Page 6 - Volume 18 Number 8

“No, No, Gene,” my 12-year- is, there probably wouldn’t be aold insistence demanded, “it’s gotta be a Beech Model 18.” My seventh-grade buddyand I were arguing over the twin- engine “Cessna” airplane he was describing, featured on the “Sky King” television program. It sure sounded like a Twin Beech to me. At the time, my household possessed neither a TV nor the electricity to power it, so my position was supported only by the Beechcraft brochures and Flying magazines I had collected. So far as I knew, Cessna built only the model 310.Eugene, as it turns out, was right. When I subsequently slept over at his house, I watched a black-and- white depiction of a silver twin with a single tailfin, flying out of the clear western skies. Schuyler King rode the range in his Cessna T-50 Bobcat in those first episodes, before he traded it in on a 310B. What a lot of people don’t know4 • TWIN & TURBINECessna Aircraft Company today if it hadn’t been for the T-50.In the late 1930s, Cessna was sputtering along building a few highly-efficient single-engineAirmasters for the limited buyers to be found during the Depression era. Clyde Cessna had largely given up on aviation by 1936, but his nephews Dwane and Dwight Wallace, who had reopened the abandoned plant in 1934, retained his name to help sell the modern sleek designs envisioned by Dwane. It was a hand-to-mouth existence, and Dwane Wallace knew the future lay with more-capable utility airplanes.And so, his vision of a low-wing twin became reality on March 26, 1939, when the new Bobcat, as itwas called, first flew. Certification of both the airplane and the test pilot came at roughly the same time; Dwane Wallace had never bothered to acquire a multi-enginerating before he flew the T-50 up to the Kansas City CAA office for inspection. Certificated on March 24, 1940, only 19 civilian T-50s were produced in 1940, and 21 were built in 1941. At the time, those weren’t bad numbers, but things were about to change.Wartime ServiceThe airplane’s timing was auspicious; wardrums were beating across Europe, and it was evident to most observers that the U.S. was going to have to play a role in the outcome. In mid-1940, Wallace secured an order from the ArmyAir Corps for 33 AT-8 advanced AUGUST 2014Cessna’s