Hugo Sundstedt

Hugo Sundstedt (12 July 1886 - 8 July 1966) was a Swedish-American aviation pioneer.

Biography Hugo Sundstedt was born Hugo Leonardsson on 12 July 1886 in Örebro, the fourth child to an unmarried woman. The family lived in cramped conditions, and in 1892, he was auctioned off to a shoe dealer for 75 Swedish krona (SEK). In 1897, he was adopted by the businessman Olof Sundstedt. Now he had the opportunity to study, but since the study results were not good, he applied to the Swedish Navy in 1901 as a cadet. After leaving the fleet in 1904, he got a job in an office in Örebro. Because he did not like being behind a desk, he applied for the merchant navy in October 1905, but he disembarked in Cardiff on 19 February 1906. He returned to Sweden, and in 1908 he got a job as a taxi driver in Stockholm, an occupation he held until 1911.

In Stockholm, he got to know the car dealer Carl Cederström, who graduated as an aviator in France in 1910; this aroused Sundstedt's interest. He started helping Cederström with the aircraft for free, with the idea of gaining his own experience of flying, in order to finally obtain a flight certificate himself. He first flew on 1 June 1912 at Ljungbyhed with Cederström's aircraft, a Blériot XI named Nordstjernan (The North Star). With some wealthy businessmen from Örebro as sponsors, he managed to buy Nordstjernan from Cederström. During one of his longer flights, on 21 June 1912, he broke the Scandinavian altitude record, when he reached an altitude of 1,800 metres during a two-and-a-half-hour flight over Malmen.

During the 1920s, Sundstedt worked for a number of different aircraft manufacturers, mainly with float-equipped aircraft. In 1924, he formed the Speed Boat Company. He formed his own consulting company Sundstedt Aircraft Corporation in 1934. The company designed a number of seaplanes for other aircraft manufacturers. He died on 8 July 1966 in Liberty, New York. His surviving writings and letters from 1919 to 1951 are preserved at the Wichita State University Special Archives.