CHAPTER TWO
The Power Plant, the Heart of an Airplane
Down on the second deck of the third wing, I looked through the doorway into a long room that housed my new billet, the Engine Section. Three flat-topped desks stood deployed as a line of skirmishers; two typewriter desks closed the blank files. At these desks secretaries had begun to tap out their daily stints of paper work. Around three of the peeled walls, battered tables sagged under a load of assorted aircraft-engine parts—dusty, oily, and, for the most part, heat-blackened examples of unfortunate mechanical failures, some of which, no doubt, had led to loss of life.
Across the near side of the room, on either side of two doors, stood three engines on wooden horses. The bigger one was a Liberty, the smaller a Hispano-Suiza, and the third a new star-shaped contraption on which hung a label, “Lawrance J-1, single-row, air-cooled radial.” The first two I recognized as war surplus, but the third I suspected to be the pride and joy, the hope and fear, of the Engine Section of BUAERO. Here was the Navy’s first promising postwar development, a project destined to exercise a controlling influence on the future of aviation.
Around the room, marred woodwork and grease-spotted floors joined with a musty smell to give the room the down-at-the-heel appearance of all those temporary wartime structures, themselves so expressive of the popular hope that war itself is but temporary. Drab enough at best, the old tenements had deteriorated swiftly with the slashing of appropriations for defense. Now as I stood in the doorway, someone slapped me on the back and I turned to find Lt. Comdr. B. G. Leighton, retiring Chief of the Section, greeting me like a long-lost brother.
“Am I glad to see you,” he whooped, saluting me with an exaggerated flourish. Under his enthusiasm the drabness faded out like a morning fog under a warm sun. Waving an airy hand at each of his secretaries, Leighton introduced me to them with, “Ladies, meet your new boss.”
Tossing an armful of homework on the right-hand desk, and waving me to a battered chair, he slid into a swivel-seated one behind it. There he sat grinning like an ape, peering at me around three mountains of paper work heaped up in trays marked, “Incoming,” “Outgoing,” and “Hold.” Though still in his early thirties, Leighton had gray splashes around his temples with laugh wrinkles twinkling at the corners of his eyes—those early-bird aviators tended toward premature grayness. Now, clasping his hands behind his head and hoisting long legs so as to rest his feet on the battered old desk, he grinned his pleasure.
“Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen,” he quoted, “but now that I’ve finally got you here, I hardly know where to begin.”
“Begin at the beginning,” I countered. “It’s all Greek to me.”
“Well, in the beginning of power-driven flight,” he commenced, “before the Wrights could take the hurdle from the glider to the airplane, they had first to find an engine whose weight was light enough, in proportion to its power, to get the contraption into the air. And since nothing suitable existed, they had to design and build their own. Thus from the beginning,” he went on, “the power plant has been the heart of the airplane. Subsequent progress has been almost entirely a matter of getting more horsepower for less weight. When you want to lift yourself up by the bootstraps,” he added with a grin, “you start reducing, and begin exercising your muscles. The history of aviation can be measured by that ratio, pounds per horsepower.”
At the turn of the century, Leighton pointed out, gasoline engines were just coming into use. The Wrights, in designing their little 20-hp 4-cylinder model, had naturally followed the current automotive practice. They had arranged the cylinders in line and had cooled the engine with circulating water.
“It is only now,” Leighton explained, waving a hand in the direction of the Lawrance air-cooled radial near the door, “that we are spreading our cylinders like the petals of a daisy and cooling them directly by air. And this section,” he added with obvious pride, “is the foster parent of an innovation but recently classified by the engineering intelligentsia as ‘impossible.’ As for that obsolete term,” he went on, “we have a saying in the Section that goes like this: ‘The impossible we do today; the fantastic may take a little longer.’” He grinned as he watched me for the effect of another one of his phrases.
Leighton went on to point out, however, that back in 1914, the year the war broke out in Europe, this country had practically no military aircraft engines. The Wrights had not thought of the airplane as a weapon carrier. Over in Europe, however, where men had long been accustomed to look at things through military binoculars, the Germans, the French, the Italians, and the British had concentrated on military power plants. In the commercial field, the United States had a fair-to-middling engine in the Curtiss OXX, rated at less than 90 horsepower. This one later went into wide war use in the Curtiss Jenny training planes. But when, in April, 1917, the war had engulfed the United States, it caught us with our britches down around our ankles. We had no high-powered military engines of any kind, nor had we any designs for them. And even had we had the designs, there were no production facilities in this country nor the know-how for using them.
Quite undismayed by this, we had indulged in our usual penchant for adopting slogans as substitutes for elementary strategy. Our politicians boldly declared their intent to “darken the skies over Germany with clouds of aircraft.” The headline figure had been 25,000 planes. But if anyone had any idea what we expected to do with them, other than darkening the skies, such information had been kept secret. There was a suspicion in some quarters that our bold brag had been designed to screen the simple citizens from the unhappy fact that we had no power plants with which to fly those clouds into the air.
That had been a period of childlike faith in the magic of mass production. Then the government, in a frantic effort to buy time, had called in the automotive industry. A handful of citizens, whose heads contained all that was known in this country about high-powered engines of any kind, had been locked in a smoke-filled room of the Willard Hotel in Washington, and there held incommunicado, until they gave birth to the Liberty engine.
The Liberty, conceived in a crisis, and literally bulldozed into production, had proved surprisingly effective in postwar flying, especially after the usual bugs had been engineered out of it. Actually, few if any engines had been used in front-line combat. Yet, keeping in mind the fact that we had only remained in the war twenty months, and that it usually takes at least two years to construct and test an experimental model, the production of several thousand engines had been little less than magic.
The Liberty had been rated at 400 horsepower on a dry weight of some 835 pounds, or at the rate of a little over 2 pounds per horsepower, a striking advance over contemporary practice. And although under the interallied agreement, we had been denied the right to build front-line planes of our own design, we had installed the Liberty in the British de Havilland observation plane and made quite a job out of it. Dubbed “flying coffins” until after correction of the bugs, these had passed through the initial stage of unpopularity, to become “the good old DH,” and pretty much the standard for “cross-country” airplanes.
But during the war, failure by the automotive industry to meet the fantastic goals set by politicians had aroused a storm of criticism in the United States. Hardly had the ink dried on the Armistice before the government, convinced that “munitions racketeers” had profited out of the war, had turned its wrath upon “malefactors of great wealth” by ruthlessly canceling war contracts, with little regard for its contractural obligations. Having now made the world safe for democracy, it felt at liberty to destroy its expensive and unnecessary war industry, venting its spite meanwhile on the industrialists.
Manufacturers, who before final accounting had anticipated profits, now found themselves facing losses instead. Some, the less well-financed, had gone into bankruptcy; others had reorganized and kept in business. Overall, it was estimated that representative suppliers of war goods had taken a write-down of nearly a billion dollars, or about one-half their “apparent” net worth. The automotive industry, licking its wounds, had gone back to do private business with its individual customers, resolved to leave future government business to the naïve.
Judged in retrospect, the venture had proved a fiasco. It would have been bad enough had industry earned its reputation for profiteering, but to have gained the reputation after losing its shirt must be counted a public-relations failure of the first magnitude.
Meanwhile, the giant aircraft industry had just withered on the vine. A handful of the hardier “old-line” aircraft manufacturers, pioneers still obsessed by undiminished zeal for aviation, still held on. Among such engine builders had been the Curtiss Airplane and Motor Company, of Buffalo, New York, and the Wright Martin Aircraft Corporation, of New Brunswick, New Jersey, now reorganized as the Wright Aeronautical Corporation, of Paterson, New Jersey. Of the automotive industry, Packard alone kept a finger in the pie.
During the war, Wright Martin had followed the other alternative to engine construction; they had bought a license to manufacture the famed French Hispano-Suiza engine. And although this procedure had been advanced as promising quicker returns, wartime experience had developed the complexities of putting foreign models into production. Designed around the European idea of handwork by skilled craftsmen, they had to be redesigned to conform to the American technique of machine-tool production. And so experience had demonstrated the necessity for having domestic types in production and ready for expansion.
After the Armistice, the new Wright Aeronautical Corporation continued to develop the Hispano type, under the aegis of the Navy Department. Using the method of “run’em, bust’em, fix’em, and run’em again,” financed by the Engine Section, Wright had developed its temperamental wartime Hispano into a rugged, 200-hp Model E-4. Wright had also developed a 300-and later a 500-hp-model Hispano, but since Congress had appropriated limited funds, and on a hand-to-mouth basis rather than for a long-term program, they had found the going rough. As long as the surplus of wartime Liberties and Hispanos hung over the market, manufacture bogged down.
And to add a further complication, Leighton had shown a lively interest in the new air-cooled engine developed by Charles Lanier Lawrance. Charlie, while a student in Paris, had discovered the new 3-cylinder 60-hp Clerget, a fixed radial engine designed to overcome the deficiencies of the old Gnome-Rhone types with their rotating cylinders and gyroscopic effects. The Navy had at that time a demand for 180- to 200-hp engines, and suggested that Lawrance consolidate three of the 3-cylinder engines into a single 9-cylinder type.
Lawrance, with no production facilities of his own, had enlisted those of the de la Verne Machine Company, in New Jersey, and had begun his own development under the “run’em and bust’em” technique. In this he had looked for guidance to Capt. A. K. Atkins and Lt. Comdr. S. M. Kraus, of the Bureau of Engineering. When, later, Admiral Moffett created BUAERO, he placed Kraus in charge of Procurement and assigned Leighton as Chief of the Engine Section.
Meanwhile, Chance Vought, a clever airplane manufacturer in Long Island City, had built a smart little, two-seater, catapult-observation plane around the new engine, a craft that carried as much load as the Army DH using the Liberty engine, yet took up half as much space. And space was a critical factor within the narrow confines of a battleship or a cruiser’s decks.
With this increased demand, the Bureau was confronted with the need for bringing in an experienced aircraft manufacturer to fabricate the Lawrance engines, and had selected Wright. But since the new Lawrance was a direct competitor with Wright’s own Hispano E-4, Leighton had been obliged to bring pressure to bear and had finally forced consolidation of what he deemed the best design with what he considered the ablest manufacturer. Wright’s purchase of Lawrance had but recently taken place and I was to have the job of making the marriage productive. This, according to Leighton, was the big project of the Engine Section, if not, indeed, of BUAERO.
Meanwhile, he discussed other assorted possibilities, like the Aeromarine Airplane and Motor Corporation, of Keyport, New Jersey, and the Kinney Manufacturing Company, in Boston. Of the automotive people, only Packard retained an interest in aero engines. Leighton admitted that mine was a slender reed on which to lean. “The heart of the airplane,” he summed up, “has damaged muscles and leaky valves.” I concluded that it would have ceased beating entirely save for the grim courage of B. G. Leighton and his Engine Section.
“The air-cooled engine,” Leighton asserted, “is the Navy’s white hope. There is less sense in liquid-cooling an aircraft engine than in air-cooling a submarine. The weight of the Liberty radiator, water pump, plumbing, and water runs about three-quarters of a pound per horsepower, or say 300 pounds. Now there’s an old design adage that says ‘it takes a pound to carry a pound.’ In other words, each of those plumbing pounds takes another pound of wings and tail to lug it around. But with the air-cooled engine we can throw away the plumbing and convert that dead weight into pay load, with a smaller airplane. On board ship, you’ve got to keep ’em small or leave ’em off.”
By the end of my first day in the Engine Section, I was a bit groggy. Leighton had tossed engineering terms around with complete abandon, terms that I must pause to translate, even as he moved on into new flights of technical verbiage. Yet from that first day’s talk I gleaned the fact that the power plant is the heart of an airplane, that aeronautical progress is paced by an engine’s “pounds per horsepower,” and that the air-cooled engine, as yet quite undeveloped, offered the greatest promise of usefulness to the Navy. Meanwhile, with the Engine Section as the focus of that development, no dull moments loomed on the horizon.