CHAPTER FIVE

Toil and Trouble

The summer of 1925, like most summers in the nation’s capital, was almost unbearably hot and sultry. Even after one of those violent electrical storms had whirled up the Potomac and deluged the blistered asphalt with a tropical downpour, its passing left the whole town sweltering in a steaming heat, even more prostrating than before the storm. It was sticky enough in the permanent buildings, but in our temporary shack on Constitution Avenue, work became quite impossible, and we often sent the Bureau staff home in the early afternoons. And before that fateful summer could pass, lightning struck twice in the same place—BUAERO.

When Bruce Leighton had passed out to sea, most of his small staff went with him, having already overstayed their allotted period of duty on shore. Luckily, Ricco Botta, a lieutenant who had come in by way of the Naval Reserve, held over with me. A pilot, an engineer, and a skilled mechanic he had now become the practical wheelhorse of the Engine Section. Later on, Henry Mullinix joined up, bringing just the right qualities to balance out our little organization. Henry had been honor man in his class at Annapolis, had later led his flight class at Pensacola, and had finally completed the aviation postgraduate course at Massachusetts Institute of Technology with top honors. And along with his intellect, Henry had a fine personality and an admirable character. Our organization was rounded out by young Lt. (jg) Ralph Parsons, who now handled the highly technical liaison with the Aero Engine Laboratory at the Naval Aircraft Factory, Philadelphia, while Henry, Ricco, and I concentrated on the task of cleaning up the bugs in the engines and accessories under our cognizance.

Take, for instance, the Lawrance J-1 air-cooled radial engine, that coffee grinder on which all our hopes were based. It was so rickety that Lt. C. C. Champion, a rising young West Coast pilot, formally reported to BUAERO that, when embarking on a fifteen-mile cross-country flight from the Naval Air Station at North Island, near San Diego, to an emergency airport at Ream Field, down near the Mexican border, his squadron always carried a whole “quiverful” of spare push rods to replace those sure to be sprayed along the beach of the Coronado Silver Strand. Our treatment for this sort of trouble was to call in Charlie Lawrance or Guy Vaughan of Wright Aero and give them a session of plain and fancy kidding, with just the right amount of sting in it.

The magnetos for our air-cooled engines were something to write home about. Here was the instrument that provided the vital spark so essential to keep the engine ticking over, yet it had proved the least dependable of the parts of the high-strung mechanism behind which pilots risked their lives. And when we looked around for more promising sources of supply, none was to be found. The Delco Company, producers of the wartime Liberty battery-generator ignition systems, could not be interested in a new development; the volume to be expected was too small. The manufacturer of cheap truck magnetos, to whom we now looked, was willing to brighten up the outside finish but was unwilling to go further for the same reason—no volume. The board of directors of the great General Electric Company had, we were advised, studied the problem with ponderous care and finally concluded there was more money in electric light bulbs. A small privately owned company was willing to help, but lacked know-how. It looked like a stalemate until the Army Engineering Division at McCook Field discovered Scintilla.

Scintilla magnetos proved to be the answer to a maiden’s prayer. Made in Soleure, Switzerland, they could be bought through Tom Fagan, of New York, and at a reasonable price. However, since we could not place full dependence on a foreign source that might be cut off in time of war, we investigated the possibility of creating an American source. The Swiss company had an excess of machinery and personnel and was willing to export them, but the red tape surrounding such a transaction, even back there in the days when the United States government had faith in private enterprise, tied us hand and foot. To cut through the tangle involved so many risks that we should have been completely discouraged save that the other alternative was to accept responsibility for the deaths of youngsters who daily risked their lives in the air.

In dilemmas of this kind, resort might be had to what was politely called “memoranda for file” but known privately as “the cover-up.” A letter was prepared for the file covering the details of the proposed transaction and carried through the whole system to be finally approved by the Secretary of the Navy himself. Then, after the Great Seal of the Navy Department had been attached, and the author had privately retained a copy for his own use, the document was carefully filed away against the day when some Congressional investigation might be looking for a noteworthy scalp. When the spirit of cover-up gets into a business organization, the evil finally shows up in the financial results; in government it is just absorbed by the taxpayer.

It was through such a time-consuming process that we finally succeeded in transporting a part of the Swiss company bodily to the town of Sidney, New York, where it continued to be this country’s source of dependable magnetos. And the time even came when I had to flash the Great Seal of the Navy Department to keep from being crucified for bringing it here. Later, when Charles A. Lindbergh arrived in London, after having flown the Atlantic behind a Scintilla magneto, it turned out that the General Electric Company had all along had the license to manufacture the British Thompson Houston Company’s magneto, but no one in Schenectady had recalled the fact.

Meanwhile, in addition to concentrating on the job of keeping engines running, we had not neglected the other task of getting them started. The Aeromarine Inertia Starter, created by Chilton under Leighton’s initiative, though employing a quite novel principle—the utilization of energy stored in a flywheel—had developed into the most dependable and efficient device in our gear locker. When, therefore, Messrs. Charles Marcus and Raymond P. Lansing of the Eclipse Machine Company called on us with a view to interesting us in a line of electric starters they had developed for the Army, we presented them with an affable but none the less impenetrable front. Things electric not only involved heavy lead storage batteries, heavy copper motors, and everything else designed around “base metals,” but they always proved undependable and difficult to maintain. My years as engineer officer on a man-of-war had generated in me a sales resistance of many ohms.

On the day when we were honored with the visit from Charles Marcus and Ray Lansing, I bolstered my disinterest with a glowing and somewhat detailed account of the virtues of the Chilton starter and was somewhat taken aback by Charles Marcus’s suave remark that Aeromarine had infringed an Eclipse patent involving the fundamentals of the Bendix drive. Marcus doubted that Eclipse could let Aeromarine live at all, and his inference was that I should shift my enthusiasm over to the Army-type starter.

Patents, I now pointed out, were outside the jurisdiction of the Engine Section. If Eclipse elected to make trouble for us, that was their privilege. If, however, they wanted to make our kind of starters, that was also their privilege. The patent matter could be left to the courts. I noticed an intent expression on Charley Marcus’s face.

“Commander,” he said quietly, “your approach is new to us and we may find it difficult to conform at first, but from the point of view of development and the public interest, it looks so sound to us, we’ll play the game your way.”

The Eclipse Machine Company did play the game our way. They developed a new starter for the Lawrance radial, and when, on its first installation down at Pensacola, it developed the usual bugs, the company moved most of its shopmen down to the air station and campaigned the trouble so enthusiastically that they made more character out of their defects than Aeromarine gained out of its satisfactory equipment.

When, after several years, the patent matter finally came to trial, the examiner for the court remarked that he could not recall a similar case but thought everyone’s interests had been well served, as a result of the Bureau policy, and especially so the interests of the public.

Another perennial problem was spark plugs. It was almost incredible how sensitive such little things could be. One might think that the manufacturers should long ago have discovered all the secrets of such a simple device, and reduced the product to some degree of standardization. But everything in aviation was so high-strung, every device so sensitive, it seemed that just changing one minor dimension of a standard nut or bolt set in motion a whole chain reaction of troubles. Pressing always for higher power on lower weight, we created more and more troubles for ourselves. In this field we came to lean on the BG plug, and on Roy Hurley, its salesman, who was responsive to our suggestions and worked hard to improve his product. Mr. Goldsmith, the proprietor of the company, and a jewelry manufacturer, had turned to making spark plugs during World War I and now subordinated his other interests to doing a good job for aviation.

And so we fired away, searching for better accessories of every kind—a new fuel pump here, imported from France perhaps by Jimmy Diamond—a new carburetor there, produced by Stromberg under the wise direction of Leonard S. Hobbs—a new fuel developed by competing oil companies and fortified by Ethyl under the direction of Dr. Graham Edgar, of the Ethyl Corporation, and so on to cover the whole field. And in the process we began collecting a little group of sales engineers like Roy Hurley, Luke Hobbs, Tom Fagan, Ray Lansing, and others, men to whom we passed on the demands of the operating squadrons and with whom we connived to beat Old Man Trouble. To facilitate operations, we urged these key technicians to visit the flying units and get the word at first hand. We brought them into close contact with George Mead, of Wright, Arthur Nutt, of Curtiss, and Lionel Woolson, of Packard; and we keyed them in with our competitors out at McCook Field, so that we finally had a team of competitive yet cooperative agents, all working for the cause of dependable and durable power plants.

And behind our day-to-day jobs of trouble shooting on the accessory front, we had the major problem of engine development. Wright Aero, in order to earn the money with which to carry on their own experimental and development work, must first generate a reasonable volume of steady profitable business. This meant that we, and others, must buy enough airplanes to create the demand for new engines. But before we could do this, the airplanes must have been conceived, created, and tested. A number of aircraft had already been built around the air-cooled radial, among them the Chance Vought UO and the Curtiss TS, but the total was hardly impressive. Then Wright got a real break when it found a new home in Reuben Fleet’s Consolidated Army training plane.

Fleet, a former major in the Army Air Service, had created a new company up in Buffalo which he called Consolidated Aircraft, and had designed and built a new type of training plane. Using the welded-steel tubular construction introduced to the United States by Anthony Fokker, the Dutch manufacturer, Fleet had created an airplane that was easy to build, easy to maintain and, more important, extraordinarily safe. His welded-steel fuselages, unlike the old stick-and-wire type of the Army Jenny or its Navy counterpart, the N-9, wouldn’t splinter all to pieces in a crack-up nor punch holes in the ribs of hapless student aviators. The Army had tested the plane extensively and with such outstanding success that Fleet felt impelled to try to sell it to the Navy with obvious advantages to all

## parties.

This decision in itself was perhaps indicative of the audacity of one of aviation’s immortal enterprisers, for none knew better than Reuben Fleet what the handicaps were; as a former procurement officer at McCook Field, Fleet had played the old Army-Navy game hard. And it took a swashbuckler like Fleet to dare intimate that anything designed for the Army could be worth hell-room to the Navy. And he probably would not have got to first base either, save that he had been smart enough to use the air-cooled radial Wright instead of the war-surplus Hispano engine. The Engine Section, at least, could be expected to favor the adoption of the Army PT, in order to increase the use of the air-cooled engines. And Reuben Fleet was right on that score.

But there were formidable obstacles. Naval air training was centered at the Air Station, Pensacola, Florida, where the N-9 seaplane was well established as a local favorite. Nearly every pilot in the Navy had qualified on it and now cherished for it the affection of a kid for his first pony. In order to keep the ancient aircraft flying, the station had built up an assembly and repair department manned entirely by civilians from the town of Pensacola—skilled carpenters, riggers, and fabric workers, fully competent to overhaul the stick-and-wire N-9’s. As a matter of fact, they could build them new from the ground up, and this was where the rub lay. After an airplane had been washed out in a crack-up, it was supposed to be stricken from the list, an action that in due course would have absorbed all the war surplus and led to new construction. But at Pensacola, there were no washouts. In the local jargon, they just “jacked up the number plate and built a new airplane under it.”

And so in addition to the natural reluctance of the old-timers to make a change in type, there was the powerful vested interest of the Pensacola workmen. This fact, however, was never brought into the open. It appeared rather that the Consolidated NY had a nasty flying characteristic, probably inherited from its Army ancestry: it possessed an “abnormal spin” as compared with the N-9. If the “good old N-9” lost flying speed and stalled, it whipped suddenly into a spinning nose dive that would lead to a crash if the pilot did what came naturally and opened his throttle. If, however, he “cut the gun” and dived to regain flying speed, he could recover control. The object of much of the student’s early training was to get him to disobey that impulse and cut the gun in a spin. This, to our old-timers, was a “normal spin.”

The trouble with the Consolidated NY was that it was difficult to make it spin at all, and equally difficult to get it out of a true spin. The old-timers, passing over the obvious advantage of reluctance to spin at all, and the priceless benefit of a fuselage that could not splinter and poke holes in a pilot, now stressed the disadvantages of the new plane; how could you teach a pilot to get out of a spin if you couldn’t get him into one? To combat this argument and get the plane adopted so as to increase production of new Wright air-cooled engines was the task of the Engine Section. And the cockpit for the final contest was Admiral Moffett’s corner office and a meeting of what was called officially a “Bureau conference.” In the course of several contests here, I had begun to learn some of the ins and outs.

As the heads of divisions and chiefs of sections of BUAERO flocked into the admiral’s office that morning, each one took up his position more or less according to rank; that is, with captains and commanders on the admiral’s right. This suited me because I had come to learn that the discussion worked downward according to rank and that sometimes the last fellow to speak might turn the tide, especially if he could present some reasonable compromise. I knew, of course, that every man in the room had previously buttonholed the Old Man in an effort to sell his own bill of goods in advance, but that the admiral, who knew nothing about engineering and wanted to know even less, would now stimulate acrimonious discussion and draw his own conclusions from the discomfiture he saw on one man’s face or the triumph he observed on another.

And as the contest raged this particular morning, everyone knew the real issue, including the admiral, but no one mentioned it. Argument and discussion raged about every irrelevant aspect, but everyone ducked the matter of Pensacola’s vested interest. After a long while the admiral turned to me.

“Hasn’t the Engine Section anything to offer?” he asked, well knowing that of course it had.

“Well, sir,” I replied, “I’m afraid we’re too much an interested party to bear weight here. We think that the adoption of the Consolidated would lead to faster engine development and that this fact alone would justify a favorable decision.” The admiral didn’t bat an eye.

“If you’ve got a suggestion,” he said, “don’t be afraid to let us have it.”

“Well, sir,” I went on, “it seems to me that what this conference must decide is this: what do we really want to do—train pilots, or kill them?” There wasn’t a sound in the room. The admiral glanced from face to face and then stood up.

“Well, gentlemen,” he said, “if that’s your decision, it’s agreeable to me. But remember now,” he added, “I’ll expect every officer in the Bureau to pitch in and make this Consolidated airplane a success.”

As the conferees filed out through the door, I noticed the admiral watching me and detected the quick jerk of his head that signaled me to lag behind. He struck a match and took two puffs at his pipe.

“There’s a lot going on around here,” he remarked, using the very words with which he had received me the morning I reported to him. “I can’t keep track of all of it,” he added, and then with a grin that drew down the tight corners of his mouth, “keep your eyes open. If you see anything you think needs handling, take care of it, whether or not it comes under your department.”

As we moved toward the door the admiral caught my elbow.

“That fellow Mitchell is on the rampage again,” he said. “The Army has decided to order him to Texas to get him out of Washington. But he’ll break out at the worst time, wherever he is.” He struck another match and took two reflective puffs on his pipe.

“Keep your eye on him,” he concluded, “and be ready to lend a hand with the counterpublicity.”