published, it came as a distinct letdown to many. The advocates of
the independent air force let out loud wails of “whitewash,” and
the press reflected its disappointment. However, in BUAERO there
was satisfaction. The Board rejected the idea of the separate air
force at that time. It did, however, recommend an Air Corps status
for the Army Air Services, something quite compatible with the Army
organization’s several branches such as Infantry, Field Artillery,
Cavalry, Engineers, Coast Artillery, and so on. The report made
separate recommendations for reorganization of the Army and Navy,
which would later be enacted into law in the Air Corps Act of 1926.
It referred to the need for waiving the requirement for competitive
bidding in cases where the public interest required it, a provision
that was later so garbled in the Air Corps Act that it became quite
impossible to procure aircraft at all without violating the law.
The Board especially turned thumbs down on the British plan of an
air ministry charged with responsibility for both military and civil
aviation. It took a strong position for the principle that historic
American tradition called for armed forces for defense only, and it
insisted they should be kept subordinate to the civil government.
However, it urged the orderly expansion of air transport, preferably
under private management and, to promote the orderly development of
civil aviation, it recommended the establishment of a bureau of air
commerce in the Department of Commerce, then under Secretary Herbert
Hoover. It further recommended the appointment of an additional
assistant secretary of commerce for air, to supervise the new bureau.
The Board recommended a policy of continuity of orders for the
aircraft industry and proposed a standard rate of replacement of
operating aircraft in order to retain a healthy industry. This, it
pointed out, must become the nucleus of rapid wartime expansion
and should be administered as a continuing source of technological
leadership.
If the report proved lacking in sensationalism, it was none the less
constructive. If now it could be implemented it might become the
Magna Charta of American aviation. President Coolidge transmitted
the report to Congress with his own approval and thus started it on
its way to being translated into the Air Commerce Act and the Air
Corps Act of 1926. These acts, in effect, placed the responsibility
for promoting aviation directly upon the shoulders of the government.
They made it the duty of those in authority to promote the orderly
development of the air forces, our air commerce, and our aircraft
industry; and thus, for the first time, enunciated a clear statement
of United States air policy.
As for General Mitchell, whose charges had led to the formulation of
this policy, he was tried by Army general court-martial and convicted
of violation of the ninety-sixth Article of War. He was sentenced
to be suspended from rank, command, and duty, with forfeiture of
all pay and allowances for five years. President Coolidge modified
the forfeiture of pay and accepted the general’s resignation, to
take effect February 1, 1926. Just ten years later, Billy Mitchell
died. But one day the United States Congress did create a separate
air force, and by then, General Mitchell’s name had been firmly
established in his countrymen’s minds as a man who had been martyred
for his vision.
During the last decade of General Mitchell’s life, Admiral Moffett
served continuously as Chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics, and there
founded the technology of naval aviation. It has been said of the
contributions of the two men that “Bill Mitchell’s fumble set up the
play from which Billy Moffett went on to score.” Just at the peak of
his career, the admiral gave his own life to his country in the crash
of the rigid airship _Akron_.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Dwight Morrow Advances the Throttle
The Morrow Board policy, for all its wisdom, might have lapsed easily
into innocuous desuetude save for the dynamic character of William A.
Moffett. Whereas the Army Air Service proclaimed it a whitewash and
a denial of their aspirations, the admiral recognized it for what it
was, a golden opportunity. And as usual, when it came to capitalizing
it, his timing was precise.
I was sitting behind my desk in the Engine Section one morning
engaged in shoveling the avalanche of papers from “Incoming” to
“Outgoing” and feeling much like a fireman on the floor plates of a
coal-burning destroyer under forced draft shoveling coal into the
insatiable maws of a pair of boilers, when the phone rang.
“This is Moffett,” came the admiral’s voice. “I want you to get hold
of Du Bose right away. Grab a taxi and come up here to The Hill.
You’ll find me in Congressman Butler’s office, Chairman of the Naval
Affairs Committee. Bring that estimate on the cost of the Mustin
plan. Got it?”
“Aye, aye, sir!”
“Wait a minute. Change that!” came the staccato bark. “Tell Du Bose
to bring the plan. You call up Marvin MacIntyre; tell him to come to
the Bureau. Then you write up a news release for him—one like this:
‘The greatest forward step in the history of aviation was taken
today when Congressman Butler, Chairman of the House Naval Affairs
Committee, announced approval of the Moffett five-year Naval Aviation
building program.’”
“Did he really approve it, Admiral?” I interposed.
“Of course not,” came the reply. “He hasn’t even seen it. But when he
reads his name in the afternoon _Star_ and looks at the editorial Mac
will get for us, he’ll think he invented it himself. Shake a leg now,
and send Du Bose on the run.”
“How did you work it, sir?” I insisted.
“At the hearing this morning,” the admiral explained, “Butler was
fit to be tied—said the public was clamoring for action on aviation
and wanted to know what to do. I told him he ought to approve my
five-year program. He wanted to know what it was. I told him the
program I’d been trying to sell him for five years. When I’d ask
Congress for money, they’d say ‘where are your men to man these
planes?’ When I’d ask BUNAV for the men, they’d want to know where
the planes were. Butler got all excited and sent me out of the
hearing to get the plan.”
The Moffett five-year building program went through Congress with a
whoop and a holler, and within a week the Army had one of its own.
With this final consummation of the recommendations of most of the
twenty-two inquiries that had investigated aviation, the throttle was
opened at last. This was true in spite of the fact that in writing
the Air Corps Act of 1926, Congress had crossed up the aircraft
industry. The manufacturers, having been promised relaxation of the
competitive-bidding requirement which had served to hamper research
and development, had in turn agreed to a provision in the Act under
which the Armed Forces could audit their accounts and thus control
profits. This was a privilege heretofore never conceded by private
industry, but Congress, lacking the nerve to go through with the
agreement in committee, had so garbled the language of the Act and
so complicated the procedure that no procurement officer could buy
anything without violating some law. However, public support of the
policy had been so evident that the more courageous procurement
people, like our own Sidney Kraus, were willing to accept the risk.
And so it seemed that almost overnight, aviation, released of its
tie-downs and wheel blocks, became airborne again. In BUAERO a
significant event was the completion of the first Pratt and Whitney
Wasp on December 24, 1926, just six months after its inception.
George had sent me a photograph of the new engine as a Christmas
card and it was a thing of beauty that was to become literally a joy
forever. It came out at exactly the 650 pounds Chance Vought had
specified but on block test turned up a nice 415 horsepower instead
of the 350 he had asked for.
Meanwhile the Wright Simoon also passed its tests at 350 horsepower
though it was already outmoded by the Wasp. In order to give the
Simoon the full benefits of an airplane designed to utilize the
engine’s qualities, Wright had put Hugh Chatfield to work on the
design and construction of their own single-seat fighter called the
“Apache.” On flight test the little craft had shown a performance
far superior to the current liquid-cooled pursuit, even in the
controversial characteristic of high speed at sea level where,
according to the critics, the air-cooled would always be at a serious
disadvantage because of its “large frontal area.”
Since that airplane would show to even greater advantage with the
higher power of the Wasp, we now wangled a deal with Wright. We
actually persuaded good-natured Charlie Lawrance to turn his pet
airplane over to Chance Vought for the installation of a Pratt and
Whitney Wasp with which Lt. C. C. Champion, who had now joined
the Engine Section, was to take a shot at the world’s record for
altitude. With the completion of Chance Vought’s own Corsair, we now
had a brilliant two-seater that compared favorably in performance
with the hottest fighters, and thus gave us a stable with which
to make an assault on all the world’s records in their classes.
The admiral, a highly competitive spirit with a keen appreciation
of the value of world’s records and racing competition, now made
participation in these events a major Bureau project.
The names “Wasp” and “Corsair” had been selected by the Engine
Section, in response to requests from Pratt and Whitney and Chance
Vought. Little did we know at the time what distinction they would
one day attain. The Wright Apache focused attention of other
manufacturers on the characteristics of the Wasp; and Boeing, after
testing an engine in a converted FB-1 fighter, immediately put a new
one in the works to be called the “F2B.” Curtiss made a conversion
of one of its single-seater Hawks, replacing the D-12 with a Wasp.
The first Wasp engine to be flight tested was flown in a Curtiss
Hawk and thus became a sort of monument to the reluctance Curtiss had
shown by their failure to develop their own R-1454 engine. It also
nearly became a monument to the failure of the Pratt and Whitney Wasp.
For on the one-hour endurance test over Long Island, Temple Joyce,
then test pilot for Curtiss and one of the best-known figures in
aviation, grew tired of the monotony of cruising back and forth
and decided to vary the routine with some acrobatics. But when he
pulled back the stick and booted the rudder to do a nice snap roll,
something snapped in the Wasp and Temp had to make a forced landing
on the Curtiss field. The competitive Wasp in a competitor’s airplane
had gone sour on its test flight! Consternation reigned in the Engine
Section—matter of fact, it really poured.
Examination disclosed that the crankshaft counterweight had sailed
out through the crankcase. Now the cheek had been designed with
ample margins for the stresses of centrifugal force, and the failure
remained a mystery until I recalled a lesson learned as a student
in the Sperry Gyro Compass School several years earlier. No one had
anticipated the effect of gyroscopic forces like those set up in a
snap roll. Now George Mead took these in hand and strengthened the
shaft to withstand them. With this change, the Pratt and Whitney Wasp
came to stay.
One day George and I, feeling happy about this, decided to take a
walk through the Smithsonian Institution museum. And there we saw
something that cut us back to size. It was the Manly engine, one
designed by Charles M. Manly, the pilot and engineer of the Langley
airplane, the craft Professor Langley had tried to fly off a catapult
years earlier. And marvel of marvels, it was a five-cylinder,
single-row, air-cooled radial that antedated the original Wright
engine and all the other liquid-cooled in-line engines that had
followed it. Charles Manly, having no prior art to befuddle him, had
reasoned out the rational form for an aircraft engine and created one
forthwith. As we stood looking at the museum piece that included the
fundamentals we had used to obsolete years of automotive practice,
George grinned sheepishly and remarked, “It all goes to show that
every time you think you have discovered America, you find that
Columbus was here back in 1492.”
With the completion of many flight tests, the Wasp was now ready
for production. But Rentschler found himself in a quandary as to
what price he should ask for the engines in quantity. He had no
experienced costs, for no engine had yet been built in production. We
had asked for six engines on the first experimental order and Kraus
had paid Pratt and Whitney the $90,000 he had set aside for them. It
was estimated that this amount covered about half of the experimental
costs, and Kraus was willing to add the remainder to the first
production order so as to write off this expense. But no one knew nor
had any way of guessing what the unit price should be for the order
of some two hundred engines now required for Vought Corsairs and
Boeing and Curtiss fighters. And so the price was fixed by that which
Kraus had previously paid for a similar number of Packard 1500’s—a
liquid-cooled engine we had earlier prescribed to replace the
Curtiss D-12’s in the Boeing FB-5’s. For while we had promoted the
air-cooled vigorously we had likewise developed the 500-hp Packard as
a successor to the 400-hp Curtiss D-12.
Rentschler was not too happy about having the price for his
air-cooled engines fixed by that of another contractor for
liquid-cooled; he insisted there was no relationship between the two.
But in government business, price may be fixed by anything else but
merit. The ever-present threat of a Congressional investigation made
it impossible to write into the Pratt and Whitney contract any figure
higher than the Packard price even though the circumstances might be
entirely different. This was but one of the things that made it hard
to interest private manufacturers in risking either their equities
or their engineering talent in a government speculation; none of the
business fundamentals with which they were accustomed to measure
their risks applied here.
However, as it turned out, an unexpected event exercised such an
influence that Pratt and Whitney not only did not lose money on the
first contract but even made an embarrassingly high profit. It
all started the morning William E. Boeing, of Seattle—not “Addison
Sims”—arrived in the Engine Section.
Bill Boeing, founder of the Boeing Airplane Company, and a successful
operator in lumber and real estate, had drawn his airplane-company
staff from versatile young graduates of the aeronautical-engineering
course of the University of Washington and had picked some good
ones. Foremost among these were Claire Egtvedt, his chief engineer,
and Phil Johnson, his factory manager. Bill, a pilot himself, had
opened an air line between Seattle and Victoria, using a couple of
Boeing-built flying boats under the management of Eddie Hubbard.
Eddie had persuaded Bill, against the advice of Phil Johnson, to
enter a bid for the new Chicago-San Francisco contract air-mail
route, and Bill had won the competition with a bid considered
absurdly low by his competitors.
As Bill took a chair by my desk that morning, he promptly launched
into the background of his low bid. It seems that Claire Egtvedt,
who had designed the single-seat fighter F2B around the Wasp, had
also made a study of that engine in a completely new mail plane, to
be called the “40-B.” By doing away with the heavy cooling system
of the Liberty in the new design, and availing himself of the other
features of the Wasp, he had turned out a mail plane capable of
carrying double the pay load on the same horsepower. By converting
several hundred pounds of dead load into as many pounds of paying
load, he had demonstrated the fact that no operator could afford to
use war-surplus airplanes—even as a gift—in face of that kind of
competition. Furthermore, Boeing could build the new planes dirt
cheap with the same overhead needed for the military business. He
thought the Wasp would revolutionize air transport. His problem was
how to get hold of about twenty-five new Pratt and Whitneys right
away with the entire production booked for the Navy.
This was a matter on which the admiral had already set Bureau policy.
Having in mind the fact that if government and commercial business
could be lumped, the increased volume could bring reduced costs
for both, he had issued instructions to cooperate with commercial
operators wherever practicable. All Bill needed was a letter of
introduction to F. B. Rentschler.
Out of this episode grew the Boeing Air Transport Company’s
profitable operation, the ultimate consolidation of Boeing and
Pratt and Whitney, to form the nucleus for the United Aircraft and
Transport Corporation, and such a profit for Pratt and Whitney on
the first order that Rentschler finally came to the Engine Section
for advice as to what should be done with the profit. Not the least
important factor in this achievement was the breathtaking daring
which Rentschler showed in tooling up his shop before the engine
had passed its tests and before he had received the contract. This
intelligent risk paid such dividends that Rentschler later agreed
with Kraus to return what might have been called “excess profits,”
and in so doing thus established a principle of voluntary profit
control that finally became the established policy of the company.
The original suggestion for this came from the Engine Section.
The development of the new engines and the creation of new aircraft
around them came just in time to ease a serious situation in
connection with the outfitting of the new carriers _Saratoga_ and
_Lexington_. The ships were scheduled for completion in about two
years and their squadrons were even then being assembled at the Fleet
Air Stations at Hampton Roads, Virginia, and San Diego, California.
And while the Wasp put us on easier schedules for the fighters, we
were still up against it for the big torpedo-bomber scouts. Our SC’s,
designed originally around the Wright T-3, had proved cumbersome and
heavy and, while operable on twin floats, had lacked the performance
desired for carrier use. The large engine had introduced a propeller
problem, too—one that for a while had given us a lot of concern.
One of the SC’s, equipped with a standard propeller made of laminated
woods glued together and finished to form, had let go on take-off at
Hampton Roads and the engine had nearly jumped out of the plane. In
response to an excited call from Norfolk, I had flown down in company
with Charles J. McCarthy, then our stress expert, to see what could
be done. Fortunately, about this time the Army Engineering Division
at McCook Field had brought along an experimental development, under
the supervision of Frank Caldwell, in which a new aluminum alloy
called “duralumin” had been introduced as a substitute for wood.
So far it had not been fully proved in service but we were in such
a right spot that I now authorized the procurement of the first
production order for 100 of them.
Now to round out the carrier program we must needs do something about
those torpedo bombers. The engine situation began to assume a certain
stable pattern that could be used to foster development: Wright had
a nice bit of business and without serious competition in the 200-hp
air-cooled Whirlwind class; Pratt and Whitney had a similar nest egg
in their domination of the 400-hp Wasp category; both companies had
undertaken new developments in a larger 500-hp type. At Wright it was
the Cyclone; at Pratt and Whitney, the Hornet. But neither of these
engines looked big enough for the torpedo-bomber class and every
engineer in the industry had solemnly assured me in writing that to
build a 600-hp air-cooled radial was completely impossible. In light
of this dictum we had installed a Packard 2500, 800-hp liquid-cooled
engine in one of the SC’s which we had called the “SC-6” but which
the mechanics had promptly dubbed the “_Sea Cow_.” Now the time had
arrived to give the old girl an endurance test.
The personnel of the Engine Section had undergone some change since
my taking over. After Ricco Botta had gone to sea I brought in Lt. L.
D. Webb, a naval aviator and experienced engineer. Lee had started
his naval career as an enlisted man and had served as an electrician
in a submarine. In World War I he had qualified as a pilot and been
commissioned in the Reserve. Later he had taken the examinations
and transferred to the regular service. He was a burly fellow with
a broad back, the kind you like to ride behind in an airplane. With
Lee in the cockpit, me in the rear seat, and Capt. Lionel M. Woolson,
the Packard experimental engineer, lying on a mattress back in the
tail, the _Sea Caw_ started her take-off at dawn from the bosom of
the Potomac River abreast of the spot where the Presidential Yacht
_Mayflower_ lay. We were so heavily laden with fuel that we missed
the first run after roaring past the _Mayflower_ wide open with our
eight hundred horses straining. On the second run past, I noticed a
figure in a nightgown waving encouragement to us, but a second look
revealed it as President Coolidge himself and his clenched fist waved
no encouragement.
And as hour after hour we droned up and down Chesapeake Bay, trying
to burn out the fuel to determine our real endurance, I began
thinking of a scheme that might solve our problem. Certainly the big
liquid-cooled Packard didn’t make sense; but a 600-hp air-cooled
might do the job. Our _Sea Cow_ grossed some 12,000 pounds of
dead weight with her full load of fuel and was correspondingly
big and unwieldy. If someone could build a 600-hp radial he would
automatically save nearly a ton right off the bat; and if some smart
designer could find a way to build a lighter airplane structure, we
might get the whole thing down to something of the order of 7,500
pounds. This would give us a smaller, handier airplane that would
still carry the bomb, torpedo, and fuel load we wanted, and thus
complete the outfit for our new carriers with an all-air-cooled
complement. The problem was how to get the job done—and Old Man
Competition was the obvious answer.
The chance of a lifetime came one day with a visit from the dean of
our aircraft manufacturers, Glenn L. Martin. Glenn’s black mood quite
overshadowed his natty dress. He was about to finish his contract for
torpedoplanes and had no new business in sight. First thing BUAERO
knew he’d have to fire his whole organization and, once they got
scattered, their know-how and teamwork would be lost forever. It was
up to the Bureau to do something to save Glenn Martin.
“Have you tried creating a new model, Glenn?” I asked innocently
enough. Glenn protested that his SC was the last word and that
nothing much better could be produced.
“I’ve had an idea checked out by the drafting room,” I said, “and
they agree that if some smart airplane manufacturer were to design
a new torpedo carrier around, say a new six hundred-horsepower
air-cooled engine, he could get it down to about seventy-five
hundred pounds gross, provided he could develop some new structural
features along the lines that Charles Ward Hall has proposed.”
Glenn was skeptical; and besides, he and the others had little
confidence in those tricky aluminum structures that Charles Ward Hall
proposed; they held out for welded steel. And besides, where could
you get a 600-hp air-cooled radial?
“Both the Cyclone and Hornet do five hundred twenty-five horsepower
now,” I said, “and if a smart airplane designer made a deal with
one or the other for a 600-hp type, say a year from now, the direct
competition in that class might persuade one or both of them to push
the development for you in time to give you the power you need, and
by that time you can have your revolutionary model.”
Glenn’s puckered brow suggested thought. “Do you think the Bureau
would finance such a development,” he asked, “with an experimental
contract?”
“Oh, yes,” I agreed, “up at the Naval Aircraft Factory at
Philadelphia.” Glenn was shocked by the suggestion.
“Have you mentioned this to anyone else?” he inquired.