More Horses, More Horsing

Nearly all the warplane engines made in the U. S. are produced by two companies: Curtiss-Wright and United Aircraft's Pratt & Whitney division. Last week both companies put out promising engine news. Curtiss-Wright's President Guy Warner Vaughan mounted a tractor-plow, broke ground for a huge new factory at Lockland (Hamilton County), Ohio. Pratt & Whitney's co-founder and chairman, Frederick Brant Rentschler, opened two additions to his factory at East Hartford, Conn., announced that still more space will be ready next spring.

Between them, Messrs. Vaughan and Rentschler now deliver some 1,500 engines (about 2,000,000 h.p.) a month. Thanks largely to orders placed by France and Great Britain last year, this total represents a tremendous advance (Pratt & Whitney, for example, was turning out only 100,000 h.p. a month in early 1939). New shops to be completed early next year will up the joint capacity of Curtiss-Wright and Pratt & Whitney to a phenomenal 4,000 engines a month. Ford, Packard, Studebaker, other automakers should begin to produce aircraft engines late in 1941.

All in all, U. S. engine production looked better last week than many another phase of U. S. defense. But behind the actuality and promise of more horse power was still a lot of inefficient, unnecessary horsing around. Biggest bottleneck for engine makers was not the supply of machine tools, or skilled workers, or raw materials. It was the military bureaucracy in Washington.

Theory since last month has been that the Army buys all Curtiss-Wright engines, the Navy all Pratt & Whitney engines (for both services). This procedure, supposed to simplify procurement and cut out much red tape and duplication, has helped to do both. But the Army and the Navy are still unable to agree on uniform engines of the same types, still demand their own peculiar furbelows. Result: continued lost motion, wastage, delay.

Neither of the big engine companies has yet had a chance to start and finish production on an order without interruptions from Washington. Service technicians and desk mechanics continually cook up new gadgets, halt production to get their pet changes made (one company had to make as many as 90 changes on a single engine in a single month). Many such changes make sense. A few are necessary. All delay production. Manufacturers understand that some mid-production alterations in both engines and planes are required. What grinds their gears is that responsible officers in the Army Air Corps and the Navy's Bureau of Aeronautics are so ostrich-blind as to insist that they now have standardization--thus postponing real standardization.

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