He was born in Lawrenceburg, IN, on Feb 15, 1901, nearly three years before the Wright brothers' first flight. Ray Kelly's career spanned commercial aviation from its earliest age to supersonic flight. His decision to pursue aviation came in 1921 at the hands of a barnstormer offering flights from an Indiana field. At the time, Kelly was a sophomore chemistry major at Franklin College, Franklin, IN, and a member of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity. With camera in hand, he boarded the Standard J-l biplane, snapped the first aerial photo of his college, and changed his life's plan.

With a blind spot in one eye Kelly had limited potential as a pilot, so he focused instead on the design and manufacture of airplanes. He transferred to Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, where in 1925 he earned a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering.

From 1925 to 1928, Kelly worked as a civilian engineer with the Army Air Corps at McCook Field near Dayton, Ohio. There he collaborated with Albert Hegenberger and James "Jimmy" Doolittle in tests and demonstrations of instrument or "blind" flying. He was also part of the development team that perfected the electrically heated pitot tube. In these formative days of aviation, Kelly was privileged to meet other famed aviators, including Orville Wright.

In 1928 and into the Great Depression, Kelly worked in Los Angeles at The American Paulin System company developing next-generation sensitive
altimeters. In 1930, when every job was rare, he took a position as foreman of the instrument shop at the Boeing Air Transport maintenance base in Cheyenne, WY. Boeing Air Transport, an early unit of today's giant aircraft maker, would soon merge with three other fledgling companies to form United Airlines. Thus began for Kelly a 37-year career in commercial aviation that continued at United facilities in Chicago, Denver, and San Francisco.

Over the years, United's route structure was built on the back of a succession of aircraft including the Boeing 40-B, 80-A, Monomail, and 247, the Douglas DC series 3 through 7, Lockheed Lodestar, Convair 340, and Vickers Viscount, before proceeding into the jet age. The rapid pace at which these technical marvels were developed and introduced into daily service was due in no small part to the developmental engineering teams at United and other airlines.

Following World War II, Kelly was asked by United's president, W.A. "Pat" Patterson, to begin investigations into the feasibility and size limitations of jet transports. His hallmark "Paper Jet" study, conducted from 1952 to 1953, helped establish that larger passenger jets could economically out-perform the era's more popular 50-seat prop-liners and smaller jets of the time. For United, it was a crucial factor in the growing airline's historic 1955 decision to order 30 100-seat Douglas DC-8s.

Kelly completed his career at United in 1967 as director of technical development, based in San Francisco. He remained professionally active into the early 1970s in part-time stints with the aviation consulting firm R. Dixon Speas Associates. His last projects focused on the development of prototype supersonic transports or "SSTs" for aircraft makers Boeing and Lockheed.

Kelly spoke and lectured widely and received numerous other professional honors, particularly for his contributions to flight safety and airline operating efficiency. In 1954, he was given the Flight Safety Foundation Award by the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) for helping to establish the "S-7" committee on flight deck and aircraft handling standards. The committee, whose membership includes prominent airline captains, still operates today. He was named in 1963 as a fellow of both the Institute of Aerospace Sciences and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) and, most notably, inducted in 1971 into the Aviation Hall of Fame, Dayton, Ohio. In 1977 Kelly delivered the sixth annual AIAA/SAE William Littlewood Memorial Lecture. It is fitting that Kelly's first flight included a camera. Through most of the 1900s, he shot and edited scores of 8mm home movies, recording flights ranging from the earliest mail planes to the Concorde and Apollo missions. A 45-minute-long compilation of this work, titled "44 Years in Aviation, 1931 to 1975," includes a narration track by Kelly and features the best known footage of a Boeing Dash 80 (prototype of Boeing's first passenger jet, the 707) performing a controversial aerobatic roll above Lake Washington in Seattle, WA, in 1959. Kelly's film, transferred onto VHS video, is held at the archives of the National Air and Space Museum, Washington, DC, the Museum of Flight in Seattle, WA, and the Experimental Aircraft Association AirVenture Museum in Oshkosh, WI. Video interviews with Ray Kelly are also on file in the archives of the National Air and Space Museum and United Airlines.