1930 - Transportation

Transportation

Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corp. opens for business January 2 (see 1929). Leroy Grumman has mortgaged his house and invested $16,875, and Leon Swirlbul has put in $8,125. They are the company's largest stockholders, and their first contract is to repair an amphibian Loening Air Yacht, a plane for sportsman-pilots that is no longer being serviced by Loening (see politics, 1931).

Amelia Earhart flies her Lockheed Vega at 171 miles per hour January 15, setting a new women's speed record.

British aviatrix Amy Johnson, 27, arrives in Australia May 24 after making the first solo flight by a woman from London. She has piloted her de Havilland Tiger Moth through a thick fog over the English Channel and been forced twice by violent storms to land—once in a Near Eastern desert, once between Java and Surabaya. Johnson has had to lay over in Rangoon and Bangkok for repairs. She follows the 19½-day flight to Australia with a record 6-day solo flight from England to India.

The Airmail Act (McNary-Watres Act) approved by Congress April 29 as an amendment to the 1925 Contract Air Mail Act (Kelly Act) gives the postmaster general almost dictatorial powers over America's fledgling airlines (see 1934).

Transcontinental and Western Air (TWA) is created July 16 by a forced merger of three domestic airlines (Western Air Express, Transcontinental Air Transport, and Pittsburgh Aviation Industries) and receives a government mail contract. The company uses Ford Trimotor planes to cut flying time between New York and San Francisco to 28 hours (see 1926; Hughes, 1939).

American Airlines has its beginnings in American Airways, founded by Auburn motorcar boss Errett L. Cord, who merges Robertson Aircraft with other small firms (see Lindbergh, 1926). Needing 20 single-engine, 12-seat planes for a Midwest shuttle service, Cord starts a company to produce the planes; he puts his brother-in-law Donald Smith in charge; and Smith hires Gerard Vultee from Lockheed, setting him up in a small hangar at Grand Central Airport, Los Angeles (see 1934; Vultee, 1928).

Three transcontinental air routes are in operation by year's end, but passenger flights are irregular.

Pan Am begins flying to South America (see 1929; 1935).

Aviation pioneer Glenn H. Curtiss dies at Buffalo, N.Y., July 23 at age 52; Chance Vought of septicemia at Southampton, N.Y., July 25 at age 40. His Chance Vought division of United Aircraft has grown to 700 men, up from just 12 in 1917.

Australian pilot Charles Kingsford Smith, now 33, lands with his three-man crew at Harbor Grace, Newfoundland, July 25 after a transatlantic flight from Portmarnock, Ireland.

Texas-born pilot Wiley Post, 31, wins the first Bendix Trophy Air Race, flying the Lockheed Vega Winnie Mae owned by his Oklahoma oilman employer Floyd C. Hall. Bendix has offered a prize for the winner of the Los Angeles-to-Chicago race that will become a transcontinental race next year (see Bendix, 1929; Post, 1931).

The British dirigible R-101 burns October 5 northwest of Paris at Beauvais on her maiden voyage to Australia. The disaster takes 54 lives.

Braniff Airways is incorporated at Oklahoma City November 3 by Salina, Kansas-born businessman Thomas E. (Elmer) Braniff, 46; its initial capitalization of $10,000 will be increased next year to $100,000 (see 1934).

Aristotle Socrates Onassis, 29, buys six freighters for $20,000 each as the worldwide economic depression reduces demand for cargo vessels. Built at a cost of $2 million each, the ships are the nucleus of a large fleet for the shrewd Greek tobacco and shipping millionaire, who will buy his first tanker in 1935.

Atlanta's Union Station opens April 18 at Pryor and Wall streets.

An electric passenger train travels on Delaware and Lackawanna tracks between Hoboken and Montclair, N.J., in a test run by Thomas Edison, now 84.

Gyroscope inventor Elmer A. Sperry dies at Brooklyn, N.Y., June 16 at age 69.

General Motors acquires two locomotive manufacturing companies that will give GM a virtual monopoly in the market (see 1961).

The first South American subway line opens October 18 at Buenos Aires; 3,000 men have built the Lacroze line of the Ferrocarril Terminal Central de Buenos Aires in 21 months (see Mexico City, 1970).

The Longview Bridge (later called the Lewis and Clark Bridge) opens March 29 to span the Columbia River in Washington State with nearly a mile of cantilevered steel. Cincinnati-born engineer Joseph B. (Baermann) Strauss, 59, has designed the structure with steel piers (see Golden Gate Bridge, 1937).

The Mid-Hudson Bridge opens August 25 at Poughkeepsie, N.Y., to span the Hudson. Ralph Modjeski, now 69, has designed the suspension bridge, having gained a reputation with the McKinley Bridge at St. Louis, the Broadway Bridge at Portland, Ore., and others, including some at Chicago (see 1926; 1935).

The Detroit-Windsor Tunnel opens to traffic under the Detroit River November 3 to supplement the Ambassador Bridge that opened late last year; it has been built of prefabricated tubes floated over a trench and sunk like sections of pipeline.

The United States has 694,000 miles of paved road, up from 387,000 in 1921, plus 2.31 million miles of dirt road (see 1940).

U.S. motorcar sales drop off sharply, but the country has an average of one passenger car for every 5.5 persons, up from one for every 13 in 1920. Ford sells 1 million Model A cars, down from 2 million last year. Chevrolet sales drop only 5 percent.

Japan has 50,000 motorcars as compared with 23 million in the United States, 18,000 in China, 125,000 in India, 4,822 in Syria.

A 16-cylinder Cadillac is introduced by General Motors, whose founder is sold out by his bankers as Wall Street prices collapse again. W. C. Durant liquidated his fortune in common stocks early last year but plunged back into the market when prices plummeted; his Durant Motors will be liquidated in 1933, and Durant will be personally bankrupt by 1936.