CHAPTER FOUR

A Backward Art

By the time the Japanese cherry blossoms had come and gone around the Tidal Basin, my wife and I had settled in our apartment at 2301 Connecticut Avenue, and joined the social whirl—cocktail parties on bathtub gin, formal dinners at home or abroad, evenings of bridge, or just plain conversation. And wherever friends gathered, their one and only topic of conversation was “shop.” While this was true of all Navy parties, it was especially so in aviation circles. The burning zeal these young pilots displayed for their profession was a constant source of wonderment to us. In what they affectionately characterized as their “old crates”—a description often all too accurate—they found the beginning and end of everything. And if the airplane itself was the object of their veneration, the “Aviation Game,” as they fondly called it, was their religion. This seemed the more remarkable, for the airplane was ever a jealous mistress, one that brooked no liberties, a fact well known to the aviators who had solemnly escorted all too many friends off to their last resting place, across the river in Arlington.

Take young Hersey Conant, for one example out of many. Hersey, a delightfully gay young bachelor, had gained the distinction of coining a popular phrase, so to speak. At an afternoon cocktail party, where the gin had just been lifted almost steaming off the kitchen stove, Hersey had mixed it solemnly with orange juice and ice and then held his glass aloft for a toast. Pausing before tossing it off, he had said quite simply, “Let it age a second!” Here, it seemed, was a suggestion the whole Aviation Game might take to heart; but it didn’t.

For the very next day, Hersey had blithely taken off in one of the fast Schneider-Cup seaplane racers for a short practice spin, and had hedgehopped his way toward Norfolk, flying right down on the water. Somewhere along the way, he stubbed his toe on one of the many fish traps and pitched headlong into shallow water. When a crane salvaged the wreck it was all wrapped up in a ball.

Old Navy families looked with jaundiced eyes upon the heedless carryings on of the aviators. At a dinner party one night my wife sat next to Capt. Claude C. Bloch, then Chief of the Bureau of Ordnance, and one of the most promising of the younger captains. The day would come when, as Commandant of the Naval District at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, he would receive a visit from the little yellow men, but back there in the middle ’twenties, his promising career still lay before him. Then, addressing my wife earnestly, he gave her the benefit of his advice.

“Tell that husband of yours,” he said, “to keep out of the side shows and get back under the main tent.” Well, I’d tried to become a gunnery officer but fate had made a Kiwi of me.

And down in BUAERO, Leighton continued day by day to unfold to me the fantastic story of naval aviation.

“Now that you are well fouled up in the slipstream of BUAERO,” he remarked one June morning, “it is about time you looked over the trade. If,” he went on, “you are going to risk your future on the creative capacity of competition, then you ought to look over your new tools. Frankly,” he added, “they aren’t too hot.” So Leighton asked Captain Johnson, Assistant Chief, for permission to make the trip in a cross-country DH, but the captain turned him down. Later on he advised me in confidence that engineers were too scarce to be risked unnecessarily in those flying coffins. And so we took off by train.

At Paterson, New Jersey, we sought out the multistoried loft building that housed Wright Aeronautical Corporation. President Frederick B. Rentschler received us in his office, sitting solemnly behind his desk. He looked to be a cool customer, a man of great singleness of purpose. Facing him across the table, Bruce Leighton exuded buoyant enthusiasm against a background of equal determination. Not having previously learned from Leighton the sharp differences in opinion between these two, I was unprepared for the sparring match that followed.

Leighton led off with an inquiry as to progress with the new J-3 model of the Lawrance air-cooled radial, which Rentschler fended off with a report on the splendid dependability shown by the liquid-cooled Hispano E-4 in its endurance tests. He had in mind that if Leighton would recommend another production order of Hispanos, Wright could use the time to get the Lawrance ready for the next production order. A flush spread up around Leighton’s ears as he rather testily replied that the Bureau was already definitely committed to air-cooled engines in the 200-horsepower size, and that it was Wright’s job to speed developments to meet Bureau requirements. Rentschler seemed to have a quiet knack of automatically tuning out any wave length he did not care to listen in on. Now he passed up the Hispano-Lawrance issue momentarily to develop the basic difference of opinion. He clearly felt that with all Wright’s accumulated experience in liquid-cooled, they could expect to make more rapid progress with them than with Lawrance air-cooled.

Leighton let a smile flicker across his lips and redirected the discussion toward air-cooling. On the way up to Paterson, he had told me about a contract Wright had with the Navy for the development of a new 400-hp air-cooled radial called “P-1.” Intended as an out and out replacement for the Liberty, the engine promised to save a lot of weight although it was just an overgrown Lawrance as to design. Now he asked Rentschler for a report on its progress.

Rentschler shrugged his shoulders in a gesture of hopelessness and reported that George Mead and Andy Willgoos, the Wright engineers, had encountered serious difficulties with piston scuffing. They were struggling with the usual cut-and-try “fixes” but so far with little positive success. Leighton thought that under the criticism of the liquid-cooled partisans he might have specified too small a diameter for the engine and suggested that if I agreed I might modify the requirements if absolutely necessary. Meanwhile, however, he was determined to push the new engine to the limit.

Rentschler shook his head in disagreement. He thought the problem went deeper than Leighton had indicated. He had a tendency to probe for fundamentals and it was his considered opinion that, for Wright at least, liquid-cooling offered the better course of engine development. Air-cooling, even though it might have inherent advantages in weight saving, suffered a handicap from the point of view of timing, and he doubted if these could be overcome. He preferred undertaking a completely new design by Wright to trying to get the bugs out of the Lawrance.

Leighton twisted in his chair as the flush spread up his neck and flooded through the gray at his temples. He had detected a note of arrogance in Rentschler’s suave statement—an inference of sure judgment on the part of the civilian as opposed to the immaturity of the naval officer. I made a note of this fundamental conflict as Leighton set his jaw.

The Navy didn’t propose to let anything stand in its way in realizing on the inherent superiority of air-cooling. Aside from the potential weight saving there was the vital factor of dependability. One-third of all Navy power-plant failures could be charged to liquid-cooled plumbing—leaky water jackets, leaky hose connections, and what have you.

“In other words,” he summed up, “in addition to saving the weight of the plumbing we can eliminate the majority of engine failures by going to air-cooled engines. We’re your customers,” he added, “and that’s our position.”

Rentschler’s face was a mask. The muscles of his jaw flexed as he faced Leighton. The latter broke the tension.

“What do you say,” he queried, “to our taking a look at the new air-cooled engines?”

We took a slow-running freight elevator that dropped us to the basement, where George Mead waited for us in the experimental department. A solidly built fellow in his early thirties, with dark bushy eyebrows, George had the serious mein of the well-trained engineer but he combined this with unusual force and driving power. No one in the aircraft industry could drive a project to completion with such remorseless energy. Now he pointed to a large radial engine mounted on a teardown stand with its ignition wiring partly stripped.

“There she is,” he remarked. The big engine was being torn down after a full-throttle run. She was up to rated horsepower but still scuffed her pistons. They were trying one more “fix” and if this one worked, they intended to go back on an endurance run. No suggestion of doubt entered Mead’s cheerful voice.

Rentschler stood noncommittal. An engineer must needs be an optimist; his job is a creative one. Day after day he has to bow his head against an avalanche of grief, from failures either in his own shop or the field, yet still press on to correct the faults. There were no margins for error in this aircraft-engine business; the machinery was stressed right up to the limit. The trick was to keep it from going beyond, and the penalty for failure might be somebody’s life. Management had plenty of worries, too; Rentschler, there, must wangle the financial problems and try to reconcile the conflicting interests of the several departments of a complex organization.

Now while Leighton and Mead discussed the teething troubles of their new baby with all the intense interest of a couple of young mothers, I tried to pick out the fundamental factors of the situation at Wright Aeronautical. BUAERO had taken the decision to stake its future on the trade. Wright Aero was our best bet. We were committed to air-cooled radials and the management of Wright was still committed, subconsciously at least, to liquid-cooled in-line. It wasn’t a matter of sentiment with them; they had a big investment in their prior art. The big job from the point of view of the Engine Section was to instill some of our own enthusiasm into Wright Aero, and this would take some doing. As we left the factory to go to a hotel for lunch, I realized I had my job cut out for me.

Next day we ran down to Keyport, New Jersey, for a look at the Aeromarine Airplane and Motor Corporation plant. It was a discouraging picture, acres of idle machine shops and a powerhouse smokestack that gave out no smoke. The one bright spot there proved to be Roland Chilton, the chief engineer, a keen Englishman whom I mentally clothed in a costume for the _Midsummer Night’s Dream_. He had the inventor’s talent for innovation, with the engineer’s knack for making ingenious mechanical contrivances work and he had created for Leighton the new Aeromarine Inertia Starter. This device, which utilized energy stored in a fast-running flywheel to crank over obstinate engines, had proved an outstanding success in the limited quantities Leighton had bought. Leighton had tried to keep Aeromarine alive in the hope that times might change for the better, but the air-cooled radials would obsolete the Aeromarine liquid-cooled in-line engines, just as they had set aside the Wright Hispano E-4.

A train ride to Boston took us to the plant of the Kinney Manufacturing Company. Their main product was heavy-duty pumps, a far cry from aircraft engines, but the management had shown a willingness to gamble on the remarkable ingenuity of its aircraft engineer, Warren Noble. His forte, like Chilton’s, was a unique capacity for accomplishing the impossible through little-used mechanical devices and principles. If anything, he was even more ingenious than Chilton, but by the same token a little less productive; once he had made some contraption work, experimentally, he lost interest in it. Production for profit seemed to bore him. But at Leighton’s request, he had undertaken to build a tiny, five-cylinder, air-cooled radial engine for a miniature airplane—one intended to be folded up and parked in a steel cylinder mounted on the deck of a submarine. The job, which imposed every known restriction on the already complicated airplane-design problem, intrigued Noble no end. His engine, with its oil-operated valve gear, incorporated every other unconventional device Noble’s fertile brain could conceive, and it ran. Beyond that point, Noble’s interest faded.

We left Boston stimulated by talking far into the night with Noble, exploring the realms of engineering fancy, but down in our hearts we knew the little engine would never get anywhere. After all the airplane itself was highly experimental and might never fly; the outlook for quantity production of air scouts for submarines was not encouraging. But it was worth the trip just to listen to the conversation of one of the most facile engineering minds in the business.

From Boston we moved out to the Army Engineering Division, then at McCook Field, Dayton, Ohio, one of those government arsenal-type establishments and about as far apart from Warren Noble as it was possible to get while still remaining on the same planet. The chief of the Engine Branch out there was Ed Jones, a former Air Service major, now in civilian clothes, and a good solid citizen. He displayed none of the usual Air Service antagonism to naval aviation, and received us warmly.

His assistant, Sam Herron, was, like Chilton, a clever Englishman, one who had done highly useful research in air-cooled cylinders under Professor Gibson, in England, then the outstanding man in his field. Sam Herron was probably better informed on this important subject than anyone in this country and had done some good work even under the handicaps of a government establishment like McCook Field. Among other things “The Field,” as it was called by the Air Service, had designed a 300-hp air-cooled radial engine which it had turned over to the Curtiss Airplane and Motor Company, of Buffalo, after competitive bidding, for construction of the first experimental model.

Leighton expressed lack of confidence in this procedure, which had carried over from the war. When disorderly reconversion had forced the automotive people out of aircraft production, “The Field” had determined to establish a great engineering division at Dayton, and to undertake its own design. After the government wizards had dreamed up their pet projects, a manufacturer would do the rest. Leighton argued that this procedure just divided the responsibility for a development between the government and the industry.

“The government,” he remarked, “will claim all the credit for everything that turns out well, and will hang the contractor for all mistakes, especially its own.” That, he insisted, was not the road to success.

“The only way to get progress,” he added, “is to put a good engineer in a tight place where he will have to fight to survive. When it’s ‘root, hog, or die,’” he concluded, “they always do the impossible.”

A run over to Detroit brought us to the Packard Motor Car Company, and another kind of setup. Here was one of the few remaining automotive companies with a continuing interest in aviation. This had probably resulted from the fact that Col. Jesse G. Vincent, a Packard vice-president, had been one of the designers of the original Liberty, and Capt. Lionel Woolson, Packard experimental engineer, still retained his interest in aircraft. The company felt that much of the aviation experimental work could be used in the automotive engines and was willing to continue to participate as a public service. In another emergency, in which the automotive industry must again convert to aircraft production, they could do a better job at it, against a background of continuing experience with aviation. The one drawback to this picture was the air-cooled engine; Packard could hardly be expected to show much enthusiasm for this.

Meanwhile, there was another consideration involved in continuing the automotive industry on a stand-by basis with respect to aircraft.

“Automobile prices,” Leighton explained, “demand low-cost volume production, a requirement that is just incompatible with the high-quality, high-precision production required in aircraft. When your automobile breaks down,” he added, quoting the old darky of the ancient wheeze, “why there yo’ is. But when yo’ airplane engine quits, where is yo’?”

And now as we moved on to Buffalo, Leighton gave me a quick preview of the Curtiss Airplane and Motor Company. Here was one of the “old-line” aircraft organizations. Though it had bid in the Army air-cooled radial project, now called the “Curtiss Radial 1454,” its heart lay in the liquid-cooled development. The Curtiss D-12 was now one of the best in the world; both the Army and the Navy were using it in fair quantities. Curtiss, he thought, was one of the smartest engine builders in the country—sometimes he had wondered if they weren’t a little too smart for their own good.

When we saw the R-1454, we were impressed. Herron’s cylinder was an advance over anything we had seen at Wright. The valve-gear rocker boxes enclosed the valves and provided forced lubrication for them in place of the old Alemite fittings of our P-1. And the Curtiss had a single carburetor in place of the triple type on the Wright, an improvement made possible partly by the use of a gear-driven blower that sucked the mixture from the carburetor and pushed it up to the cylinders. This was geared low for rotary induction, and gave fine distribution; someday it could be geared high for supercharging.

That evening we were dinner guests of the company at a hotel overlooking Niagara Falls. Afterward, Arthur Nutt, chief engineer, gave us a sales talk on the D-12. Roy Keyes, president of the company, expressed no fear of competition from the air-cooled radials. Curtiss, he confided in us, had bid in the Army 1454 just to keep it under their control. He considered it unlikely that any radial rock crusher could replace the D-12; in fact, he had no intention of letting it.

That night, Leighton and I sat on the edges of our twin beds in the hotel room and, smoking a last cigarette together, sized up the situation. Curtiss, a good manufacturer, had a fine engine but was keeping it under wraps. Wright, also a competent producer, had an inferior engine and no enthusiasm for air-cooling as such. The problem was to get the best features of the Herron-designed 1454 into the second engine of our P-series at Wright. If we could sell them on that and build up their enthusiasm, we might put a new set of valves in the heart of the airplane and even build up its muscles. That called for another visit to Paterson.

But when we returned to Wright Aero we found that a change had taken place. Fred Rentschler had resigned from the presidency, leaving Charles Lanier Lawrance, the daddy of the American air-cooled radial, in his place. There was nothing left to worry about on the score of air-cooled enthusiasm, though the company had lost an able executive. Guy Vaughan, a dynamic and personable fellow, had moved up from quality manager to factory manager. A former automobile racing driver, Guy had plenty of zing. With George Mead to do a finished engineering job, we could release the P-2 engine with all the latest wrinkles in it.

Back at BUAERO, Bruce Leighton wound up his affairs in the Engine Section. For three and a half years he had fought and bled there, stacking up brief moments of triumph against hours of grief. As a matter of fact, aircraft engines were one big pain in the neck. Reports of poor performance in service streamed in under the heading “Trouble Report.” If by some chance they performed well, that was only as it should be and certainly not a subject for comment. The art was still young, and even the best equipment could hardly be classified as safe to fly. In the face of disheartening problems, Bruce Leighton had never let his enthusiasm slacken; his heart and soul were all wrapped up in what he himself characterized as “these funny damned airplanes.” He had pioneered air-cooled engines in the face of universal resistance; he had stood by private industry when everyone else had plumped for government ownership. Now he was “off to sea.”