AVIATION: Up from the Doodlebug

On a freezing December night in 1928, a weird-looking little monoplane called “the Doodlebug” took off from a Milwaukee airfield and headed hopefully in the general direction of New York City. Designer-Pilot James S. McDonnell Jr., then 29, hoped to make aviation history by a daring night flight. Ha also hoped to prove that his plane was the safest in the air, thus get enough orders to start manufacturing the air “flivver.” But he had scarcely cleared Milwaukee before the engine began flying apart. By a well-executed dead-stick landing in a farmer’s field Pilot McDonnell saved his skin.

The Doodlebug washed out, but Denver-born, M.I.T.-trained “Mac” McDonnell kept on doodling with designs, ultimately founded his own company and made his share of aviation history. In 1945, he got an order to build the first carrier-based jet fighter for the U.S. Navy, and thereby turned his small, six-year-old McDonnell Aircraft Corp. into a fast-growing big planemaker almost overnight. Last week, as he announced new expansion plans, McDonnell put his backlog at more than $200 million, the seventh biggest in the industry. And his profits for the fiscal year just ended were $2,800,000 on sales of $38.6 million, nearly a 70% profit jump in a year.

High Ceiling. Some cynics have an easy answer for McDonnell’s fast rise on an original investment of only $200,000. “How could he miss,” they say, “with all that Rockefeller money behind him?” Of his original $200,000, McDonnell did get $10,000 from Laurance Rockefeller. Later, Laurance and his family (TIME, Jan. 31, 1949) increased their investment in McDonnell Aircraft to $475,000, giving them 20% of the stock. But Mac McDonnell put “M.A.C.” (as he calls McDonnell Aircraft) on its feet through his own talent for design, production know-how and sharp eye for cost-cutting.

After the failure of his Doodlebug, McDonnell went to work for the Glenn L. Martin Co., rose to be chief project engineer of land planes. In 1938 he decided to take a second try at manufacturing, gave himself exactly six months to raise his stake. It took him seven. He rented a second-story office in St. Louis, hired 20 engineers and went scouting for orders. In the first two years he got none, even though he won a $3,000 design-award from the Army and a $9,900 award from the Navy. His first actual order was for $7,672 worth of parts for Convair’s Stinson observation planes. The company kept going during World War II by making such varied products as ammo boxes, gun turret parts and tail assemblies.

Unable to get a toehold in conventional plane manufacture, M.A.C. made a virtue of necessity: it concentrated its research on jets. As a result, when the Navy decided to equip two carrier squadrons with jet fighters after World War II, McDonnell was ready with his twin-jet 500-m.p.h. Phantom. The Navy liked the Phantom so well that it ordered 235 of the plane’s heavier, faster sister, the twin-jet Banshee, has since greatly stepped up its orders.

In addition, the company won an assortment of experimental orders for aircraft, including the long-range penetration XF-88 Voodoo fighter, the tiny, bomber-borne XF-85 parasite jet fighter, the first ramjet helicopter (“Little Henry”), radio-controlled bombs and jet-powered “drone” aircraft to simulate attacks on fighter pilots during training.

Low Overhead. Mac McDonnell still keeps his nose close to his drawing board, his eye on production. He likes to pad around the huge war-surplus plant on the edge of Lambert-St. Louis field, uses a public-address system to tell his 6,500 employees about new orders as soon as they come in. Lest they think that he is overpaid, he reminded them in his last annual report that his own salary (after taxes) is only “equal to the wages … of ten unskilled laborers.”

By such informal touches and by generous benefits (retirement plans, stock-participation programs, etc.), McDonnell has kept morale high, has never lost a day’s production through strikes. Neither has he lost his Scotch canniness; for the annual Christmas party, he figured out that exactly twelve ounces of eggnog per person was the right amount to insure conviviality without excessive hilarity—and ordered the whisky accordingly. As a result of such dollar-watching, his overhead, says the Navy, is among the lowest in the business.