Cessna flew the monoplane south to Blackwell, Okla., in July for the Independence Day celebration, covering a distance of 65 miles in 41 minutes at a speed of 96 mph. More than 11,000 people attended the event. Cessna flew once in the morning and again in the evening, chiefly because of the ubiquitous and still dangerous prairie winds.

The next day he flew back to Wichita in 36 minutes, 35 seconds at a speed of more than 107 mph. The new ship was said to fly through the sky like a comet. The name stuck, and was emblazoned on the fuselage in black letters. Cessna further streamlined the airframe to reduce drag and installed a 70-hp Anzani engine in October. According to Cessna, the new power plant improved the Comet’s ability to carry two people, and on October 9 he made three flights at Wichita with passengers aboard.

As 1918 approached, civilian flying activity decreased because fuel rationing measures had been enacted and the nation had achieved a full wartime footing. Interest in Cessna’s airplane factory and flying school waned, and the brothers were forced to abandon their Wichita facilities and their dreams of selling airplanes. Remembering his farming roots, Clyde Cessna returned to Adams and tilled the soil to help feed American doughboys and support the war effort. He continued to operate a custom threshing business after the war. In 1924, however, he joined forces with Lloyd C. Stearman and Walter H. Beech to found the Travel Air Manufacturing Co., Inc., in Wichita. Cessna was named president of the biplane manufacturing company, and provided both money and equipment to help establish and support the infant business.

Always the monoplane man, Cessna sold his Travel Air stock in 1927 and founded the Cessna Aircraft Company in partnership with Victor Roos. In rented facilities down the street from Travel Air in west Wichita, Cessna built his ultimate airplane–a high-wing, full-cantilever aircraft he dubbed the Phantom. Fast, sleek and capable of carrying three people, the Phantom was powered by a 90-hp Anzani radial engine. Cessna had bought dozens of the obsolete Anzani power plants and installed them on early production Cessna Model AA cabin monoplanes.

The vagaries of the Great Depression era, however, forced Cessna out of his own company. In the early 1930s, he and his son Eldon built custom racing airplanes. After the death of his friend Roy Liggett in one of the tiny speedsters, Cessna lost his enthusiasm for aviation and retired to his Kansas farm.

When his nephews Dwane L. and Dwight Wallace resurrected the Cessna Aircraft Company in 1934, Clyde Cessna refused to participate directly in its re-emergence. As further testimony to his aversion to aviation, in the late 1930s he destroyed the 1917 Comet monoplane, according to his son Eldon. With it went the last vestige of Clyde Vernon Cessna’s early legacy of flight. He died in November 1954, at the age of 74.

Cessna never received a pilot’s license and achieved only a fifth-grade education. He was truly an aero pioneer, not only as an airman but as a manufacturer whose airplanes have become an American aviation icon. Like the Cessna company motto he penned, the aircraft Clyde Cessna built were truly “A Master’s Expression.”

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Edward H. Phillips is an aviation researcher and historian who specializes in Travel Air, Beechcraft, Cessna and Piper history. He has written four books detailing the evolution and impact of these companies on aviation. He is air transport editor for Aviation Week and Space Technology and is an active general-aviation pilot, a flight instructor and an aircraft and power plant technician. For further reading, try Phillips’ Cessna: A Master’s Expression; and Eye on the Sky, by Gerald Deneau.

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