Clyde V.Cessna Case Study
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Based in Wichita, Kansas, Cessna Aircraft Company is now the worlds largest manufacturer of private aircraft. The company focuses on the best quality and the nicest design. Cessna began its operations building small propeller-driven aircraft for the private pilot market, than they started to manufacture corporate jets. Since then the company became the leading private jet manufacturer in the industry. In the history of the company many changes happened over the years, in this essay I will write about the beginning of the Cessna Aircraft Company in 1911 to 2010.
In 1911 Clyde V. Cessna, a 33-year-old farmer from Rago, Kansas, founded the company. After he saw an air show in nearby Oklahoma City at the Moisant International Aviation Air Circus he got inspired. He traveled to New York, where he bought a French Bleriot aircraft from the Queens Airplane Company in the Bronx. The plane was sold as a kit, without an engine so he used his own water-cooled engines. Without experience in flying an aircraft Cessna wheeled the aircraft out onto a salt plain near Jet, Oklahoma, to begin practice runs. His brother Roy was an eyewitness of the first takeoff.
Clyde V.Cessna
After local bankers would not lend him any money he moved to Wichita to start a biplane manufacturing company. He partnered with Walter Beech and Lloyd Stearman, and after many difficulties with his partners he decided in 1927 to leave the company to build his own. The Cessna Aircraft Company focuses on monoplane instead of biplane. Then later he flew one of his monoplanes in a demonstration for Beech, who was forced to agree that Cessnas design was excellent. Later the city of Oakland and the Woolaroc produced these two aircrafts, were the first civilian planes to flown to Hawaii.
In the time of economic crisis in 1932 to 1934 the company had to close its doors. Meanwhile, in June of 1933, Cessnas nephew Dwayne L. Wallace graduated from Wichita University with a degree in aeronautical engineering. In 1934 the brothers Dwayne and Dwight took over the company and started working very hard to get the firm out of the depression and back to the old success of the company. They designed the C-34, this airplane did what they were expecting, it established the company as one of the leaders on the American market.
In 1935 Clyde Cessna, now age 55, sold his shares in the company to the Wallace brothers. He remained president of Cessna Aircraft until October 8, 1936, when he retired. In my research I found that his nephews forced Clyde Cessna out of the company. He returned to his 640-acre farm in Rago and invented new farm implements until his death in 1954.
Also in 1936 the C-34, known as Air master became the worlds most efficient airplane with a top speed of 162 miles per hour. Three years later Cessna made the T-50, the first twin-engine aircraft, it was used as a training