Vultee (as anyone at Saturday’s gathering would be glad to tell you) was the man with intense black eyes and a love of airplanes who bought the old Downey airstrip and production plant founded by E. M. Smith of EMSCO in 1936 and established Vultee Aircraft Corporation.There were smiles and handshakes and memories to share as the former employees of Vultee Aviation held a reunion and luncheon at the Los Amigos Country Club Saturday, Sept. 24, 1994.
Jerry Vultee was not to enjoy his new production facilities for long, for he died with his wife, Sylvia, in an air crash in 1938. But Vultee lived on after him. He had brought together an engineering team of genius. The aircraft production plant where Rockwell stands today, became a key to American production of warplanes in World War II, and the home of the famed "Rosie the Riveter," women who joined the war effort by working on the production lines to build fighting machines for their men who were overseas.
Vultee had designed the V-1A airliner in 1933, which set a number of point-to-point speed and distance records, and became the standard plane used by American Airlines in the 1930s.
The Vultee plant assembled more than 11,000 military planes during World War II, the most famous of which was the BT-13, a low-winged trainer that was politely called the "Valiant," but which was also familiarly known as the Vultee "Vibrator" by its harsher critics.
During World War II Vultee merged with Consolidated to become Consolidated Vultee, later known as Convair.
Some fine fighting machines rolled off Convair’s production lines in Downey.
Following World War II, Consolidated Vultee pioneered American research in missiles, using the German V-2 as a model. It built a short-range navy missile called the Lark and in 1946 was awarded a $1.2 million contract to study the possibility of a long range missile weapon. The project was identified as MX-774.
The company was concentrating on weight reduction (the V-2 was far too heavy) when the contract was pulled by the government in July of 1946 as an economy measure. Consolidated Vultee pulled all operations back to its San Diego facilities. But the Vultee missile research was the foundation of the mighty Atlas missile that followed in the 1950s.
The plant was occupied in 1947 by North American Aviation (later to become Rockwell).