Baedeker for the Air-Minded
Is liquid-cooled power superior to air-cooled power in military airplanes? Should Detroit take over the aircraft industry? How many planes should we ship to Britain, how many keep for ourselves? Can our fighters stay in the same air with the Messerschmitt? What will be the status of international airlines when the war is over?
The air-minded citizen stands in the prop wash of many a muddled controversy. He realizes that the U. S. aircraft industry has grown in three years from a midget employing fewer than the knit underwear trade to the focal point of Bill Knudsen's "terrible urgency" which today holds Britain's life in the balance. But he is confused by fragments of ill-ordered, semi-secretive information and misinformation fired at him haphazardly by the press, labor, Government, business. Out of this confusion this week came an encyclopedic attempt to synthesize the whole problem: the all-aviation March issue of FORTUNE.
FORTUNE'S gorgeously illustrated document ranges over the strategy of sky war, turns the aircraft industry inside out, dabbles in aeronautical research, peeks prophetically into a future wherein "the whole world is the shoreline of the universal ocean of air." But its most telling pages seek to smash an illusion and restore a faith. The illusion, mass production of military airplanes, was stimulated by 1) Franklin Roosevelt's call for 50,000 planes a year, 2) Henry Ford's dream of 1,000 planes a day, 3) Walter Reuther's dream of 500 planes a day within six months. Even assuming them to be all of one type, 50,000 planes a year is still not mass production, FORTUNE points out, and could not justify the expensive specialized tooling required by mass-production methods. The military airplane relies on fluidity of designs to outfly the enemy, a multiplicity of designs to satisfy a multiplicity of functions (dive bombing, altitude bombing, torpedoing, strafing, bomber protection, interception, night pursuit, sea patrol, observation, training, transport and liaison work, etc.), a precision in design unnecessary to consumer goods. Thus military planes cannot be coaxed off the assembly line like V-8s--even in Detroit.
Simultaneously FORTUNE gives a hand to the infant prodigy in which many of the war-wise lost faith last summer. It tells how the fastest expanding industry of all time increased its backlog to $3,200,000,000 in 1940 (see cut), up 3,900% in four years, and will have brought its personnel, 30,500 in 1938, up to 550,000 by Aug. 1-- greater than last year's average in the steel or automobile industries. And if Detroit's assembly-line methods are barred to them, planemakers have a trick or two of their own. One is the "breakdown" policy of James Howard ("Dutch") Kindelberger, onetime chief engineer for Douglas and now president of North American Aviation, Inc. (former General Motors subsidiary). Until recently airplanes were assembled like ships. But Dutch Kindelberger, who speaks of his job as "a manipulation of shortages," saves North American 25% of its man hours by putting together planes like prefabricated houses ("Don't let 'em get too big too fast"), keeping them turned "inside out" until the last minute, seeing that subcontractors keep up a steady flow of subassemblies.
Other FORTUNE excerpts:
> In an academic study of U. S. air power, New York Times Military Expert Hanson W. Baldwin plumps for more bases (in the Galapagos Islands, in Canada and on the strategic shoulder of Brazil), suggests long-range bombers be withheld from Britain to patrol our "moats" and fill in for the two-ocean navy until its completion.
> Propellers, not engines, will provide the bottleneck in the horsepower race. While military motors may conceivably double in horsepower, a propeller reaching sonic speed (750 m.p.h.) is shackled by a destructive drag. Many predict that jet propulsion (as in "rocket ships") will be required for airplane performance over 500 m.p.h.
> Air-cooled (radial) motors have a current edge in the air-cooled - liquid-cooled squabble largely because they have a longer engineering history. But the Germans have a compromise: an air-cooled, in-line engine which would combine the best features of both types.
> Average hourly earnings of aircraft workers in 1940 approximated 74-c- compared to the autoworker's 96-c- , the rubber-worker's 86-c- , the steelworker's 84-c- . Meantime the planemakers have raided the labor pools of other industries, are putting many a white-collar youth to work with his hands. "It is too early to tell, but this expanding migration of bookkeepers and clerks and filling-station attendants into the manual skills of the defense industries may be the beginning of a revolution in U. S. public-school education and in the 'whitecollar culture' of the '20s."
This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.