Mr. Horsepower

AVIATION Mr. Horsepower

(See Cover]

Trundled out of Pratt & Whitney's experimental hangar at East Hartford, Conn. one day last week, the huge, red-tailed bomber looked like any other B-50. Actually, it was like no other plane in the world. The earth shook as Test Pilot Gil Haven revved up the plane's four Wasp Major engines, each one as powerful (3,500 h.p.) as a diesel locomotive. Then he sent the big silver plane thundering down Rentschler field, pulled it up into the air.

Quickly the plane climbed to more than 20,000 ft. There Pilot Haven opened the plane's bomb bay and lowered into the airstream a shining mass of metal. It hung 5 ft. below the plane, like a stubby cigar. Like a cigar, it began to bum at the tip, and it let out a whine like the wail of 10,000 banshees.

Pilot Haven idled his four piston engines, but the B-50, instead of slowing up, flew even faster, on nothing but the power of the whining metal cigar. The bomber's air-speed indicator edged up to 370 m.p.h. Over Bangor, Me., an F-86 jet fighter, part of the air-raid interceptor defense, streaked up through the clouds, swept in close to investigate the B-50's strange, roaring belly-pod.

The pod was Pratt & Whitney's biggest, newest jet engine, the J-57, and Pilot Haven was putting it through a flying test. When he landed again at Rentschler field he gave a laconic report: "That monster's got a lot of pizzazz."

Frederick Brant Rentschler, boss of Pratt & Whitney and its parent United Aircraft Corp., thinks the J57 has more pizzazz than any other engine. Says he flatly: "It is more powerful than any jet engine ever flown." Moreover, he thinks the J57 has gone a long way to overcome a great handicap of jets, their enormous fuel consumption. United's engineers say that it uses less fuel than anybody else has even promised for an engine of its size.

The Key to Supremacy. The engine is of enormous importance to the U.S. in the global race to dominate the skies. As Rentschler and every other airman knows: "The engine is the key to air supremacy." To help the U.S. gain air supremacy, the armed forces are already rushing plans for production of new fighters and big intercontinental bombers--Boeing's giant B-52 and a sweptback-wing version of Convair's B-36--to use the new jet's fuel economy and power.

It was high time the U.S. had an engine like the J-57, for the U.S. had been behind in the jet engine race. It had been caught napping at the start when jet propulsion began to revolutionize air power. Both the Germans (in 1939) and the British (in 1941) actually flew jet fighters before the U.S. even woke up to the fact that jet engines were practical. Thanks to Britain's foresight, and the fact that U.S. engine makers were forced to concentrate on piston engines during the war, the British stayed ahead in jets. With his J-57, Rentschler thinks he has overtaken them. But the race is still touch & go. Britain's Bristol Aeroplane Co. boasts that its new Olympus jet engine is at least as powerful as the J-57, though it is not as close to production. (Reportedly, Wright Aeronautical is dickering to build the Olympus under license.) In the same power range, Westinghouse is already testing its new J-40, General Motors' Allison division is testing its new J-35-A-23 and General Electric has its J-47. Nobody knows what the Russians, who got some of Germany's best jet engineers, are making behind their curtain, but there is no reason to think that they are far behind. Midwives for an Age. One of the best hopes that the U.S. can forge ahead lies in the past performance of Fred Rentschler, who has probably done as much for U.S. aviation as anyone since the Wright brothers. Starting from scratch a quarter-century ago with fledgling Pratt & Whitney Aircraft Co., he transformed U.S. military and transport aviation with his air-cooled Wasp engine. In the late '20s and '30s, Wasps, Hornets and the famed Wright Whirlwind (which Rentschler had just produced) were the midwives for the birth of the Air Age. They powered the fighters for the Navy's new aircraft carriers, won the world's altitude record for the U.S., hurled Jimmy Doolittle to racing fame, carried Pan American's Martin flying boats in the first commercial flights across the oceans, flew Lindbergh on a record-breaking transcontinental flight, Wiley Post around the world, Howard Hughes to a transcontinental record, and Amelia Earhart to her unknown fate. In World War II, engines made by Pratt & Whitney and its licensees (Ford, Buick, Chevrolet, Nash-Kelvinator and others) furnished half of all the U.S. piston horsepower flown in the war. By war's end Pratt & Whitney was developing the piston engine to its limits with its Wasp Major, now the most powerful piston engine ever built. It had also reached the end of an era. For the future does not lie with piston engines, but with jets--pure jets and jets driving propellers. Fred Rentschler is betting that his J57 will do for jets what the Wasp did for piston engines. Says he confidently: "Our job is not to catch the others, but to be first."

Man with a Mission. Few men ever approached aviation with more devotion to that job. Fred Rentschler thinks, talks, breathes and dreams engines. Like an engine himself, his tall (6 ft. 2), lithe-muscled figure is as straight as a master rod, his face, which looks younger than his 63 years, as emotionless as a cylinder head. Like an engine, he carries a normal workload easily and can turn on extra power when needed. A shy man, he seems to shrink from human contact, uses memos to notify his top men of raises. Even United Aircraft's President H. M. ("Jack") Horner, Rentschler's close aid for 23 years, still calls him "Mr. Rentschler."

But in his machine-made ivory tower,

Fred Rentschler is a farsighted, practical dreamer. "Every five or ten years," he says, "there comes an opportunity for a complete reversal in aviation power plants. That is the sword always hanging over our heads."

Lest he miss opportunity, Rentschler scans five newspapers daily, reads aviation magazines and technical papers tirelessly, greets friends by saying: "What do you know?" They have long since learned that this means: "Do you know any new developments affecting my business?" When any conversation strays far from engines Rentschler's eyes glaze over, and he stops listening. Wherever his men travel, he expects them to send him constant memos on anything they hear. If one hears an admiral say, "The Navy needs more engine power," Rentschler wants the dope by wire.

Though he runs all United Aircraft-whose other divisions are Chance Vought fighters, Hamilton Standard propellers and Sikorsky helicopters--Pratt & Whitney is his first home and he roosts there. He picks able younger men and gives them their head--up to a point. But on big decisions, he runs a one-man show; the committee-governments that run many big corporations merely baffle him. Says he: "I don't see how a soviet can run a company." He may stay at his nine-room, Norman-style house, high on a hill above Hartford, for days, brooding over a problem, then stop at the office some morning and say: "This is it." Then things move.

Tight-Rope Business. A fierce individualist, Rentschler fights shy of Government-financed expansion, is currently spending $40 million on expansion from United's own funds. "There's a lot of difference if you're using your own money or playing with someone else's," he says. "The one thing that would destroy our country's leadership in the air would be for Government to take a dominant part. I've seen that happen in other countries. France dominated the air in the First World War . . . then the government stepped in and we've never heard from France again." Like all heads of plane companies, he works closely with the U.S. Government, but he wants to be free to do things his own way.

In a tight-rope business, Rentschler is far from infallible. "We naturally make mistakes," says he, "but we have the guts and sense to make it go the next time." For example, the Wasp Majors in Boeing's Stratocruisers developed a long list of bugs when put into service. United went methodically to work to help eliminate them, and offered to provide replacement parts for the four lines using Stratocruisers. One line (United) got $1,200,000 worth of free parts. At home with his family, Rentschler relaxes--like an engine idling. He usually takes a Martini or two before dinner, and may sip champagne afterward. With both daughters married, he and his slender, attractive wife Faye live pretty much by themselves. Winters they spend in their Spanish villa near Florida's Boca Raton Club, where Rentschler plays tennis well enough to take on ex-Wimbledon Champion Fred Perry. He travels back & forth to East Hartford--as well as everywhere else--by plane. Even in the roughest weather, Rentschler merely grunts to his pilot, "Getting a bit dusty outside," then resumes reading memos about engines. Money in the Bank. Fred Rentschler was taught to be single-minded by his father, George Adam Rentschler. Adam's father brought him to the U.S. from Germany when he was three. Orphaned at eleven, Adam had to scratch hard for every penny, scratched so hard that he eventually became a millionaire out of the foundry he started in Hamilton, Ohio. "Only two things are worth having," Adam always said, "money in the bank and pig iron in the plant."

A stern master to his sons, Robert, Gordon, Fred and George, he made them do the threshing on his 130-acre farm near Hamilton, made them learn the iron business by sweating as puddlers in the foundry, sent them all to Princeton* (where Robert died in his junior year).

Fred liked to play poker ("He played them close to his chest," says a boyhood chum), drink beer and drive a car at breakneck speed. After graduation, when his father took a fling at making autos, Fred helped him turn out a few of his four-and six-cylinder Republics before they gave it up. But it taught Fred about engines, and when, at 30, he was commissioned a ist lieutenant in World War I, the Army made him an aircraft-engine inspector. He was sent to New Brunswick, N.J., where Wright-Martin was making the famed Hispano-Suiza engine under French license. There Rentschler was converted to aviation. At war's end, he told brother George: "Come hell or high water, I'm going to stay in it."*

Poker Player's Bet. With the war over, the big demand for engines was over, too. Wright-Martin liquidated and sold its plant. But Rentschler had so impressed everyone that he was asked to help start a smaller company with $3,000,000 in Wright-Martin assets. He hired Wright-Martin's best engineers, and in 1919 found himself president of the fledgling Wright Aeronautical Corp.

Most airmen thought that the future lay in liquid-cooled engines, like the Hispano-Suiza, and in flivver planes. But Rentschler staked his poker player's bet that the future lay with big engines, big military and commercial planes and air-cooled engines. An engineer named Charles L. Lawrance began experimenting with an air-cooled engine in which the Navy was interested, but he was having trouble with production bugs. Rentschler bought out Lawrance, eliminated the bugs and perfected the engine as Wright's Whirlwind. By 1924, he was making engines for both Army & Navy planes, and Wright was one of the few engine builders making profits.

But Rentschler, who wanted to run a one-man show even then, quarreled with his directors because they wanted to pay dividends instead of plowing money into engines. He resigned and decided to go into competition with Wright by building an air-cooled engine far more powerful than the 200 h.p. of Wright's. An old friend, Chance Vought, the brilliant pioneer plane designer, told Rentschler he could build a new naval plane that would win them contracts if Rentschler could provide a 400-h.p. engine weighing no more than 650 lbs.

Rentschler persuaded Niles-Bement-Pond Co. (precision tools), which had plenty of war-earned surplus cash and unused war-built factory space, to bet its cash on Rentschler's know-how. The company staked him to $250,000 and a factory to develop his first engine. Because Rentschler got his factory space and tools at Hartford, in the plant of Niles-Bement-Pond's tool-building Pratt & Whitney division, the new company was called Pratt & Whitney Aircraft.

Rentschler's group held half the stock. Rentschler persuaded several of his old associates at Wright--including Wright's top engineers, George Mead and Andrew Willgoos--to quit and join him. While stored tobacco was being cleared from the idle Hartford plant, Willgoos set up a drawing board in the garage of his New Jersey home. With George Mead directing, they designed a new engine with a lot of weight-saving and power-boosting tricks. Seven months later, on Christmas Eve 1925, the engine was ready for the big test; it developed 425 h.p., well over the 400 expected, weighed 650 lbs., and sounded so angrily powerful that Mrs. Fred Rentschler called it a Wasp. The Navy promptly ordered 200.

Empire Building. In Chance Vought's first Corsair observation-fighter, and in William E. Boeing's fighters, the engine proved itself so conclusively that the Navy almost entirely abandoned liquid-cooled engines, and the Army also bustled to get Wasp-powered planes. Bill Boeing, quick to grasp what the Wasp would do to commercial air transport costs, grabbed the first Chicago-San Francisco airmail contract by underbidding everybody else by nearly half. To everybody's amazement, he made money doing it, and gave commercial flying a tremendous boost. Explained Boeing: "We would rather carry more mail than a radiator and water for cooling."

Fred Rentschler's dreams soon ranged far beyond engines to a great air combine. He, Bill Boeing and Chance Vought decided to merge their plane and airline companies into United Aircraft & Transport Corp., rounded it out by adding propellers (Hamilton Propeller Co. and Standard Steel Propeller) and large amphibians (Sikorskys). When National Air Transport, holding the Chicago-New York mail route, balked at merging with them, Rentschler said imperiously: "The air between the coasts is not big enough to be divided." He bought up National's stock in the market until he had a controlling interest; its bosses came to terms and the first coast-to-coast airline (United) was formed.

Then high-flying Fred Rentschler got an order to land. Senator (now Justice) Hugo Black, investigating supposed overpayments in Government airmail contracts, compared the value of Rentschler's original investment in Pratt & Whitney (nothing but his know-how and a few shares bought at 20-c- each) to the market value of his holdings in United Aircraft in 1933. Black concluded that Rentschler had a paper profit of $21 million on a $253 investment. Rentschler said that he had, indeed, made a lot of money, and patiently explained that this was because Pratt & Whitney had grown big by making good engines.

Flying Windmill. The upshot of the Black investigation was the Air Mail Act of 1934, which divorced aircraft builders from airlines. Boeing and United Airlines went their separate ways while Rentschler held Pratt & Whitney, Vought-Sikorsky and Hamilton Standard together in truncated United Aircraft. Trouble of a different sort now struck Pratt & Whitney. By 1937 it had lost the lead it once had over Wright Aeronautical, largely because it spread its engineering talents trying to develop nine different engines, while Wright concentrated on its famed Cyclone, grabbed much of the transport and military market.

Doggedly, Pratt & Whitney went back to improving the Wasp, got back into the running. Furthermore, Rentschler had not lost his prophetic eye. He decided to stop making flying boats in his Vought-Sikorsky division (they were competing with his planemaking engine customers), and decided to start pouring millions into a brand-new type of aircraft, the helicopter. In 1940, Igor Sikorsky made the first helicopter flight in the U.S., and opened up another field of air transport. But soon, the helicopter, and most other experimental projects at United, were swept into the background. World War II came and the big job was to expand production of United's engines, propellers and Corsair fighters.

United did the job swiftly because, for years, it had turned over the manufacture of almost half of its parts to outside suppliers. Thus, it could put much of the burden on them, did not have to spread its own staff too thin. United expanded its own engine-making twelve times, turned out 137,436 engines in all. It expanded its propeller-making ten times, boosted its plane-making from 72 to a wartime peak of 2,677 a year. Its production was so important that the Government arbitrarily ruled it out of experimenting with jets; it did not want anything to interfere with engine & plane output. Instead, the Government got the plans of some British jets, turned them over to General Electric and Westinghouse for further development. Result: in the early postwar years, United again was the unquestioned leader in piston engines, but it was years behind in jets.

Dirty Hands. When United was at last free to turn to jets, the job was turned over to Leonard S. ("Luke") Hobbs, whom Rentschler regards as the world's finest aviation engineer. Luke Hobbs, a Texas A. & M. graduate and World War I combat infantryman, already knew the fundamentals of jet-turbine work. He had built an experimental jet engine in 1940 but had shelved it to push his development of the Wasp Major. He brought himself up to date on jets by turning out Westinghouse-type engines. Then United bought the U.S. rights to Rolls-Royce's 5,000 lb. thrust Nene, the most advanced jet at that time. "With the Nene," says Rentschler, "we got our hands good and dirty in jets." Then Pratt & Whitney, working with Rolls-Royce, developed a much more powerful jet, the J-48. Boss Engineer Luke Hobbs was also blueprinting the designs for a different type. Last year his men finished the axial-flow T-34 Turbo-Wasp, an intermediate jet type which drives a propeller. Hobbs pushed on to the pure-jet J-57, last January had the first model in a test block. As its blast shook the concrete floor of the test cell, Jack Homer said: "Well, I think we have overshot the field." Solemnly, an old Pratt & Whitney hand interposed: "We may have trouble with the landing gear." Asked the puzzled Horner: "What landing gear?" "I mean," said the Old Hand, "when we let the building back down."

Road to the Top. For all his one-man rule, Fred Rentschler has picked a team which can carry on without him. "Anybody who can run Pratt & Whitney," he says, "can run United." Jack Horner, 47, moved from Pratt & Whitney to United's presidency in 1943. William Gwinn, 43, who came to Pratt & Whitney at 19 as a kid "crazy about aviation," now bosses Pratt & Whitney. (Of Rentschler's original team, he alone is active in the company.) Though United is primarily an engine-builder (more than two-thirds of its dollar sales), its other divisions are fast expanding:

P:SIKORSKY in ten years has mushroomed from a small experimental shop, working on a handmade product, to a 365,000-sq. ft. plant employing 2,000 people. Its S-51 four-place helicopter has so proved itself in Korea (where it has evacuated 2,993 wounded men) that it now has more than $100 million in military orders. Sikorsky is now concentrating on its bigger (ten-place) S-55, and a secret ship-based helicopter believed to be the biggest ever built.

P:CHANCE VOUGHT, which moved to Dallas three years ago, is now producing the tailless, swept-wing jet Cutlass. Vought also is working on flying missiles. P:HAMILTON STANDARD will shortly quit its plant adjoining Pratt & Whitney for a new $12 million plant at Windsor Locks, Conn. Its postwar hydromatic propellers have made such advances in airline safety that they are now specified on 90% of all U.S. transports in service or on order. In the belief that turboprops will be used on commercial planes before pure-jets, Hamilton Standard is perfecting supersonic and dual-rotating propellers for use with them. With all this, United Aircraft, which has paid a dividend every year since 1935, last year chalked up $269 million in sales and a net of $13.2 million. In 1951's first quarter it earned about $3,700,000. Total backlog: $910 million.

The Challenge. Despite its fast jet progress, United--and the whole aviation industry--now faces an even bigger challenge. For the hard fact is that aircraft production is nowhere near what the U.S. needs to fight a hot war, or even supply reasonable protection in a cold one. In the past year, production has not even doubled. In 1951, it will not exceed 5,000 planes (about the 1939 rate) v. World War II's peak of 96,318 (see chart). Engines are the bottleneck, and there are two main reasons: shortages of machine tools and of critical metals (cobalt, columbium and tungsten). Moreover, engines are so much bigger and more complicated than World War II's that it takes more time, more skill and three times more labor to build them.

Since the "lead time" for engines (i.e., the lag between orders and actual production) is more than a year, there is an absolute limit on boosting production. The U.S. did,not start its emergency production soon enough. Fred Rentschler uses the industry's famous "rule of three" yardstick: from the moment all-out production begins, the existing rate can only be tripled in the first year. In the second year, the new rate can be seven times the original; not until the end of the third year are there no limits except manpower and materials.

The Goal. But the Government's goal is not all-out production. It is not primarily to build engines, but to expand capacity to build. The goal by 1953 is a national productive capacity of 50,000 planes and 216,000 jet engines a year. Thus, instead of concentrating on total production in fewer plants, the manufacturers must spread their skilled forces thin to bring the larger number of plants into limited production. They must have huge new research and development facilities to perfect their knowledge of the infant science of jets (United alone has spent $12 million on its turbine laboratory).

Soon, the big U.S. automakers will begin building United, Wright and other aircraft engines under license. Chrysler, for example, is building a plant near Detroit to make United's J-48, and Ford will make parts for the new J-57. In theory, the big gain in engine production will come then. But the crucial test is whether, by the time these plants come into production, suitable substitutes can be developed for the critical metals now desperately short. If they cannot, the engine program will fail because there is not enough nickel, columbium, etc. in sight now to build the engines scheduled in 1953.

Pratt & Whitney has already made big gains in solving the problem.lt has worked out high-alloy mixes which eliminate the use of columbium completely in the J-48. It has also reduced the use of other critical metals to a mere fraction of a pound per engine. Others have developed substitutes which permit existing supplies of the critical metals to be stretched 15 times farther.

But the production race is still far from won. And no airman thinks the U.S. has the lead it needs in the jet-engine race for air supremacy. But all airmen think it will have to get it--and keep it--to survive. Says Fred Rentschler: "There is no such thing as a second best air force. There is the best, or nothing."

* Also in Fred Rentschler's class ('09): Judge Harold Medina, Samuel (Captain from Castile) Shellabarger, Publisher Wilfred J. Funk and onetime Assistant Secretary of State Norman Armour.

* Two of the brothers did well elsewhere. Gordon was chairman of Manhattan's National City Bank at his death in 1948. George, now 58, runs the family plant and is chairman of Baldwin-Lima-Hamilton Corp.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.