Donald A. "Don" Luscombe

Don Luscombe's gift was seeing what private pilots wanted before they did. Twice in ten years he found the right designers, raised the money and put a new kind of light airplane on the market. Donald Arthur Luscombe was born in Iowa City, Iowa, on May 25, 1895, the son of an English-born father. After the United States entered the First World War he volunteered as an ambulance driver in France, where he was cited for valor and took his first airplane ride, in a French Voisin. Home again, he built his own advertising agency in Davenport, Iowa, bought a war-surplus Curtiss JN-4 and learned to fly.

By the mid-1920s Luscombe wanted a small, enclosed, side-by-side airplane that a businessman could fly in comfort. In 1926 he persuaded Davenport-area businessmen to back the Central States Aero Company in Bettendorf and hired a young designer, Clayton Folkerts, to build it. The first Monocoupe, built in an abandoned church in Davenport, flew in the spring of 1927. The company became the Mono Aircraft division of the Velie Motor Corporation in 1928 and then the Mono Aircraft Company of Moline, Illinois, with Luscombe as president and Folkerts as chief engineer. There, in 1930, the company introduced the refined Model 90, and the 90A with its 90-horsepower Lambert radial became the best-known version. Monocoupes earned a reputation as the most successful stock racers of the Golden Age of air racing. Late in 1931 the firm moved to Lambert Field near St. Louis, and in 1933 Luscombe left.

Luscombe had come to believe that wood, steel tube and fabric were too costly and slow to build. In 1933 he founded his own company in Kansas City, Missouri, to build light airplanes of metal. Its first product, the two-seat Phantom of 1934, had an all-metal fuselage. In 1935 the company moved to Mercer County Airport in West Trenton, New Jersey, and opened the Luscombe School of Aeronautics there. The breakthrough came with the small Continental four-cylinder engine. The Luscombe Model 8 first flew on December 17, 1937, and the 65-horsepower 8A received its type certificate on March 27, 1939.

Luscombe did not get to enjoy the success. Public stock sales had shifted control of the company to an Austrian-born businessman, and in 1939 Luscombe was edged out of the firm that carried his name. He sold his shares, retired at 44 to a farm in Pennsylvania, and never built another airplane. He died on January 10, 1965, of a ruptured aorta. His death certificate records burial at West Laurel Hill Cemetery in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania. He was inducted into the Iowa Aviation Hall of Fame in 1997.

The Caldwell Collection at Mustang Field holds an airplane from each of his companies. Our 1936 Monocoupe 90A was built after he had moved on, but it belongs to the line he founded and ran. Our 1939 Luscombe 8A came out of West Trenton in the year he lost the company, and it is everything he set out to build: a light airplane made of metal.