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THE CALDWELL COLLECTION AT MUSTANG FIELD
1938 Ryan SCW-145
Specifications
Length
25 Feet 5 Inches
Wingspan
37 Feet 6 Inches
Seats
3
Engine
Warner Super Scarab 145
Maximum Speed
150 MPH
Cruise Speed
140 MPH
Horsepower
145 HP
1938 Ryan SCW 145:
An Airplane That Came Home
I had been looking for a Ryan SCW for a while before I found this one. The type had gotten under my skin the way certain airplanes do — not because of what they can do, but because of what they are. The SCW is a low-wing, all-metal cabin monoplane with a seven-cylinder Warner radial engine and the kind of lines that stop people mid-sentence. Ryan Aeronautical built it at Lindbergh Field in San Diego — the same company, the same field where the Spirit of St. Louis was born. Only twelve SCW-145s came off the line before Ryan moved on to other things. Ours is constructor’s number 211. The eleventh built. It is among the rarest flyable types in the world.
But that’s not why it’s here.
Jerry B. Sass with his new Ryan SCW cabin monoplane, Oklahoma City, 1938. From Southern Flight magazine.
The first owner of this airplane was a man named Jerry B. Sass — and Jerry Sass is one of the people who built the place where you’re standing when you visit The Caldwell Collection. In 1941, Jerry and three partners founded the Oklahoma Air College and built two contract Army Air Corps primary flight training schools: Cimarron Field near Yukon and Mustang Field near El Reno. Mustang Field is where our hangar and museum are located. The building you walk through when you visit — that’s the original 1943 facility that Jerry Sass and his partners built to train Army pilots. Between the two fields, they graduated 8,500 cadets before the war ended.
Jerry was one of Oklahoma City’s most visible aviators in the 1930s. He organized statewide air tours, led the Oklahoma City Aviation Club, co-founded the Oklahoma Air Patrol, and launched Trans-Southern Airlines — a proposed passenger and mail route from Amarillo to Atlanta through Oklahoma City. The airline never flew, but the ambition was pure Jerry Sass. He wrecked five airplanes in his first few years of flying, which tells you something about both his enthusiasm and his learning curve, and he once talked the Hollywood actor Wallace Beery out of a Stinson Reliant by walking into a factory, taking a test ride, and paying cash on the spot. The newspapers loved him for it.
In the summer of 1938, Jerry bought the airplane now in our hangar: a brand-new Ryan SCW-145, purchased through Booth-Henning Inc. at Love Field in Dallas for about $5,420. He was featured that August in Southern Flight magazine, standing beside the Ryan in a white shirt and khakis, looking like a man who had just gotten exactly what he wanted.
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Then came the war. Jerry took his Ryan to Florida when he went on active duty in 1942. The government impressed it into military service as an L-10, and it flew anti-submarine patrols with the Civil Air Patrol along the Atlantic coast during the worst of the U-boat campaign. Then the government sold it out from under him while he was overseas — without telling him. He sued, and in 1948 a federal judge awarded him $8,000 in compensation. But by then the airplane was long gone.
It spent the next seven decades scattered across the continent and beyond — Virginia, California, back to California again, then across the Pacific to Australia, where a man named Steve Carter restored it with extraordinary devotion in Ballarat, Victoria. He flew it to the Goodwood Revival in England, where it won third prize in the Freddie March Spirit of Aviation concours. He wrote a blog about it called Ryan Ramblings that documented every chapter of its life. And when the time came to let it go, he chose to send it to a place where its story would be honored.
It started for me a few years ago at an EAA hamburger fry in Sonoma, California. I was sitting across from a man named Bill Ewertz, and we got to talking about airplanes — as you do at these things. Bill knew Ryans having owned two Sport Coupes at the same time. Something about the way he described the SCW stuck with me. Twelve built. Radial engine. All-metal. A cabin monoplane from 1938 that looked like it was designed by someone who cared as much about beauty as about engineering. I started looking.
When I found Steve Carter’s SCW in Australia and started pulling the provenance, the story that came back was almost too good. The first owner was an Oklahoman. Not just any Oklahoman, but one of the founders of the very airfield where my museum sits. The airplane had been around the world — Oklahoma to Florida to Virginia to California to Australia to England and back to Australia — and now it was coming home to the hangar its first owner helped build.
You don’t plan a thing like that. You just recognize it when it happens.
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Some airplanes come to a museum because they’re beautiful, or rare, or historically significant. This one is all of those things. But it’s here because it belongs here. It always did. Jerry Sass’s airplane is back in the building that Jerry Sass helped build — eighty-eight years after he signed the delivery receipt at Love Field in Dallas.
