James Howard Kindelberger

James Howard Kindelberger (born May 8, 1895 in Wheeling , West Virginia , USA , † July 27, 1962 ) was an American manager in the aircraft industry. Because of his innovations in aircraft production, he is considered one of the most important pioneers in the American aerospace industry.

Life

education

James Howard Kindelberger (called Dutch) was born on May 8, 1895 as a child of German emigrants from Nothweiler / Pfalz in Wheeling, West Virginia. Dutch grew up in the shadow of the large ironworks in Wheeling. His parents taught him typical German virtues: all his life he believed in the value of hard, honest work. He left school at the age of 16 to work like his father in the local steel mill. Under these working conditions, Kindelberger modified his ideas about the value of hard, honest work and now imagines his future life to be different from picking off pig iron every day from seven in the morning to half past five in the evening. For this reason, he took correspondence courses for two years to catch up on his school leaving certificate. He had thus qualified for a job for the engineering group of the American Army, where he initially worked as a civilian draftsman and inspector. In addition, he continued his distance learning, graduated from college, and in 1916 was admitted to study at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh , one of the renowned American technical colleges . 1917 after Dutch had studied one year, the United States entered the First World War one. He volunteered for the US Army Air Corps where he was trained as a pilot . Until the end of the war, Lieutenant James H. Kindelberger worked in Memphis (Tennessee) as a flight instructor and finally decided to take up employment in the young aircraft industry. He took a job as a draftsman with the Glenn L. Martin Company in Cleveland Ohio, where other aircraft designers began their careers at the same time: Glenn Martin and Donald Douglas . Since his position was only paid modestly at $ 27 a week, Dutch gave flight lessons in the evenings and wrote for Popular Mechanics magazine .

California

After six years, in which he had made it to the chief draftsman and deputy chief designer, Kindelberger accepted an offer from his former colleague Donald Douglas in 1925 and became chief designer and vice president of his Douglas Aircraft Company in Santa Monica, California . In the early 1930s he was responsible for the construction of the legendary DC-1 and DC-2 , the first successful American passenger aircraft and in this respect a counterpart to the Junkers Ju 52 .

In 1932 the 39-year-old Dutch Kindelberger had the big chance of his life when he received an offer to move to North American Aviation in Dundalk , Maryland as General Manager . At North American, Kindelberger had to start from scratch. The company had not sold a single aircraft so far, only carried out conversions on other aircraft. Dutch's first project was the construction of a training aircraft for which the US Navy had announced a competition. In just nine weeks of hard work, Kindelberger and his team had completed the prototype of the NA-16, but with which North American lost the competition to the Seversky BT-8 . After the BT-8 turned out to be unsuitable during training, the USAAC ordered an improved NA-16 in large numbers and thus gave the company a better economic basis. Because Southern California had excellent flying weather all year round , North American - like many other aircraft manufacturers - moved to Inglewood in 1935 . Kindelberger had an aircraft factory built there on the outskirts of Los Angeles Airport, which employed workers as early as 1936. The advanced training aircraft, known as the BT-9, became the first major success for North American, in which practically every pilot of World War II was trained. North American's success was not only due to their excellent aircraft. Practically single-handedly, Kindelberger began to convert the production of aircraft from the previously predominant manual methods to mass production based on the model of the automotive industry.

North American's most successful product, the North American P-51 , arose when, in January 1940, the British Procurement Commission responsible for purchasing American weapons asked the North American Aviation Company to license the Curtiss P-40 for British use would produce. James Kindelberger promised greater profits for North American if the company would produce an in-house development and would not have to pay any license fees to Curtiss. He succeeded in convincing the British that a new design could outperform the mediocre performance of the P-40, and thus received an order for 320 machines of the still-to-be-developed type NA-73, which was ultimately named North American P- 51 was made in different versions in approx. 15,000 copies.

In 1960, Dutch Kindelberger retired as CEO of North American Aviation.

literature

• Richard P. Hallion: Test Pilots - The Frontiersmen of Flight . Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington DC 1981, 1988.
• Donald M. Pattillo: Pushing the Envelope: The American Aircraft Industry . The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor 1998.
• Charles D. Bright: The Jet Makers - The Aerospace Industry From 1945 to 1972 . The Regents Press of Kansas, Lawrence KS 1978.

Web links

• aerospacelegacyfoundation.org
• nationalaviation.org
• centennialofflight.gov
• kindelberger.de