Chasing the WINGED STAR

SQUIER COMES TO BURBANK

Detroit Aircraft chose able executives to operate divisions it acquired. And it planned to apply the same mass production and standardization policies that were making the automobile business the world's leading industry. Its first president was Edward S. Evans, Detroit industrialist, and the directorate included Charles F. Kettering, R.E. Olds, and Roy D. Chapin, all active in motor car manufacturing.

Among airplanes built and sold under Detroit Aircraft supervision were commercial versions of Lindbergh's New York-to-Paris Ryan monoplane The Spirit of St. Louis, the Eastman sport seaplane, a monstrous all-metal flying boat called the Blackburn Nile, and Lockheed's Vega and Air Express.

The new management immediately stepped up production of Lockheeds. Experiments began on a metal-framed Vega fuselage, first step toward a metal Lockheed. Several ships had aluminum fuselages built in Detroit and conventional plywood wings turned out in Burbank.

Among wiser division management choices was that of Carl B. Squier as Lockheed general manager. Already a veteran of the aircraft industry, Squier had wide acquaintance among leading flyers, airline officials, and aviation executives. He was a founder of Eastman Aircraft and joined Detroit Aircraft when it purchased the Eastman firm.

When he arrived in Burbank, Squier found the plant facilities weren't impressive. A small red brick building, once a ranch house, served as the front office. Behind it, sharing a building with the Mission Glass Works, were the wood and metal shops. Scattered about were a hangar, two sheds where the sleek wooden airplanes were assembled, a drying shed that stored spruce plywood, and a small service hangar adjoining the flying strip.

Squier investigated everything. He visited the one-room engineering department, once the ranch house kitchen and then headquarters for Chief Engineer Vultee and two draftsmen - James M. Gerschler, who joined the company in May 1928, and Richard A. Von Hake, who came early in 1929. Next Squier looked at his own small office with its rain-soaked ceiling. He glanced at the four-drawer cabinet that contained all the company's files. he sniffed the glue and airplane dope and sawdust, and listened to the hammers and buzz saws.

Then he took off his coat and set out to become within a few years the world's best-known airplane salesman.

LOCKHEED INTRODUCES THESIRIUS

He had two quality products to sell - the Vega and the Air Express. Joining these popular planes late in 1929 was Lockheed's first successful low-wing model, the Sirius.

Northrop had laid out the Sirius, first known as the Explorer, in 1928 on order from Wilkins, the polar flyer. But Wilkins ran out of funds, and workmen stored the partly finished fuselage. Then Harold Bromley, a pilot who hoped to win prize money offered for a Tacomato-Tokyo flight, bought it. An open cockpit design with an unusually long dorsal fin vertical stabilizer, it was the first Lockheed to have balanced rudder, droppable landing gear, and full-length landing skid. Named City of Tacoma, it held enough fuel to fly 5500 miles.