airplane, flew to Princeton and landed in a field frequently used by barnstormers. According to Wells, "the Dean got excited because Princeton sophomores were not supposed to have motor vehicles". Fortunately, that stunt did not get him suspended, but the incident was noted by the New York Times as a box story on its front page. It was from this that Well's father learned that he had purchased the Jenny. Wells said his parents did not force him to sell the airplane. "They were resigned to the fact that if I was going to be in the airplane business, I should learn to fly. But they didn’t exactly like the way I was doing it." By the end of the semester, the pair of students had not raised sufficient funds to pay for tuition, so they were forced to sell the Jenny for the $600 they had paid for it. Aviation career Wells purchased a Travel Air D4000 in 1928 and used it for air racing, flying in the 1929 Portland Derby which was part of the National Air Races. This was a cross country race from Portland to Cleveland, which involved navigation skills, as well as maximizing aircraft speed. Wells won this race, receiving $10,000 in prize money. Wells was hired by Travel Air, a division of Curtiss-Wright as a part-time demonstration pilot in 1928, during the summer of his junior year at Princeton. He then was hired by the company full-time as a design engineer after he graduated in 1929, filling the engineering void left by Clyde Cessna and Lloyd Stearman. Wells and Herb Rawdon designed the Travel Air models 12 & 16. In his spare time in 1930, Wells designed and built a racing biplane, the Model W4B, also known as the Wells Special. During one of the flight tests, he was flying at only above the ground, when both ailerons tore off the wings. Ted managed to bail out and deploy his parachute just in time, suffering only a broken ankle when he landed in mud. In 1931, Wells began producing the next design for Travel Air. The Model 17 was a four place enclosed cockpit biplane with an unconventional placement of the top wing aft of the bottom wing. This was done to improve visibility associated with the standard configuration. Then president of Travel Air, Walter Beech, was impressed with Wells' Model 17 "Staggerwing" drawings