Viewing page 11 of 51

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

[[bold title]] New ED President Made and Flew First Plane While Still A Student in High School [[/bold title]]

[[three columns]]

[[column one]]

George Prudden is Director of Quality Control for Lockheed Aircraft Corporation. He has been with the Company since 1932 when the present organization was established.

He is one of the first men to investigate aviation, and helped establish some of the basic aeronautical knowledge from which airplanes are designed today. For example, a formula worked out by Prudden around 1920 from which he designed an early airplane wing has become a fundamental one still used to figure the distribution of stresses on aircraft wings.

The Wright Brothers built and flew their plane in 1903-seven years later, while still in high school, George Prudden built and flew his first airplane. This he did in secret because no one seriously accepted aviation then-that is, no one but a few farsighted, adventurous young men like Prudden.

Prudden is listed in Who's Who in Aviation; and in the book "Man's Fight to Fly,' is credited with being the first to use successfully an engine in the leading edge of an airplane wing - previously the engines were hung beneath the wings.

Also, Prudden probably had more to do with the development of the all-metal airplane than any other man in aviation; his pioneering work began in 1920.

Prudden has several "firsts" to his credit. He says when he started in aviation, you had to be first - no one had done much of anything yet. When he built his first airplane, at the age of seventeen, he could find no books on aviation, nothing to study. So he just pored over newspaper photos and tried to copy what he saw. This first plane-a glider type-was built after school and on Saturdays. For the first flight, Prudden took one friend with him to the out-skirts of Saint Paul where he lived; they enlisted the help of some farm boys to help tow it for takeoff. The ship took off, so the project was called a success.

"In those days a flight was a success if you got off the ground," Prudden says. "About 100 feet was our longest flight. Of course, you crashed the plane every time, too, and had to make repairs before another takeoff. We flew that plane many times, but always in secret."

While still in high school, Prudden built a second plane. This one had an engine-a Ford L-head - and was a copy of the airplane Bleriot used to make the first airplane crossing of the English Channel.

And in highs school, Prudden organized what probably was the first model airplane club.

Even if he could have found a college offering courses in aeronautical engineering, Prudden could not have attended after graduation from high school, because his conservative parents did not

[[column two]]

approve of his interest in this new-fangled field.

So he went to the University of Minnesota and studied architecture. Later, he found this seemingly un-allied field contributed to solving his aeronautical designing problems. There was practically no data available at that time on structural problems of aircraft, according to Prudden, and he found his architecture basic in figuring stresses and strains on airplane wings.

After college, in 1920, Prudden designed and built, with Bill Stout, an all-metal plane for the Navy. It was for design of this airplane that Prudden developed his "elastic center of inertia" formula, still considered a basic one. For this plane, Prudden built the first internally-stressed wing in the United States-that is without all the external wires and rigging visible in photos of early planes. Four of these planes were contracted for by the Navy, at a cost of $200,000.00 each; but no more than the four were ordered because of the high cost.

There was practically no market for airplanes then, but pioneers like Prudden kept on building them.

In 1923, he built another plane, using this time corrugated metal for a less expensive construction in the hope that he could find a buyer. The corrugated metal eliminated internal ribs and stringers previously necessary for strength. This plane had the same 90-horsepower Ox-5 engine used in the Jenny, and carried 4 people-the Jenny carried 2.

This year, 1923, Prudden decided to build a larger plane for commercial use-he hoped; and to make it safer, he planned to use three engines. But it was impossible then to buy three of the only suitable radial engines, so the birth of a tri-motor was delayed some years.

In 1924, Prudden built still another airplane-a single engine job (Liberty engine), developing 400 horsepower, carrying eight people, and at a cost down to $25,000.00. But still there was no outlet; no one wanted to buy airplanes.

With Sout, Prudden was then working in Detroit, and drew the attention of Henry Ford, Sr.

Ford asked them to put in an airport on his estate at Dearborn so that he could watch progress on aircraft construction. Ford bought four of the 8-place airplanes and used them for transporting parts to and from his plants in Chicago, Cleveland and Buffalo. Performance was excellent, according to Prudden; the first plane was put on a daily schedule between Chicago and Dearborn and never missed a flight in three months.

In all, ten of these airplanes were sold-in addition to Ford's 4-one was used for mail service and five went to

- 6 -

[[third column]]

Florida for airline use. The young aircraft designers were making money at last.

Meanwhile, the radial engine Prudden had wanted for his proposed tri-motor plane was being produced by Wright Aeronautical Corporation, and the airplane took shape again.

In 1925, Ford bought the plant, and the Ford Tri-motor was introduced. Three months after the Ford purchase, Prudden resigned and moved to California to retire.

But his interest in aviation won out, and in 1927 Prudden, with a group of San Diego business men, organized the Prudden-San Diego Airplane Company. Here he built another all-metal, tri-motor airplane; and designed Lindbergh Airport. Incidentally, Prudden was one of seven men to watch Lindbergh's historic takeoff there on his flight to Paris. The inevitable financial troubles of the early aviation company won again, and the company was dissovled.

Around 1928-1929 in Atlanta, Prudden built the first low-wing, all-metal, transport in the United States, an 8-place tri-motor. Also he designed and built Candler Field there.

Concurrently with his Atlanta business, he served as all-metal consultant on a Navy project being undertaken by Curtiss-Wright in New York.

Then in 1932 he came back to the West Coast and the Lockheed company.

His first project at Lockheed was all the stress analysis for the Model 10, Electra; Lockheed's first all-metal airplane. He remembers that this required 700 pages of typing-he did it himself-and the stack reached the height of his typewriter table. Engineers needed to be versatile, then.

A pilot, too, Prudden has flown nearly every Lockheed plane except the old Vega; this includes the PV-1, PV-2, P2V, Constellation, Constitution, and the T-33 Trainer, version of the F-80.

The famous pilots who frequented Lockheed in the early days were his friends-especially, Wiley Post, Amelia Earhart, Sir Charles Kingsford-Smith, Laura Ingalls, and the Lindberghs. Capt. Eddie Rickenbacker he knows from the first World War; Prudden was not officially a pilot in the Service, but his assignment as Regimental Subsistence Officer permitted him to make frequent visits to the nearby airfield, where he promoted as much flying time as he could in Jennies. He retired March 1, 1955, after twenty-five years with Lockheed.

Prudden is President of the "Early Birds," an organization of three-hundred and fifty pilots who soloed before the first World War - in the United States, before 1916; in Europe, before 1914. He is a member of the "Quiet Birdmen."