Ryan Airline Company

Ryan Airline Company was an American airline and aircraft builder founded by T. Claude Ryan and Benjamin Franklin Frank Mahoney at Dutch Flats Airport in San Diego, California, on April 19, 1925. In March 1925 the partners had set up a scheduled service between San Diego and Los Angeles, which the Federal Aviation Administration chronology cited by the article describes as the first scheduled passenger air service operated wholly over the contiguous United States and throughout the year. The airline flew a Standard J-1 trainer that it modified with a closed four-passenger cabin, and it also bought and modified the Douglas Cloudster. The company then designed the Ryan M-1 for mail and passenger service, building the first in the fall of 1925 and 22 more within a year, and later built the NYP monoplane Spirit of St. Louis for Charles Lindbergh. When orders fell, Ryan and Mahoney ended the partnership in November 1926 and Mahoney kept using the name for several months. The business was renamed B. F. Mahoney Aircraft Corporation in July 1927. The article stresses that it was not the business that later became Teledyne Ryan Aeronautical.