North American and the P-51, Origins

Video from the channel Greg's Airplanes and Automobiles about North American P-51 Mustang, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 28:01. Language: English. Video type: Documentary.

The video argues that North American Aviation, the company that built the P-51 Mustang, didn't appear out of nowhere in the mid-1930s: its technical capability and much of its workforce came from the American subsidiary of Fokker, which General Motors bought and renamed twice before the fighter was born.

After World War I, Anthony Fokker returned to the Netherlands with trainloads of tooling, engines and more than a hundred aircraft. A contract from Billy Mitchell for 135 DH-4Ms with welded steel structures, which had to be built in the United States, led him to lease a factory in New Jersey; in 1923 he moved to the country and obtained citizenship. His subsidiary, first Atlantic Aviation and from 1925 Fokker Aircraft Corporation, became the world's largest aircraft manufacturer in the 1920s thanks to trimotors like the F.VII. General Motors bought a controlling stake in May 1929 and in February 1930 brought in Edgar Schmued, a self-taught engineer who was working for GM in Brazil. In 1931 the crash of an F-10 in Kansas, which killed the Notre Dame football team's coach, damaged Fokker's reputation and accelerated the shift from wood to metal; that same year Anthony Fokker left the company, which GM renamed General Aviation Corporation. In 1933 GM bought North American Aviation, at the time a holding company that had never built aircraft, unified its aeronautical division under that name, and in 1935 moved it to Inglewood, California.

Of roughly 250 initial workers in Inglewood, about 75 came from the Teterboro plant. Among them were Schmued, who would lead the P-51 project, and Vance Breese, a former Fokker pilot and the Mustang's first test pilot. The first production aircraft was the O-47, derived from the GA-15; next came the NA-16 trainers, which culminated in the T-6 Texan (more than 15,000 built), and the XB-21 and NA-40 prototypes, forerunners of the B-25. In February 1940 the British asked James Kindelberger to build P-40s, and he offered instead a new fighter with a flying prototype in four months. After the war, orders fell from 8,000 to 24 aircraft and the workforce dropped from more than 90,000 to about 5,000 people, until the F-86 Sabre brought the company back to success.