This week we have the twenty-second installment featuring the American aviation Ace, Major Reed Gresham Landis! Landis was flying with the RFC when he scored his dozen victories, all from an S.E.5. Landis was awarded the British Distinguished Flying Cross and the American Distinguished Service Cross. He would survive the war and go on to become chairman of the American Legion during the 1920’s, but returned to service in 1942 where he rose to the rank of colonel—stationed in Washington, D.C.

He passed away May 30th, 1975, aged 78 near Hot Springs, Arkansas.

• Download “Lives of the Aces in Pictures – Part 22: Major Reed G. Landis
  (March 1934, Flying Aces)

Yancey became interested in aviation and the science of navigation while in the Coast Guard after a stint in the Navy. He quickly became a sought after navigator making his first trans-continental flight as a co-pilot in 1927. In 1929 he and Roger Q. Williams flew from Old Orchard Beach, Maine to Rome (in the picture at left, Yancey is loading provisions on his plane while German aviatrix, Thea Rasche looks on); and the first flight from New York to Bermuda in 1930. In 1938 he flew to New Guinea with Richard Archbold for the American Museum of Natural History.

He unfortunately died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 44 in 1940.

• Download “They Had What It Takes – Part 41: “Lon” Yancey”
  (June 1940, Flying Aces)

Douglas was an influential American aircraft industrialist and engineer who founded his Douglas Aircraft Company in 1921 which would become one of the leaders in the commercial aircraft industry. He went head to head with arch-rival Boeing gaining the early advantage throughout production during WWII, but then sadly fell behind with the advent of the jet age. Douglas retired in 1957 and passed away in 1981 at the age of 88.

He was such a big figure in Aeronautics that Popular Science also ran an illustrated feature on his life and career in their December 1940 issue. Illustrated by B.W. Schlatter.

• Download “They Had What It Takes – Part 40: Donald Douglas”
  (May 1940, Flying Aces)

Fokker was training as an automotive mechanic in Germany when he built his first plane—”The Spider”—in 1910. That plane was subsequently destroyed when his partner flew it into a tree. Fokker built another and managed to gained his piolt’s licence flying it. By 1912 he had started his own Airplane Company and quickly established a reputation for building some of the fastest and most stable planes flying at the time. One of the keys to his success is that he personally tested all the planes he designed and kept the pilot in mind asking their opinions on the planes. He sought out the advice of the men on the flight line and brought in the best engineers he could find.

With the outbreak of WWI, Fokker’s designs were very much in demand and soon the greatest names in German aviation—Voss, Immelmann, Boelke and Richtoffen—were being cursed at while flying his planes.

After the war he returned to his native Holland establishing a company there and later emigrating to America where his tri-motor planes helped establish the fledgling airlines and some of the great airplane records of the 30’s. Fokker unfortunately died at 49 in 1939 from pneumococcal meningitis after having been ill for three weeks.

• Download “They Had What It Takes – Part 39: Tony Fokker”
  (April 1940, Flying Aces)

Grover Loening was a noted American aircraft manufacturer, who got his start as an assistant engineer to Orville Wright before starting his own company. He was known for test flying his own planes and at one time employed Leroy Grumman, William T. Schwendler, and Jake Swirbul who left to form Grumman. Of his many accomplishments, Loening was appointed chief aero-engineer for the Army Signal Corps in World War I and was chief consultant to the War Production Board, NACA and Grummand during the Second World War.

Grover Loening lived to the ripe old age of 87, passing away in 1976.

• Download “They Had What It Takes – Part 38: Grover Loening” (March 1940, Flying Aces)

Grumman may have started out as a Navy flier, but he went on to become one of the leaders in Aircraft design and beyond. The company he founded in 1930 by mortgaging his house and pooling that money with several other investors would go on to build some of the key planes of WWII—The F4F Wildcat, F6F Hellcat and the TBF Avenger torpedo bomber. After the war the company continued to supply the Navy with excellent fighter aircraft like the A-6 Intruder in the 1960’s and the F-14 Tomcat of the 1970’s, but sought out new markets as well. They developed the Gulfstream series of corporate Jets and the Apollo program’s Luner Excursion Module (LEM) that landed astronauts on the moon!

Grumman passed away in 1982 at the age of 87, but his company, which had been aquired by Northrop lives on as Northrop Grumman, one of the largest defence contractors in the world.

• Download “They Had What It Takes – Part 37: Leroy E. Grumman” (February 1940, Flying Aces)

William Avery “Billy” Bishop, V.C. has been credited with 72 victories making him the fourth greatest Ace of the First World War. He was made an honorary Air Marshall of the Royal Canadian Air Force and placed in charge of recruitment in 1938 and developed a training program for pilots across Canada during the Second World War. Stress would eventually see him resign his post in the RCAF in 1944, but remained active in aviation, even offering to return to his recruitment role with the RCAF with the outbreak of the Korean War (he was politely refused by the RCAF due to poor health).

Billy passed in his sleep in 1956 while wintering in Palm Beach, Florida and was buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Owen Sound, Ontario where he was born 62 years earlier.

• Download “They Had What It Takes – Part 36: Billy Bishop” (January 1940, Flying Aces)
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According to his wikipedia entry, Major Lord was a keen writer, often chronicalling his exploits. A number of these appeared in Flying Aces while his unpublished papers are held in the archives of the Rabb Collection along with hundreds of photographes of Lord frequently with his plane. Lord even “approached movie production companies in the hopes that his story would be turned into a feature film.”

He lived to the age of 70 when he was killed by a vagrant in Apple Valley, California in 1967.

• Download “They Had What It Takes – Part 35: Major Fred Lord” (December 1939, Flying Aces)
]]> http://www.ageofaces.net/2011/11/%e2%80%9cthey-had-what-it-takes-%e2%80%93-part-35-major-fred-lord%e2%80%9d-by-alden-mcwilliams/feed/ 0 http://www.ageofaces.net/2011/09/%e2%80%9cthey-had-what-it-takes-%e2%80%93-part-34-clarence-chamberlin%e2%80%9d-by-alden-mcwilliams/ http://www.ageofaces.net/2011/09/%e2%80%9cthey-had-what-it-takes-%e2%80%93-part-34-clarence-chamberlin%e2%80%9d-by-alden-mcwilliams/#comments Thu, 08 Sep 2011 22:20:35 +0000 David http://www.ageofaces.net/?p=2812 Alden McWilliams’ illustrated tribute to the pioneer fliers of the early days of aviation was called “They Had What it Takes”, and this week we bring you the 34th installment, which appeared in the November 1939 Flying Aces. . In this week’s installment McWilliams brings his talents to rendering the life of that Trans-Atlantic vet, Clarence Chamberlin.

Clarence Chamberlin just missed out on being the household name that Lindbergh became. When Lindbergh took off, the plane’s owner Levine was still tinkering with the plane and arguing with who would pilot it—thus preventing Chamberlin from becoming the first to fly solo across the Atlantic. However, several weeks later, Chamberlin took off with Levine as a passenger and became the second man to pilot a fixed wing aircraft across the Atlantic to the European mainland, but the first to take a passenger! And he flew further setting a distance record, landing in Eisleben, Germany when he ran out of gas—just 110 miles short of his goal of Berlin.

• Download “They Had What It Takes – Part 34: Clarence Chamberlin” (November 1939, Flying Aces)
]]> http://www.ageofaces.net/2011/09/%e2%80%9cthey-had-what-it-takes-%e2%80%93-part-34-clarence-chamberlin%e2%80%9d-by-alden-mcwilliams/feed/ 0 http://www.ageofaces.net/2011/08/%e2%80%9cthey-had-what-it-takes-%e2%80%93-part-33-arch-whitehouse%e2%80%9d-by-alden-mcwilliams/ http://www.ageofaces.net/2011/08/%e2%80%9cthey-had-what-it-takes-%e2%80%93-part-33-arch-whitehouse%e2%80%9d-by-alden-mcwilliams/#comments Thu, 25 Aug 2011 01:12:25 +0000 David http://www.ageofaces.net/?p=2800 This week we bring you Part 33 of Alden McWilliams’ illustrated tribute to the pioneer fliers of the early days of aviation. He called it “They Had What it Takes” and this installment appeared in the October 1939 Flying Aces. It features our old pal here at Age of Aces—Arch Whitehouse. Whitehouse was a prolific writer, both for the pulps and aviation-themed books after the pulps ended. We’ve posted a number of Whitehouse’s stories from Flying Aces and Sky Birds with some of his long running characters like Buzz Benson, Crash Carringer, Coffin Kirk, The Casket Crew, Tug Hardwick and The Griffon!

Arch Whitehouse was blessed with a fertile imagination which seemed to spill over into the acounts of his own war record. McWilliams piece and Whitehouse’s own biography, Hell in Helmets, credit Whitehouse with shooting down 16 German aeroplanes—at most he may have had 4 kills—it seems that he was something of a serial exaggerator.

We’ve posted this installment long before we started posting the entire series of Alden McWilliam’s “They Had What It Takes”, but here it is in sequence in case you missed it.

Next time: Clarence Chamberlin—Trans-Atlantic Vet.

• Download “They Had What It Takes – Part 33: Arch Whitehouse” (October 1939, Flying Aces)
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