CHAPTER TWELVE

A Change in Status

As the summer of 1927 came to a close, I began to sense that my own work in BUAERO was coming to its end. The fact was crystallized for me one evening when Fred Rentschler, Chance Vought, my wife, and I sat out on the little balcony of our apartment at 2301 Connecticut Avenue, watching the shadows fall. Fred and Chance had had dinner with us and we could hear the clatter of dishes in the pantry as the maid of all work finished her chores. For when the visiting firemen came to town, we either had dinner with them downtown somewhere or they with us in the apartment. We balanced the social obligations that way.

Our apartment looked out over Rock Creek Park and across the Memorial Bridge toward Wardman Park, and the tiny balcony was the one cool spot in it. In an open space among the trees stood a riding school that was reminiscent of that avid horseman, Billy Mitchell. And though he had lost out in his fight, his spirit still haunted aviation and would continue to do so for all time. He had created the opportunity on which Admiral Moffett had capitalized, and people like Fred Rentschler and Chance Vought had founded their businesses. Now Fred Rentschler, whose consuming passion was business, was talking about it.

“This aviation business,” he was saying, “is like no other business in the world.”

Chance Vought, sitting with his feet on the porch rail, glanced skeptically at him; Chance delighted in debunking Fred’s somewhat ponderous deductions.

“Whoever said it was a business?” he demanded. “The best you can say for it is that it’s the ‘Aviation Game’; but it’s still a lousy racket.” A pained expression crossed Fred’s serious face.

“Aviation is no longer a game or a racket,” he insisted. “It’s serious business and the sooner some of you airplane wood butchers wake up to that fact, the better.” Chance winked at me and then closed his eyes. He would snore during Fred’s discourse on a pet subject, but would probably come to life in time to put the clincher on the evening’s lesson.

Fred stressed the fundamental difference between the airplane and other mechanisms. Most things produced in factories would wear out in time and replacement furnished the manufacturer with a continuing source of business. The airplane, on the other hand, would never wear out; the high quality required for dependable service meant that the goods would last forever. The only sources of business were expansion and crash losses, and even these were limited. In other words, even while the aircraft manufacturer must strive to increase his quality in the interest of safety, in the process he works himself out of production.

There appeared to be only one solution to this problem, and that was the factor of obsolescence. In things like clothing, or automobiles, or what have you, the trick was to so modify the styling as to keep the customer “just enough dissatisfied with what he has to persuade him to buy something new.” Fred ascribed this precept to his friend “Boss” Kettering, of General Motors.

But the factor of styling, so important in some lines, had no bearing in aviation. Here performance was the key to progress: in military aircraft it was speed, climb, and ceiling; in air transport it was dollars per ton-mile. And the degree to which this last factor was important to the commercial airlines depended upon the intensity of economic competition between them.

Bill Boeing, for instance, might have continued to use the war-surplus Liberty-engined DH’s indefinitely, had not competition for the air-mail contract forced him to risk a low bid and then build new aircraft to meet his own standards. And so price competition, which many were beginning to think was cutthroat and destructive, was over-all, the key to progress in aeronautics.

The engine manufacturer, for instance, must experiment with new ideas, conduct research into strange fields, and come up with something so economical that the airline operator can’t get along without it. That will obsolete his airplanes, retire them to some embryonic service that cannot yet afford new types, and force him to introduce the newest and latest models—or else go out of business. Competition, Fred insisted, was not destructive, but creative; it was tough on the one who lost his shirt, but favorable to the public at large.

Fred went on to develop the vast difference between the volume-producing industries, where low first cost was the incentive, and the aircraft industry, where low operating cost was the real criterion. The airline operator could afford to pay a high price for high quality aircraft, provided he reduced his operating costs enough to absorb the first cost in a reasonable time. The whole character of the two types of industry differed, and neither could expect to do the other’s job. Technological development was the key to the economic security of an enterprise like aviation. The way to keep in the forefront was to stress your engineering; once you got behind you could never catch up, unless the other fellow broke a leg and fell down. Yes, he thought, this aviation was a funny business. At this remark, Chance Vought woke up.

“The thing that is funny about it,” he said sleepily, “is that it has at last become a business.”

I sat looking out over Rock Creek Park as it faded into the shadows. The conversation had pointed up a new situation in my own affairs. If aviation was now a business, then my job here was finished. You could hardly have called it that three and a half years ago, and the time had come for me to go to sea, lest some Selection Board pass me by. I’d go see Admiral Moffett in the morning.

But in the morning the admiral was, as usual, one jump ahead of me. I found a note on my desk instructing me to see him the first thing. In his corner office he waved a letter at me, one scrawled in longhand in the bold writing of Rear Adm. Joseph M. Reeves, Commander, Aircraft Squadrons, Battle Fleet. It was dated at San Diego, California, on the _Langley_, and it took note of the fact that the carriers _Saratoga_ and _Lexington_ were scheduled to join the fleet in a year or so. His chief of staff, Karl Smith, was ill and he needed a relief for him. He asked if I could be made available.

“Bull” Reeves was a distinguished officer and an able commander. Only a year or two earlier he had dropped in on me in the Engine Section to inquire if I thought he should accept an invitation to join the aeronautic organization and go to Pensacola for instruction with the ultimate idea of succeeding to command of the Aircraft Squadrons, Battle Fleet. He had graduated from Annapolis into the old Engineer Corps but later, upon amalgamation with the line, had qualified for command. A hero of Naval Academy football, he had been on duty at Annapolis as an instructor while I had been a midshipman, and he had been rated “white” by all hands—the highest commendation an officer could earn from the brigade. During the Spanish American War, he had made a name for himself in the engine room of the old _Oregon_ in her dash around the Horn. Admiral Moffett was smiling at my obvious satisfaction.

“Yes,” he remarked, “you should be a big help to me out there.”

I put in a request for a month’s leave and bought tickets for my wife and myself on the Panama-Pacific liner, _Mongolia_, sailing direct for San Diego via the Panama Canal. We sailed from New York where Fred Rentschler, Chance Vought, Guy Vaughan, and many other friends in the aircraft industry saw us off. After a lovely cruise through the Caribbean and the transit of the Canal, we headed north for the West Coast and San Diego, where my wife and I had first set up housekeeping at the Coronado Hotel, while I served my tour of duty in the old Pacific Torpedo Flotilla. It was there we had made our first contact with aviation.

When the _Mongolia_ pushed her nose into San Diego harbor that morning late in October of 1927, the bright sun glittered on the white sands of North Island just as it had done some fifteen years earlier when we had last looked upon this pleasant scene. Meanwhile, however, North Island itself had undergone change. Then it had been a flat, brush-covered expanse on which we had hunted jack rabbits; now a latticed airship mooring mast thrust its height above a cleared surface, and white hangars lined the shores of West Beach. The mooring mast, located there as a haven for Admiral Moffett’s rigid airships, lay down near the entrance to the ship channel; the hangars, intended for heavier-than-air craft, faced across the bay to San Diego or across Spanish Bight to Coronado Island’s bungalows and cottages. The ancient Hotel del Coronado, with its white sides and red-pinnacled roofs reminiscent of the lush days of the land-and-railroad boom, still dominated the bright scene.

As our ship nosed into the pier on the San Diego side, we could look back at North Island and the Naval Air Station where the experimental carrier _Langley_, alongside her dock, filled the immediate foreground, and the tower of the yellow stucco mission-type Administration Building pierced the blue heavens. Here, less then twenty years earlier, had stood the tent hangars of the pioneer Army and Navy aviation schools, the one operated under the supervision of the Wright Brothers, the other by Glenn Curtiss. Here too had been born the early rivalries that still dominated the aircraft establishment, a pattern of Army versus Navy, and of manufacturer versus manufacturer, that had put the spark in the development of a new art.

Back there, student pilots had taken off at the crack of dawn in their powered box kites to get in their flight time before the gentle southwesterlies could interfere with their training. And if, perchance, a student like my classmate “Spig” Herbster, of the Wright camp, were forced down on the harbor by a failure of the tricky engine of his seaplane, another student like Jack Towers, of the Curtiss camp, waiting for just such an opportunity, would literally fly to his rescue—for the benefit of thrilling headlines in that enterprising newspaper, _The San Diego Union_. To us salts of the Destroyer Flotilla, moored alongside the ferry slip or the “Spreckles Dock,” accustomed to night torpedo tactics on the high seas off Coronado Island, the whole thing had looked a bit silly. But to the aviators, news headlines had been the breath of life ever since that day at Kittyhawk when the wise money in the public press had refused to print the news of the first flight because it was too smart to fall for such a hoax.

Now that same Jack Towers was serving as captain of the first flattop, the _Langley_, a vessel named for the professor who had failed to fly, and I recalled the _Langley_ when she had been commissioned as the collier _Jupiter_ at the Mare Island Navy Yard, under command of Comdr. Joseph M. Reeves. The _Langley_ had a revolutionary power plant, the electric drive, and had been equipped with a forest of masts and booms designed to fuel battleships at the rate of 500 tons of coal per hour. Today, fuel oil had replaced coal in all naval vessels and the _Langley_ masts had been leveled to make room for a flat landing area for aircraft. And I, who had set out to become a gunnery officer but had been converted into a mechanical engineer, was now a naval aviator. Well, the new job seemed to have possibilities, but just how far-reaching they would prove to be, I didn’t even dream.