Wichita Wonder

Cessna’s I-50 proves to be astonishingly necessary for RCAF trainees

- ROBERT S. GRANT

Before Pearl Harbor, nations at war desperately needed more twin-engine pilots. North of the U.S. border, the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan's armada of Airspeed Oxfords and Avro Ansons could not meet demands. Cessna's contribution not only saved the Allies, but rescued an American manufacturer from near collapse.

Roof shingles and lightning rods thudded into prairie snow as a yellow airplane slammed against a barn, west of Winnipeg. While tangs of dribbling 80/87 gasoline wafted outward, three men tumbled from the crumpled steel tube and shredded wings. The misadventure on April 16, 1944, which included a 500-foot trail of debris and a missing left wing of Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) Cessna Crane 7928, was not the first since the creation of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan (BCATP) in 1939.

This advertisement for the Cessna Aircraft Company Cessna T50 twin highlights the aircraft's versatility.

Dozens of the 245-hp Jacobs L-4 MBpowered Cranes had been bent or burned in rigorous efforts to prepare aircrew for battling the Axis hordes. As World War II progressed, Wichita's Cessna salesmen pushed their innovative Model T-50 to supplement training aircraft in sub-Arctic snows and blistering summer suns. Allied bomber offensives and complex twin-engine intruders demanded wing-wearing airmen ordained from diminutive single-engine airplanes. Few winged knights of hope en route to the heavies had felt fistfuls of Bakelite-knobbed throttles or sensed the ratcheting clicks of electric landing gears and fabric-covered flaps tremoring into fur-lined boots.