Hawks's End

When the Connecticut Nutmeg reached its readers last week, it carried an enthusiastic boost for a stubby "flivver" biplane by illustrious Frank Hawks, pacemaker to U. S. commercial aviation. For his Nutmeg contribution he had been promised a year's subscription to the paper. "Fool-proof," wrote Frank Hawks of the Gwinn "Aircar" behind which for the last year he had been putting all his reputation and energy. "It will not spin and it will not stall. . . . With only an hour or two of instruction any average person (even the intelligentsia) can fly our ship. . . . A development that should go down in history as the greatest aviation contribution since the advent of the Wright Brothers." But Frank Hawks will not get his year's subscription: he had taken his last flight, suffered his final crash.

Nearly a year ago, short, sturdy, smile-flashing Frank Hawks forswore his 20 years of headlong, rough-&-tumble aviation, became vice president of the Gwinn Company, and shuttled around Eastern airports showing what the Gwinn airplane could do. But even in such a head-over-heels endorsement as his Nutmeg contribution, Hawks had felt constrained to set down one big but. "Birds," he reminded the Nutmeg's readers, "are the only ones who never fail to make a perfect landing."

At 41, after two decades of flying army Jennies, daredevilish barnstorming, and pushing swift racers to more than 200 flying records coast-to-coast and here-to-there in the U. S. and Europe, Frank Hawks had learned a thing or two about landings. He had cracked many a ship in those 20 years. One in 1921 had cost him $200, one last year, $100,000. Such mishaps he took with a grin. "If you can walk away from it," he used to say, "it's a good landing." Once or twice Frank Hawks was unable to walk away--one crash in 1932 put him in the hospital for months and filled his famous smile with store teeth; in another he somersaulted off a line of overhead wires, landed upside down. Overhead wires were Frank Hawks's pet hate. "They ought to bury 'em all," he used to growl.

Ever since 1929 Frank Hawks had been aviation's best pal and severest critic. Then he was flying for Texaco, and every push he gave aviation meant bigger gas and oil sales. Flying coast-to-coast and point-to-point faster than men had traveled such distances before, he used to crow: "That's the way the airlines could fly this route if they'd take that outside plumbing off their ships." Recent years have seen most of Frank Hawks's speed records fall to Howard Hughes, but they have also seen the "outside plumbing" disappear from commercial aviation. By 1935, when Frank Hawks quit flying for Texaco, the 200-mile-an-hour transport flying he predicted had been approached.

Last year, Hawks joined Buffalo Engineer Joseph Gwinn in the Aircar venture. The two-place, closed-cabin Gwinn Aircar drives like an automobile with wings, a steerable nosewheel preventing ground loops or nosing over. Capable of low-speed (50 m.p.h.) landings and takeoffs in small areas because of its trim, 24-foot wing span, it cruises at 123 miles an hour, costs $5,000. Hawks knew that with sales volume this price could come down. He envisioned the snug Aircar as every man's airplane, affectionately called it his polliwog.

Last week, Frank Hawks shuttled to East Aurora, N. Y. to show off his polliwog to a prospect, Sportsman J. Hazard Campbell. He landed neatly on the polo field in a nearby estate at about 5 p.m., climbed out, chatted awhile with Prospect Campbell and a cluster of friends. Presently he and Campbell took off smartly, cleared a fence, went atilt between two tall trees, and passed from sight. Then there was a rending crash, a smear of flame, silence. Half a mile the fearful group raced from the polo field. From the crackling wreck they pulled Frank Hawks; from beneath a burning wing, Prospect Campbell--both fatally hurt. The ship that could not stub its toe aground had tripped on overhead telephone wires.

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