A Laboratory Flies

Some very unkind things were said about her. There she sat, sleek and new, the biggest plane in the world--on the ground. For ten weeks she sat there, on Clover Field at Santa Monica, Calif. In one of her first taxiing tests, the Douglas B-19 had chewed up her hydraulic braking system. Earlier she had broken through the macadam pavement. Some, who should have known Douglas Aircraft and the Air Corps better, said she'd never get into the air, she was too heavy.

Last week, while the wind whipped in briskly from the Pacific, she did what her makers knew she could do. Major Stanley Umstead, the Air Corps's crack, cigar-chewing test pilot, climbed aboard; his crew of six trailed after him. Stanley Umstead started the four engines from left to right, kicking up a great williwaw of dust as he turned them up. He wheeled the Gargantuan bomber down the field, swung her into the wind, gave her the coal. Rolling hugely down the runway, she picked up her skirts slowly. But she was off, wobbling a bit--her feel was still strange to the man at the controls--in a run of 2,000 feet. Lightened to 41 of her 82 tons (full load), she climbed easily while Douglas workmen left their work to watch, saw the job that had kept them busy for better than four years dwindle into the sky.

Fifty-six circling minutes later, Stanley Umstead set B-19 down at her new home, March Field, 70 miles away. He walked away from her with his cigar frayed, his eyes narrowed in a grin. He had made a tentative takeoff, a bouncy landing. Said he, chewing his cigar: "I could take her up any time now and have the feel better." He will have plenty of chances. For B19, so big that a telephone had to be rigged for communication from cockpit to wheels while her brakes were being adjusted, is an experimental job. Too slow (200 miles-plus) for combat work, she is the first big experiment by the Air Corps with the supersize aircraft that may be the bombers of the future. In her design and building, Douglas and Air Corps engineers learned many a principle they had no more than suspected from their plane-building lore in smaller ships. From flying and maintaining her, they expect to learn much more.

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