AVIATION: Walter and Olive Ann

The plushiest employe profit-sharing plan in big corporation history last week was announced by Beech Aircraft Corp. The scheme—which was okayed with a whoop and a holler by Beech's 6,000 employees—gives them one-half of all company profits. Distributions (50% cash, 50% U.S. Defense Savings bonds) will be made every three months on the basis of the preceding quarter's earnings. Beech thereby expects to generate enough worker cooperation and efficiency at least to offset the cost to the stockholders.

Beech was an unusual planemaker even before it announced this unusual plan. The biggest U.S. mass producer of heavy, twin-engined bomber trainers, its sales and profits have paralleled those of the bomber makers themselves, though at a lower level. In the year ended Sept. 30, Beech sales rose 240% to $8,063,000, profits 600% to $472,000. Both were all-time records.

Tough-minded Walter Hershel Beech, 48, looks like an oversized Bing Crosby. He never got through the seventh grade but has an amazing knack for machinery and aerodynamics. After five years in the Army Air Corps (1917-21), he joined Lloyd Stearman and Clyde Cessna (both of whom later formed their own companies), started Wichita's Travel Air Co. to make small planes. Travel Air boomed with the air craze of the Twenties.

Beech's secretary then was Olive Ann Mellor, a smart girl who urged him to sell out at the top of the boom to Curtiss-Wright. He did, became a Curtiss-Wright vice president. But Beech is no chairwarmer, unless the chair is a pilot's seat (he has 15,000 solo hours). So first he married Olive Ann, then he quit Curtiss to organize Beech Aircraft in 1932. His first break came when he startled the industry with his "reverse stagger" biplane (lower wing ahead of upper). Called unairworthy at the time, Beech biplanes are still the only single-engined private craft able to do 250 m.p.h. .

When the defense boom started Beech had sold fewer than 300 airplanes. He was long on reputation, short on orders and cash. But he had three assets: 1) energy, 2) a smooth tongue, 3) a twin-engined commercial transport readily convertible into a bomber trainer. After a Beech sales talk, the Army started signing bomber trainer orders. Now Beech has an $85,000,000 backlog.

Of this, $35,000,000 is for a plane unique in U.S. aviation history—the all-plywood bomber trainer AT-10. The AT-10 uses very little scarce aluminum or steel and can be turned out much faster than metal craft. Almost ready for full-scale production, Beech has subcontracted 30-40% of his plywood ship to companies like American Seating Co. (school and theater seats), Reed Roller Bit Co. (oil-well drills), Kansas City woodworking outfits.

Walter Beech is only half of Beech Aircraft. As secretary-treasurer, Olive Ann works 10-12 hours daily. When expansion plans were afoot last year, she was in a Wichita hospital having her second baby. But she had a direct hospital-plant telephone and the directors met at her bedside. Later she and two associates went to Washington, got Emil Schram to okay a $13,540,508 RFC revolving credit.