[caption id="attachment_15455" align="alignright" width="234" caption="Portrait of Giuseppe Bellanca
(photo courtesy: Friends of Bellanca Airfield)"]
Giuseppe M. Bellanca, born in Sicily in 1886, began his career as an aircraft designer and builder in his native Italy. After layovers in New York, New Jersey, Maryland and Nebraska, Bellanca landed in Delaware in late 1927 at the urging of Henry B. du Pont, other Delaware businessmen and city of New Castle leaders.
In 1928, Bellanca established the Bellanca Aircraft Corp., and built a hangar, manufacturing plant and airfield on a 360-acre site on the south side of Frenchtown Road (Route 273), east of the Du Pont Highway, stretching all the way to the Delaware River, where ramps for seaplane operations were installed.
Bellanca came to du Pont’s attention after building a solid reputation as an innovator in the aviation industry. In Italy, he partnered with Enea Bossi and Paolo Invernizzi to produce the first flight of a totally Italian-designed and -built aircraft in 1909. Two years later, he came to the United States, designed and built a single-engine plane and taught himself to fly on Long Island, in the Garden City-Hempstead-Mineola area now memorialized with the Cradle of Aviation Museum.
Once he learned to fly, Bellanca began teaching others. From 1912 to 1916, he operated the Bellanca Flying School. His pupils included Fiorello LaGuardia, later to become mayor of New York City, who repaid Bellanca by teaching him how to drive a car.
In 1917, as a consulting engineer for the Maryland Pressed Steel Company, he designed two trainer biplanes, the CD and the CE, but the CE never went into production because the company’s contracts were canceled at the end of World War I.
Bellanca then headed west, to Omaha, Nebraska, where investors hoped to make the city a center of aircraft manufacturing. His backers there also ran into financial trouble, but he was able to create the Bellanca CF, described by Janes’s All the World’s Aircraft as “the first up-to-date transport aeroplane that was designed, built, and flown with success in the United States.” The CF, however, was expensive for its time, priced at $5,000 when surplus World War I aircraft could be purchased for as little as $250, so it never went into production.
Bellanca moved to New Jersey, joining the Wright Aeronautical Corp., where he helped design the speedy Wright-Bellanca WB-1, which won a race and an efficiency contest before crashing. Bellanca’s improved model, the WB-2, would eventually set a world non-refueled endurance record, flying 51 hours, 11 minutes and 59 seconds in April 1927.
By late 1926, Bellanca left Wright and partnered with Charles Levine to form the Columbia Aircraft Company. They held the rights to the WB-2, now named the “Columbia,” which Charles Lindbergh wanted to buy for his proposed New York to Paris flight. Levine, who had his own designs on the trans-Atlantic competition and its $25,000 prize, refused to sell. Lindbergh flew the “Spirit of St. Louis” to Paris in April 1927; two months later, Levine and his pilot flew the “Columbia” even farther, reaching Eisleben, Germany in 43 hours, the first of two successful Atlantic crossings for the Bellanca aircraft.
Bellanca, disappointed because the “Columbia” was not the first aircraft to accomplish the New York to Paris flight, severed relations with Levine.
By then, Bellanca had gained the attention of Henry B. du Pont, his family and business associates, and soon he was on his way to Delaware. On Oct. 6, 1928, a crowd of 30,000 people gathered in New Castle to celebrate the opening of what then was considered the most modern airfield east of the Mississippi. Twenty military aircraft flew over to start the day, which featured races, mock bomb attacks, simulated aerial combat and parachute jumps.
In Delaware, Bellanca would find new, more upstanding financial backers and continued to design and build innovative aircraft. The “Columbia evolved” into the CH series, which was used in numerous famous and record-setting flights. One of the most notable was the “Miss Veedol,” flown in 1931 on the first nonstop flight across the Pacific, from Japan to Wenatchee, Wash. Through the 1930s, Bellanca’s efficient and reliable single-engine planes were purchased by governments, businesses and celebrities, as well as by airlines in South and Central America, Asia and Europe.
Bellanca Aviation would build more than 3,000 planes in New Castle and, at its peak during World War II, would employ more than 3,000 workers. Giuseppe Bellanca sold the business in 1954 and retired to Galena, MD He died in 1960.
Bellanca was enshrined in the National Aviation Hall of Fame in 1959 and was a charter inductee of the Delaware Aviation Hall of Fame in 2000.
A state historic marker was installed on the airfield site in 2003, and the airfield was added to the National Register of Historic Places two years later.