Ryan Aviation

The future looked overcast and dreary for T. (Tubal) Claude Ryan at the start of 1927. He and his partner, the glad-handing B. Franklin Mahoney, had launched the nation's first year-round regularly scheduled daily airline passenger service two years earlier on March 1. The San Diego-Los Angeles flights sold out at the beginning. Then, with the novelty gone, business dropped and bankruptcy loomed. So Mahoney bought out his partner's share of Ryan Airlines, Inc.

Ryan stayed on as manager. His preoccupation with financial problems left little time for overseeing production of the Ryan M-1, the first plane of his own design. Airmail flyers liked the trim little monoplane for its rugged dependability. Despite its appeal, the trickle of M-1 orders had all but dried up.

Early in 1927 a wire arrived from Robertson Aircraft in St. Louis. : "Can you construct Whirlwind engine plane capable flying nonstop between New York and Paris? Stop. If so please state cost and delivery date." The wire came from Charles A. Lindbergh, former balloonist, wing walker and airmail pilot. He put up $2,000 of his own, obtained backing from St Louis businessmen and convinced them a single-engine plane stood the best chance for the crossing. Other fliers vying for a $25,000 prize for the first non-stop Atlantic flight had opted for multi-engine planes, some of which could not rise off the ground when their oversized tanks were filled with gasoline.

Lindbergh visited Ryan Aviation's San Diego plant, which still exuded pungent reminders of its previous use as a cannery. He felt in his bones time was running out. His first choice, the Columbia aircraft, was unobtainable, so with his options nearly nil he signed papers with the Ryan company and practically moved in. Engineer Donald A. Hall designed just what Lindbergh wanted -a flying gasoline tank almost twenty-eight feet long and with a forty-six foot wing span.

One day a careless worker dropped a crescent wrench that broke off a thumbnail-size piece of the engine's number one cooling fin. Mechanic 0. L. Gray said, "We could smooth that out with a file and paint it, and never know the difference." Lindbergh said, "I'll always know the difference." After a pause he added, 'We want another engine in there."

Gray thought he was kidding. Someone asked, "Why so much perfection in this?" Lindbergh had his reasons: "One is I'm a poor swimmer." In this way the work crew learned of his plans and redoubled efforts in the race against time.

Enmeshed in the firm's economic plight, Ryan rarely became involved in the craft Lindbergh called "The Spirit of St. Louis." The two men shared much in common. Both grew up in small towns: Ryan in Parsons, Kansas, and Lindbergh in Little Falls, Minnesota. They developed affinities for motorcycles, cars and finally airplanes. In San Diego Ryan bought his first aircraft, a jenny trainer, in 1922 for four-hundred dollars. Lindbergh followed suit a year later, paying five-hundred for his Jenny. Both took flying lessons on their own, then benefited from military training schools. And both of them did stints at barnstorming, acquiring along the way know-how in matters such as forced landings, which in the early days of flying rated as routine.

Lindbergh's solo nonstop flight that began outside New York City May 20, 1927 ended thirty-three and a half hours later in Paris. Overnight he became a hero around the world. The flight also made Ryan Aviation famous. Orders for the M-1 came from all parts of the globe to a woefully unprepared company. Ryan, no longer an owner and far removed from the design or construction of "The Spirit of St. Louis," built a protective shell that shielded him from the onrush of news media inquiries about his role in the saga. He kept the shell up for years.

In 1928 Ryan formed The Ryan Aeronautical Company. His knack for anticipating the needs and desires of fliers helped the San Diego firm survive the lean depression years. The Ryan ST (for Sports Trainer) became the Model T of flying, except it looked much sportier. Adapted slightly, the ST served as the preeminent trainer through World War 11. In the years the followed, Ryan built the first jet-plus-propeller aircraft for the Navy and the first successful vertical takeoff and landing aircraft -the Ryan X13 Vertijet. His company pioneered remotely piloted vehicles and jet drones, Doppler systems and lunar landing radar.

Like Lindbergh, Ryan ended up a wealthy and widely acclaimed man. Teledyne, Inc. acquired Ryan's company in 1969 for $128 million.

He started out mowing lawns and delivering The Saturday Evening Post or spending money During school vacations he drove a wagon for his father's Excelsior Steam Laundry in Parsons, where he was born January 3, 1898. His first regular job, a paper route, still left time to watch repairs being made on the town's first automobiles. Later, after the family moved to Orange, California, he invested his savings in a motorcycle, a seven-horsepower model.

After buying his Jenny in San Diego, he charged from two-and-a-half to five dollars a ride, using an improvised air field on the waterfront near the foot of Broadway. Next he shifted operations to Dutch Flats, which later would become the main Postal Service office site. Dutch Flats served as the terminal for the airline passenger service he and Mahoney operated.

"Claude Ryan's name will probably be longer remembered for associations with Lindbergh's plane than for many more significant contributions he made in the half century that followed," according to William Wagner, author of Ryan, the Aviator. T. Claude Ryan died in 1982 at the age of eighty-four while he sketched a rough design concept for a plane with simplified controls. It was a goal that characterized his career - making flying easier for more people to enjoy.

[biographical sketch from San Diego Originals by Theodore W. Fuller, published by California Profiles Publications, 1987]

Ryan Aeronautical Company

T. Claude Ryan, best known for building the plane that Charles Lindbergh flew in his famous 1927 transatlantic flight, was born in Kansas in 1898. He learned to fly in 1917, was trained by the U.S. Army Air Corps, and served with the U.S. Aerial Forest Patrol. In 1922 he established the Ryan Flying School and a business in San Diego, California, for flying sightseers around town. In April 1925, needing capital, Ryan became partners with Benjamin Franklin Mahoney and formed Ryan Airlines. The company converted war surplus aircraft for civil use, rebuilding Standard open-cockpit biplanes to cabin transports. Ryan also acquired the Douglas Cloudster and used it as a passenger plane after modifying it to accommodate passengers in an enclosed cabin. He designed and built about 40 M-1 and M-2 mail/passenger transports in 1926.

Ryan sold his interest in the company to Mahoney in 1926 but stayed on to manage the company. In early 1927, a group of St. Louis investors asked Ryan if he could build a plane for a nonstop transatlantic trip within 60 days. He accepted the challenge and produced the Spirit of St. Louis, which Charles Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic. Ryan, however, had no financial stake in the company and did not receive much in the way of tangible rewards.

Mahoney formed the Mahoney-Ryan Aircraft Corporation in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1928, to capitalize on Ryan's name. The new company produced a number of airplanes but was acquired by the holding company Detroit Aircraft Corporation in May 1929. Detroit folded the next year and sold the factory in October 1930.

Meanwhile, also in 1926, Ryan had established a separate, Ryan Aeronautical Company, primarily to import Siemens aircraft engines from Germany. In 1928, Siemens, which wished to establish its own distributorship in the United States, bought Ryan out for $75,000.

With the money he received from Siemens, Ryan started a flying school in May 1928, and formed the Ryan School of Aeronautics on June 5, 1931. On May 26, 1934, he formed a new Ryan Aeronautical Company, and the school eventually became a subsidiary.

The first design by the new company was the Ryan ST. The prototype's first flight took place from Lindbergh Field on June 8, 1934. The ST was a two-seat, open-cockpit aircraft with fabric-covered braced low-wings and an all-metal fuselage. A 95 horsepower (71-horsepower) inline engine powered it, giving the ST a top speed of almost 140 miles per hour (225 kilometers per hour). With its exceptional handling and speed, the ST caused a minor sensation at the time. However, only five were produced. Less than a year later, the STA appeared. Powered by a 125-horsepower (93-kilowatt) engine, this model set a number of light plane speed and altitude records and also won the 1937 International Aerobatic Championships, piloted by Tex Rankin. The next model was the STA Special, powered by a supercharged 150-horsepower (112-kilowatt) engine. This led directly to the STM (Sport Trainer Military) that had the same engine but a slightly wider cockpit opening to accommodate the wearing of parachutes.

The STM was initially marketed in Latin American. Small numbers of single-seat versions were sold to Bolivia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico and Nicaragua.. The biggest export customer turned out to be the Netherlands East Indies (later Indonesia), which needed a basic trainer when war broke out in Eureope in 1939 and its pilots could not reach the Netherlands for training. In 1940, an order was placed for 84 STM-2 landplane and 24 STM-S2 floatplane trainers that were used as primary, basic, and advanced trainers and for every task except bombing and gunnery training. Following the invasion of Java by the Japanese, several STMs were captured and flown by the invading forces. However, 34 managed to be evacuated by ship to Australia where the Royal Australian Air Force put them into service.

Meanwhile, in 1939, the U.S. Army Air Corps acquired an STA for evaluation under the designation XPT-16. A contract for 15 YPT-16s (the limited version of the XPT) followed. Production for the Air Corps was initiated in 1940 with 30 PT-20 trainers, which were similar to the YPT-16. The next year, Ryan developed a version with an engine that would provide better performance. One hundred PT-21s with a 132-horsepower (98 kilowatt) engine were ordered. Additional trainers were ordered, and with the rapid expansion of training during 1941, Ryan received a contract for 1,023 PT-22 Recruits, which were similar to the earlier model. He also developed the civil S-C cabin version.

Also notable was the experimental YO-51 Dragonfly observation craft, which pioneered short takeoff and landing (STOL) techniques. Ryan delivered three YO-51 test models in 1940, but no production order followed.

Ryan's school also trained thousands of Army pilots during the war, very likely becoming the largest contract flying school in the country during the war.

Ryan received a Navy contract in December 1943, to develop the XFR-1 compound fighter, with a piston engine mounted conventionally in the nose and a turbojet engine in the rear fuselage and exhausting through the tail. This was followed with an order for 100 FR-1 aircraft, later named Fireball. The first XFR-1 flew on June 25, 1944 without the turbojet, and the first flight with both engines took place in July. Deliveries of Fireballs to the Navy began in March 1945, and by that time Ryan had received contracts for a total of 1,300 production aircraft. But cancellations at the end of the war reduced its numbers and none served in the war. They were used extensively for tests aboard aircraft carriers before being phased out in 1947.

In the postwar slump, to stay in the business, the company produced burial coffins for a time. It then turned out Navion planes until the Korean War, a small plane for the personal-business market and for military customers, acquired from the aircraft company North American Aviation. While out of aircraft production, Ryan gained important experimental aircraft contracts and was one of the early leaders in the emerging missile and unpiloted-aircraft fields, along with Douglas, Martin, and Bell companies. Ryan developed the Firebee target drone and the Firebird, the first true air-to-air guided missile. His company also pioneered Doppler systems and lunar landing radar.

There was strong interest in vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) high-performance combat aircraft. The Air Force sponsored the Ryan X-13 Vertijet, which made its first conventional flight on December 28, 1956. It achieved vertical takeoff to horizontal flight to vertical landing on April 11, 1957, but remained strictly experimental. The Vertijet, along with the VZ-3RY, and the SV-5A Vertifan convertiplanes all advanced the field.

In 1955, the Emtor Holding Company, a California investment firm, acquired 20 percent of Ryan. The company originally had gone public in the late 1930s, and Claude Ryan held only 12 percent of the stock by 1955, so Emtor gained effective control. Robert Johnson of Emtor joined Ryan's board and became president in 1961, with Claude Ryan continuing as chairman. Ryan acquired a 50-percent interest in Continental Motors Corporation of Detroit, the aircraft engine producer, in 1965.

Ryan was acquired by Teledyne, Inc., for $128 million in 1968 and became a wholly owned subsidiary of Teledyne in February 1969. Claude Ryan retired but afterward pursued independent experimental work in aircraft for several years.

Claude Ryan died in 1982 at the age of 84.

-Judy Rumerman