And out of my swing around the circuit, I reached clear conclusions with respect to my own problem, aircraft power plants. I had heard nothing to shake my convictions as to the superiority of air-cooled radials. On the contrary, I had heard much to confirm them. If the Air Corps still wanted a source of supply for liquid-cooled engines, they should look elsewhere than Hartford. Furthermore, even if Pratt and Whitney could create the world’s best liquid-cooled engine as well as the best air-cooled, it would do little good. The two required different tools, different production processes, in fact separate factories, and we already had our hands full with our own job.
This added up to the fact that in trying to do both jobs we were compromising our ability to discharge our responsibility with respect to air-cooling. We must get back on the beam at the first favorable opportunity and devote our resources to continuing to build the best air-cooled engines in the world.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
A Yankee Peddler
In the spring of 1938, Tom Hamilton, our United Aircraft representative in Europe, came home on one of his periodic visits, to bring himself up to date on new products and to let us in on the low-down in his territory. Ordinarily a buoyant optimist, Tom was much depressed by the developments in Germany. Adolf Hitler had got him down.
Tom had first taken over the European territory at my suggestion back in the early ’thirties. His aviation interests had always been predominantly commercial. While he had built propellers for both Army and Navy at his Hamilton Aero Manufacturing Company, in Milwaukee, he had built only commercial aircraft at his other establishment, the Hamilton Metalplane Company, of the same place. His “Hamilton Metalplane,” a high-wing metal monoplane with a single Pratt and Whitney Hornet engine, had been used extensively by Canadian bush flyers and The Isthmian Airways had operated them with signal success across the Isthmus of Panama. This plane, according to Tom, had been the prototype from which the Ford Trimotor had evolved.
At the time Tom had first gone abroad there appeared little likelihood of any real business for United in Europe. European aircraft were considered by Europeans to be vastly superior to the American, and their strong nationalism caused them to prefer to buy at home in support of their own industries. But there was one item in which we had attained leadership—metal aircraft propellers—and even though we might not sell the articles themselves, I thought we might dispose of the right to manufacture under our foreign patents for a good price. The money would come in handy in the development of the controllable-pitch propeller.
Tom had therefore gone abroad as a direct representative of the three companies under my management, Hamilton-Standard, Sikorsky Aviation, and Chance Vought Aircraft. Vought, of course, had nothing to offer at the moment. Upon arrival in Europe, Tom set up headquarters in Paris and laid the groundwork for his business. As a Yankee peddler, Tom displayed all the initiative and enterprise that characterized the American in a foreign land, but combined it with a rare knack of adapting himself to the customs of the country. In character and outward appearance he became quite continental. He set himself up in the George V Hotel in Paris, showed an aptitude for meeting and impressing the right people, and gave to his business entertainment the personal touch of a naturally warm-hearted individual. He exuded the confidence in American products that derived from deep conviction born of intimate knowledge of aircraft production and aeronautical engineering, and undertook the apparently hopeless task of penetrating the European market because he was certain that American production techniques could compete against European cheap hand labor. He had seen the automotive industry succeed in penetrating foreign trade barriers to the benefit of both American industry and American labor, and was confident American aviation could duplicate the feat.
He had not done too well with our propeller license—it took Raycroft Walsh and the controllable-pitch propeller to turn that trick—and when Fred Rentschler visited Europe after a year or so, Tom had to put on his best selling vest to keep Fred from closing out the office. Tom finally won out by suggesting that he give up his salary and continue on a commission basis.
In the interim between the long Armistice and Hitler’s renewal of the World War, commercial air transport flourished on the Continent. International competition was reminiscent of the earlier struggle for control of the sea; one nation relied on private initiative, the other sought to capitalize air commerce through government ownership. Earlier in the struggle for sea power, Britain had defeated France through private enterprise. France, under the brilliant Colbert, had staked everything on government support of monopolistic trade associations or guilds. When, finally, Colbert had called in the industrialists to ask what more he might do to help them, they had responded in unison, “Laissez nous faire!” (Leave us alone).
But now Britain, having concentrated authority over civil air transport in a separate ministry wholly dominated by an air force steeped in the Douhet doctrine, had abandoned private enterprise, and, following the drift toward state ownership, had put commercial aviation under government control. The effect of this had been clearly set forth in the so-called “Cadman Report,” the Report of the British Committee of Inquiry into Civil Aviation, published in March, 1938, which stated unequivocally that, except on Empire routes, that country was backward in civil air transport.