The Travel Air, however, replaced the New Swallow's wooden fuselage structure with welded steel tubes.

An interim design, the Winstead Special, was developed by the Winstead brothers from a metal fuselage frame developed at Swallow by Stearman and Walter Beech, but subsequently rejected by Swallow president Jake Moellendick, a decision which triggered the departure of both Stearman and Beech, and the creation of Travel Air.

[6] In addition to a wide range of normal aircraft applications, the Travel Air biplanes saw extensive use in early motion pictures, where they often stood in for the increasingly scarce Fokker D.VII.

[2][3] Commercial operators found the Travel Air biplanes to be versatile, owing to their useful payload, rugged construction and (for the times) speed and efficiency.

[2][5] Most remaining Travel Air biplanes have been restored, and are in museums, while a small number continue to be used for personal recreation or selling rides and flying at airshows.

In fact, Hollywood's demand for Travel Air biplanes was so intense that Travel Air's California salesman, Fred Hoyt, coaxed Travel Air co-founder and principal airplane designer, Lloyd Stearman, to come to Venice, California in 1926 to exploit the movie industry demand for his aircraft by starting the short-lived independent Stearman Aircraft Company (re-opened back in Wichita in 1927).

[2][4][8] Some of the many movies using Travel Air biplanes (2000 and 4000, in particular) included:[8][9] Date from Aerofiles[10] Variants were distinguished with prefixes and suffixes in a particular order, and denoting different fittings.