Society of Mechanical Engineers, the Institute of Electrical
Engineers, the Society of Civil Engineers, and others, had joined
hands to build a new Engineering Societies’ Building on 39th Street
in New York City, where they had their several offices and conducted
their technical sessions. One of these societies extended an
invitation to Admiral Moffett to address a joint session on naval
aviation and the admiral passed the job of writing the screed on to
me. But when I handed the finished product over to him, he glanced at
the title “Power Plants for Aircraft,” and grinned.
“You read it,” he directed.
I read it at a session at Pennsylvania State College and afterward,
to my surprise, learned that it had won some kind of award. To
receive this prize, I attended a session in the New York auditorium
of the society’s building and in the course of a little talk, told
the story of how George Mead and I, after the “invention” of the
air-cooled engine, had discovered its prototype in the Smithsonian
Institution in the power plant of the early Langley airplane, the
Manly engine. There was a disturbance in the back of the auditorium
and a member stood up to remark that Mr. Charles M. Manly was right
there in the audience. Amid the shouts that followed, Mr. Manly was
belatedly revealed as a great pioneer.
In addition to the journals and technical papers of the booming
American societies, we received the best articles from foreign
countries. Among these, the Royal Aeronautical Society of London
furnished almost world leadership, while the English magazine, _The
Airplane_, edited by an outspoken character, C. G. Grey, published
stimulating news and comment. Articles in German and French were
translated and distributed through BUAERO in such profusion that it
required a lot of homework just to keep up with the ever-changing
nomenclature of a rapidly growing art. The most scientific writings
came to us from the British National Advisory Committee for
Aeronautics, but gradually our own committee with the same name began
to forge to the front with selected articles and digests of the best
laboratory reports from all over the world.
There was some discussion as to the wisdom of releasing the latest
in research or development in this country in exchange for similar
data from abroad, but the admiral settled it characteristically.
If you couldn’t keep ahead of the other fellow by resort to your
own initiative and enterprise in a free market, he felt, then you
certainly couldn’t beat him on a closed circuit. An alert mind could
often find something in the other fellow’s research which the other
fellow might have missed; and if the other fellow beat you to the
punch in your own field, you deserved to lose out. The admiral’s
highly competitive spirit kept the whole Bureau on its toes and a
word of commendation from him fired his supporters to play better
ball than they really knew how.
This general type of leadership seemed to permeate the Washington
atmosphere of the middle ’twenties. The team of Harding and Coolidge
had been elected to office on the slogan of a “Return to Normalcy.”
The American people had tasted the European way in World War I and
had found it bitter indeed. Then, after President Harding had died,
Mr. Coolidge had taken office and given us an administration founded
on New England character and integrity. This had been particularly
apparent in the monetary field. We in BUAERO had to supply Admiral
Moffett with sound bases for our requests for appropriations, but
when we did, the Old Man would come through; he had a rare knack for
getting money, especially after he had established the principle of
the five-year plan. But we were expected to make our appropriations
pay dividends; they weren’t handouts for “social” purposes.
We didn’t pretend to know anything about the obscure theories of
economics, but anyone could understand the soundness of Mr. Andrew
Mellon’s tax policies. The war had left us with the heaviest debt
in the history of the country, and with income taxes at high rates.
Mr. Mellon seemed determined to reduce the debt, and to this end he
resorted to reduced taxation. Meanwhile Mr. Coolidge sat on the lid
in so far as expenses were concerned. In BUAERO we got no sudden
slashing, but a quiet mandate that when a vacancy occurred, it would
not be filled; the work would either be divided among others or, if
unnecessary, be allowed to lapse. And between the two processes,
prosperity returned. Reduced taxes made funds available for new
enterprises; new enterprises paid new taxes which further reduced the
debt. Mr. Mellon now began anticipating this result by further tax
reductions, which accelerated the creation of new enterprises and new
jobs. And so a boom was born and men talked of the “new economic era.”
With the Morrow Board policy and the Moffett five-year building
program as its foundation, and the favorable climate of the new
economic era as its medium, American aviation seemed to turn around
almost overnight. The surviving domestic companies, impelled by the
incentive of constructive competition, began forging ahead with their
integrated programs of research, development, and production. Foreign
designers who had languished in the bad atmosphere of war-torn Europe
now began peddling their know-how in the promised land. Mr. Anthony
Fokker, the rough-and-ready Dutch designer of the famous German
Fokkers of World War I, appeared with a new transport designed around
the Liberty engine. It had a welded-steel tubular fuselage and a
thick monoplane wing made of plywood. With the Liberty it could be
nothing but a “kluck” but with three Wright Whirlwind air-cooled
radials, it was a hot number. When Dick Byrd planned to fly over
the North Pole I wangled one of them for him which he used with
conspicuous success. The smaller Fokker Universal made history in the
Canadian bush.
Igor Sikorsky, who, as a pioneer Russian pilot and constructor, had
built the first four-engined bomber but had left revolution-torn
Russia for free America, now designed a remarkably efficient big
bomber or transport and began developing his twin-engined amphibian.
Giuseppe Ballanca, after setting up shop in Wilmington, Delaware,
produced a single-engined cargo carrier, designed around a single
Wright Whirlwind engine with which Lt. C. C. Champion of BUAERO’s
Engine Section, now headed by Henry Mullinix, won all the prizes for
speed and efficiency at the Philadelphia national air races.
And a new crop of American designers sprang up almost overnight.
Tom Hamilton, of Milwaukee, built a single-motored, high-wing metal
monoplane around the Pratt and Whitney Hornet engine and put it into
service on many freight routes. Mr. Henry Ford, inspired by zeal to
do something concrete for aviation, supported his chief engineer,
William Mayo, in the development of the Ford Trimotor—a high-wing,
metal monoplane built around three Wright Whirlwinds—and its sale to
budding air transport lines at a price which would permit profitable
operations. In this Mr. Ford was not prompted by the modern incentive
of “tax loss”—that idea had not been born in an era of American
initiative and enterprise.
Numerous other enterprisers like Stearman, of Wichita, Kansas, and
Stinson, of Detroit, Michigan, began creating private aircraft to
exploit the coming boom in personal flying. Many, drawing the analogy
with the automobile, were convinced that this boom had already
arrived, and began building airports and flying services all over the
country. Much of this building was based on shoestring finance, but
some of it was sound. And all of it might have made steady progress
except for one thing: speculation permeated the sound core of
aviation just as it ate at the vitals of all other industry.
Even naval officers, who up until then had seemed to pride themselves
on a certain aloofness to the marts of trade, now began dabbling in
“the market.” Profits here were sure and swift—provided always you
were on the inside. One of our friends had an inside tip on a new
graveyard to be constructed within the city limits of Los Angeles,
with the advice and consent of the City Council, where profits were
quick and sure. The harvest for this enterprise was guaranteed to be
as sure as—say, death and taxes. This friend looked down his nose at
another man whose mouselike wife had been inveigled by a door-to-door
salesman into buying a lot in Long Beach, California. The extra
burden of paying for this “investment” was about to break the couple
down when someone poked a hole in a nearby piece of ground and the
oil field on Signal Hill was born. Now the young wife followed the
young husband’s battleship around in her private yacht. But none
of this seemed to discourage creative enterprise, like the rising
aircraft manufacturing and air-transport industries.
Among the newcomers in the manufacturing field, Donald Douglas and
“Dutch” Kindleberger began to stand out. Prior to their advent, most
of the newcomers had been alumni of the great Curtiss Aeroplane
Company, of Garden City, Long Island. But Glenn L. Martin, an
early bird who had pioneered American twin-engined bombers with
his famous Martin bomber, had collected a stable of promising
colts; Don Douglas, Dutch Kindleberger, and Larry Bell had worked
for him until some temperamental disagreement sent all three on
independent projects. After that, each concentrated his efforts to
outdoing the others, and especially the old master, Glenn Martin.
We in BUAERO, sitting as we did at the crossroads, could always get
the dirt and low-down from the visiting firemen and, after sifting
it and appraising it, use our own judgment in how to make it pay
dividends in new development. Intercompany competition mixed up with
interservice competition and whirled about in the old slipstream
might look disorderly and inefficient, but it was motivated by highly
creative impulses.
Admiral Moffett kept his own Bureau on its toes by involving us in
all sorts of racing or other projects. Back in Bruce Leighton’s time,
BUAERO had given Don Douglas the job of building an experimental
single-engined Liberty torpedo-bomber plane—one with extra
large tanks for long-range flying. But after Don had produced a
masterpiece, the Army Air Service seized upon the type while the
Navy dawdled, and the Army had completed the first ’round-the-world
flight. This job, a masterpiece of planning and operations, proved
such a pronounced success that it gave great impetus to other
projects. It also gave the Navy such pain that Admiral Moffett never
got over it.
The classic international seaplane race had long been the Schneider
Trophy and the admiral had set his heart on winning it. The
expenditure of time, money, and effort could be justified then
because it always stimulated technical progress. And so BUAERO
created a new class of racers and brought the trophy to America;
the admiral, master that he was of the art of publicity, played up
the results to the fullest. The Navy had also entered the classic
land-plane races using special racers in the “free-for-all pursuit.”
Then, since turn about had always been fair play, the Army entered
Jimmy Doolittle in the Schneider Cup seaplane races and won them
hands down. This was the same Jimmy Doolittle who would one day take
off in an Army bomber from the Navy carrier _Hornet_ in our first air
raid on Tokyo. Meanwhile, the middle ’twenties were a free-swinging
era of intense competition that pushed American aeronautics to the
forefront of world progress. The bursting bubble of stock-market
speculation in 1929 squeezed out the small fry, but the big boys went
on for a while longer.
Meanwhile I found my new flying ability most useful in my billet
as Chief of Design. On a training-plane competition between Boeing
and Huff-Daland, I was able to check the trial-board report myself
and, being fresh out of Pensacola, to do so with a fair knowledge
of the latest edition of the _Flight Manual_. The Boeing developed
a characteristic which, until then, was new to us. Pete Mitscher,
the same Pete who would one day command Task Force 58 in the Pacific
and earn from his mates the reputation for being the ablest air
commander of them all, got into a flat spin at 6,000 feet over
Washington and windmilled to a crash on the end of Haines Point,
where he stepped out of the damaged plane quite unharmed. Had he
known about flat spins back in the days of the “Affair Fleet,” things
would have been more difficult.
Then one of these tests of mine came near to washing me out of
aviation’s slipstream forever and leaving me as a part of the
permanent “slip.”
There had been some discussion in BUAERO of a suggestion to equip
Pensacola with some advanced combat trainers by taking the Pratt
and Whitney Wasp out of the Curtiss Hawk and substituting in it the
lower-power Wright Whirlwind. I had argued against this and suggested
obtaining the same result by flying the standard Hawks with partly
open throttles. And in order to prove the efficacy of this, I went
over to the Naval Air Station, Anacostia, where we did our flight
testing, to put on a demonstration. When I waddled out in my flying
suit and parachute, I found the plane turning up on the line, but the
mechanic was dissatisfied with the way the engine was running. It was
one hundred revs short of the full-throttle crank speed. Since this
might be due to a weak spark plug or some other minor fault and since
I intended to fly at half throttle anyway, I got in, taxied out onto
the field, and took off.
The Anacostia Naval Air Station occupied about half of a flat strip
of land and had its hangars and shops along the river front. The
Army Bolling Field occupied the other part of the reservation with
its old wartime buildings lying under the hill on which stands St.
Elizabeth’s Hospital. If the presence of an institution for the
insane, overlooking the rival Army and Navy fields on the same plot,
had any significance, I was not concerned with it that day. What I
had to look out for, however, was the extensive regrading going on,
which limited the operating area to a narrow tract.
My take-off was diagonally across the field toward the bluff, and
the little Hawk, to my delight, fairly leaped into the air at half
throttle, and climbed over the trees. Turning to the left, looking
down on the hospital, I noticed the circle that marked the landing
area, and promptly cut the switch to make a dead-stick precision
landing on it. When this turned out well, I started the engine and
repeated the maneuver. On the third take-off, noticing a certain
roughness in the engine, I opened the throttle wide, thinking to
clear a possible fouled plug. But even as I did so, I felt something
let go and noticed the ears of the valve rocker box covers drop below
the rim of the engine cowl.
There was a sudden “whoosh” and the cockpit filled with flames.
Instinctively I cut back the throttle, slapped off the switch, and
pulled the fire-extinguisher knob. As I reached behind me alongside
the seat for the fuel cutoff valve, I glanced into the cockpit where
the flames were licking my stick hand, and curling up around my
ankles beneath my slacks. When I looked out again, we were nearing
the end of the field. At such a low altitude I could not jump and
now, to get the flames out of my face, I kicked into a steep slip to
the left which headed us out over the Potomac River. A water landing
to a sailor has more appeal than a crack-up in a thicket, and I held
the heading until it was certain I could not stretch the river. Then,
close to the ground, I booted the rudder to fishtail her the other
way and followed this with four hard kicks alternating left and right
until she had lost speed. Now as the burning Hawk touched down hard,
I had an overwhelming sense of panic; the next thing I knew I was on
the ground on my hands and knees and the plane was crackling behind
me. Feeling the heat on the back of my neck, I glanced quickly over
my shoulder and then, as the flame seared my cheek, I scrambled out
of there on hands and knees.
Clear of the wreck, I got to my feet and looked around. A small
car was careening toward me from the direction of the Army hangar.
My first reaction was one of embarrassment at being caught by the
Army in such an undignified situation. When I looked again at the
airplane, it stood there without its engine, burning abaft the
cockpit, but headed in a direction opposite to that in which I had
landed it. Its engine lay a few yards beyond me, one propeller blade
broken off near the hub.
Well, that accounted for the crack-up. When the blade had let go,
several of the holding-down stud bosses had broken off, but others
had held the engine in the airplane. Then the rough landing had
sheared the others; the airplane, freed of its heavy noseweight, had
bounced into the air, done a split S, broken my safety belt, and
dropped me clear of the fire. Had it happened any other way, I must
surely have burned up before I could escape the flames.
I glanced at my hands and saw that the skin was burned deep enough to
expose the cords. I felt my face and found burns around my lips and
eyebrows; at least I would not be disfigured for life. The careening
Army car swung alongside with squealing brakes and I climbed on
its running board for a fast run back to Anacostia’s sick bay. The
soldier in the car said the broken propeller blade had sailed right
past him, screaming like a wild thing. Arrived at the sick bay, I
was hustled into a ward and told to lie down; the doctor said I was
suffering from shock. I lay down on the bunk awhile, and when I
looked up, Admiral Moffett stood in the door.
“Have you telephoned your wife?” he asked eagerly.
“No, sir,” I replied.
“Better do it yourself,” he ordered. “News of this will be all over
town. Save her the shock.”
But when I tried to get up, I couldn’t move. The admiral pushed the
bed toward the telephone. When I got our apartment, no prior news had
preceded me; my wife gasped and said she’d be right over. The door
opened and a doctor walked in to examine my hands.
“I’m afraid you’ll never use those again,” he said. Then he looked
up. “Can you stand a lot of pain?” he asked.
I had never had to stand much. The doctor said he’d try a treatment
developed in World War I, one using a solution of tannic acid. It
worked and today I have nothing to show for the experience save a few
minor scars. Meanwhile, the admiral sat there; for the first time
that I could recall, he seemed to droop.
“Things like this,” he said, “make you wonder if this cockeyed game
is worth the candle.” He paused.
“Well,” he added, standing up to leave, “there’s nothing much we can
do about it but play it out. The thing’s bigger than any of us and
we’re in it up to our necks.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
A Lone Eagle Sets the Standard
Among the aviation phenomena of the late 1920’s was the outbreak of
glorified stunt flying. Barnstormers and wing walkers of the earlier
half of the decade now began vying with one another on a world-wide
scale, competing for rich prizes offered by various personalities,
and for assorted motives. Some courageous souls, quite unprepared,
took off in the direction of the wide blue yonder and never came
back; others, more successful, returned to bask for a while in the
pitiless glare of publicity and then faded out.
But one day, while the whole world seemed to hold its breath and
to offer up a little prayer for him, a lone eagle soared out over
the broad Atlantic and, after thirty-three hours, let down through
the murk over Le Bourget, outside Paris. And after taxiing toward a
milling throng so dense he had to cut his engine to avoid injuring
someone with his propeller, he remarked, “I am Charles A. Lindbergh.”
Perhaps one measure of the character of this performance is the
fact that, to this day, in spite of all the strides in airplane
development, no person has sought to duplicate a solo flight from New
York to Paris.
The impact of Lindbergh’s flight on the progress of American aviation
is well known; it started an upsurge that carried aviation over
a dead center and started it spinning on its way. What is not so
well known is the underlying character of the man himself and its
influence on American air power. For, just as a community or an
enterprise mirrors the character of its pioneers, so has aviation
taken on some of the personalities of its immortals.
In BUAERO we were at first inclined to look at this last stunt as
more or less a lucky break, until Guy Vaughan came down to tell
us about the night take-off. Since Lindbergh was flying a Wright
Whirlwind engine, Guy had invited him to dinner. And while he and
his wife, Helen, sat talking with Lindbergh, word came from Dr.
Kimball, the weather wizard, that things were clearing over the
Atlantic. The party drove out to the flying field and when the men
had pushed their way into the hangar to look for the _Spirit of St.
Louis_, the tiny ship was lighted by a single, dim carbon-filament
bulb—“so dim,” according to Guy Vaughan, “you had to strike a match
to see if it was burning.”
Outside the hangar, Dick Byrd, aided by his ample staff, had also
been making preparations. But Guy Vaughan and Charles Lindbergh,
using their own hands, topped off the fuel tanks of the _Spirit of
St. Louis_ and started her rolling out onto the ramp. Guy ascribed
Lindbergh’s achievement to three things: he was the best pilot in
the world, he trusted nothing to anyone but himself, and he took no
unintelligent chances.
Admiral Moffett hailed Lindbergh’s accomplishment, but feared the
Army might make capital of it by persuading Lindbergh, an Army
Reserve officer, to say that his feat had obsoleted all navies.
Jerry Land, now our assistant chief, got a big kick out of the whole
thing; Lindbergh was his nephew. And then, as the flight proved to be
far more than just a seven days’ wonder and Lindbergh’s popularity
increased rather than diminished with the passage of time, all sorts
of people began getting into the act. When the word was passed around
that Lindbergh was coming home on the cruiser _Memphis_ and that he
was writing a book to be called _We_, the Navy began to take him very
seriously. The Secretary of the Navy, Mr. Curtis D. Wilbur, radioed
Lindbergh on the _Memphis_, offering to assign a naval officer as
his technical advisor in the preparation of the book. Lindbergh
accepted the offer with alacrity, and I found myself assigned to the
detail. My job was to see that his book didn’t sink the Navy with a
fragmentation bomb.
On the day of Lindbergh’s arrival at the Navy Yard in Washington,
all the naval aviators in the vicinity were tolled off to act as a
guard of honor for him. I walked through the part, but was so little
interested that I neglected to attend the ceremonies at the foot
of the Washington Monument, and went home as usual for lunch. But
after Lindbergh’s tour of the provinces, we began to take notice;
not only did his popularity increase, but he developed a knack of
being exactly on time for all ceremonies. I had noted, during the
time the _Spirit of St. Louis_ had been in the hangar at Anacostia,
that Lindbergh himself had never failed to check every detail of her
preparations. Now his incredible on-time performance, under trying
conditions, seemed to bear out Guy Vaughan’s estimate; he trusted no
one but himself and was the best pilot in the country. Then came the
day when Charles Lindbergh returned to Washington.
Jerry Land sent for me to tell me that Secretary Wilbur had placed
his yacht _Sylph_ at Lindbergh’s disposal for a cruise down the
Potomac as far as Mount Vernon. A number of dignitaries, including
Bill McCracken, Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Air; F. Trubee
Davison, Assistant Secretary of War for Air; Ed Warner, Assistant
Secretary of the Navy for Air; and a number of Slim Lindbergh’s St.
Louis backers, were to make the trip. The idea was to give Lindbergh
a lot of good advice on his future conduct and afterward we would
all adjourn to the house of Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover
on S Street, where we would meet an agent of George Palmer Putnam,
prospective publisher of the book _We_. I was to go along on the
_Sylph_ and then do my duty at the Hoover house.