Dwane Wallace

Dwane Leon Wallace (October 29, 1911 – December 21, 1989) was the President and/or Chairman of the Board of the Cessna Aircraft Company from 1935 until the 1970s, having then continued on the board as a director and consultant into the 1980s. He is generally credited with leading the company from a minor role in the aviation industry to overwhelming dominance—ultimately the world's largest and most diverse general aviation manufacturer with the highest volume of aircraft production. He later became known as the "Quiet Giant of Aviation", and was posthumously inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame in 2012.

Dwane Wallace was raised in Belmont, Kansas. He and his brothers Deane and Dwight, and sister Doreen, were children of physician Dr. Eugene Wallace and Grace Opal (Cessna) Wallace. More importantly, they were the nephews of their mother's noted brother, aviation pioneer Clyde Vernon Cessna, founder of Cessna Aircraft Company. Cessna became the first planemaker-aviator of the Great Plains in the year Dwane was born, and gave the brothers their first airplane ride in an OX-5 Swallow in 1924.

One account describes Wallace as having made up his mind at age 10 to make his life in aviation.

In his early adulthood, Dwayne entered the aeronautical engineering program at the Municipal University of Wichita, in Wichita, Kansas (one of the nation's first three such programs), and graduated in May/June, 1933 (historian Ed Phillips says June 1932), the first (of many) to graduate that university with a bachelor's degree in aeronautical engineering.

While at Wichita U., Wallace learned to fly from his uncle's test pilot, George Harte. He soloed in the Cessna CG-2 after only an hour and 45 minutes training, and advised changes to the glider that resulted in the Cessna CG-3. He first soloed in Travel Air biplane in March 1932, earning his private pilot's license in 1933. (Later he would advance to a commercial pilot license, with multi-engine and instrument-flight ratings.)

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