Silver Platter

Through the night the long windows of Pratt & Whitney's aircraft engine plant glow with an eerie, blue-green light. Through the streets of East Hartford, Conn., freight cars lumber along old trolley tracks from the plant to the New Haven Railroad. The air of the whole neighborhood palpitates with the muffled thunder of Wasps and Hornets on test stands in the research buildings. And every six seconds the white finger of the airport beacon flicks over the fleshening skeleton of a huge new factory extension growing from the main plant.

Last week President Donald Lamont Brown of United Aircraft Corp., which owns Pratt & Whitney, could have been expected to pinch himself as he looked over the production report of his engine division. Sawing away at a backlog of something like $100,000,000 (United's total backlog: above $115,000,000), Pratt & Whitney has hit the high point of its production history, above 350* engines a month, more than double its average for 1938. This production will be doubled when the new plant reaches its capacity next spring.

Not the least remarkable part of this 300% increase in production is the new plant. It will double P. & W.'s floor space, and the building will cost United not a dime. To speed up deliveries on orders for $60,000,000 or more worth of warplane engines and an additional $12,000,000 of propellers (which went next door to United's Hamilton Standard division), France has already advanced $1,500,000 to $2,000,000 to erect the new factory. The cost will be defrayed by Pratt & Whitney gradually by a small charge on each engine delivered until the advance is used up. The new factory will belong to Pratt & Whitney with no strings attached. To France this is a necessary extravagance. She needed the engines and United was unwilling to put capital into mushroom war expansion.

Just as extraordinary is what is now going on within Pratt & Whitney's existing plant. Workmen are being hired at the rate of 50 a day. Soon there will be two men at every job--one working, one watching -- throughout its 6,000-job plant. This also is a necessary extravagance. For one man at each job is a learner. When the new plant is opened, a trained staff will be ready to march in and begin production at full speed.

Before the snow is off the ground, Pratt & Whitney expects to have its factory-on-a-silver-platter turning out as many high-powered motors as are now being crated in the loading room of its old plant, sees no trouble ahead in filling the requirements of the U. S. Army and Navy, plus still other orders from overseas.

At Paterson, N. J., at the works of the other big aircraft engine builder, Wright Aeronautical Corp., another plant extension is springing up under the watering of another French grant. Wright's expansion is financed by a French order said to be $30,000,000, will nearly double its capacity of about 400* Cyclones a month. Meanwhile, in Indianapolis, General Motors' new Allison plant is getting into production on its high-powered, liquid-cooled engines to go into new Army pursuit ships. By the middle of the summer the production of the three plants in military engines may well hit a total of close to 2,000 a month, end fears which Army and Navy men entertained that engine production might become a bottleneck in U. S. armament.

*Estimate based on Aeronautical Chamber of Commerce figures. *Estimate based on Aeronautical Chamber of Commerce figures.

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