Featuring many never-before-seen images, this video takes you behind the scenes at the Douglas Aircraft Company with once-Secret Projects, showing rocket planes, strategic bombers, global airlifters, and even jet airliners converted for highly-classified military missions.
The Douglas Aircraft Company was an American aerospace and defense company based in Southern California. Founded in 1921 by Donald Wills Douglas Sr., it merged with McDonnell Aircraft in 1967 to form McDonnell Douglas, where it operated as a division. McDonnell Douglas merged with Boeing in 1997.
The company was founded as the Douglas Company by Donald Wills Douglas Sr. on July 22, 1921, in Santa Monica, California, following dissolution of the Davis-Douglas Company. An early claim to fame was the first circumnavigation of the world by air in Douglas airplanes in 1924. In 1923, the U.S. Army Air Service was interested in carrying out a mission to circumnavigate the Earth for the first time by aircraft, a program called “World Flight” Donald Douglas proposed a modified Douglas DT to meet the Army’s needs. The two-place, open cockp. it DT biplane torpedo bomber had previously been produced for the U.S. Navy. The DTs were taken from the assembly lines at the company’s manufacturing plants in Rock Island, Illinois, and Dayton, Ohio, to be modified.
Sources: Wikipedia; YouTube