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Concept
Douglas Aircraft Company
Summary
The Douglas Aircraft Company was an American aerospace and defense company based in Southern California. It was founded in 1921 by Donald Wills Douglas Sr. and later merged with McDonnell Aircraft in 1967 to form McDonnell Douglas; it then operated as a division of McDonnell Douglas. McDonnell Douglas later merged with Boeing in 1997.
The company was founded as the Douglas Company by Donald Wills Douglas Sr. on July 22, 1921, in Santa Monica, California, following dissolution of the Davis-Douglas Company. An early claim to fame was the first circumnavigation of the world by air in Douglas airplanes in 1924. In 1923, the U.S. Army Air Service was interested in carrying out a mission to circumnavigate the Earth for the first time by aircraft, a program called "World Flight". Donald Douglas proposed a modified Douglas DT to meet the Army's needs. The two-place, open cockpit DT biplane torpedo bomber had previously been produced for the U.S. Navy. The DTs were taken from the assembly lines at the company's manufacturing plants in Rock Island, Illinois, and Dayton, Ohio, to be modified.
The modified aircraft known as the Douglas World Cruiser (DWC), also was the first major project for Jack Northrop who designed the fuel system for the series. After the prototype was delivered in November 1923, upon the successful completion of tests on 19 November, the Army commissioned Douglas to build four production series aircraft. Due to the demanding expedition ahead, spare parts, including 15 extra Liberty L-12 engines, 14 extra sets of pontoons, and enough replacement airframe parts for two more aircraft were chosen. These were sent to airports along the route. The last of these aircraft was delivered to the U.S. Army on March 11, 1924.
The four aircraft left Seattle, Washington, on April 6, 1924, flying west, and two of these returned there on 28 September to great acclaim, while one plane had been lost under fog conditions, and another was forced down over the Atlantic and sank (the DWC prototype was then rechristened, and joined the other two in completing the North American leg of the flight).
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