When Cessna, Beech, and Stearman started Travel Air together in a rented room behind a Wichita hotel, no one knew they were starting three of the most famous names in general aviation.
A Pirep featured story · KICT Wichita Dwight D. Eisenhower National, Wichita, KS
On January 26, 1925, four people signed papers to form Travel Air Manufacturing Company in a thirty-foot-square rented room behind the Broadview Hotel in downtown Wichita. The senior partner was Clyde Cessna, a 45-year-old Kansas farmer who had been building monoplanes of his own design since 1912. The two younger partners — Walter Beech and Lloyd Stearman — were former employees of the Swallow Airplane Company who had walked out together a month earlier over a disagreement with their boss about steel-tube construction. The bookkeeper they hired was a 21-year-old named Olive Ann Mellor.
The first Travel Air biplane left the rented room within months. By 1928, the company was the largest-volume aircraft manufacturer in the United States. Wichita's Chamber of Commerce coined a new title for the city that year: Air Capital of the World.
Then it came apart. Cessna wanted to build full-cantilever monoplane wings — no struts, no wires. Beech and Stearman thought it was reckless. In January 1927, Cessna sold his 179 shares of Travel Air stock for $90, shook hands with his partners, and walked across town to start the Cessna Aircraft Company. Stearman left later that year, founding Stearman Aircraft — which Boeing acquired in 1929 and used to build the Kaydet trainer that taught a generation of Allied pilots to fly, and then the B-29 Superfortresses that flew over Japan.
Beech ran Travel Air until 1932, married the bookkeeper, and then founded Beech Aircraft with her as co-founder. Olive Ann Beech ran the company for decades after Walter died in 1950 — for a long stretch, the only woman heading a major American aircraft manufacturer.
Today the airport where commercial aviation lands in Wichita is named Eisenhower National. Within twenty miles of its runways, the descendants of three companies founded by three men who once shared a thirty-foot office still build airplanes: Textron Aviation makes Cessnas and Beechcrafts; Spirit AeroSystems makes Boeing 737 fuselages on the old Stearman / Boeing site. The Air Capital is still the Air Capital.