Celebrating 100 years of Fairchild Aircraft

Fairchild Aviation Corporation was created in Long Island, New York, in 1925 to address a specific need for aircraft designed as aerial photography platforms.

Led by Sherman Mills Fairchild, who enjoyed both wealth and talent, Fairchild and its iterative companies fast became a reliable part of American aviation industry.

Let’s take a quick look at Fairchild over the years. Call it a primer if you are heading to 2025 EAA AirVenture Oshkosh this summer, as the centennial of Fairchild will be celebrated there, and several models of Fairchild airplanes are expected to park in the grassy tree-lined Vintage Aircraft area on Wittman Regional Airport (KOSH) in Wisconsin.

Sherman Fairchild invented a synchronized camera shutter and flash mechanism when he was a freshman at Harvard. A troubling bout with tuberculosis made Sherman ineligible to serve in the U.S. military during World War I, but he endeavored to be of value with his lens shutter inventions, particularly suited to aerial photography.

The ability to photographically represent huge tracts of land, populated or wilderness, gained traction and young Sherman established the Fairchild Aerial Camera Corporation in 1920. Survey work in Canada and the U.S. was promising, but Fairchild’s use of existing generic aircraft as camera platforms disappointed him, and the bright inventor went to several aircraft manufacturers with his ideas for a photographic survey aircraft.

The responses Fairchild received for building such an airplane sounded too expensive to him, so Sherman created the Fairchild Aviation Corporation in Long Island, New York, in 1925 to build his FC-1.

The FC-1 was a high-wing cabin monoplane with extensive flat glazing in the fuselage to accommodate camera angles.

The FC-1, which first flew in the summer of 1926, led to the FC-2, which spanned 44 feet. The production FC-2 frequently was fitted with a Wright J-5 radial engine of 200 horsepower.

The FC-2 enabled Fairchild’s photo survey business. But Fairchild and his team were cognizant of a broader aviation market than just specialized photo platforms, and the FC-2 could carry four passengers or more than 800 pounds of cargo.

Characteristic of early Fairchild aircraft, the FC-2 incorporated wings that could be folded back parallel to the fuselage for storage in smaller spaces than required for a full-spanned aircraft.

Sherman Fairchild’s business model included purchasing a major interest or ownership of other companies to further his goals. In 1929 he attained majority stock interest in the Kreider-Reisner Aircraft Company in Hagerstown, Maryland. The Kreider-Reisner plant became the home base for Fairchild at that time.

With FC-2 production underway, the new talent pool from Kreider-Reisner created a clean-sheet single-engine parasol design, the Fairchild Model 22 of 1931. This open cockpit sport aircraft was well-received, and became the basis for the enclosed-cockpit Model 24, held dear in the hearts of antiquers as the classic Golden Age Fairchild of the 1930s and 1940s.

Iterations of Fairchild F-24s flew with Warner radial engines or inline air-cooled Fairchild Ranger motors. The F-22 and F-24 began with an almost cetacean-like rounded narrow chord vertical fin and rudder. Over the life of the cabin F-24, this morphed into a more traditional broader chord design.

Fairchild produced a number of civilian aircraft models, but really hit a big production stride with the acceptance by the Army Air Forces of the PT-19 trainer before World War II.

The company made extensive use of molded plywood shapes, and developed the Duramold plastic bonded plywood AT-21 twin-engine trainer for the Army Air Forces. Intended to foster crew integration training for gunners and other crew positions, AT-21s exhibited some flying characteristics undesirable for such a trainer, and their service was abbreviated in 1944.

Many people know Fairchild for the low-wing Ranger-powered PT-19 primary trainer and its offshoot iterations during World War II. More than 6,000 PT-19s were built by Fairchild and other contractors.

But Fairchild had another design in the works since 1941 — a design that would keep the company busy even after World War II.

While the PT-19, PT-23, and PT-26 trainers were staples for Fairchild during the war, it would not behoove company planners to slip into a false sense of economic security. So their most ambitious design of that era was a tricycle-gear twin engine, twin boom transport that could load from trucks at deck height, discharge aerial cargo out the back in flight, and carry troops into battle. It was the C-82, a modestly successful transport that flew before war’s end and served into the early 1950s.

The C-82 gave rise to the larger and more capable C-119 Flying Boxcar, a hallmark of Fairchild.

Fairchild stepped in with larger production capacity to make production versions of the Chase Aircraft-designed C-123 Provider transport. More than 300 C-123s were built.

Fairchild continued to leverage its relationships with other manufacturers, buying rights to construct the high-wing, twin-engine Fokker Friendship airliner as the F-27 in the U.S.

In 1964, Fairchild bought Hiller Helicopter Co., later selling it back to Stanley Hiller.

And in 1965, moribund Republic Aviation, storied builder of rugged fighters for the Air Force, came under the Fairchild umbrella. With that acquisition, the development of the Fairchild Republic A-10 Thunderbolt II ground attack aircraft gave the combined companies a winning warplane for quantity production at the Fairchild facility in Hagerstown, after two prototypes were made in the old Republic plant in Farmingdale, New York.

Another assimilation by Fairchild was the Swearingen company, leading to a production run of slim Metroliner twins.

The prototype T-46 jet trainer built by Fairchild Republic failed to garner an Air Force contract, and marked the end of aircraft production by the Fairchild companies even before the T-46 was canceled by the Air Force in 1988.

Space does not allow a description of every aircraft issued under the name Fairchild, but the examples cited give a sense of the company’s rationale over many decades.

A hundred years ago, Sherman Fairchild began building airplanes to support his photo mapping business. For the following 60 years, the evolving iterations of Fairchild companies made original designs, and also purchased the ideas of other makers when it suited.