Aircraft: Mitey Mooney

Hal Rachal, 55, is president, chief executive, general counsel and personnel director of the largest employer in Kerrville, Texas (pop. 11,300). Though he is also controlling stockholder, he draws no salary, receives no dividends, pockets no expense money. Instead, he plows every cent of profit, which he prefers to call “operating surplus,” back into his business—aviation. In the space of 13 years, Rachal’s little known Mooney Aircraft Inc. has gone from the brink of bankruptcy to become, after Cessna, Piper and Beech, the nation’s fourth biggest private-aircraft maker.

Positive Control. A wealthy oil-industry lawyer and longtime aviation buff, Rachal figures that his aircraft business needs extra cash more than he does. The company was founded back in 1948 by Al Mooney, who raised a small amount of capital to build the “Mooney Mite,” a durable, single-engine one-seater. Trouble was, Mooney proved to be a better aeronautical engineer than businessman. Learning that the aircraft maker was hopelessly in debt, Rachal decided to take “a calculated risk.” In 1954, on the night before Mooney planned to file for involuntary bankruptcy, Rachal and a brother-in-law, Norman Hoffman, came forth with $225,000 to rescue the company.

The newcomers began concentrating on the Mark 20, a prototype four-seater that Mooney (who soon left to join Lockheed Aircraft) had recently designed. The plane was noisy, but its wooden-wing construction enabled Rachal to price it low; by 1959, the company was turning out 180 of the 150-m.p.h. craft a year. The following year, Rachal switched to an all-metal plane, the single-engine Mark 21. The rakishly styled plane grew more popular with the addition in 1964 of a gyro-driven control system that automatically keeps the plane on course without constant pilot corrections.

Rachal also put Mooney’s internal operations on a straight course. To keep pace with growing output—from 348 planes in 1962 to 790 last year—he expanded Mooney’s Kerrville plant. To hold down payroll expenses, he enlisted only two other executives—Chief Engineer Ralph Harmon and brother-in-law Hoffman, who serves as a vice president in charge of sales. His 1,000 plant workers get substantial incentive bonuses; Mooney is delighted that few of them have seen fit to join a union (“They’re paid more for their services than I am”).

Electric Cars. Mooney’s present 4.8% share of the light-aircraft market comes on the strength of three models, all of them relatively low-cost ($18,430 to $23,345) offshoots of the Mark 21. Encouraged by the company’s rapid growth—over the past five years, annual sales have almost tripled, to $15.2 million—Rachal merged last month with Alon, Inc., a Kansas manufacturer of training aircraft. Moving into the twin-engine field, he has contracted to build a 300-m.p.h. turboprop executive plane designed by Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd. And next year, in his most ambitious undertaking, Rachal will introduce the Mooney Mustang; a pressurized, single-engine private plane, it will cruise at 230 m.p.h. and altitudes of up to 24,000 ft.

To fuel his company’s expansion, Rachal plans to offer its stock publicly within two years. Meanwhile, he predicts sales of $40 million by 1970, says flatly that Mooney will eventually “dominate the light-aircraft industry.” Nor does he stop there. By 1980, the Texas planemaker fully expects to be producing electric-powered cars.