Tri Motor Aircraft - Up to this point, Stout airplanes used a single engine. The introduction of the lightweight Wright air-cooled radial engine, however, set Stout and his design team onto a new course: a three-engine airplane.
"Between A Yacht & A Hard Place" M/V Madame Butterfly - May 2007v
Tri Motor Aircraft
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Commercial Service
There were several notable flights for the Ford Trimotor. A Ford 4-AT Trimotor, named Floyd Bennett, flew on an expedition over the South Pole, led by Richard E. Byrd who was accompanied by three other men. The round trip flight took approximately 19 hours. Another Ford 4-AT Trimotor, serial number 10 built in 1927, made many notable flights by Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart.
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The legendary Ford Tri-Motor gave the young Northwest its first step up to “trunkliner” service with a full passenger cabin and multi-motor power. While the fleet only totaled five frames, it was well photographed and used heavily in advertising. Arguably, this was the aircraft that cemented NWA as a major carrier. While its tenure only lasted from 1928 to 1935, the Tri-Motor pioneered the route to Seattle that would become the company’s commercial heart for the next twenty years.
"Laying Down On The Job" - M/V Cougar Ace -- Aug. 2006 -- Amazing !
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Thirty Stinson Model A aircraft were built prior to the end of produc-tion in 1936, but the success of the 6000-A was cut short due to the popularity of the Boeing 247 and Douglas DC-2. However, because of long waiting lists for these new aircraft, the airlines of Australia went ahead and ordered three more Stinson Model A aircraft. They rapidly proved useful, so a fourth and final A model was built and shipped to Sydney, Australia on December 14, 1936. Two Australian airlines, AOA and ANA, began cutting into each other’s profits. ANA attempted to obtain AOA, but this failed until AOA tragically lost half of its fleet. A merger occurred in 1937, but they kept their separate identities until July, 1 1942, at which point there were only two sur-viving Stinson 6000-A’s.
"Carrying Coal To Newcastle" - M/V Pasha Bulker - June 2007
Bird Of Paradise
The interior was shot; there was not much worth saving. The seat frames were reupholstered, and along with that, new flooring, walls and ceiling were installed. After the fabric is glued, ironed and UV treated, it is then ready for primer and paint. As you can imagine, on an aircraft this large, it is a somewhat challenging task to paint. The plane was painted to rep-licate the original American Airlines colors and scheme that it had the day this Stinson Model A left the factory.
In 1933, the Stinson Aircraft Company produced the Stinson Model A, or Stinson 6000A Tri-motor, their last tri-motor airliner. It was a low-wing plane, designed as a feeder liner for American Airlines. The retractable gear hangs below the engines slightly, even when in the “Up” position, as pilots would sometimes forget to lower the undercarriage upon landing. This aircraft also has a restroom, which was a state-of the-art amenity for the time. The unique double tapered wing, combined with the stout steel tubed fuselage, is what gives this 6000-A its noteworthy appearance.
Our museum location is typically open Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays from 11:00 am – 5:00 pm. For 2023, we will be closed for the Christmas and New Year’s holiday weekends, and Thanksgiving Day. We will also close the museum on Saturday, October 14 to dedicate staffing to the MSP Airliner Show that day.
Henry Ford would agree that we need no more "Boeing Tri-Motor" incidents -- the venerable "Ford Tri-Motor" alone is just right four our history.
The America
During World War II, parts for the Lycoming radial engine were hard to come by, so the engines were replaced with Pratt and Whitney Wasps. This gave the aircraft the ability to carry additional weight, along with enjoying higher cruising speeds. In 1945, one of the re-maining Model A’s came apart in mid-air during a regular flight, killing both crew members and all eight passengers. This left only one remaining Stinson Model A. This aircraft also crashed, in Alaska in 1947. It was rebuilt in 1979, and then in 1988, it was moved to Gregg Herrick’s Golden Wings Museum, located at the Anoka County – Blaine Airport, in Minnesota. Upon its arrival in Minnesota, the real restoration work began on the aircraft.
In 1956, Northwest leased N8419 for a special 30th anniversary celebration, first bringing it back to St. Paul for a complete overhaul and refurbishing. In October, NWA flew the restored aircraft on a 20-stop, coast-to-coast tour of the carrier’s key stations, replete with celebrity and politician photo opportunities and media interviews with longtime Northwest staff.
In the late Twenties, the Fokker Trimotor was one of the preferred commercial airliners. When the fatal crash of famed football coach Knute Rockne's plane in 1931 was traced to rot in the Fokker Trimotor's wooden wings, that marked the end of the aircraft's popularity, and the next generation of commercial airliners (the Boeing 247 and Douglas DC-3) were developed.
When the Trimotor was first built, the service life of the plane was only expected to be 2,500 hours.4 However, Trimotors remained in service long after they were expected to be retired, creating a testament as to the quality of and workmanship of the airplane. This set a new standard for the expected service life of future aircraft.
Military Service
The Ford Trimotor pioneered coast-to-coast airline service in the United States. Transcontinental Air Transport, the future TWA, provided regularly scheduled flights from New York to California. Not all of the trip was by air. Passengers would normally fly by day, and ride aboard sleeper trains at night. The journey took 48 hours. Pan American Airways used the Trimotor extensively in Central America and South American, and made their first international flights from Key West, Florida to Havana, Cuba. The Trimotor also served as military transports. The US Navy received nine of the 4-AT and 5-AT versions from 1927, while the USAAC received thirteen.6
"Crack'n On The Sidmouth" - M/V MSC Napoli - Jan. 2007 - Disaster In Real Time
The door to the Pacific had opened in June, 1928, with the flight of U.S. Army Air Corps officers Lester J. Maitland and Albert F. Hegenberger, in a Fokker Trimotor called the 'Bird of Paradise' (identical to Richard Byrd’s America), from San Francisco to Honolulu, Hawaii. Maitland and Hegenberger could not put down along the way and had no landmarks to guide them along the twenty-four-hundred miles of featureless ocean. The successful flight was a tribute to the piloting skills of Maitland, the navigating skills of Hegenberger, and the reliability of the Whirlwind engines and the Fokker aircraft.
“[On] August 11, a helicopter set our crew of sixteen men down near the Stinson Trimotor somewhere near the Toklat and Kantishna Rivers to prepare for the oncoming fire. We figured we had about 24 hours to dig a fire line down to permafrost, cut the existing trees down, drag them to the outside of the fire line, and back-burn the fuel before the fire hit. We worked feverishly to prepare for the onslaught, resting only when we dropped from exhaustion. I marveled at the very reason for our task, as the Stinson Trimotor, partially dismantled, was the most incredible air-craft I had ever seen. The interior appeared to be in excellent condition and with a little imagination, it was easy to imagine what a splendid ma-chine it was in its prime.
The South Pole
"Scheldt Snafu!" - M/V Grande Nigeria - Feb. 2006 because Ship Happens©
In the action movie Air Force One, Harrison Ford is cast as the president of the United States and Glenn Close as the vice president, but the surprise star of this movie was Kalitta Air freighter N703CK --a B747-146 , the 54th and the 3rd to enter the Japan Air Lines fleet after it rolled off the production line in June 1970.
The development of the Trimotor begins in 1925 with the Ford Reliability Tour, sponsored by Henry Ford, to showcase his renewed interest in aviation. One of the contestants, Dutch aviation pioneer Anthony Fokker, entered the Fokker F.VIIa-3m tri-motor in the tour. The Fokker aircraft was originally a single-engine aircraft, but Fokker developed it into a tri-motor powered by three 200 hp Wright J-4 Whirlwind engines, specifically for this event, and his airplane easily won the contest. Realizing the future potential of civil transports, Ford decided that he wanted to get back into the aviation manufacturing business. Ford had a longtime interest in aviation since 1909 and his company built Liberty engines during World War I. He also built the first modern airport in Dearborn, Michigan with concrete runways.2
In 1968 Doug Lutz and three of his companions left their jobs at Glacier National Park in Montana to “seek fame and fortune in Alaska”. They got hired by the Bureau of Land Management as wildland firefighters and were soon put to work on a wildfire within sight of Mt. McKinley. They only had hand tools, since at the time the logistics of providing gasoline for chain saws in the remote tundra was difficult, Mr. Lutz said.
With 15 of his co-workers, he volunteered for an assignment to protect a very unique aircraft from an approaching wildfire. It was the last Stinson A Trimotor in existence at that time, NC15165, one of only 31 or 32 that were built. It crashed in 1947 and J. D. “Red” Berry had been trying off and on since 1964 to get it out of the tundra.
America West Kisses Concrete M/V Ville De Orion - stack shift at LAX
1. William T. Larkins. Aircraft in Profile, Volume 7. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc. 1970. 124. 2. C. V. Glines. Ford's Forgotten Aviation Legacy Aviation History. May 2008. 30. 3. Kenneth Munson. Airliners between the Wars 1919-39. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1972. 139. 4. Heiner Emde & Carlo Demand. Conquest of the Air. New York: Viking Press, 1968. 98. 5. William T. Larkins. 126. 6. Enzo Angelucci and Paolo Matricardi. World Aircraft 1918-1935. New York: Rand McNally & Company, 1976. 223.
Of the entire aircraft, the wings were one of the few salvageable parts. Upon completion of the airframe construction, the wings and fuselage were covered with new fabric. The entire airframe was covered, along with the wings. Fabric work is a process involving gluing the fabric on, shrinking it, and rib stitching and reinforcing where necessary.
SPECIAL NOTE: The historic dangers of carriage by air & sea continue to be quite real. Shippers must be encouraged to purchase high quality marine cargo insurance from their freight forwarder or customs broker. It's dangerous out there.
The U.S. Army Air Corps bought three trimotor aircraft from Fokker in 1926, designated the Fokker C-2, essentially an improved version of the F-VIIA, including upgraded 220-hp Wright J-5 engines. (Shown at left.) One was converted to an airborne radio test lab. Various communications and navigation equipment was installed. (Also pictured.)
U.S. Navy EP- 3 -- China Hostage Situation - Spring 2001
A snapshot was taken on the fourth day, August 14, by one of the guys who sent me a small print later that fall. The most vivid picture, however, resides only in my mind as the helicopter raised up to take us home. The two acres or so within the fire line was resplendent green, and as far as you could see in every direction was starkly black. And the Stinson Trimotor sitting in the center of the green circle, looking so proud and incredi-bly alive, remains as one of the most significant and indelible images of my life…”
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