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.