Travel Air 2000

The Travel Air Model A was engineered chiefly by Lloyd Stearman, with input from Travel Air co-founders Walter Beech, Clyde Cessna, and Bill Snook and could trace its ancestry back to the Swallow New Swallow biplane. The Travel Air, however, replaced the New Swallow's wooden fuselage structure with welded steel tubes. An interim design, the Winstead Special, was developed by the Winstead brothers from a metal fuselage frame developed at Swallow by Stearman and Walter Beech, but subsequently rejected by Swallow president Jake Moellendick, a decision which triggered the departure of both Stearman and Beech, and the creation of Travel Air. ==Operational history==

In addition to a wide range of normal aircraft applications, the Travel Air biplanes saw extensive use in early motion pictures, where they often stood in for the increasingly scarce Fokker D.VII. Aside from surplus military aircraft such as the Curtiss JN-4 Jenny and along with their chief competitor WACO, Travel Air biplanes were the most widely used civilian biplanes during the late 1920s and very early 1930s in America. As the Model 2000 was nearing the end of its development cycle, a pair of new designs, the Travel Air 12 and 14 were developed to replace it - the 12 as a slightly smaller two-seat trainer, and the larger 14 as a direct replacement, even to continuing some of the marketing names. Both would fly while Travel Air retained its identity, but would be incorporated into the Curtiss-Wright line with the same numbers. Movie industry Travel Air biplanes were widely used in 1920s/1930s war movies, particularly to represent the airplanes they were patterned after: Germany's Fokker D-VII fighter, the top fighter of World War I. In the motion picture industry, they were known as "Wichita Fokkers." In fact, Hollywood's demand for Travel Air biplanes was so intense that Travel Air's California salesman, Fred Hoyt, coaxed Travel Air co-founder and principal airplane designer, Lloyd Stearman, to come to Venice, California in 1926 to exploit the movie industry demand for his aircraft by starting the short-lived independent Stearman Aircraft Company (re-opened back in Wichita in 1927). Some of the many movies using Travel Air biplanes (2000 and 4000, in particular) included: • Wings (1927) won the first-ever Academy Award for Best Picture for its technical accuracy • Flying Fool (1929) early leading roles for William Boyd, later famous as "Hopalong Cassidy") • ''Hell's Angels'' (1930) extravagant war epic by Howard Hughes • The Dawn Patrol (1930) • Heartbreak (1931) • Ace of Aces (1933) featured five Travel Air Model Bs, and numerous other aircraft. • Hell in the Heavens (1933) • Flying Devils (1933) • Murder in the Clouds (1934) ==Variants==

Date from Aerofiles -powered Travel Air 2000 at the Historic Aircraft Restoration Museum, Dauster Field, Creve Coeur, Missouri Variants were distinguished with prefixes and suffixes in a particular order, and denoting different fittings. The prefix S, preceding all other prefixes meant it was a Seaplane and was fitted with floats. Next it was wings. B was the Standard wing, not to be confused with the original basic elephant ear wing, and D indicated the aircraft was fitted with a Speedwing. The engine code followed this, and due to the long service period when considerable experimentation occurred, a wide variety of engines were installed in production airplane as follows: • C - Curtiss C-6 inline engine • D - Aeromarine B 6-cylinder inline engine Suffixes were also added that were specific to modifications made and often referred to conversions or post-production versions. ;2000 :Improved Model B with Curtiss OX-5 engine. First Travel Air to be Type Certified. ;C-2000 : Curtiss C-6 6-cylinder inline engine ;D-2000 :OX-5-powered racing aircraft with reduced-span wings and narrower fuselage. Later converted to Model 11. ==Surviving aircraft==

• 206 (NC1081) – at the Golden Age Air Museum in Bethel, Pennsylvania. • 669 (NC6217) – static display at the Yanks Air Museum in Chino, California. • 720 (CF-AFG) – on static display at the Canada Aviation and Space Museum in Ottawa, Ontario. • 721 (NC6282) – on static display at the Shannon Air Museum in Fredericksburg, Virginia. ==Specifications (OX-5 Travel Air 2000 (ATC 30)) ==