Douglas Aircraft Company

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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 simply "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, CA, El Segundo, CA, Long Beach, CA, Torrance, CA, Tulsa, OK, Midwest City, OK, 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.

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.

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, 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 derivative of the Douglas DC-9, essentially the DC-9-95), ceased production in May 2006. Production of the C-17 Globemaster III is scheduled to continue until 2008, which will end nearly seventy years of aircraft production in Long Beach.

1 Aircraft
2 Missiles and Space Launch
3 Further reading
4 External links

[edit] Aircraft

Douglas DC-3

Douglas DC-6

Passengers deplaning a SAS DC-6

Douglas DC-7

DT-1 (1921)
DWC (1923)
O-2 (1924)
C-1 (1925)
M-1 (1925)
T2D (1927)
BT-1/BT-2 (1930)
Dolphin (1930)
O-31 (1930)
B-7/O-35 (1931)
XT3D (1931)
DC-1 (1933)
DC-2 (1934)
B-18 Bolo (1935)
DC-3 (1935)
TBD Devastator (1935)
Douglas DB-7 Boston / A-20 Havoc (1938)
SBD Dauntless (1938)
DC-4E (1938)
B-23 Dragon (1939)
DC-4 (1939)
DC-5 (1939)
Douglas XB-19 (1941)
A-26 Invader (1941?)
BTD Destroyer (1943)
XA-42/XB-42 (1944)
A-1 Skyraider (1945)
C-74 Globemaster (1945)
XB-43 (1946)
DC-6 (1946)
D-558-1 Skystreak (1947)
D-558-2 Skyrocket (1948)
F3D Skyknight (1948)
C-124 Globemaster II (1949)
A2D Skyshark (1950)
F4D Skyray (1951)
A-3 Skywarrior (1952)
X-3 Stiletto (1952)
A-4 Skyhawk (1954)
B-66 Destroyer (1954)
DC-7 (1953)
F5D Skylancer (1956)
C-133 Cargomaster (1956)
F6D Missileer (1958)
DC-8 (1958)
DC-9 (1965)
DC-10 (1971)

[edit] Missiles and Space Launch

[edit] Further reading

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.