For good or for ill, the Mooney story is a long and interesting one. After working for various airplane companies in the heady 1920s, the depressed 1930s, and the wartime 1940s, Al Mooney, along with his brother, Art, once again went into business for himself, founding Mooney Aircraft, Inc., in Wichita in 1948. Its only product was a single-seat retractable-gear model, the M18 Mite, originally to be powered by a Crosley car motor; like most automotive conversions, it didn’t work until a proper Continental A-65 engine was fitted. The innovative little Mite soon attracted considerable attention, in the limited way of single-place airplanes.
As Mooney’s proof-of-concept, the M18 was built from 1949 to 1955, showing that a wooden-construction wing and tail, with a welded-steel fuselage frame, offered strength and lightness that could be incorporated into a four-seat variant. The first such M20 flew on Sept. 3, 1953. At that point, the company had moved to Kerrville, Texas, in the state’s rolling hill country, a fertile transplanting that became one of the key ingredients of the firm’s survival over the years.
Al Mooney, like most visionary designers, wasn’t a practical businessperson, so he was no longer with the company by late 1955. Two Midland, Texas, investors, Hal Rachal and Norm Hoffman, had seen the M20’s potential, and with their help, the airplane was CAA certified on Aug. 25, 1955. The company sold only 10 airplanes that year, but it was a start, and sales steadily grew. The new four-seat speedster was marketed as the “Mooney Mark 20.”
