"Within Two Years"

"Within Two Years "

"There was a man who built a house upon the sand. And the rains descended and the floods came and the winds blew and beat upon that house and it is still there, and will be till Hell freezes over; because the man that built it had brains enough to know what he was doing. Costs too much to build a house upon a rock."

Thus, with parables perverted, did William Bushnell Stout, designer and builder of Ford tri-motor planes, last week in Aviation magazine castigate the airplane industry for its lack of ingenuity and inventiveness. In the same tenor in the same magazine two years ago Designer Stout, long a gadfly of the industry, observed that no plane had been produced as efficient per horsepower as the original Wright kite-like biplane. Illustrating with cartoons from his own drawing board (see cut), he queried: ''What would you think if the designer of a ship put the propeller in front to blow all the water back over the hull ... of a bicycle manufacturer starting to build high wheeled bicycles . . . of Gar Wood if he put his motors out in the water. . . ."

No empty-handed carper, Gadfly Stout last year brought out a "Sky Car," a truncated, pusher-type two-seater, fitted purposely to suggest the oldtime Model '"T" Ford (TIME, April 13, 1931). It approached in form the plane which he foresees, a plane which will "stand on the ground horizontally instead of at a slant ... be reminiscent of a motor car or bus . . . have upholstery or trim so that one repeats some previous feeling of transportation security. . . ." If it is also foolproof, U. S. wives will say to U. S. husbands : "You can fly in that and I will go with you." And U. S. husbands will buy airplanes.

The Stout "SkyCar" does not yet fill the skies. No model of it was visible at last fortnight's national air show in Detroit. But Designer Stout hopes "to fix it so that a man can take a couple of lessons on Friday and fly his plane home on Monday." The commercial "plane that will support itself in the air, financially as well as mechanically," will be developed within two years. The private plane, he snorts, has been a "flop."

Yet Designer Stout feels that not from the big, rich companies, but from little fellows, handy with tools, tinkering in their own shops, will come the radical innovations that are imperative. Or. he adds, with a pat on the back of his employer: "It looks as though a certain motorcar man with youth and most certain brains might know so little about what the experts say, that he might show us all how."

As a youth bushy-haired, bespectacled Bill Stout was a great whittler, taught the boys in his father's pastorate in St. Paul to carve toys. His whittling permitted him on several occasions to navigate early financial straits when he was struggling with the development of the thick, interior-trussed wing, the "Bat Wing" monoplane, the first all-metal planes. A onetime journalist, he sold stock in the Stout Metal Airplane Co. (purchased by Ford Motor Co.) with the proposition: "I want to take $1,000 of your money to see if I can develop something in the aviation field. . . . You may never get it back but I guarantee you $1,000 worth of fun."

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