One of the important considerations that had influenced my decision to resign from the Navy had been my desire to work on constructive tasks with men whose competence I had admired. Among these were Fred Rentschler, Bill Boeing, George Mead, Claire Egtvedt, George Wheat, Don Brown, Phil Johnson, and Chance Vought. As fate dealt the cards, however, the decade of 1930 saw the passing of Chance, George, and Don, and of these, Chance was the first. During the summer of 1930, after I had added Sikorsky to my responsibilities, Chance died of septicemia, something which today would respond quickly to the new drugs. With him, much of the sparkle went out of United Aircraft.
By the time I joined United, Chance had already come to realize that his famous Corsair two-seater, which had done so well on battleship catapults and carrier decks, had all but been outmoded by the passage of time alone. And he was at a loss to know what to do about it, and talked far into the night about that problem. His untimely death relieved him of all necessity for further worry, but it also handed the job to me. Worse still, the Vought company, like most other aviation concerns, had always been a one-man show and there were no more Chance Voughts standing around to be hired, even with more jobless men around than the country had ever known. And so we faced the task of creating a new organization—one of a type then new to aviation—of developing some new product and of marketing it in what was becoming a tough market indeed. In this job we pinned our hopes on some of the old-timers in the Vought organization and on a relative newcomer, Charles J. McCarthy.
“C.J.,” as we called him, to differentiate the airplane engineer from “J.F.,” the financial wizard, had been in BUAERO in charge of the new department called “Stress Analysis” at the time when I had been chief of the Engine Section. It was C.J. who had flown to Norfolk with me the day the Wright T-3 engine jumped out of a torpedo bomber when the wooden propeller flew apart, and it had been out of that experience that we decided to standardize on metal propellers. It was curious how, in the aviation slipstream, we milled around, each trying to add his little push to the effective forward thrust. For Chance had offered C.J. a job in his company, and C.J. had accepted. Now I began to look upon him as my second there, and between us we decided to bring in a new chief engineer.
The newcomer was Rex Beisel, a man who had received good training in the old school of Curtiss Airplane Company but had gone west to create a new private airplane. The stock-market crash had made Rex available and we now promptly scooped him up. We thought Rex a bit opinionated, and expected to have to handle him roughly at times, but we knew there was great capacity there. And in this we were right, for Rex created a strong engineering organization as a substitute for the genius of Chance Vought, and came ultimately to head the Vought Division in his own right. The story of how this was done, like the story of Hamilton-Standard, or Sikorsky, or Pratt and Whitney, or any of the great independent outfits like Grumman, or Martin, or Douglas, or Boeing, is worth a book in itself; but for our purposes here we can sweep in only those high lights that seem to back light the slipstream itself. And though the several stories run concurrently, we are concerned more with events than with precise timing.
There was, however, one vital factor that influenced the performance of every aircraft company, and in the end, imperiled the existence of them all. For while the creative force of the Morrow Board policy carried over beyond the 1929 stock-market crash, it did not survive the ordeal of the New Deal. With the election of President Roosevelt in 1932 and his advent into the White House in 1933, an earthquake hit American aviation. When President Roosevelt ordered the cancellation of the air-mail contracts and directed the Army to take over, the young air-transport business suffered a vital blow. When, after the deaths of several Army pilots who had had no preparation for the complex transport task, the lines were returned to private operations, the blight of Congressional investigation fell upon the whole aircraft industry.
Senator Hugo Black, later a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, who had been probing the ocean-mail subsidies, now turned his attention to aviation. The airplane, long a subject of great public interest, crowded the headlines with sensational charges and countercharges, none of which seemed to lead anywhere other than to the glorification of the investigators. Then Senator Gerald P. Nye, not to be outdone in courtesy, dragged out the old myth of the “munitions racketeer” and the “merchants of death” and dusted it off for the more modern treatment of klieg lights and other technological advances in the art of public relations. Whatever else may be said for these hippodromes, they had the effect of knocking down an airplane program just as a killer in the stockyards fells an ox with one neat blow from a maul. Even though the programs remained on the statute books, it would have required a courageous procurement staff, indeed, to make contracts with such apparent renegades as headed the unhappy aircraft companies.
The moment arrived when Chance Vought Aircraft was running out of work. In order to extend the useful life of the old Corsair, we had replaced the Wasp engine with a new Pratt and Whitney Hornet 1690. This gave us a breathing spell while we assembled our engineering team and dreamed up a new model. But BUAERO had now revived the old two-seat fighter project and thrust it on us. Worse still, they had designed the airplane themselves and now looked to us to detail it and build the prototype. Recalling the old fight between FLEET AIR and BUAERO on this subject, back when I had been Admiral Reeves’s chief of staff, the whole thing had elements of poetic injustice in it that now aroused me to action. I decided to build their old two-seat fighter, according to all specifications, to exceed their designed performances, and at the same time build the structure strong enough to be used as a dive bomber. This would take a lot of doing, for the performance guarantees were already high, but it would leave us with two strings to our bow, a two-seat fighter that would probably not go into production, and a two-seat dive bomber that probably would. In the latter event, Vought would give the Navy a distinctly new type of airplane, one that could depend upon its guns to penetrate enemy fighter cover and then use its bombs on ground targets.
One of the complications involved was the specification that called for the installation of the new Pratt and Whitney two-row radial, the R-1535. The two-row feature would have introduced excessive drag and cooling difficulties, except that I chanced to read an article by C. G. Grey in The Airplane, a British magazine devoted to aviation and to running down everything American. Mr. Grey had recently visited the great Bristol airplane factory and had been impressed with a project for cooling air-cooled engines. Unlike certain foreign engine builders who insisted on blowing large quantities of air in the general direction of their cylinders, Bristol had devised an ingenious contrivance through which they had succeeded in directing a “mere trickle” of air at precisely the required spots, thus saving much drag and improving the cooling no end.
After this tip-off, we set up a joint project using the Sikorsky wind tunnel and staff, under the direction of Chance Vought engineers, to develop a cowl for a Pratt and Whitney engine. Out of this cooperative effort came a new power-plant installation using the “cowl-flaps” which any passenger in any American transport can still see by looking out the window at the engine nacelle and watching the opening and closing of the “gills.” This development not only made the two-row radial a success but proved so effective that it has been rated by discerning observers as a development quite as revolutionary in its way as was the controllable-angle propeller.
With the drying up of both military and commercial business in our own country, we must needs look elsewhere or fade out. The export market was the only outlet, and while there were obstacles there, the superiority of our products, built up under the Morrow policy, had put us in a strong competitive position. Even from the point of view of costs and in the face of a preference on the part of some countries for aircraft of their own production, we could still make headway. American automobiles had won leadership in foreign markets because of superior quality and lower price. The idea that we could not compete with “slave labor” had been disproved; the technology of production could support higher wages and still produce low-cost goods of high quality. That was our heritage which we would now exploit.