Inside Story

When he was a little boy, Grover Loening built model planes of bent wire and toilet paper, powered them with rubber bands, begged his mother to remove the chandeliers so they could fly better. One day in 1908 his mother took him to see a real airplane fly. The plane was wrecked because the propeller had been put on backward. Grover Loening (pron. Loaning) decided then & there to become an aviation engineer.

At Columbia University he founded the first student flying club, took the first Master of Arts degree ever given in Aeronautics (1910). He joined the Wright Brothers, became their general manager. In 1914 the U. S. Army Signal Corps made him its Chief Aeronautical Engineer. First thing he did was condemn all the Army's Wright and Curtiss pushers as unsafe to fly. After the War he founded his own company, built the world's first successful amphibian.

In 1928 he sold out to the bankers, retired with his millions to do aerodynamic research. Now he has written a book-- the inside story of U. S. aviation.*

Wilbur Wright is dead, Orville is an embittered man of 64, Glenn Curtiss has been dead for nearly five years. But Grover Cleveland Loening, B. Sc., M. A., C. E., F. R. Ae. S., F. I. A. S. is at 47 a curiously youngish man to be one of aviation's pioneers. A swank, dapper socialite who still flies often and badly, he is rich, independent, honest, can well afford to tread on many a famed toe, call many a spade by its rightful name. Some typical Loening evaluations:

Richard Evelyn Byrd : "His real talent, as I intimately saw him, was that of a promoter. . . . I don't believe that he is a self-seeker. His presentation of self is just good showmanship. . . . A Virginia gentleman, imbued with an exploration mission in life, with the left eye slightly cocked on the profit."

Lindbergh: "A singularly human and sensible guy . . . not so shy, either, but annoyed, and rightly so, by all the publicity. . . . I continue to rank him at the very top of real men. The most surprising thing about him, I found, was his technical ability. He is a born engineer."

Lawrence B. Sperry (late inventor of the automatic gyro-pilot): "To show how it could fly the plane with his hands off the controls, he was demonstrating this to a girl friend he had with him, by a little conservative lovemaking. At that moment the stabilizer went wrong and the [flying] boat went into a vicious spin, and the two were found pretty much in each other's arms, very severely injured."

Author Loening stoutly defends Orville Wright in the famed controversy with the Smithsonian Institution over Professor Samuel Pierpont Langley's Aerodrome (TIME, Jan. 1, 1934). Bitterest Loening scorn is reserved for the Wartime Aircraft Production Board headed by Motorman Howard Earle Coffin, whom he accuses of having led a "Detroit conspiracy" in "crafty scheming to wean away aviation from its rightful owners."

For all the $640,000.000 spent by the U. S. Government on aircraft production in the War years, says Author Loening, only 213 planes were delivered in Europe. "It is safe to say that the delivered A. E. F. American airplanes cost $1,000,000 each." The original Liberty engine he calls "a complete washout--designed overnight in a hotel room by a group of engineers who shut themselves in and lived on buttermilk--or pulled some such publicity stunt."

Richly illustrated with old photographs, the book contains one of a strikingly handsome youth seated at the controls of an early (1913) Wright pusher. The young man was Grover Cleveland Bergdoll, son of a wealthy Philadelphia brewer. Popular as an amateur automobile racer and pioneer sportsman pilot, Early Bird Bergdoll was to become notorious four years later as the No. 1 U. S. draft-dodger during the War. Grover Cleveland Loening says Grover Cleveland Bergdoll's reason for evading the draft was that he was refused a commission in the U. S. Air Service.*

Of aviation's future, Author-Pioneer Loening is convinced: "The railroads are as obsolete today as the great Erie Canal was in 1830. . . . The handwriting is on the wall for the steamship lines also. . . . At 500 m.p.h., 50,000 ft. above the ocean, flying through the warmer stratosphere, far above storms or ice or fog-- this is the way we will cross from New York to London in six hours in the not very distant future."

*Our Wings Grow Faster--Doubleday Doran ($3.75).

*Fortnight ago a beauteous young German woman arrived in the U. S. with two little girls in blonde pigtails, a flaxen-haired boy waving a U. S. flag, a babe-in-arms. They were Dodger Bergdoll's wife & children, come to visit his 76-year-old mother in Philadelphia and petition the Federal Government to pardon him, give back his confiscated $800,000 fortune, let him return to the U. S. a citizen. The Government promptly indicated it would do no such thing. In Germany this week Fugitive Bergdoll announced he would surrender to the U. S. and stand trial in Federal Court if the five-year court-martial sentence against him were annulled.

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