He brought his gaze back to Montgomery’s face and smiled, “I’m sorry, Monty. I guess you’ve never heard me go on quite like that, have you? I usually do it alone — in the middle of the night.
“But you know I’m right. Every competent engineer in the aircraft industry knows it. Our manufacturing methods just aren’t good enough — and can’t be made good enough — to eliminate the duplication of components. Our design should be capable of creating a plane to perform the military function of the Ninety-one in a tenth its size and weight — and cost.
“What price tag will the production model have? We can guess at eighteen to twenty million. It’s economically disasterous to put that much into a single piece of equipment as vulnerable as a plane — even one with the dubious importance of being designed as carrier for the H and cobalt bombs. As a solution to an engineering problem, it’s a bust.”
“Why didn’t you build the Ninety-one a tenth its present size, then?” said Montgomery cautiously.
George appeared with their orders. Gunderson unfolded the napkin and tapped the side of his head. “Here —,” he said. “We haven’t got what it takes up here.”
“You have no right to blame yourself! With your accomplishments —”
“Not just me,” said Gunderson. “All of us. Your R&D outfit, NACA, the universities, the airplane plants. Look how we operate: We spend a couple million for a new computer, six million for a wind tunnel, our reports cover miles of microfilm. R&D farms out a million or so projects all over the country.
“But do you remember the story about how the Wrights learned to warp a wing? Just the two of them, watching the shape of a little cardboard box Wilbur twisted about as they talked — and there it was.
“How many of your people are capable of catching such a tiny clue? Not the R&D supervisor who’s wondering how to jack up his GS rating from 12 to 13, or the wind tunnel chief, or the computerman. Something’s wrong with the way we’re going about it. We’ve built giant data-collecting organizations under the fond delusion that this was research. We build oceans of little ingenious gadgets, thinking this is invention. And we look in vain in all this mass of data and gadgetry for the new, basic idea. It isn’t there. So we build another flying monster and pat ourselves on the back.”
Montgomery contemplated the long string of spaghetti dangling from his fork. “I’ve heard some of that kind of talk before,” he said. “I always thought it was just the product of a bad week when everything had gone wrong. If it’s actually true, what can be done about it? What are you going to do about it?”