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The Detroit of the small-plane industry is Wichita, Kans., where the two biggest companies—Cessna and Beech—account for 70% of all the dollars spent on light planes. Between them, they offer customers twelve different models, priced from $7,000 to $210,000. Beech concentrates mainly on higher-priced planes, while Cessna rules the middle and lower brackets. And though Beech leads in total business, with 1957 sales of $104 million (66% military), Cessna is the world's biggest private-plane builder, with commercial sales of 2,489 planes worth $33 million (total sales: $70 million). First-quarter fiscal 1958 sales: a peacetime-record $20.7 million for Cessna, a near-record $20.8 million for Beech. Just below Beech and Cessna stands the third member of the Big Three: Piper Aircraft of Lock Haven, Pa., which concentrates on low-priced planes and whose ubiquitous Cub is known the world over. Piper's sales: a record $26.6 million in 1957, but down slightly in igsS's first quarter.
Beech and Cessna might be one huge company today were it not for a personality clash between Walter Beech, a Tennessee farm boy turned pilot, and Clyde Cessna, another farm boy from Kansas. The two started off together, formed Travel Air Co. in 1925 with Cessna as president, Beech as sales manager. But after building two types of planes, one of which was the first commercial aircraft to fly the Pacific to Hawaii, Cessna went off to form his own company. Beech merged Travel Air with Curtiss-Wright and later, in 1932, formed his own company.
Pilot Beech's only trouble was making a profit: he was no financial man, left most of the details to his wife Olive Ann, and the company barely kept aloft. Cessna had even deeper problems. In the Depression he had to close his plant. What saved the company was Cessna's nephews, Dwane and Dwight Wallace, one an aeronautical engineer who once worked for Beech, the other a lawyer. By sweet-talking creditors they reopened the plant, and, though Clyde Cessna sat as president until he retired in 1934, the man in charge was Dwane Wallace, then only 23.
Right Plane, Right Price. He kept the company in the air, but it was shaky flying. Cessna had only $3.97 in the bank when it got the first World War II order for its T-50 trainer, went on to produce 5>359 by war's end. Beech, with a bigger, six-passenger Model 18 transport-trainer, made 7,400 units and millions in profits from every branch of the armed forces. With peace both companies faced some agonizing reappraisals. Beech wanted to merge with Cessna. Dwane Wallace refused, doggedly set about finding civilian markets once it became crystal-clear that the day of the flying flivver had not yet quite arrived.
Beech and Cessna have learned that the U.S. businessman will pay handsomely to fly the right plane at the right price. Under President Olive Ann Beech, who took over when her husband died in 1950, and Vice President Jack Gaty, who runs the operating end, Beech's line starts with its famed single-engined Bonanza ($25,000), goes up to a far fancier Twin-Bonanza at $88,000, and ends with an eight-passenger peacetime version of its wartime D18, which costs $125,000. This year, like its competitors, Beech will try to fill in the chinks (see box).