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A brief history of Cunningham-Hall

Flight Journal, Aug 2000 by Bowers, Peter M

The publicity generated by the recent restoration and flying of one of its PT-6F biplanes has made Cunningham-Hall familiar to today's aero enthusiasts. But what of the obscure company itself? When and where did it exist, and how did it get its hyphenated name?

The story goes back a long way. In 1838, the James Cunningham & Sons Co. was formed in Rochester, New York, as a coach-building firm, and it was soon famous for its high-quality vehicles. After WW I, it replaced horse-drawn carriages with automobiles. These were not mass-- produced on assembly lines like contemporary Detroit products; they were handbuilt in the old carriage tradition: every unit was built individually-usually as a custom order. Cunningham even built its own engines, and even in the 1920s, total annual production never exceeded 350 units. These included luxury limousines-considered to be the American equivalent of the Rolls-Royce-hearses and ambulances.

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In 1928, at the height of the "Lindbergh boom," the firm decided to add airplanes to its product line. By coincidence, a group of engineers and managers from the Thomas-Morse (T-M) Aircraft Corp. of Ithaca, New York, had resigned from that firm because of its upcoming absorption by the Consolidated Aircraft Co. of Buffalo, New York.

This group included Randolph Hall (assistant chief engineer of T-M), W.T Thomas (in 1912, he was among the founders of the Thomas Bros. Aeroplane Co., which became Thomas-Morse Aircraft Corp. in January 1917, following a merger with the Morse Chain Co.), W.R.R. Wymann and Paul Wilson (a T-M test pilot).

Without formally becoming a company, the group started to design a large, six-- place, all-metal-construction biplane that would have a fabric covering. Early in 1928, this group and the Cunningham group formed the Cunningham-Hall Aircraft Corp. F.E. Cunningham was president, and Half was vice president and chief engineer. The new firm set up shop in the existing carriage works, where all the necessary manpower and skills for airplane production were already available. Design work on the biplane, now designated PT-6 for "personal transport, six-place, continued.

Powered with the new 300hp Wright J-6-9 radial engine, the first unit flew on April 3, 1929. True to the carriage-making tradition, by contemporary airplane standards, it had a truly luxurious interior with synthetic red "leather" on the walls and cane-and-rattan seats-even curtains at the windows! Its registration number was originally NX461 E, but the serial number did not follow usual aircraft practice, which was to use either 1 or 101 for the first unit. Its serial number2961-seems to have fitted in with the serial numbers of the Cunningham cars, but the second PT-6 NC692W-- built a year later, had serial number 2962, so that theory doesn't fit.

The Approved Type certificate A-177 was awarded to the PT-6 in July '29, and its advertised price was $16,000-soon reduced to $13,900. Work on the second PT-6 was delayed while the firm developed Model X for the Guggenheim Safe Airplane Contest of November 1929. This design was a two-seat, low-- wing monoplane with full-- span slotted flaps on the lower wing and a small upper wing that supported the ailerons. It was registered X90N, but its serial number, 2921, was out of sequence with the PT-6s.

That plane was developed in too much of a rush to be perfect; it was ferried to the contest site two days after its first flight on October 2, 1929, after only two hours of flying time. It was disqualified early in the contest, but after being extensively tweaked at the factory, the unique Hall highlift features proved their worth.

By 1930, the Great Depression was well under way and killed the market for airplanes such as the PT-6. In the early 1930s, many long-established firms closed down. Having sold only two PT-6s by then, Cunningham-Hall survived the Depression by manufacturing industrial products in its car factory.

Aircraft engineering continued, however, and another-- but more conventional-- design was built to use Hall's high-lift devices. Model GA-21 (for "general arrangement") was an all-metal, side-by-- side, two-seat, sport-type, low-wing monoplane with prominent wheel spats. This airframe, registered X14324 (serial number 211), underwent several modifications and redesignations-from GA-21M (for "modified") through the tandem-seat GA-36--but it was never produced for sale.

In 1937, a Philippine mining company ordered a freighter version of the PT-6. From the material on hand, the first and only PT-6F ("F" for "freighter") was built. This version omitted the luxury features, had a two-section cargo door at the right rear of the cabin and a hatch in the cabin roof for top loading. The cabin was expanded back into the baggage compartment and lined with metal. The engine was now a 330hp Wright R-975E-I (an improved J-6-9) with a two-position propeller and an NACA cowl.

The original registration was NX16967, serial number 381. After being added to ATC A-177, the U.S. registration was canceled and the Philippine registration NPC-44 was applied ("N" representing United States; "PC" for Philippine Commonwealth). The customer could not take delivery, so the PT-6F got a new U.S. registration number easily converted from the Philippine number: NC444. Oddly, this was only four digits from that of the special Sikorsky S-43 amphibian that had been built for Howard Hughes-- NR440.

A brief history of Cunningham-Hall

Flight Journal, Aug 2000 by Bowers, Peter M

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