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Glenn Martin in the pilot's seat

Chicago Daily News, Courtesy of the Chicago Historical Society

For more than two centuries, Maryland has been a leader in American aviation. In the twentieth century, the aviation industry employed thousands of Marylanders in manufacturing, testing, and air transport.

The first American to leave the earth’s surface in an artificial device was Baltimore teenager Edward Warren, lifted aloft from Howard’s Park by a 30-foot hot-air balloon on June 24, 1784. The balloon was built by Peter Carnes, proprietor of the Indian Queen Tavern in Bladensburg. A number of balloon ascensions took place over Maryland in the nineteenth century, mostly as carnival attractions. In the Civil War, the Union Army’s Balloon Corps made ascensions in Maryland in 1861–62.

Heavier-than-air flying came to the state in 1909 at Owings Mills, with Charles Elvers’ first flight of his homemade biplane, and at College Park with Wilbur Wright’s establishment of the first U.S. Army flight school. In continuous operation since 1909, College Park is the world’s oldest airport. In November 1910, thousands of Marylanders had their first sight of airplanes in flight at the Halethorpe Air Meet, which included a dramatic flight over downtown Baltimore by the Anglo-French aviator Hubert Latham.

World War I saw the first stirrings of aircraft manufacturing in Maryland. In Baltimore the American Propeller Company employed 900 workers producing wooden propellers for American and Allied planes. In Hagerstown, the Maryland Pressed Steel Company geared up for the production of warplanes. Military testing of aircraft began in army and navy research establishments at Aberdeen, Annapolis, and Indian Head.

By the early 1920s, the emphasis had shifted to peaceful use of the air. Air mail service was launched at College Park, and Logan Field in Dundalk was the site of Maryland’s first passenger air terminal. Mexico Farms Airport in Cumberland was developed as the initial stop on a government “flyway” to the Midwest. In Hagerstown, Ammon Kreider and Lewis Reisner began an aircraft-manufacturing company that was to last for 70 years.

The Lindbergh Boom, 1927
All this was overshadowed by the boom in aviation that accompanied Charles A. Lindbergh’s New-York-to-Paris flight of April 1927. Although government officials in Annapolis and Baltimore had already laid the groundwork for an extensive aviation industry, Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight and his visit to Baltimore in the “Spirit of St. Louis” in November galvanized public enthusiasm.

Most significantly, Baltimore began developing a new municipal airport along the Dundalk waterfront. To be built on soil dredged from Baltimore Harbor, the new airport was planned to offer both runways for land planes and a terminal for flying boats—and sites for aircraft factories. Civic leaders sought to lure the new industry to Baltimore and they were remarkably successful. Two modern factories were built, one by the Curtiss-Caproni Company, a joint venture between American and Italian firms, and another by a new firm founded by Marylanders Henry A. Berliner and Temple Joyce. The biggest prize was the Glenn L. Martin Aircraft Company, initially attracted to the Dundalk site but eventually located ten miles north at Middle River.

The boom was not limited to Baltimore. New private and municipal airports opened across the state. In Hagerstown, Kreider and Reisner sold out to New York investor Sherman Fairchild, who built a modern factory alongside the “little green shed” which housed the original operation.

Just as these efforts were coming to fruition, the Great Depression sharply reduced demand for aircraft. The Curtiss-Caproni and Berliner-Joyce factories never attained full production. Through a series of mergers, both eventually came into the hands of North American Aviation, which moved to Los Angeles. Martin managed to keep operating mostly on military contracts; Fairchild shrank to just a few employees.

Although grim financially, the 1930s were a time of great technological innovation. Martin received the Collier Trophy for the B-10 design, and Armand Thieblot of Fairchild designed a safe-to-fly primary training plane, the PIT-19. In 1933–34 the noted engineer Frederick Weik designed a sleek private plane that was “spin-proof” and could be controlled like a car, using only a “steering wheel.” In 1938, the Engineering Research Corporation (ERCO), another enterprise of Henry Berliner, built a factory in Riverdale to manufacture the Ercoupe.

World War II Boom
The Depression ended quickly after war broke out in Europe in 1939. Martin became an industrial colossus. Fairchild won lucrative Army Air Forces contracts for the PT-19 “Cornell” trainer, for the C-82 “Packet” cargo plane, and for military versions of its older designs. Although Ercoupe production was halted, the ERCO factory hummed with work on aircraft gun turrets. The General Motors factory in Baltimore, cooperating with other General Motors plants, built bombers and fighters for the navy.

The wartime boom extended far beyond manufacturing aircraft themselves. The Bendix Radio Company of Towson and Westinghouse Electronics Division of Linthicum supplied aircraft electronics. Black and Decker equipped aircraft plants with thousands of their newly invented hand-held electric drills. The laboratories of the Johns Hopkins University did vital work on the proximity fuse for aircraft guns. The military services opened new major air bases in Prince George’s and St. Mary’s Counties and built new airfields later converted into municipal airports at Salisbury, Easton, and Cumberland.

Industrial expansion drew tens of thousands of new workers to Maryland. The influx was increased by the industry’s initial reluctance to hire many female or African-American workers. The “Hagerstown Plan” managed to recruit new workers mostly from existing local factories and farms, but in Baltimore the incoming tide of white male workers and their families necessitated the construction of a whole new town outside the gates of the Martin plant in Middle River. After 1943, when hiring prejudices waned, an influx of African Americans crowded Baltimore’s segregated black neighborhoods, leading eventually to the construction of a new segregated suburb at Cherry Hill.

Postwar and Mass Transportation
The end of the war saw a boom in private aviation. New airfields opened all across the state, including several airparks combining airstrip and residences: “an airplane in every garage.” The ERCO factory worked three shifts, but Americans took to the roads more than the skies, and many of the private airfields closed.

Aircraft production in Maryland gradually declined as well. Ercoupe production in Riverdale ended in 1952. Martin produced its last plane in 1960. Fairchild produced a wide variety of aircraft, including the famous C-119 “Flying Boxcar,” the F-27 turboprop airliner, and the A-10 “Warthog” attack plane. In 1987, three years after the last A-10 was rolled out, all of the Fairchild factories abruptly closed.

The aviation industry was moving into new fields. Aviation-related electronics boomed at Westinghouse, later Northrop Grumman. The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and Goddard Spaceflight Center emerged as major centers for aerospace research. Andrews Air Force Base served as home for presidential flying, the base for Air Force One. Navy pilots demonstrated “the right stuff” at the Patuxent River testing base. Baltimore and Washington were ringed with Nike antiaircraft missile sites for defense against Soviet bombers.

Finally, in the decades after World War II, the airplane became a vehicle of mass transportation. By 1946, Baltimore’s leaders realized that the runways at their municipal airport at Dundalk were too short for modern airliners. Transatlantic flying-boat service, active during World War II, had ceased. Imaginatively, they abandoned the nearly new municipal airport on the harbor (it became the Dundalk Marine Terminal) and chose a new inland site centered on Friendship Church, midway between Washington and Baltimore in Anne Arundel County. At first the new Friendship Airport, opened in 1950, failed to thrive. But state ownership and investment after 1972, and a name change—to Baltimore/Washington International Airport—launched an era of continual expansion.

BWI (now Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport) served mostly the major airlines’ routes to large cities. In Hagerstown, Richard A. Henson, aviation entrepreneur and Fairchild test pilot, pondered how air travel might be brought to smaller communities. He developed an air-taxi service into the first commuter airline linked to major airlines’ schedules, with small airliners reassuringly painted in major-airline colors. The idea spread across the country; Henson eventually moved the operation to larger quarters in Salisbury. At the end of the twentieth century aviation was a mature industry in Maryland, continuing nearly a century of growth and innovation.

—John R. Breihan

Loyola College in Maryland