14 Dec 06
C-119
Henry John Kaiser made his name and his fortune in ship-building and civil engineering. His first venture into the skies was a 1942 partnership with businessman, movie mogul and aviator Howard Hughes. The Hughes-Kaiser Corporation obtained an $18 million government grant to build flying boats, and Hughes got a team of engineers to draw up the largest flying boat ever seen, an eight-engined, 3,000bhp monster, the HK-1. But the government would not allow the use of steel - needed for the war effort - so the craft was built out of laminated wood. This was said to make it lighter and stronger than aluminium, and it also led to the craft's nickname of Spruce Goose. Kaiser and Hughes - a volatile personality - failed to agree on certain crucial elements of the Goose's construction and design, however; Kaiser sensibly pulled out mid-1944 when the HK-1 was no nearer to taking flight, leaving Hughes to pursue the ill-fated project, now relabelled H4, alone. Hughes was investigated by the US Senate for misappropriation of government funds, poured millions more dollars into the project and the Spruce Goose flew just once, a brief elevation off the water in 1947.
After World War II, Kaiser tried his hand at car-building, too, teaming up with the president of the defunct Graham-Paige company, Joseph Frazer, to make cars under both the Kaiser and Frazer brand names. The range grew to comprise the no-frills Henry J, the fibreglass-bodied Darrin sports car and the downright bizarre Dragon saloon, but Kaiser-Frazer couldn't make these cars cheap enough to sufficiently undercut the prices of the Big Three, and only around 150,000 were built in 1945-55.
Kaiser's choice of production base was canny, however: he had purchased Ford's Willow Run aircraft factory (see above) and all its facilities, and in the mid-'50s (having purchased Willys-Overland, makers of the General Purpose GP truck, aka the Jeep, as well as the Aero, Ace and Lark cars), he shifted his car factories to Argentina and pitched for a plane-building contract from the US airforce. In 1951, Willow Run started to build the C-119 troop and cargo carrier, a development of the North American Aviation C82 Packet known as the Flying Boxcar.
But it was an awkward arrangement: most C-119 production was carried out by Fairchild, and conspiracy theories abound as to why so few planes were made by Kaiser-Frazer and at such high cost to the US government; some insiders claimed that Fairchild had been slow to supply some of the parts and reluctant to share technical information, others that Kaiser-Fraser had to do too many modifications to accommodate the Wright engines it was using instead of the Pratt & Whitney units fitted by Fairchild. Either way, there was an enquiry by Congress, and Kaiser lost the contract to make the C-123 - to Fairchild. Estimates vary from 55 to 88 as to how many C-119s Kaiser-Frazer actually built; some Korean War veterans who flew the planes say that a number of unfinished Kaiser-Frazer planes were repossessed, stored for years and then redesignated as Fairchilds. Many C-119s served again in Vietnam, and were used by the USAF well into the 1970s, though many ended up with the Vietnamese and Taiwanese airforces.
Meanwhile Kaiser's Argentinian car factory, subsidised by the local government, turned out cars including the Manhattan and Carabela, the latter the first fully Argentinian-built mass-production car, as well as the Estancia, a version of the Willys station wagon, jeeps and pick-ups. The last Kaiser-badged car was the Bergantin, before the company turned entirely to building Renaults under licence in Argentina and Brazil. The remaining Kaiser-Jeep assets were bought by American Motors in 1970, and the Argentinian/Brazilian operations were eventually fully bought out by Renault in 1975.
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