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.”