Oklahoma-Built Wings

The Entrepreneurs and Airplanes That Made This State Fly

By Tony Caldwell, Founder — The Caldwell Collection at Mustang Field

I get asked a version of the same question at least once a week. Usually it comes from someone standing in the hangar, looking at the Wacos, and it goes something like this: "So why Oklahoma? Why is this museum here?"

And I love that question. Because the answer isn't what most people expect.

They expect me to say something about the hangar — and sure, Mustang Field matters, the WWII history matters, the fact that we're standing in a 1943 Army Air Corps training facility matters enormously. But that's not the whole answer. The whole answer is that Oklahoma has been building airplanes almost as long as anybody in America has been building airplanes. This state didn't just train pilots. It built the machines they flew. And the people who built them were exactly the kind of people Oklahoma has always produced — restless, self-taught, a little bit crazy, and absolutely certain that whatever they were building was going to work. Which, as I think about it, is a great definition for “entrepreneur” which is my life’s work.  But, I digress.

This is the story of those people and those airplanes. It is also, I'll confess, a shopping list of sorts — because some of these machines belong in this museum, and I intend to find them.

— THE BIRDMAN OF ENID, 1911 —

You have to start with Clyde Cessna. Not because he built a company in Oklahoma — he didn't, not quite — but because the airplane that started everything was born here, tested here, crashed here repeatedly, and finally flew here, on the Great Salt Plains near Jet, Oklahoma, in 1911. Jet is an out of the way place to say the most.  It’s tiny, flat, windswept and practically empty of people.  Exactly why Cessna went there. Every story I’ve ever read about Clyde Cessna tells us he was from Kansas.  And he was, but his aviation story really starts just over the border.

Silverwing

Cessna was managing an Overland automobile dealership in Enid when the flying bug bit him. He'd seen a Moisant International Aviators exhibition in Oklahoma City and decided, with the kind of quiet certainty that only a Kansas-born farmer's son could muster, that he was going to build an airplane. He and his brother Roy built the Silverwing — a monoplane in the Blériot XI style, powered by a modified Elbridge motorboat engine that made all of forty horsepower and weighed a hundred and fifty pounds without the magneto. The airframe was spruce and linen. Twenty-six feet long with a twenty-six-foot wingspan.

The Salt Plains gave him what he needed: flat, open, and forgiving when things went wrong. And things went wrong. Cessna reportedly crashed the Silverwing thirteen times before he got it right. His first successful flight came in June of 1911 on the Salt Plains, and by December of that year he made a five-mile flight and landed in one piece, and the newspapers called him the Birdman of Enid.

He spent the next two years barnstorming Oklahoma towns — Enid, Cherokee, Pond Creek, Kremlin — before moving to Kansas. The companies he eventually built in Wichita (including Swallow, Travel Air and his own Cessna Aircraft Company) need no introduction. But the man learned to fly in Oklahoma, and the airplane that proved he could do it was built with Oklahoma hands on Oklahoma dirt.

No Silverwing survives. A replica was built in the 1960s. But the spirit of the thing — a man with a motorboat engine and a pile of spruce who simply refused to stop crashing until he flew — that's as Oklahoma as it gets.

— THE FIRST FACTORY, 1917 —

Most people don't know this. I didn't know it until I started pulling on the thread. The first quantity production of aircraft in Oklahoma happened in Dewey — a little town just north of Bartlesville — during the First World War.

Joe Bartles, for whom Bartlesville is named, organized the Dewey Aeroplane Company in 1917. They had a government contract to build Curtiss JN-4D Jennys — the legendary trainer that taught a generation of Americans to fly and then scattered across the country's barns and cow pastures when the war ended. Dewey built approximately ten of them before the Armistice shut the contract down.

Ten airplanes. That's not a lot. But it was enough to matter, because it proved the thing that mattered: Oklahoma could build airplanes, not just fly them. And the Jenny itself — open cockpit, OX-5 engine, fabric and wire and wood — is exactly the kind of machine that started the golden age we celebrate in this museum. Every barnstormer, every airmail pilot, every county fair daredevil of the 1920s either learned in a Jenny or learned from someone who did.

There are Jennys still flying today. Roughly a dozen airworthy examples remain. It would be something to have one in the hangar — not just as an airplane, but as a reminder that Oklahoma's first aircraft factory was a wartime operation in a little northeastern Oklahoma town, building the most important trainer in American aviation history.

—A BRIGHT IDEA IN WAYNOKA, EARLY 1920s—

Out in Waynoka, in the northwestern corner of the state, a man named W.D. Lindsley had a vision that was genuinely ahead of its time. His Oklahoma Bi-Monoplane Company set out to build an airplane with an aluminum airframe — at a time when practically every airplane in the world was built from wood, wire, and fabric.

The airplane made a brief hop. The company sold stock to finance manufacturing. The whole venture has been described, charitably, as a dismal failure in the flight department.

But here's the thing. Lindsley was right about aluminum. He was just early. The all-metal revolution that would transform aviation in the 1930s — the stressed-skin construction that made the DC-3 and the Spartan Executive possible — was exactly where the industry was headed. Lindsley saw it before almost anyone, built it in a town most people have never heard of, and the airplane barely got off the ground. That's aviation. Sometimes the vision is perfect and the execution needs another decade of metallurgy.

No Oklahoma Bi-Monoplane survives. I doubt one ever will ever be replicated. But the story belongs in the record, because the ambition was real and the instinct was right.

—THE OILMAN AND THE AIRPLANE FACTORY, 1926—

This is where the story turns from scrappy beginnings to serious industry, and it starts with an oilman named William G. Skelly.

Skelly was born in Erie, Pennsylvania, in 1884. He came to Tulsa in 1919, founded Skelly Oil Company, and by 1923 was running one of the strongest independent oil operations in the country. He was not a pilot. He was something arguably more useful to aviation: a man with money, vision, and an absolute conviction that airplanes were the future.

In January of 1928, Skelly bought the struggling Mid-Continent Aircraft Company in Tulsa, reorganized it, and renamed it the Spartan Aircraft Company. He also established the Spartan School of Aeronautics — which still exists today as Spartan College — because Skelly understood that building airplanes was only half the equation. You also had to build pilots.

Spartan Executive

What Spartan produced over the next seventeen years makes it, without question, the most important aircraft manufacturer in Oklahoma history.

The Spartan C-3 (1926–1930)

The C-3 was Spartan's first production airplane, and it was a beauty — a three-seat open-cockpit biplane built for utility and honest flying. The early C3-1 models carried a 125-horsepower Ryan-Siemens radial. Later variants stepped up to the 165-horse Wright J-6 and, in the finest version, the 225-horsepower Wright Whirlwind. That last one — the C3-225 — would do 132 miles an hour, climb at better than a thousand feet a minute, and reach a service ceiling north of fifteen thousand feet. For a late-twenties biplane, that was serious performance.

Spartan built approximately 160 C-3s across all variants. Five survive today. At least three are airworthy, including one at the EAA AirVenture Museum and one at Spartan College itself that was restored between 2007 and 2011.

I want one. A C-3 in the hangar would represent the birth of serious aircraft manufacturing in Oklahoma. An open-cockpit biplane built by an oilman's company in Tulsa, with a Whirlwind up front — that's golden age aviation at its purest.

The Spartan C-2 (1931)

The C-2 was a pivot — a low-wing sport plane monoplane that showed Spartan wasn't content to keep building biplanes while the rest of the industry moved on. The C2-60 carried a little 55-horsepower Jacobs engine. Only eighteen were built across both variants. Survivors are extremely rare.

The Spartan Executive Model 7W (1935–1940)

And then Spartan built something that still stops people in their tracks.

The 7W Executive prototype — the 7X — made its first flight on March 8, 1936, with the legendary Eddie Allen at the controls. The production version that followed was a four-seat, all-metal, low-wing monoplane with retractable gear and a 450-horsepower Pratt & Whitney R-985 Wasp Junior turning the prop. Cruise speed: just over 200 miles an hour. Service ceiling: 24,000 feet. The interior was soundproofed, heated, and finished to a standard that made most contemporary airliners look spartan — no pun intended.

Spartan built only 34 Model 7Ws. That's all. Thirty-four airplanes, and they were so good, so beautifully made, that the list of people who bought them reads like a guest list for a party I'd very much like to have attended. J. Paul Getty owned the company by then — Skelly had sold the manufacturing operation to Getty in 1935 — and Getty kept one for himself. Howard Hughes flew one. King Ghazi of Iraq bought one. Hollywood stunt pilot Paul Mantz owned one that appeared in John Wayne's Overland Stage Raiders.

Twenty complete airframes survive worldwide — fifteen in the United States, two in England, one each in France, Germany, and Russia. Nineteen or twenty sit on the FAA registry. Between six and twelve are in flyable condition, and several show up at Oshkosh every year, where they still draw crowds like it's 1937.

A Spartan Executive in this hangar is not a question of if. It's a question of when, and which one. That airplane is the crown jewel of Oklahoma aviation manufacturing, and it belongs here.

The Spartan NP-1 (1940–1942)

When the Navy needed a primary trainer, Spartan answered. The NP-1 was an open-cockpit biplane — tandem seats, a 220-horsepower Lycoming radial, and the kind of honest, demanding flight characteristics that either made you a pilot or sent you home. The Navy contracted for 201 airplanes at $9,300 each, and Spartan delivered 202, including one they called the Spirit of Spartan.

Here is the detail that makes the NP-1 more than a footnote: a young man named George Herbert Walker Bush earned his Navy wings in one. The future president of the United States learned to fly in a Tulsa-built biplane.

The NP-1 is a military trainer, so it sits at the edge of our collecting focus. But the Oklahoma connection is too strong to ignore entirely.

— THE OIL COMPANY'S AIRPLANE, 1928 —

In Bartlesville — the same town that gave us the Dewey Aeroplane Company a decade earlier — Phillips Petroleum decided to get into the airplane business. The Star Aircraft Company was a division of Phillips, and its product was the Star Cavalier: a high-wing light airplane designed by E.A. Riggs and W. Parker, with Billy Parker directing aviation operations for Phillips.

Star Cavalier Prototype

The Cavalier came in several variants. The Model A arrived in 1928 — three were delivered at $3,450 each. The Model B followed in 1929 with a 55-horsepower Velie engine, priced at $2,895, and Phillips sold fifteen of them. The Model E came in 1930 with a 90-horsepower Lambert and a taller, more angular tail — thirteen built. Single examples of Models C, D, and F rounded out the production run.

Total production: roughly 34 airplanes. Only three remain on the U.S. civil register as of this writing. At least one — a 1930 Cavalier B — is airworthy at the Historic Aircraft Restoration Museum in Creve Coeur, Missouri and they have another one that needs to be restored.

Thirty-four airplanes built by an oil company in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. Five survive. A Star Cavalier in this museum would be one of the rarest golden-age airplanes on public display anywhere, and it would tell a story that's pure Oklahoma: an oil company that thought it could build airplanes, and did, and then the Depression came and the whole thing was over in three years.

— A YOUNG MAN IN OKAY, 1928—

This one astonishes me every time I think about it.

In 1928, a young aeronautical engineer named John Leland "Lee" Atwood founded the Okay Monoplane Company in the little town of Okay, Oklahoma, near Muskogee. He designed a low-wing sport aircraft. The company didn't survive the Depression.

But Lee Atwood did. He went on to become the president of North American Aviation. He was the chief designer — or co-designer — of the P-51 Mustang, arguably the finest fighter airplane of the Second World War. He oversaw the development of the F-100 Super Sabre, the X-15 rocket plane, and the Apollo Command Module that carried astronauts to the moon.

And the design lineage of the little monoplane he built in Okay, Oklahoma? Aviation historians trace it forward to the AT-6 Texan — the advanced trainer that taught more Allied pilots to fly in WWII than any other airplane in history.

A kid in Okay, Oklahoma, drew an airplane. The line runs straight from that drawing to the P-51 and the moon. I can't put an Okay Monoplane in the hangar — I don't think any survive — but the story of what started there belongs on our walls.

— SAM COFFMAN'S OVERHEAD STICK, 1927—

Coffman Monoplane Brochure

On the south side of Oklahoma City, in 1927, Sam Coffman opened Coffman Monoplane, Inc. His design featured an overhead control stick — unusual for the era, innovative, and the kind of thing that tells you the man was thinking about how an airplane should be flown, not just how it should be built. Limited records survive of the company's production. Like so many small manufacturers of the late 1920s, the post-Lindbergh boom that created them came just as an economic whirlwind arrived to destroy them.

— PIPER COMES TO PONCA CITY, 1946 —

I know. 1946 is three years after the war started and our nominal golden age ended. But Piper's Oklahoma chapter is too important to leave out, because it put more Oklahoma-built airplanes into the sky than any manufacturer except Douglas — and unlike Douglas, they built the kind of airplanes that fill small airports and grass strips to this day.

Piper opened a factory in Ponca City in the summer of 1946, riding the post-war aviation boom. The plan was bold: supplement the Lock Haven, Pennsylvania plant with Oklahoma production and ride the wave of returning GIs and new pilots who were going to buy small airplanes by the thousands.

And for a little while, they did. Ponca City built 1,190 Piper J-3 Cubs between March 1946 and March 1947 — airplanes rolling off the line at a pace that would have stunned Bill Piper himself a decade earlier. They also built 234 PA-12 Super Cruisers. Total Ponca City production: 1,424 airplanes in roughly two years.

Then the boom collapsed. The post-war market had been a bubble, and when it burst in mid-1947, Piper laid off two-thirds of its workforce and closed the Ponca City plant in 1948. The whole Oklahoma chapter lasted barely two years.

But those 1,424 airplanes went everywhere. The J-3 Cub is the most recognized light airplane in history — between 3,800 and 5,000 remain on the FAA registry today, and the vast majority of them still fly. Some of those Cubs have Ponca City in their bones. The PA-12 Super Cruiser is almost as beloved — over 1,600 remain registered in the United States alone.

We have room in the hangar for a Ponca City Cub. We’ve been offered one by a generous donor and it’ll be here just as soon as his grand kids finish learning to fly. And that’s what it will do as part of the Collection – help a new generation of aviators learn to fly as we build our program where kids with visions of flight in their eyes trade time working in the hangar for flight time.  Just like the generations before them did.

— BETHANY'S COMMANDER, 1950 —

The last great Oklahoma aircraft manufacturer set up shop in Bethany, just west of Oklahoma City, and it produced an airplane that flew presidents.

Aero Commander

Aero Design and Engineering Company was founded in 1950 by Rufus Amis, a contractor, and Ted Pew, an aeronautical engineer. They leased a 26,000-square-foot factory in Bethany and started building the Aero Commander 520 — a twin-engine, seven-seat corporate airplane that cruised at 200 miles an hour. The prototype had already flown on April 23, 1948, and Aero Design spent two years refining it before production began.

The airplane had style, and it had a flair for the dramatic. In May of 1951, they flew the prototype from Wiley Post Airport to Washington, D.C. — a 1,140-mile trip — with one propeller removed. Try explaining that to your insurance company. But it proved the point: the Commander could fly on one engine, and it could do it convincingly enough to impress the people who mattered.

It impressed the people who mattered most. In 1955, the United States Air Force selected the Aero Commander as President Dwight D. Eisenhower's personal transport aircraft. Fifteen were ordered; two served the White House directly. An airplane built in Bethany, Oklahoma, became Air Force One.

The company's test pilots read like an aviation hall of fame. Bob Hoover — the greatest stick-and-rudder pilot most of us will ever see — flew for Aero Commander in its early years. Jerrie Cobb served as company pilot and manager; by age 28, she had set three world aviation records and would go on to become the first woman to pass all the Mercury astronaut selection tests.

Aero Design built 150 Model 520s, followed by the 560 series — 80 of the standard 560, 99 of the 560A (fourteen of which went to the Air Force), and 93 of the 560E. The company merged with Rockwell Standard in 1958 and continued producing Commanders for decades under various corporate banners.

An early Aero Commander 520 in the museum would bring the story full circle — from Clyde Cessna's spruce-and-linen monoplane on the Salt Plains in 1911 to a pressurized twin leaving Bethany for the White House in 1955. Forty-four years, and Oklahoma was in the airplane business every single one of them.

We don’t need one of these in our museum.  It doesn’t fit the period we’re focused on and it’s important to build a successful flying collection for future generations, that we stay focused.  We also don’t need to.  My friend Dave Amis, grandson of the founder, spearheaded an effort recently to display one of the very first Commanders in Eldon Lyon Park, Bethany, Oklahoma just blocks from where it was built.

— WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR —

Let me be direct, because that's how collectors talk to each other.

The Caldwell Collection at Mustang Field is actively interested in acquiring the following Oklahoma-built aircraft:

Spartan Executive Model 7W. The crown jewel. Twenty survive worldwide. If you know where one is — especially one with a good story — I want to hear about it.

Spartan C-3. Five survive. Any variant. An open-cockpit Spartan biplane in this hangar would represent the birth of Tulsa's aircraft industry.

Star Cavalier.  One of the rarest golden-age airplanes in existence. I know where they are.  And I want one.  Are you listening Albert? An oil company's airplane from Bartlesville — it belongs in Oklahoma.

Piper J-3 Cub (Ponca City-built). One’s coming.  Just as soon as some shirt tails get cut off.

Curtiss JN-4D Jenny. Not Oklahoma-built necessarily, but the type was built in Dewey. Any airworthy or restorable Jenny would anchor our earliest aviation manufacturing story.

These aircraft don't need to be in show condition. Restorable is fine. Honest is preferred. The stories matter as much as the paint.

— COME SEE THE STORY —

The Caldwell Collection at Mustang Field is open every Saturday from 10 am to 2 pm — no appointment required, and admission is always free. We’re at 6600 S. Mustang Field Road, Hangar 3, El Reno, Oklahoma, at El Reno Regional Airport.

If you have an Oklahoma-built airplane — or know where one is — I want to hear from you. If you have photographs, documents, factory records, or family stories connected to any of these manufacturers, those matter just as much. History isn't just hardware. It's the people who built it, flew it, and kept it alive.

Oklahoma has been building airplanes for 115 years. This museum is here to make sure people know it.

▸ The Museum: thecaldwellcollection.org

▸ About Me: tonycaldwell.net

▸ The Dream Wacos Collection: dreamwacos.com

▸ Contact: info@thecaldwellcollection.org

The Caldwell Collection at Mustang Field is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit established in 2024. Aircraft donations are tax-deductible; consult your tax advisor.