-17 Flying
Fortress. After the war, Douglas built another Boeing design
under license, the
B-47
Stratojet.
Women at work on bomber, Douglas
Aircraft Company, Long Beach, California in October 1942.
World War II was a major earner for Douglas. The company produced
almost 30,000 aircraft from 1942 to 1945 and the workforce swelled
to 160,000. The company produced a number of aircraft including the
C-47 (based on the
DC-3), the
DB-7 (known as the
A-20, Havoc or Boston), the
Dauntless
and the
A-26 Invader. The company
suffered at the end of hostilities, facing an end of government
orders and a surplus of aircraft. It heavily cut its workforce,
sacking almost 100,000 people. As part of their wartime work
Douglas had established a
United States Army Air Forces
think-tank, a group that would later become the
RAND Corporation.
Douglas continued to develop new aircraft, including the successful
four-engined
DC-6 (1946) and their last
prop-driven commercial aircraft, the
DC-7
(1953). The company had moved into jet propulsion, producing their
first for the military - the conventional
F3D Skyknight in 1948 and then the more 'jet
age'
F4D Skyray in 1951. Douglas also
made commercial jets, producing the
DC-8 in
1958 to compete with the new
Boeing
707.
Douglas was a pioneer in related fields, such as ejection seats,
air-to-air, surface-to-air, and air-to-surface missiles, launch
vehicles, bombs and bomb racks. Douglas was eager to enter the new
missile business in the 1950s. Douglas moved
from producing air-to-air rockets and missiles to entire missile
systems under the 1956
Nike program and
becoming the main contractor of the
Skybolt
ALBM program and the
Thor ballistic missile program. Douglas also
earned contracts from NASA, notably for designing the
S-IVB Stage of the enormous
Saturn
V rocket.
In
1967, the company was struggling
to expand production to meet demand for
DC-8 and
DC-9 airliners and the
A-4 Skyhawk attack plane. Quality and cash flow
problems, DC-10 development costs, combined with shortages due to
the
Vietnam War, led Douglas to agree to
a merger with
McDonnell
Aircraft Corporation to form
McDonnell Douglas. Douglas Aircraft
Company continued as a wholly owned subsidiary of McDonnell
Douglas, but its space and missiles division became part of a new
subsidiary called McDonnell Douglas Astronautics Company.
McDonnell Douglas later merged with
Boeing in
1997. Boeing combined the Douglas
Aircraft Company with the Boeing Commercial Airplanes division,
ending more than seventy-five years of Douglas Aircraft Company
history. The last Long Beach-built commercial aircraft, the
Boeing 717 (a third generation version of
the Douglas DC-9), ceased production in May 2006. The
C-17 Globemaster III is the last
remaining aircraft being assembled at the Long Beach facility, as
of 2008.
Aircraft
Passengers deplaning a SAS DC-6
Missiles and Space Launch
References
- The Entrepreneurs: Explorations Within the American
Business Tradition, Robert Sobel
(Weybright & Talley 1974), chapter 8, Donald Douglas: The
Fortunes of War ISBN 0-679-40064-8.
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