Albert W. "Al" Mooney

Every Mooney M20 in the sky today traces back to a red-haired kid from Denver named Albert Mooney. He was born on April 12, 1906, the son of a railroad engineer who taught his boys drafting. Al had been studying airplanes since he was twelve, and he started out sweeping the Alexander Aircraft hangar after school. In 1925, at nineteen, he signed on as a draftsman. Within a year he was effectively the company's engineer, and the Long Wing Eaglerock, drawn in 1925 and in production in 1926, was his first airplane to reach production.

In 1926 he worked briefly in Marshall, Missouri, where his M-2 monoplane was built, then returned to Alexander, by then in Colorado Springs, as chief engineer. There in 1928 he designed the Alexander Bullet, a low-wing cabin monoplane with retractable landing gear, and he held one of the early basic patents on retractable gear. In 1929 he left to start the first Mooney Aircraft Corporation in Wichita with his older brother, Arthur. It did not survive the Depression and closed in 1931. Mooney went on to Bellanca as chief engineer in the early 1930s, and in 1935 he became vice president and chief engineer of Monocoupe in St. Louis, where he designed the Dart and the twin-engine Monocoach.

In 1938 Knight K. Culver, a Monocoupe dealer, joined Mooney to form the Dart Manufacturing Corporation in Columbus, Ohio, and take over the Dart. Renamed the Culver Aircraft Company in 1939, it brought out the Model L that December, soon called the Cadet, with Art Mooney supervising production. After about fifty airplanes the company moved to Wichita, where the retractable-gear LFA and LCA followed, and more than 350 Cadets were built before the war. In 1941 Walter Beech and Charles Yankey took over Culver. During the war Culver built more than 3,000 radio-controlled target drones derived from the Cadet, the PQ-8 and PQ-14.

In July 1946 the Mooney brothers founded a new Mooney Aircraft in Wichita, with Yankey financing it and W. L. McMahon as a partner. Al was general manager and chief engineer, and Art ran production. Their single-seat M-18 Mite sold for $1,995. The company moved to Kerrville, Texas, in 1953, and the four-place M20 first flew there on September 3 of that year. Yankey died the same year, and after the M20 was certificated Mooney sold his interest and in November 1955 joined Lockheed in Marietta, Georgia. He worked on the proposal that became the JetStar, the AL-60 and the XV-4 Hummingbird before retiring on February 1, 1968. He died in Dallas on May 7, 1986, at eighty. The Texas Aviation Hall of Fame inducted him in 2017, and a collection of his papers is at the University of Texas at Dallas.

The Caldwell Collection at Mustang Field holds two airplanes from his drawing board. Our 1928 Alexander Long Wing Eaglerock comes from the first design he saw into production, and our 1940 Culver Cadet LCA from the trim little line he drew a dozen years later. The M20 that grew out of them still carries his name.