The L-3805 prototype nicknamed the Blue Goose. Flying in the right seat during a military competition is Ted Smith. For his book Stars and Commanders, Dave Duntz conducted years of research, including with Ted Smith’s unpublished memoir. The memoir is presented in part here, as Chapter 12 in Duntz’s book. You can purchase Duntz’s book at www.starsandcommanders.com.
In July of 1950 I had a call from Rufus Amis and he asked me to come to Oklahoma City to discuss the project. I followed up on the suggestion and visited with Rufus and Bill Amis in their construction office. With smiles on their faces, they told me that they, together with George Pew, would provide $400,000.00 to start the airplane in production provided we could get our key people to move to Oklahoma City to get the program started.
Indeed, this was good news and news that I had hoped for! I immediately contacted ten key people: Al Moore and Bill Hobbs in engineering, Richard McInturff, Harry Branton, Ernie Bahr, Andy Anderson, Rod Absher, Sidney Judge, and Dave Olsen from the shop, and Bert Bantle. Bert Bantle was very enthusiastic about the potential and had learned to love the airplane so he agreed to leave the C.A.A. and move to Oklahoma City to be in charge of flight test. I, too, agreed to move to Oklahoma City, making a total of eleven people.
At that time the labor pool in Oklahoma City and in the little towns surrounding provided one of the greatest pools of experienced aircraft people to be found anywhere including the Los Angeles area.
The corrugated tail would be used until the 500B change to flat skins. Aero Design photo by Wayne Entrekin, Wartinger Collection.
The plant as mentioned before was located on Tulakes Airport near Bethany, Oklahoma. Nearby there was the city of El Reno about 20 miles west, Cimarron about 10 miles west, and other little towns close in and all containing good trained people. Since Douglas Aircraft had a very large manufacturing plant on Tinker Air Force Base where the Douglas C-47 (DC-3) was built by thousands and in Tulsa, Douglas had built a beautiful plant to manufacture the A-26 but few were built as the war ended before they really got started.
We were on our way. I returned to Los Angeles and Amis followed shortly thereafter as it was imperative to get started as soon as possible. We started looking for machine equipment that would be needed. The prototype tooling would have to be increased to start production, but most of the templates and form blocks had already been built for the prototype and could be used for initial production. I had already made layouts and had drawn up the specifications for the changes that were to be engineered into the production model to be called the Model 520. Primarily these changes were:
- Extension of the nose with finer lines leaving space for better nose gear installation.
- Batteries were to be located aft of the baggage door in a compartment by themselves, installed on tracks with a door on the outside so the batteries could be rolled out for ready access and maintenance. The baggage compartment was located just aft of the cabin with a large external door for access to the compartment.
- Electric trim for rudder and elevator. (The Aero Commander was the first commercial airplane to use electrically controlled trim.)
- Electric fuel shutoff valves (another first in the industry).
- Rudder aerodynamic balance to be redesigned to eliminate the spring device and a dorsal fin to be added.
- Geared GO-435 Lycoming engines of 240 HP continuous/260 HP for 10 minutes, were to be installed instead of the O-435, 190 H.P. direct drive engines. The new geared engines contained pressure carburation instead of float type carburation that was used on the O-435 series of engines.
- Refinement of instrument panel and overhead panel, as well as the control quadrant.
- Control wheel design was to be changed to two yokes joined at the center line of the fuselage with bicycle chain running down through the yokes to connect to a cable and sleeve at the center line of the floor for interconnecting the ailerons. This new control yoke design eliminated the through-the-instrument panel arrangement that had been used on the prototype.
- Rudder pedals and posts were to be redesigned as castings instead of built-up welded steel construction.
- The cooling system for the engine was to be redesigned to incorporate augmenter tubes to replace cowl flaps.
- Engine mounts were to be redesigned to accommodate the GO-435 geared engine and 93-inch diameter, all metal hydraulic diaphragm propellers were to be used in lieu of the Aeromatic propellers. Although not constant speed, it would give us controllable pitch from the control in the cockpit.
- Engine cowlings, as well as the induction system, were to be redesigned to accommodate the increased induction system requirements of the GO-435 engine.
- The nose gear was to be changed from the Firestone trailing type gear to the Navion nose gear, which for a while, we purchased directly from Ryan Aircraft who were building the Navion single engine aircraft. The Navion gear was later replaced by a gear of similar design and dimensions built by the Electrol Company in New York.
- Other minor changes we contemplated as refinements to the overall aircraft and to add comfort to the seating and re-arrangement of the interior for improved appearance.
Obtaining equipment and adding tooling was the first in importance. Some of the people from the West coast moved to Oklahoma City early in September of 1950 and the entire crew by the first of October 1950. In the interim I was making trips back and forth between Oklahoma City and Los Angles and to the Detroit area looking for machine tools.
We began hiring from the local area just as soon as our key people started arriving from the West Coast. The tooling shop was set up in the little building adjacent to the hangar and we hired Joe Waddell, an experienced tool builder, to work with Rod Absher, who was appointed Operations Manager. An engineering department was developed with those engineers from the original group that came from California together with others that we hired locally. A good stress man, Hal Cronkite, was hired for structural analysis and other engineers and draftsmen to get started on the new engineering program.
All certification data was transferred from the Los Angeles Western region to the Fort Worth Midwestern region and the Chief there was Ted Von Rosenberg, a person who had formerly been in the Western region, and he, too, was happy to have the new project in his group. He was most cooperative and provided every assistance possible.
We purchased an Onsrud double arm router from a company in Culver City, California. In Detroit, Michigan we were able to purchase a very good hydro press of 100-ton capacity. We had built, by a Los Angeles Company, a salt bath cold water quench heat treat system to heat treat aluminum alloys. Just as soon as the equipment arrived and tooling was set up, we were on our way to building the first production Model 520.
From a bare hangar on Tulakes Airport in September 1950 we were underway in 60 days including the hiring of additional engineering people and shop staff.
Rufus became President of the company; Bill Amis was elected Vice-President and George Pew being major stockholder became Chairman of the Board. I was appointed General Manager of the entire operation.
In the interim we hired Carl Wooten as Sales Manager, who had formerly been with Beechcraft at their factory in Wichita, but had just sold out a Beechcraft Distributorship in the South. Carl had a wide background in aircraft sales and was just the man for the job—a very personable, highly qualified salesman and he became a great asset to our team.
About the middle of October 1950, we received word through a friend of ours in Washington, D.C. that there would be a competition at Fort Bragg, South Carolina for the purchase of a large quantity of single engine and also twin-engine aircraft. The order was to be placed by the Army Transportation Department and all aircraft had to be under 5000 pounds gross weight.
This requirement was of interest to us as we felt an opportunity existed by taking part in the demonstration to further broaden the exposure of the Aero Commander, and, if nothing else, the military would get a good insight into the capabilities of our aircraft.
We obtained copies of the military requirements, did some performance studies, and concluded if we increased the gross weight of the prototype to 4800 pounds, install the 260 hp GO-435 geared engines, we could easily meet the requirement set by the military.
Work immediately started. GO-435 engines were ordered from Lycoming and upon receipt installed in the prototype with the 93-inch diameter Hartzell metal propellers. The airplane was painted a light blue, retaining the original red trim. Bert Bantle, who would perform all of the demonstration work, nicknamed the airplane “Blue Goose”.
It was now December of 1950 and the competition was to be conducted during the winter of 1951. Cold weather had set in and the prototype was without a heater which resulted in a very cool cockpit. The nose wheel well was not completely sealed so there was a lot of cold air entering the cabin from there too. It was necessary to wear heavy clothing but even so the occupants of the airplane were uncomfortable from the cold. We did hope, however, that Fort Bragg would have a more temperate climate, which we found later to be true.
After all modifications to the aircraft were completed, Bert and I flew over to Wright Field, who had jurisdiction over the competition for the Army. At Wright Field all of the entries in the Fort Bragg program were briefed on the requirements and given a schedule of when each event would take place. All of the rules were spelled out so that each pilot would be knowledgeable of what was to be expected. A point system was spelled out for each maneuver, and the aircraft that obtained the highest score would be the winner of the competition.
Bert and I flew on to Fort Bragg, made official entry, and the next day the competition started. The Army was most interested in short field performance, taking off and landing over a 50-foot barrier, rates of climb at full gross weight to an altitude, and other requirements pertinent to the use of a utility aircraft.
In the competition Beechcraft had the prototype of the Twin Bonanza, the Model 50, the airplane that resulted from the conversation that Walter Beech and I had almost three years ago. As I recall there were only two twin engine aircraft entered in the competition: The Aero Commander and the Beech Model 50.
The Aero Commander performed beautifully under the skilled hands of Bert Bantle, but the twin engine Bonanza did not do too well. In attempting a short, short field landing and approach on one occasion, obviously trying to outperform the Aero Commander, the pilot could not control the rate of sink at the low speed and dropped the airplane in very hard, collapsing both main gears. The aircraft sustained substantial structural damage and, being of low wing design, damaged both propellers and engines. It was a sad ending for the Twin Bonanza during the last part of the competition.
As it turned out the Aero Commander won the competition hands down and scored the highest points. We later learned, however, that the contract could not be given to Aero Design and Engineering Company, Inc. The reason given was that we were not yet in production! The production version was not yet built or certified so the contract was awarded to Beechcraft. We learned later in dealing with government contracts, they in reality are not very lucrative. It was just as well we did not get the contract as it would have caused a great burden on a new company whose main purpose was to build business aircraft.
Anyway, we continued with getting tooled up, organized, and prepared to build the Aero Commander on a production basis. Our entire staff was a dedicated and loyal group of people with most of them so interested in seeing the company get started and grow that hours meant nothing. They worked days, nights, and weekends to push on toward the completion of the first production aircraft.
Model 520 mockup from the Ron Smith Collection
