North American Aviation

• 1. Introduction

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  North American Aviation built more than aircraft. On the 6th of December 1928, a holding company was quietly incorporated in the United States, its founder Clement Melville Keys more interested in buying and selling airline stakes than in manufacturing anything at all. Within a few years, that same company would be pressed by federal law to reinvent itself. What came next would produce the plane many historians regard as the best American fighter of the Second World War, the rocket aircraft that broke altitude records, the command module that carried astronauts to the Moon, and the second stage of the Saturn V rocket that pushed them there. How does a holding company become one of the most consequential aerospace manufacturers in American history? The answer runs through a labor strike broken by bayonets, a British suggestion about a different engine, a fatal fire in a spacecraft cabin, and a series of mergers that eventually folded the whole enterprise into Boeing.

• 2. Reinvention Under Kindelberger

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  James H. "Dutch" Kindelberger arrived at North American after being recruited from Douglas Aircraft Company, and the first thing he did was move the company. Out of Dundalk, Maryland, and into Los Angeles, California, where the climate allowed flying every day of the year. His strategic instinct was deliberately modest. Rather than challenge established firms on large military contracts, Kindelberger steered toward training aircraft, believing the competition would be easier to navigate. The company's first planes were the GA-15 observation plane and the GA-16 trainer. The approach was pragmatic rather than visionary, but it gave North American the manufacturing experience it would need when the world changed. General Motors had purchased a controlling interest in North American in 1933, merging it with the General Aviation Manufacturing Corporation while keeping the name. NAA also held ownership of Eastern Air Lines until 1938, a remnant of its original life as a holding company. The BC-1 of 1937, North American's first combat aircraft, grew directly from the GA-16 lineage.

• 3. War Production and the Mustang

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  By 1940, North American was opening new factories in Columbus, Ohio; Dallas, Texas; and Kansas City, Kansas, racing to meet wartime demand. The T-6 Texan trainer, the follow-on to the BT-9, would eventually reach a production run of 17,000 aircraft, making it the most widely used trainer ever built. The twin-engine B-25 Mitchell bomber gained international fame through the Doolittle Raid and flew in every combat theater of the war. The P-51 Mustang came about in part because North American refused to produce the Curtiss P-40 Warhawk under licence. Britain needed a fighter; North American delivered its own design instead. The derivative A-36 Mustang was developed as a ground attack and dive bomber, kept in production in part because the US Army Air Corps had not yet committed to buying the type as a fighter. Then the Royal Air Force made a suggestion: swap the P-51's Allison engine for a Rolls-Royce Merlin. That single change, described in the source as possibly one of the most significant events in Second World War aviation, transformed the Mustang into what many consider the best American fighter of the conflict. North American ranked eleventh among all United States corporations by the value of wartime production contracts.

• 4. Bayonets at Inglewood

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  June 1941 brought a crisis that had nothing to do with enemy aircraft. A wildcat strike by a local union closed the North American plant in Inglewood, California, on the 5th of June. The plant was producing a fourth of the nation's fighters. The United Auto Workers had won representation rights over the International Association of Machinists and represented all employees there. The local union's negotiators had demanded the starting wage rise from 50 cents an hour to 75 cents, plus a 10-cent raise for the 11,000 workers already employed. The UAW national leader Richard Frankensteen flew in and could not persuade the workers to return. President Franklin Roosevelt intervened on the 8th of June, sending the California National Guard to reopen the plant with bayonets. Workers were told: return immediately or face the draft. They complied. The political context mattered. During the 22 months from August 1939 to June 1941, Communist union officials in the US had opposed Lend Lease aid to Britain, calling strikes in war industries. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union on the 22nd of June 1941, those same activists reversed course entirely and became the strongest advocates for uninterrupted war production.

• 5. Collapse and Comeback

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  On V-J Day, North American held orders for 8,000 aircraft. A few months later that figure had fallen to 24. Employment, which had peaked at 91,000, collapsed to 5,000 in 1946. General Motors divested NAA as a public company in 1948. Yet the company refused a quiet exit. It returned with the F-86 Sabre, which began as a redesigned FJ Fury and proved itself in Korea by shooting down MiGs. Over 9,000 were built in total; 6,656 in the United States alone, making the Sabre the most produced postwar military aircraft in the West. North American opened facilities in a former Curtiss-Wright plant in Columbus, Ohio, to handle Sabre production. Employment at the Columbus plant grew from 1,600 workers in 1950 to 18,000 in 1952. By the end of 1952, North American's sales had topped 315 million dollars. The F-86's successor, the F-100 Super Sabre, was produced in 2,294 units. But the cancellations of the F-107 and F-108 programs in the late 1950s, along with the Navaho intercontinental cruise missile program, dealt blows from which the company, according to the historical record, never fully recovered.

• 6. Atomics and Autonetics

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  Rocketdyne was not North American's only technical venture into unfamiliar territory. The Atomic Energy Research Department at the Downey plant, established in 1948, was renamed Atomics International in 1955. The division earned a series of firsts: the first nuclear reactor built in California, a small aqueous homogeneous reactor at the Downey plant; the first reactor to deliver power to a commercial grid in the United States, the Sodium Reactor Experiment at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory; and the SNAP-10A, the first nuclear reactor launched into space. As commercial interest in nuclear power declined, Atomics International shifted toward coal gasification and similar non-nuclear energy projects, eventually merging with the Rocketdyne division in 1978. Separately, Autonetics had been growing since 1945 inside North American's Technical Research Laboratory in Downey. Established as a formal division in 1955, it moved to Anaheim, California, in 1963. Its most consequential work was the guidance system for the Minuteman ballistic missile.

• 7. Moon Hardware

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  In 1955, North American spun off its rocket engine work into Rocketdyne, a division that supplied engines for the Redstone, Jupiter, Thor, Delta, and Atlas missiles, and then for the entire Saturn family of NASA launch vehicles. The X-15 rocket plane, built by North American and first flown in 1959, pushed the boundaries of atmospheric flight. North American also built the first of several Little Joe boosters used to test the Project Mercury launch escape system. When the new CEO Lee Atwood decided in 1960 to commit the company to the space program, North American became the prime contractor for the Apollo command and service module, for a larger Little Joe II to test Apollo's escape system, and for the S-II second stage of the Saturn V rocket. The fatal Apollo 1 fire in January 1967 initially drew blame toward the company in the press. A congressional hearing later ruled otherwise. In September of that year, North American merged with Rockwell-Standard to form North American Rockwell. The combined company built the Command and Service modules for all 11 Apollo missions, then won the Space Shuttle orbiter contract in July 1972.

• 8. Into Boeing

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  In February 1973, North American Rockwell changed its name to Rockwell International and designated its aircraft work as North American Aircraft Operations. The Autonetics and Rocketdyne divisions, along with the other defense and space units that traced their lineage directly back to North American Aviation, were sold to Boeing in December 1996. Boeing initially called the acquired group Boeing North American before integrating it into its defense division. Rocketdyne changed hands again in 2005, sold by Boeing to UTC Pratt and Whitney, and then again in 2013, when UTC sold it to Aerojet, which was owned by GenCorp. The T-2 Buckeye naval trainer, developed by the Columbus, Ohio division of North American, flew in training with virtually every Naval Aviator and Naval Flight Officer in the US Navy and Marine Corps for four decades, finally retiring from service in 2008, its name a deliberate nod to both the state tree of Ohio and the mascot of Ohio State University.