In the early 1920s, Henry Ford, along with a group of 19 other investors including his son Edsel, invested in the Stout Metal Airplane Company and in 1925, Ford bought Stout and its aircraft designs.
The Ford Trimotor was a development of previous designs by William Bushnell Stout, using structural principles copied from the work of Professor Hugo Junkers, the noted German all-metal aircraft design pioneer and adapted to an airframe very similar to the Fokker F.VII - even using the same airfoil cross section at the wing root.
The single-engined Stout monoplane was turned into a trimotor, the Stout 3-AT with three Curtiss-Wright air-cooled radial engines. After a prototype was built and test-flown with poor results and a suspicious fire caused the complete destruction of all previous designs, the "4-AT" and "5-AT" emerged.
A total of 199 Ford Trimotors were built between 1926 and 1933, including 79 of the 4-AT variants, and 116 of the 5-AT variants, plus some experimental craft. Well over 100 airlines of the world flew the Ford Trimotor. From mid-1927, the type was also flown on executive transportation duties by several commercial nonairline operators, including oil and manufacturing companies.
The impact of the Ford Trimotor on commercial aviation was immediate, as the design represented a "quantum leap over other airliners." Within a few months of its introduction, Transcontinental Air Transport was created to provide coast-to-coast operation, capitalizing on the Trimotor's ability to provide reliable and, for the time, comfortable passenger service.
As of 2011, there are 18 Ford Trimotors in existence, eight of which have current FAA airworthiness certificates.
