RB-18B wrote:
Thanks for your comments Noha, but Interstate had actually built at least 332 S-1A Cadets (and received a coveted Approved Type Certificate) before they got the L-6 contract from the USAAF.
Oh, my mistake. My knowledge of the L-6 is unsurprisingly limited and I must have just assumed that the S-1 designation applied to the postwar CallAir production. Thanks for the correction!
You did make me think of one other question though: Why was it designated the "S-1" and not the "I-1" for "Interstate"? Wikipedia doesn't name who designed the aircraft, but I'm willing to bet that it was the president of Interstate, Don P. Smith, and from this hence the "S" for "Smith". Is this correct?
Also, it would be interesting to know how the company came up with the name "Interstate". (Origins of aircraft manufacturer names is a bit of an interest of mine, being something I touched on in a
different thread a while back.) However, I did notice that: 1) the L-8 production went to the Bolivian Air Force, 2) the rights to the S-1 design were purchased by Harlow in 1945, which also had an export focus with their PC-5 (I assume the sale was part of Interstate's postwar refocus on appliance production.), and 3) Harlow was owned at one point by the Intercontinent Corporation in 1941. All of this seems to suggest to me that there was a predisposition toward foreign sales and maybe the name was a reference to that? However, I am also not clear on the timeline of all of the above and depending on when it happened, it may have been due to the influence of Harlow rather than anything by Interstate itself.
RB-18B wrote:
I want to assure that the article I am nearly finished with will address all of your excellent observations and, hopefully, shed just a little more light on yet another unloved aircraft!
Awesome, I can't wait to hear your conclusions. (I actually added a good deal to the
Wikipedia article on the company a while back, but it was mostly pulling from various newspaper articles, so your article should be a good reference should I ever get back to it again.) Where will the article be published?
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