Articles from The Downey Eagle on the NASA site in Downey
The Time Traveler Series

The pre-Vultee aviation history here in Downey

DOWNEY-Many are aware of the great strides in space exploration achieved during the years of the Apollo moon landing and Space Shuttle programs here in Downey, but this community also has a history of aviation development at the same site that dates back to the 1920s.
As stated in a previous story, the history of aerospace in Downey dates to E.M. Smith, a wealthy industrialist who founded the E.M. Smith Co. (EMSCO) in 1911 to manufacture transmission belting, rubber products, and hydraulic brake linings. Smith's holdings included the EMSCO Asbestos products factory in Downey and a newly purchased Albatross Company, a small aircraft company in Long Beach. Envisioning a landing field that could be used by both commercial and private pilots, Smith bought a 73-acre tract of Downey land from James Hughan. The land was largely orange groves and castor beans with a few farm structures.

Due to lagging sales and the depression, Smith leased the plant to Champion Aircraft Corporation in 1932, whose goal was the manufacture of safe, low cost, two-seater planes that people could afford to fly. They were not beautiful, often compared to bathtubs, but featured a simple and sturdy tandem seat design and were meant to fly at low altitude and at speeds as low as 10 miles per hour. Sales were not any better for Champion and in seven months the plant was turned over to the Curtiss Manufacturing Company of Los Angeles which hoped to build trucks, buses and airplanes here. Before their plans developed, however, the plant was leased to the Security National Aircraft Corporation only five months later.
Security National was owned by Walter B. Kinner, an innovative and experienced pilot who had been the head of Kinner Airplane and Motor Corporation of Glendale. Builder of the Kinner motor, he designed and built two planes for Amelia Earhart. The first was called "The Canary," and was bought by Earhart after she took flying lessons in it at Kinner Field in Long Beach. The second plane was bought in Boston in 1925 after she invested money in a Kinner company.

Kinner dreamed of being to the aircraft industry what Henry Ford was to cars. He focused on a folding wing patent on a plane with side-by-side seating that could fit in a garage when "folded." He flew the aircraft at the 1933 Los Angeles Air Races. It was called the Security "Airster," but despite a reasonable price of $1,985 sales were slim. Kinner decided to move his operation to Van Nuys Airport and sold the Downey plant to the Baker Oil Tools Company. Baker used it for storage.
Jerry Vultee, finding financial support from Erret L. Cord (of Cord auto fame), designed the Vultee V-1 prototype, an eight passenger commercial air transport. Due to revised requirements by the Aeronautical Branch of the Department of Commerce, the V-1 became the V-1A with accommodations for two pilots in the cockpit. The plane was an immediate sensation and was purchased by American Airlines. But by 1936, its orders were dwindling, and Vultee looked toward the military market by designing the V-11 attack bomber.

Recalling the EMSCO plant in Downey where he had worked for a year, Vultee leased the plant from Baker Oil Tools in 1936, and moved his Aviation Manufacturing Corporation from Glendale to Downey.
Vultee's first customer for the V-11-G and V-11-GB was the Chinese National Government which ordered 30 V-11-Gs. The Soviet Union ordered one, and the Turkish government ordered 40 V-11-GBs, while Brazil took 26 V-11-GBs.
But tragedy struck when Vultee and his wife were killed in an air crash in Arizona while en-route to Washington, D.C. in January 1938. He was succeeded as president and general manager of the Vultee plant by Richard Palmer who became chief engineer in 1940, and the plant was named Vultee Aircraft. A new plane known as the V-12-C was ordered by the Chinese who took 26 in 1939. And the U.S. government ordered training planes in a contract worth $2,986,000 with Vultee in August of the same year. The plant was redesigned to meet the new production demands. More

Sources of this series on Downey aviation history include the July 1999 Preliminary Final Historic Buildings and Structures Inventory Evaluation published by NASA).