THE REVOLUTIONARY ALL-METAL PLANE OF THE LENERT AIRCRAFT CO. 1928 - 1930 PENTWATER, Michigan
Pam VanderPloeg, copyright 2023.
As a researcher and walking tour guide, I enjoy chasing down the back stories of Pentwater's fascinating early residents. Some died in Pentwater, but many left their mark and moved on. Willy Lenert is one of these temporary residents. He founded the Lenert Aircraft Company in 1928 in Pentwater. The Grand Rapids Press announced the project on March 6, 1928. Lenert had opened an airplane factory in a building on South Hancock Street to make his patented all-metal airplane to take to the Detroit Airplane exhibit, an aircraft he had been working on for 18 years. According to the newspaper account, it was the only all-metal plane at that time and was less costly, and weighed the same as the wood and cloth planes but had the advantage of being fireproof. Lenert set up the manufacturing company on the shores of Pentwater Lake, describing the aircraft cost as $2,500. The village acquired from W. H. Gardner about 80 acres at the east end of the town for a landing strip.
Willy Lenert was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1886 and moved to Chicago with his parents at age eight. His education ended in the sixth grade, and he became a "slack wire performer" in vaudeville around 1906. He performed his act around the country in June 1908 and at the Grand Rapids Airdome, a new open-air performance facility at the corner of Crescent and Ottawa Streets, designed with circus-style seating. For unknown reasons, Hoertz & Son contractors purchased and razed the Airdome in 1911 for its lumber. By then, Lenert worked in aviation as a balloon ascensionist. Along the way, he opened but closed a failed wholesale grocery operation in a Chicago residential neighborhood.
By 1924, when his son Willy G. Lenert Jr. was born, Lenert Sr. had an idea for an all-metal bi-plane to replace the cloth-covered, wood-frame bi-planes, which he described as a fire hazard. Willy came to Pentwater in 1925 to build his airplane, and in 1926, according to his recollections, it was a hit at the 1926 Detroit Air Show. The Lenert Aircraft Corporation filed articles of incorporation with the Oceana County clerk in 1926 with $50,000 of capital. At the firm's Pentwater, Michigan plant in 1930, he built his third aircraft, described as "all metal but the tires." In January 1930, the company had just finished a new plane, and the Pentwater News described the test flights by Forrest King of Muskegon.
The plane was a "model C" biplane, the only all-metal bi-plane on the market. Representatives of Detroit's Continental Motors and Sky Specialities companies flew from Detroit to Pentwater to inspect the new plane they planned to exhibit at the St. Louis aircraft show. That spring, the Ludington Daily News carried an article about Mrs. & Mrs. Willie Lenert and their children Willy Jr. and Ruth and their trip flying a Lenert airplane from Muskegon to Chicago by way of Dowagiac and Benton Harbor. Before that, Lenert took the aircraft on a demonstration tour to Detroit, Selfridge Field, Lansing, and Grand Rapids airports. Licensed pilots tested the plane at those locations. Mr. Myers, a Michigan state department of commerce inspector, described the aircraft glowingly. According to the article, requests for information were coming into the Pentwater plant daily, and the company worked on a catalog. On June 1, the Ludington Daily News reported that Lenert planned a demonstration for invited stockholders the following Monday at the Ludington airport.
On January 18, 1931, the Ludington Daily News reported that a Lenert Plane carrying Willie Lenert and pilot William Butters en route to Florida made a successful emergency landing in foggy, rainy conditions in a farmer's field near Latrobe, Pennsylvania. The Lenert Plane, model X866N, was undamaged. The plane's chief test pilot, Bill Butters, also stopped on January 22, 1931, in Knoxville, Tennesee, on the way back to the Pentwater factory from North Carolina to fix a small leak in the oil tank. According to the Knoxville Journal, the plane had a 165 horsepower Continental motor with a high speed of 135 miles per hour and a cruising speed of 115 miles per hour.
In 1930, the company discussed moving to Dowagiac, where one of the largest stockholders, Mr. Fitch, resided. The officers of the company in August 1930 were Willy Lehnert, president; L. G. (His wife Lillian Lenert), secretary-treasurer; Martin Mullaly of Muskegon, vice-president; John O. Reed of Montague; Chairman of the board; D.W. Atkinson of Sparta, Jesse Bilderback; and A.W. How of Dowagiac, evidence of this move has not been found yet.
The Pentwater plant built six airplanes but closed in the early 1930s due to the stock market closure. By 1936, Lenert was living in Chicago and pitched his plan to reopen the aircraft factory to approximately 25 towns, according to reports in newspapers in Victoria, Texas, and Bowling Green, Kentucky, This was a move to position a new company to build army and navy planes for the United States government and foreign countries. In 1939, he received a government flyer requesting bids to supply an army training plane. He got assistance in developing the design from aeronautical engineers at the University of Michigan and opened a shop at the Pontiac, Michigan City Airport and designed what he described as a "sleek, metal, low-wing two-seater. Lenert's government bid priced the training plane at $3,000, apparently the lowest bid. However, the government awarded the contract to a different firm, returning the plans to him. He sued the government in a $9.8 million lawsuit.
By the 1940s, the Lenert family may have lived again in Chicago and ended up in Sylvania, adjacent to Toledo, Ohio. Then in 1947, tragedy struck the family. Willy Lenert Jr. was now a 22-year-old World War II veteran and a student at Ohio State University. He and his wife, 20-year-old Louise Lehnert, succumbed to carbon monoxide poisoning in their student trailer residence, both dying a few days later.
In 1952, the firm founded by aviation pioneer Willy Lenert lost their $9.8 million lawsuit filed in U.S. Claims Court. The Lenert Aircraft Company (by then called the Zephyr Aircraft Company) sought compensation for losses suffered from the rejection of its design submitted for a 1939 pre-World War II war department training plane. According to the government, although Lenert’s company was one of twelve companies invited to submit, their application was rejected because their proposal failed to demonstrate an ability to fulfill a contract for a large number of planes and the submission had no proof the design had even been built. The Zephyr firm liquidated its assets at the time of the court decision and Willy Lenert retired from aircraft design.
On April 15, 1966, New Castle News (Pennsylvania) article featured the life of Willy Lenert, who was by then living with his wife Lillian, daughter Grace (Lenert) Pifer, and her husband and rebuilding a farm in that area in Scott Township, PA. He had rebuilt the barn and, on his drawing board, had plans for rebuilding the house on the property. He took time to recall to the reporter his fascination with flight in 1910, seven years after the Wright brothers' flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. That flight inspired Lenert to begin his extraordinary adventure, building and flying an innovative all-metal aircraft. Lenert told the New Castle News, New Castle, Pennsylvania, that he thought one of the planes was still flying near Niles, Michigan, in 1966. He said, "I was offered a half-million dollars for the enterprise by a St. Louis steel firm only months before it closed.
Early in 1966, Lenert wrote a vehement letter to the editor of that newspaper, decrying the Vietnam war and lamenting the lost Vietnamese and American lives. He described his bitterness, having lost the bid to build a training plane for the U.S. government. The letter may have been the catalyst for the newspaper's feature article about Lenert's life in April 1966. Thanks to that, we know more about Lenert's extraordinary aircraft adventure. Willy Lenert died of pneumonia on September 18, 1968. Still, the memory of his airplane factory remains alive in Pentwater history, and as of 2007, a Lenert Plane was registered to an owner—more to investigate on that.
SOURCES:
"All Metal Biplane Stops at Airport," Knoxville Journal, January 22, 1931.
"County man built his own airplane," New Castle, Pennsylvania News, Friday, April 15, 1966.
"First Glimpse of the new Airdome," Grand Rapids Press, May 28, 1908.
"Five Years Ago," Ludington Daily News, August 4, 1933.
"G.I. is Victim of Gas Fumes," Lima News, Saturday, November 29, 1947.
"Lenert TO Demonstrate Plan at Local Airport," Ludington Daily News, June 1, 1930.
"Lenert Plane Forced to Land, Undamaged," Ludington Daily News, Sunday, January 18, 1931.
"Lenert's plane meets with flyers' approval," Grand Rapids Press, May 25, 1930.
Michigan Aircraft Manufacturers by Robert F. Pauley, 2009.
"Next Week's Shows," Grand Rapids Press, June 27, 1928.
"Pentwater-Made Plane to be shown in St. Louis," Pentwater News, January 31, 1930,
"The People Write" (letter to the editor), New Castle, Pennsylvania News, Friday, February 9, 1966.
Smithsonian Institution Archives.
"State Firm Loses Suit," Grand Rapids Press, June 4, 1952.
"To be made at Pentwater," Grand Rapids Press, March 6, 1928.
"Willy Lenert Moves Plant to Dowagiac," Ludington Daily News, August 17, 1930.