Former Curtiss-Wright Plant 1 | factory, warehouse, former- dont use this category

 factory, warehouse, former- dont use this category, historical layer / disappeared object

Constructed by the Wright Aeronautical Corporation in 1929 as a fully modernized aircraft engine production facility, Plant #1 quickly became the key engine production facility for the highly successful P-36 Hawk fighter built by Wright Aeronautical’s parent Curtiss-Wright Corporation. With domestic and international orders for the P-36 keeping the facility humming through the lean years of the Great Depression, the acceptance of Curtiss-Wright’s design for the P-40 Warhawk by the US Army Air Force in 1939 brought an ever increasing workload for the engine plant as the United States geared up for war.

With an initial order of 524 P-40’s from the USAAF bolstered by orders from both English and Free French Air Forces after the outbreak of the Second World War, Curtiss-Wright’s dedicated aircraft production facilities were quickly overwhelmed. With demand grossly outstripping supply by late 1940, Plant #1 retooled and began to manufacture full airframes as well as engines in their increasingly cramped facility. Lacking the space to construct a runway for the aircraft it was now producing, Curtiss-Wright test pilots were forced to use the plant’s gravel parking lot as their runway as they took completed airframes up for their short test flights to Curtiss’ spartan outfitting facilities at the Buffalo Airport.

The completion of a much larger airframe production facility at the Buffalo Airport in 1941 lessened some of the strain and backlog at Plant #1, however with the P-40 called on for service with the air forces of 28 nations during the war the demand for new aircraft and engines remained high. Though their plant was never designed to build aircraft, workers at Plant #1 would eventually complete 3,836 P-40 aircraft and thousands of engines by the end of P-40 production in 1944. Returning to dedicated engine production for Curtiss-Wright’s C-46 Commando and SB2C Helldiver aircraft, Plant #1 remained at full capacity until the end of World War Two.

With Curtiss-Wright streamlining its enormous wartime production network in order to cope with the drastic decrease in post-war aircraft demands, Plant #1 was idled in 1946 and subsequently sold to Western Electric who used the facility to construct telecommunication equipment. Sold once again in the early 1990’s following Western Electric’s merger with AT&T, the former Curtiss Plant factory is now home to numerous industrial tenants, while the former Curtiss offices have been repurposed as the Charter School For Applied Technologies