When Henry Ford made state-of-the-art airplanes and fought against jazz

Aug 30, 2021

A Ford Trimotor 5-AT-B once owned by Charles Lindbergh’s Transcontinental Air Transport (later TWA), at Waukegan (Ill.) Airport

Rattling and banging, the 93-year-old Ford Trimotor 5-AT-B prop plane rose heavily from the Waukegan Airport runway, then moved forward at a barely-perceptible velocity.

If it were a modern jet aircraft, it would stall and crash as it cruised at only 85 mph. So there was a modicum of terror.

Chill, I told myself. You’re up too high to jump out anyway.

But every pitcher in the American and National Leagues can throw faster than this 15-passenger airplane was flying.

In 1925, Ford Trimotor planes like this one started rolling off the assembly lines of the same Dearborn, Michigan plant where Henry Ford’s company was then making Model T’s.

Ford, a conservative inside and out, understood that many people were still very afraid of flying. So he insisted that the Trimotors be built entirely of metal, and look like it. They were three-engined boxes with wings, entirely sheathed in corrugated aluminum.

The corrugation gave the planes a lot of drag, and therefore, less efficiency. But they were sturdy and reliable and relatively cheap, like Ford’s cars.

The first Trimotors were ready for the aviation boom following Charles Lindbergh’s 1927 solo trans-Atlantic flight. Lindbergh chose them for the new airline he helped found, which would eventually become TWA.

Lindbergh was, of course, a Nazi sympathizer and America Firster as World War II approached. Ford was a big jerk who hated Jews and Blacks.

But the planes were a revelation.

They became the backbone of early commercial aviation. About 100 airlines around the world sold the ungainly-looking Trimotors to each other for decades.

Despite their air of invulnerability, Trimotors were involved in five fatal crashes before 1935. Only one was due to mechanical failure, however.

The rest were all collisions of one kind or another, including one in 1929 with a New Mexico mountain, and one in 1935 when two Trimotors managed to find each other in midair near Medellin, Columbia.

Air crashes were a much bigger deal 90 years ago than air pollution. But the “Tin Goose” has a relatively tiny carbon footprint. It leaves behind a little over 800 pounds of CO2 per hour compared to about 5,000 pounds for a jet with a similar capacity.

Unfortunately for those climate change-aware readers now entertaining a brainstorm to bring back clunky old prop planes, the few surviving Trimotors are about as fast as a Greyhound bus. A flight from Chicago to St. Louis in a Tin Goose would take longer than a jet flight to Las Vegas.

The Experimental Aircraft Association, which flies Trimotors around the country for $77 fundraising rides, has no illusions about the modern usefulness of the planes. The volunteers just seem to like antediluvian stuff like antique planes, Ovaltine and John Kass.

They might still be fans of Ford and Lindbergh, who, despite their basic repugnance, got a lot done in their lifetimes.

If they were trying to get it all done today, they would be opposed at every turn because of their wretchedness.

That’s fair. People like them should not be encouraged to be, well, people like them.

But had they been thwarted, lots of things would have come much later, and they would be different. Those things include affordable automobiles and commercial air travel.

And during World War II, Ford built 8,600 B-24 Liberator heavy bombers, rolling one out the door every hour. Lindbergh became an Allied military consultant in the Pacific.

But then again, Ford spent big dough promoting square dancing, hoping that it would squeeze out jazz, which he thought was a vehicle Jews and Blacks were using to poison the culture of the United States.

Both Ford and Lindbergh were spectacular, notorious monsters, but Americans choked back their distaste to take advantage of their contributions. And they let them make lots of money along the way.

Now, we’re throwing roadblocks in front of many of our most talented people, not because of their actions, but because of intemperate things they say. Some of their utterances came years ago, when the complainants, or their parents, might have been speaking similarly (but never became celebrated enough for anybody to care).

There are some genuinely repulsive big shots walking around America lately. But few of them are quite as bad as Ford and Lindbergh were.

Be thankful.

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