The North American Aviation B-25 Mitchell medium bomber played a key role in the Allied victory in World War II around the globe.

Of the 9,800 B-25s built between 1940 and 1945, the U.S. Army Air Forces had more than a couple thousand in service at the height of the bomber’s employment in the war, while Great Britain and the Soviet Union also flew squadrons of Mitchells.

Responding to Air Corps requests for bomber designs, North American created the NA-40 twin engine bomber that first flew in January 1939. The NA-40 had promise, but warranted a redesign that became the B-25 of 1940.

By the last year of World War I, the major combatants had made significant contributions to the aeronautical state of the art.

America created the Liberty engine. Germany produced the advanced Fokker D.VII biplane fighter. France gave the Allies the sturdy and fast SPAD XIII. And England, after a bit of a rough start, produced one of the finest fighters of the war, the S.E. 5A.

Before jet-age stretches of transport aircraft fuselage designs became commonplace, in World War II the Consolidated Aircraft Company demonstrated how it is done with the famed B-24 Liberator heavy bomber.

In 1941, ahead of America’s entry into the war, Consolidated made a design change to the Liberator that added nearly 3′ — 2′, 7″, to be exact — to the nose of the aircraft ahead of the cockpit. This gave all subsequent Liberators a longer, less pug-nosed appearance and provided greater space where the navigator and bombardier worked.

Charles Lindbergh’s May 1927 transatlantic flight is credited with stoking an unprecedented national sense of airmindedness.

A friend of Lindbergh’s, Oliver Parks, established Parks Air College that December and embarked on a mission to educate pilots and aeronautical engineers to meet the demands of industry.

Parks’ bag of tricks included having students build aircraft that were used in the college’s flight training program. The first of these was the P-1, a very conventional biplane powered by an OX-5 engine, its radiator placed between and just ahead of the main landing gear struts extending from the belly of the forward fuselage. 

The big Curtiss C-46 Commando transport of World War II was a milestone in air transport. With a wingspan greater than that of a four-engine B-17, the C-46 used a pair of R-2800 radial engines to get it aloft at a gross weight of 56,000 pounds. It was the largest twin-engine aircraft in the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II.

Military Commandos hauled troops and carried vehicles and light aircraft, loaded through a large aperture in the left side of the fuselage.

The C-46 in popular literature has been viewed as a maintenance-prone airlifter when compared with the smaller Douglas C-47. And yet the Commando’s weight-lifting and altitude performance made it the star of the ongoing Allied airlift over the Himalayas in the China-Burma-India theater of operations.

Peace in 1945 cut short the production of C-46s after more than 3,000 were built. The War Assets Administration (WAA) worked with the Air Force to make C-46s available to civilian operators.

Aircraft manufacturers have long been adept at leveraging designs to gain as much utility — and production — as possible.

The dual tracks of commercial transport and military airlift had more in common in the 1940s than today. It was an era before low-sitting, end-loading, and air-dropping cargo behemoths defined military transport procurement. The need for moving large numbers of troops and large numbers of airline passengers over long distances had some commonality back then.

World War II blunted the development of pure civilian transports for the duration, but big players in the airline business, including Pan American Airways, had important wartime transport duties. Pan American also had enough clout to influence the development of a super transport for the Navy that might one day also be an ocean-spanning airliner.

As the fledgling U.S. Army Air Service was still figuring things out, in 1924 it created the C-Class of aircraft to include cargo and personnel transport, doing away with an earlier T-series that indicated Transport.

And C-Cargo it has been ever since, starting with the original Douglas C-1 biplane, introduced in 1925.

The McDonnell Aircraft Company expressed a fondness for paranormal or spooky aircraft names.

This may date back to the company’s ambitious XP-67 fighter design during World War II occasionally referred to as the Bat or Moonbat, although the official nature of such a moniker is unclear.

Nonetheless, McDonnell — later McDonnell-Douglas and now part of the mega Boeing holdings — ran through a list of names with its ensuing jet fighters, including Phantom, Banshee, Goblin, and the F3H Demon.