The Airplane - Jay Spenser [52]
Like all Fokkers, the F-10A had a sealed plywood-skinned wing. As it turned out, cracks had developed in the crashed machine’s wing. Rainwater had seeped in, softening the plywood and dissolving organic glues. Like a ticking time bomb, this undetected deterioration had progressed to the point where the weakened structure simply could take no more. Although the airplane was just eighteen months old, it had failed catastrophically under normal flight loads.
Fallout from the 1931 crash of a Fokker F-10A, which killed football coach Knute Rockne, hastened U.S. adoption of all-metal airliners.
Museum of Flight, Seattle
All Fokkers in the U.S. fleet were summarily grounded and mandatory inspections were performed. When similar deterioration was found in other Fokkers, trust evaporated in wooden flight structures (on Fokkers, only the wings were wooden). All of this came as a great blow to Anthony Fokker, whose F.VII trimotor in particular had found wide use in the U.S. civil fleet.
Tony Fokker had immigrated to the United States, become a naturalized citizen, and started two airplane factories in New Jersey and West Virginia. His airplanes had set many international records and were the state of the art. But the Kansas crash—together with the spreading Great Depression, triggered by the U.S. stock market crash of 1929—effectively put him out of business.
Rockne’s loss thus became a catalyst that propelled aviation forward. It ensured that subsequent U.S. airliners would be built entirely of metal, wings included.
On May 20–21, 1927, a slender twenty-five-year-old U.S. airmail pilot named Charles Lindbergh flew his monoplane Spirit of St. Louis all the way from New York to Paris nonstop. His thirty-three-and-a-half-hour solo flight thrilled the world.
Photographs suggest one reason why Lindbergh’s flight had such cultural resonance. Hollywood’s finest casting and prop departments could not have matched the visual perfection of this clear-eyed young Swedish American flier and his graceful silver ship. But more was at work here than poetic appeal.
By directly linking two of the world’s great cities, Lindbergh’s flight audaciously suggested commercial air travel might someday be possible between the world’s continents. Airplanes would not just rival the train; someday they might also give ocean liners a run for their money.
With Lindbergh, America seemed to become “air-minded” overnight, though in fact technological progress had been ongoing. A critical mass had been reached, however. Assuming leadership in the spectrum of flight-related technologies, the United States took off and left the rest of the world behind.
Charles Lindbergh and the Ryan NYP Spirit of St. Louis, 1927.
Museum of Flight, Seattle
The Wright brothers had single-handedly dominated aviation through the year 1908, after which they quickly fell behind. France assumed the lead and held on to it through most of World War I. Before that war ended, however, Germany had claimed the mantle of aviation leadership. Dominant in the sciences since the latter part of the nineteenth century, German inventors, mathematicians, and theoreticians remained in the forefront throughout the 1920s.
Now with the 1930s, America’s turn had come again. Serving notice that this was the case were two single-engine U.S. mail planes that took to the skies at the start of the decade. The first was Jack Northrop’s all-metal Alpha, which flew in March 1930 in the Los Angeles area. The Alpha—the first production airplane to employ all-metal semi-monocoque construction—had a fully cantilevered wing unsullied by struts or wires.
Returning by ship to America, Lindbergh and his Spirit of St. Louis made a triumphal 1927–28 tour of the United States and Latin America, drawing large crowds wherever they landed.
National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution
Some two months later and 950 miles (1,500 kilometers) up the West Coast of North America, Seattle saw the first flight of the Boeing 200 Monomail. A rival airplane built to the same configuration, the