Where did North American Aviation come from? The showed up out of nowhere and in very little time were able to turn out planes like the T6, P-51, and B-25. How was this possible?
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My answers to common questions and comments on this video.
Correction, Not Boston, Baltimore, for whatever reason I said Boston Logan but it was actually near the airport in Baltimore Maryland.
Pronunciation. I know the Dutch say Fokker differently. There is no way to please everybody on pronunciation. This is a world wide forum and we are all going to have to make do with other people's accents and pronunciation. Some of the names in this video are made with letters that don't even exist in English. With Fokker it's even more complex because the most common Dutch pronunciation would probably trigger some profanity problems with youtube. I know Fokker is a name and isn't profanity, by try arguing with the youtube demonetization bot.
Oklahoma is 23 times larger than Holland, however "only" slightly more than four times larger than The Netherlands.
Edgar Schmued was only at Bellanca for a few weeks. According to his biography "Mustang Designer". He went to Bellanca in Oct. of 1935. We don't have an exact date when he left, but we know he left soon to go back to North American in California. Tragically he was in an auto accident on the trip resulting in the death of his wife. This accident happened on Nov. 12th 1935. He was back at work at North American in Feb. of 1936. Thus he could not have been at Bellanca more that a few weeks at most certainly not months or years as some in the comments are claiming.
There have been quite a few commenters saying that Fokker was not the major contributing factor to the rapid success at North American. Let's look at the facts.
G.M. paid over 7.8 million 1929 dollars for their stake in Fokker. That's over 143 million in 2023 dollars. Fokker was the largest aircraft manufacturer in the world during much of the 1920's.
Some are saying that it was other companies that G.M. purchased that were the true drivers of North American. This is just nonsense. For example, one very vocal critic has brought up Berliner-Joyce, an airplane company bought by G.M. in 1933. It's just crazy to compare Berliner-Joyce to Fokker. Berliner-Joyce had only been building planes since 1928. They had only built a total of 75 planes by the time of the buyout in 1933 and none of those were multi-engine and only about seven of them were were monoplanes. That's SEVEN monoplanes planes total, NOT seven types of monoplanes. To try and argue that this was some large or advanced operation that rivaled Fokker in terms of it's contributions to North American is just plain silly.
The other argument seems to be centered around personnel. Yes, as I stated in the video North American hired people from the outside. I specifically mentioned that some came from Douglas, some from Martin. However the biggest single source of employees when North American Started were the Fokker employees who went with them. These include, just to name a few Edgar Schmued, who we talked about. Vance Breese the original P-51 test pilot and Richard Thaiss who was a sheet metal foreman foreman at North American and had started at Fokker in 1927.
Arguing that 1, 2 or even 6 people from Douglas or wherever had a bigger effect than all of Fokker seems a bit silly and I think it stems from elitism. If making that argument you're discounting the production value of the people on the shop floor who know how to actually turn those drawings and ideas into airplanes. These people were predominately from Fokker at the time the Inglewood plant got going.
Most of the other complaints I am getting on this video have to do with omissions, not anything that's incorrect or even debatable. The problem with complaining about an omission is that it's a criticism that can be leveled and any video ever made or book ever written, thus it's a pointless complaint and a waste of intellectual space.