page_title: Donald Wills Douglas Sr.
section_title: Early engineering career
hierarchical_section_title: Donald Wills Douglas Sr. / Early engineering career
caption_attribution_description: Donald Wills Douglas Sr, founder of Douglas Aircraft, with his revolutionary DC-3 aircraft at the Museum of Flying in Santa Monica, CA.
context_page_description: Donald Wills Douglas Sr. was an American aircraft industrialist and engineer.
  An aviation pioneer, he designed and built the Douglas Cloudster. Though it failed in its intended purpose—being the first to fly non-stop across the United States—it became the first airplane with a payload greater than its own weight.
  He founded the Douglas Aircraft Company in 1921. Under his leadership, the company became one of the leaders of the commercial aircraft industry, engaging in a decades-long struggle for supremacy with arch-rival William Boeing and and his eponymous enterprise. Douglas gained the upper hand, particularly with his revolutionary and highly successful Douglas DC-3 airliner and its equally popular World War II military transport version, the C-47; at the start of the war, his airplanes made up 80% of all commercial aircraft in service. However, he lagged behind in the jet age and was overtaken and surpassed by Boeing. He retired in 1957.
context_section_description: In 1915 Douglas joined the Connecticut Aircraft Company, participating in the designing of the Navy's first dirigible, the DN-1. In August 1915, Douglas left for the Glenn Martin Company where he was, at the age of 23, chief engineer, where he designed the Martin S seaplane. Shortly after Glenn Martin merged with Wright Company to form Wright-Martin, Douglas resigned to become, in November 1916, the chief civilian aeronautical engineer of the Aviation Section of the US Army Signal Corps. Soon thereafter he returned to the newly reformed Glenn L. Martin Company, in Cleveland, Ohio, again becoming their chief engineer. Douglas would design the Martin MB-1 bomber.
  In March 1920, Douglas resigned from his $10,000 (equivalent to $128,000 in 2019) a year job to return to California, where he had met and, in 1916, married Charlotte Marguerite Ogg (1892–1976). They had four sons and one daughter including Donald Jr.
  He soon started his first aircraft company, Davis-Douglas Company with $40,000 financing from partner David Davis. They worked together to attempt to build an aircraft that could fly coast to coast nonstop, the Douglas Cloudster. Following an unsuccessful attempt, Davis left the partnership, and Douglas founded the Douglas Aircraft Company.
caption: Statue of Donald W. Douglas Sr. with the Spirit of Santa Monica at the Museum of Flying in Santa Monica, CA
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