of every aircraft company, and in the end, imperiled the existence
of them all. For while the creative force of the Morrow Board policy
carried over beyond the 1929 stock-market crash, it did not survive
the ordeal of the New Deal. With the election of President Roosevelt
in 1932 and his advent into the White House in 1933, an earthquake
hit American aviation. When President Roosevelt ordered the
cancellation of the air-mail contracts and directed the Army to take
over, the young air-transport business suffered a vital blow. When,
after the deaths of several Army pilots who had had no preparation
for the complex transport task, the lines were returned to private
operations, the blight of Congressional investigation fell upon the
whole aircraft industry.
Senator Hugo Black, later a Justice of the Supreme Court of the
United States, who had been probing the ocean-mail subsidies, now
turned his attention to aviation. The airplane, long a subject of
great public interest, crowded the headlines with sensational charges
and countercharges, none of which seemed to lead anywhere other than
to the glorification of the investigators. Then Senator Gerald P.
Nye, not to be outdone in courtesy, dragged out the old myth of the
“munitions racketeer” and the “merchants of death” and dusted it off
for the more modern treatment of klieg lights and other technological
advances in the art of public relations. Whatever else may be said
for these hippodromes, they had the effect of knocking down an
airplane program just as a killer in the stockyards fells an ox with
one neat blow from a maul. Even though the programs remained on the
statute books, it would have required a courageous procurement staff,
indeed, to make contracts with such apparent renegades as headed the
unhappy aircraft companies.
The moment arrived when Chance Vought Aircraft was running out of
work. In order to extend the useful life of the old Corsair, we had
replaced the Wasp engine with a new Pratt and Whitney Hornet 1690.
This gave us a breathing spell while we assembled our engineering
team and dreamed up a new model. But BUAERO had now revived the old
two-seat fighter project and thrust it on us. Worse still, they had
designed the airplane themselves and now looked to us to detail it
and build the prototype. Recalling the old fight between FLEET AIR
and BUAERO on this subject, back when I had been Admiral Reeves’s
chief of staff, the whole thing had elements of poetic injustice
in it that now aroused me to action. I decided to build their old
two-seat fighter, according to all specifications, to exceed their
designed performances, and at the same time build the structure
strong enough to be used as a dive bomber. This would take a lot of
doing, for the performance guarantees were already high, but it would
leave us with two strings to our bow, a two-seat fighter that would
probably not go into production, and a two-seat dive bomber that
probably would. In the latter event, Vought would give the Navy a
distinctly new type of airplane, one that could depend upon its guns
to penetrate enemy fighter cover and then use its bombs on ground
targets.
One of the complications involved was the specification that called
for the installation of the new Pratt and Whitney two-row radial, the
R-1535. The two-row feature would have introduced excessive drag and
cooling difficulties, except that I chanced to read an article by C.
G. Grey in _The Airplane_, a British magazine devoted to aviation
and to running down everything American. Mr. Grey had recently
visited the great Bristol airplane factory and had been impressed
with a project for cooling air-cooled engines. Unlike certain foreign
engine builders who insisted on blowing large quantities of air in
the general direction of their cylinders, Bristol had devised an
ingenious contrivance through which they had succeeded in directing
a “mere trickle” of air at precisely the required spots, thus saving
much drag and improving the cooling no end.
After this tip-off, we set up a joint project using the Sikorsky wind
tunnel and staff, under the direction of Chance Vought engineers,
to develop a cowl for a Pratt and Whitney engine. Out of this
cooperative effort came a new power-plant installation using the
“cowl-flaps” which any passenger in any American transport can still
see by looking out the window at the engine nacelle and watching the
opening and closing of the “gills.” This development not only made
the two-row radial a success but proved so effective that it has been
rated by discerning observers as a development quite as revolutionary
in its way as was the controllable-angle propeller.
With the drying up of both military and commercial business in our
own country, we must needs look elsewhere or fade out. The export
market was the only outlet, and while there were obstacles there,
the superiority of our products, built up under the Morrow policy,
had put us in a strong competitive position. Even from the point of
view of costs and in the face of a preference on the part of some
countries for aircraft of their own production, we could still make
headway. American automobiles had won leadership in foreign markets
because of superior quality and lower price. The idea that we could
not compete with “slave labor” had been disproved; the technology
of production could support higher wages and still produce low-cost
goods of high quality. That was our heritage which we would now
exploit.
However, there were other considerations. The control of export
permits had been lodged in the State Department, which would not
grant such permit without the approval of the military department
concerned. In the case of the SBU-1 two-seat dive bomber we had first
to obtain permission from BUAERO and then run the gantlet of the
State Department and the office of a Mr. Joseph Green. This problem
came to the fore when the Argentine Navy sought to acquire some
of our planes. Admiral King ruled that since the airplane had the
characteristics of a dive bomber it was too secret to permit foreign
sale. Of course the only secret about it was that the wings had been
made strong enough to take the pull-out loads—something any designer
could build in—but that proved enough.
Chance Vought Aircraft now found itself in a tight spot. I camped on
the doorstep of the State Department, of BUAERO, and even went to see
Adm. William H. Standley, then Chief of Naval Operations, to urge
that the matter be viewed from the point of view of the long-term
public interest, keeping a vital industry alive and 800 men and women
employed. We already had millions on relief without swelling the
throng on a technicality, but I was too poor a salesman to make the
idea stick. In desperation, I tried another approach.
With my wife as company, I caught a Pan American Airways flight for
Buenos Aires, determined to close the contract and then see what
Uncle Sam had to say. If he wanted to accept the responsibility for
an overt act that would take the food from the mouths of our men, he
could do so, but I refused to hold the bag while they gave me the
run-around.
We were fortunate in our representation in Argentina. The firm
of Jorge Luro y Cia. brought us the experience of Jorge Luro, a
distinguished pioneer aviator, and the mature wisdom of Señor
Guillermo Leloir, member of an aristocratic Argentine family.
“We Latins,” Guillermo counseled me, in anticipation of direct
negotiations with Capt. Marco Zar, the director of Argentine naval
aviation, “admire your North American enterprise but resent your
high-pressure salesmanship.”
Marco Zar, a graduate of the Pensacola Naval Air Station, had come to
me one day in BUAERO, asking for advice on his procurement problems.
His current interest in Vought airplanes was due to his knowledge
that I managed the company. An earnest, conscientious officer, he
believed that a good deal for his service must needs be a fair deal
all around. My tactics during the negotiations were predicated on
this fact plus the advice from Guillermo.
Details of our contract were argued out before a large conference of
Captain Zar’s subordinate officers. The captain won every skirmish
pertaining to prices or specification, yet the final conclusions were
satisfactory to all concerned. When I returned to Hartford, I passed
the word around the shop that the kids could eat for another year,
provided Uncle Sam did not refuse us an export permit.
With work for the shop we could direct our attention to a new
development. It was already clear that biplanes were being outclassed
by monoplanes, but they had persisted longer on carriers because
of the space limitations imposed there. As a replacement for our
two-seat dive bomber, which could carry a 500-pound bomb, we drew
up a proposal to construct a folding-wing 500-pound monoplane dive
bomber so designed that a carrier could manage its full complement of
the new, faster type. The Bureau considered the proposal for a while,
and then, instead of giving us the advantage we deserved for having
conceived the idea, got out its own specification and published it to
the trade. Then they further complicated the problem by advertising
for two types, a 500- and a 1,000-pounder. We submitted proposals
for both, and were awarded the 500-pound model. Now in order not
to get left at the post in case BUAERO finally decided to buy only
1,000-pounders, we decided to build our ship to meet all the tight
specifications for the smaller size but still capable of carrying a
1,000-pound bomb.
The competition from other manufacturers was tough. Every airplane
was stressed to the ultimate and no margins were left for error.
After winning a design competition, a manufacturer had to submit an
article for test by the trial board at Anacostia. If he beat out
his competitors there and won a production award, then followed the
trials and tribulations of trying to build his brain child without
losing his shirt. Then, after the airplane got into service and
developed the unforeseen bugs that always show up regardless of
previous care, he had the added responsibility for correcting faults
on aircraft he might have donated to the government at a substantial
loss to himself. After that, all that remained was to dream up a new
model to replace the old, and in the meantime, keep service men in
the field to show untrained mechanics how to operate a complicated
contraption that was fully as high strung as the president of the
company that had built it.
After our new SB2U went into service, we shifted our attention back
to building a monoplane observation replacement for the battleship
and carrier-catapult planes, represented by our original Corsairs.
For so well had Chance Vought wrought that his little two-seaters,
conceived back there in 1926, remained in service until after Pearl
Harbor, some fifteen years later. Our replacement was called the
“Kingfisher” and it saw service in World War II. One of them saved
Eddy Rickenbacker from a watery grave on the vast Pacific, something
that alone compensated us for the painstaking design efforts we had
put into a complicated project.
Meanwhile, in the effort to find a product for export sale and,
possibly, break into an Army competition, we built a fighter under
circumstances so fantastic as almost to belie the telling. Jack
Northrup, who had built a sweet little single-seater for the Army,
using the Wright 1510 two-row engine, had won high praise from
the Army Engineering Division at Wright Field, Dayton, Ohio, in
competition with fighters by Curtiss and Seversky. But during
an interlude in the contest, after the plane had gone back to
California, it had sailed out over the broad Pacific and not
returned. There had been gossip at the time that the Japs might have
had something to do with it. At any rate, Jack Northrup had decided
not to reenter the Army competition, but Jack Horner, sales manager
of Pratt and Whitney, suggested that Vought take over the design from
Northrup, reconstruct the model around the Pratt and Whitney 1535
engine, and create an export fighter model for United Aircraft.
I conducted the negotiations with Jack Northrup over the telephone
and sent our men west by air. Starting with few drawings and no
materials, we rushed the airplane to completion in something like
forty-five days. During the work at East Hartford, the Connecticut
River overflowed its banks and cut off the electric power, but our
crews, working night and day, finished the little ship in the light
of their automobile headlights.
In the competition at Wright Field, which was based not on the actual
performance of the prototype but on what the contractor was willing
to guarantee in production, we lost out to Alex Seversky. When we
offered the airplane to the Navy, with arresting gear, we were unable
to arouse interest. While this put us in the clear for an export
permit, we failed to sell any of the craft, at least to countries
with cash to buy them. One day our European export representative,
Tom Hamilton, brought some Japanese officers to Hartford.
When the Jap pilot put the little fighter through its paces, we
looked at one another in wonderment. We had long understood that
these boys couldn’t learn to fly—they had myopic eyes. But whatever
else the Japs had, this pilot had everything; he didn’t put on
any dive-and-zoom noise show, but checked out the little airplane
especially as to its maneuverability at altitude, the characteristic
at which it excelled. And so with the full approval of Washington,
the plane, which had been rejected by both Army and Navy, was sold to
the Japanese.
Later on in the Pacific war, their fighter pilots proved quite
proficient in the air. Furthermore, their fleet fighters, the Zeros,
could give even our Grumman Wildcats plenty of trouble. Finally one
of their Zeros was captured and brought to San Diego where, after
passing severe tests by the guards, I was permitted to see it. It
was bigger than our Northrup-Vought and powered with a Japanese
two-row radial of about the size of our 1830. The engine was of
Japanese design but incorporated what the Japs considered to be the
best features of the French Gnome-Rhone radials, the British Bristol
Jupiter, the Wright Cyclone, and the Pratt and Whitney Wasp. And it
displayed beautiful workmanship throughout.
As for the airplane, it looked a good deal like the Northrup-Vought,
though it was larger and incorporated some of the best features of
other aircraft bought by the Japanese, as well as some neat wrinkles
of their own. The power-plant installation was distinctly Chance
Vought Aircraft, and the wheel stowage into the wing roots was
definitely Northrup. The wing-tip folding was Japanese, and it looked
like an idea we should have used. All in all, it was a masterful
example of good imitation—they even copied the Navy inspection stamp
from the Pratt and Whitney type parts—plus some good Jap innovation
which combined to make the product of an “inferior race” all too
devastating. As Admiral Reeves had been wont to remark, “One should
never discount an enemy.”
But while the Japs had been busy with their Zeros, we had not been
idle at Vought. I, for one, had not forgotten the lesson of Panama,
even though our Navy now seemed to have turned its back on the
fighter-bomber idea. Fighter pilots are inherently resentful of
any suggestion that they should know how to dive bomb as well as
dogfight. But the fact remains that, once they have driven an enemy
from the skies, neither they nor their ships are useful unless they
can turn a hand at attacking objectives on the ground. With this idea
in mind, we set out at Vought to build a new Corsair. She must be
able to out-perform enemy fighters and still be readily convertible
to a dive bomber; she must have the structural ruggedness and
strength to withstand the high stresses of this work. This meant, in
turn, that she must be larger than the pure fighter and to this end
she must have a more powerful engine. That is just another way of
expressing Bruce Leighton’s ancient adage about the power plant being
the heart of the airplane.
We had such an engine in the new Pratt and Whitney 2800. Originally
intended to develop from 1,800 to 2,000 horsepower, this engine was
later actually used at from 2,500 to 3,000 in World War II. Around
the new power plant we designed a new fighter bomber, and offered
it to BUAERO in anticipation of the war that seemed inevitable. But
BUAERO was cool to our proposal. Large airplanes could not be carried
on the flattops in the same numbers as could the smaller, more
compact fighters; number was an important factor in the complement of
a carrier. They were willing to let us go ahead on the project, but
they could not hold out much hope for ultimate production.
Now I took a long breath and embarked on the gamble of a lifetime.
We would commit Chance Vought to a new single-seat fighter, one with
such blazing speed and such fire power and such maneuverability that
it could blast any enemy from the skies, even though handicapped with
all the rigging that goes on a carrier fighter. We would build into
it such rugged strength that it could carry heavy bombs in a dive,
and still withstand the clumsiness of any horny-handed pilot who
might try to pull its tail off.
But in taking this kind of decision we were not alone. Out in
Seattle, Boeing had staked its future on the conviction of the Young
Turks of the Army that a long-range heavy bomber would one day become
the backbone of air power, no matter who said it would not. Farther
down the West Coast, Don Douglas risked everything on the future of
a new four-engined transport to be called the “DC-4” at a time when
the Army remained cold to all transport and the airlines were doing
very well, thank you, with the DC-3. Across the city, Bob Gross, at
Lockheed, took his chances with a new twin-engined liquid-cooled
fighter to be called the “Lightning,” at a time when the predominance
of opinion was against such craft. Nearby, Dutch Kindleberger of
North American, always crazy like a fox, dreamed up a single-seat
liquid-cooled fighter around the Rolls Royce Merlin engine, a fighter
which was to be called the “Mustang,” that would one day become
a long-range escort for bombers over Europe. Down at San Diego,
Reuben Fleet plugged along with flying boats and amphibians, long
after the smart money was all on carrier planes. His Consolidated’s
Catalinas would one day fight the world over for all our allies. And
down Baltimore way the Old Master, Glenn Martin, rode his own hobby
of light, fast bombers for ground attack at the very moment when
the “Young Turks” seemed about to prevail in their battle for heavy
bombardment. Out at Farmingdale, Long Island, the brilliant engineer
Kartveli was forging his Thunderbolts, intended as fighters but
destined for use in the invasion of Europe as the long-range fighter
bombers that broke Hermann Goering’s heart because he was sure we
couldn’t build such planes.
These are but a few of many that come readily to mind. The fact was,
no one could guess whom we would fight, to say nothing of how or
when. Without a foreign policy, we could shape no military policy,
and without a military policy who could guess what airplanes might be
called upon to do? But our saving grace lay in the fact that this was
a free country where any man might risk his money, or even his neck,
in backing his pet idea. When the chips were finally down, Uncle
Sam, who hadn’t killed his air craftsmen with kindness, found they
had supplied him with a wide variety of combat types from which to
choose, a variety that made it possible for him to go out and win. In
a postwar interview, Hermann Goering was reported to have said that
the one thing the Germans had envied us was our flexible system of
individual initiative and enterprise.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Review of Some Fundamentals
During the protracted period when Hamilton-Standard, Sikorsky, and
Chance Vought found the going rough as they endeavored to create new
products that could be sold to a reluctant government, Pratt and
Whitney for a while made much smoother weather of it. The Wasp engine
had proved so outstanding that no other power plant had challenged
it, and in a field that offered the greatest volume. Subsequent
engines, while not outclassing all competition, as had the Wasp, won
a fair share of the market. As a matter of fact, it was Pratt and
Whitney that had provided most of the resources out of which the
other divisions had prosecuted their new developments. But now as the
year 1937 arrived, even the bellwether of our flock began to find the
pickings scarce.
For certain ones in the Army Air Corps still persisted in advocating
liquid cooling, and now, as they began occupying positions of
power, they pressed harder than ever, this despite the fact that
the brilliant performance of the air-cooled radials had all but
driven liquid-cooled in-line engines out of the country. In England,
however, where the Bristol air-cooled engines had not attained
to the same leadership as had the Pratt and Whitney and Wright
radials in America, Rolls Royce had done an outstanding job with
a racing-plane engine which they had later developed into a fine
pursuit engine. In Germany, where tremendous effort was being made
to rehabilitate aviation after the terms of the Treaty of Versailles
had been modified, Junkers had taken a license to build Pratt and
Whitney engines but, as usual, had not built power plants wholly
comparable with the original. Simultaneously B.M.W. had prosecuted
the development of their own liquid-cooled engines, a type in which
they had background and experience. These facts, plus some new
liquid-cooling developments, had encouraged certain men in the Army
to promote an American liquid-cooled program.
By using Ethylene Glycol, or Prestone as we know it in our
automobile antifreeze mixtures, many of the difficulties inherent
in liquid-cooling were ameliorated. The new “pressure-cooling”
systems became competitive with the “baffles” of the radials in so
far as weight and performance were concerned; they still retained
the old handicaps of leaky plumbing. In order to exploit this
progress, the Army Engineering Division at Wright Field had designed
a liquid-cooled, in-line engine of its own, and turned over the job
of building and testing it to the Allison Engineering Company, of
Indianapolis, Indiana.
Allison, skilled in automotive experimental work, especially
that associated with racing in the speedway, had built up a fine
reputation by undertaking highly experimental projects that, for
one reason or another, failed to appeal to companies interested in
production. Allison’s president, “Pop” Gilman, had done a lot of
Diesel development, and other clever experimental work for BUAERO
when I was chief of the Engine Section, and he had built up a highly
competent outfit. After completely redesigning the Wright Field
effort, Pop had gone ahead to make a fair engine out of the “Allison.”
In addition to their convictions that the United States should
develop a good liquid-cooled engine, some men in the Air Forces had
always believed that General Motors should become a factor in engine
production. Out of this conviction, the time came when General Motors
absorbed Allison and put its back into power-plant development.
This meant tough competition for the aircraft industry and while we
might, by dint of great effort, keep ourselves in the forefront of
technological progress, we could not, of course, match the limitless
financial resources of “the corporation.” With the head start we
already held in current engine types, we should more than hold our
own, but now with the cold hand of the long depression pressing down
on us, we found the new Army-G.M. alliance cold comfort indeed.
Meanwhile, the Army continued its pressure on Pratt and Whitney
and Wright Aeronautical, to force both companies to undertake
liquid-cooled engines of their own design. The fact that the two
types would not mix any better than oil and water, and that for us
to divert a portion of our limited energies to something we did not
believe in would impair the development of air cooling, seemed to
have no weight with a few liquid-cooled fanatics.