CHAPTER TEN

The Take-off

Back in Washington, the admiral welcomed me with a grin and promptly assigned me a new job as Chief of the Airplane Design Section. This was a naval constructor’s stronghold, and even though we line officers had pretty well dominated design down in the Engine Section, I could have been made to feel like a blacksmith in a glassworks, had it not been for my new wings and my postgraduate engineering course under Dr. Lucke. But by now the vision he had foreseen had begun to come to pass: the “professors” and the “practical men” had got together in the person of the engineer, and the world was already on fire with new developments.

Among other things the great engineering societies, like the American 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.”