Typhoon

Last week in London Lord Beaverbrook made an announcement that many a U.S. airman had been waiting to hear. British designers, working under the drive of war, had finally produced an airplane that could do an honest 400-plus m.p.h. under service conditions. Its name: the Hawker Typhoon, lineal descendant of Britain's famed Hawker Hurricane. Beyond the fact that apparently the Luftwaffe has nothing like it, what interested many an airman most was Lord Beaverbrook's description of its engine. To drive the Ty phoon past the 400-m.p.h. mark the Napier engine company had turned out a 24-cylinder, liquid-cooled engine (the Napier Sabre) that turned up an incredible 2,350 h.p. for takeoff, an equally incredible 1,800 at the Typhoon's best operating altitude (secret).

Thus, liquid-cooled engines had topped their air-cooled rivals, at least for the time being, in horsepower output (most powerful U.S. engine, Wright's 2,200-h.p., air-cooled job). What answer would come from the laboratories of the U.S.'s big air-cooled manufacturers (Wright and Pratt & Whitney) no outsider yet knew.

Meanwhile the British, all-out in the manufacture of Typhoons, were also busy with another plane, the Tornado, powered by a 2,000-h.p. Rolls-Royce (the Vulture). Better bet of the two seemed to be the Napier, and last week British representatives in Washington were reputed to be urging OPM to get busy and manufacture Sabres on a big scale. Luckily for the U.S. Army Air Corps, one of its top-flight airmen has seen the Typhoon perform, has had a good look at its engine. British newsmen reported that Major General Henry H. Arnold seemed more impressed by it than by anything else he had seen in Britain.

Well might "Hap" Arnold be impressed, because the big end of the Air Corps's engine purchases for pursuit airplanes is in liquid-cooled power plants of half the Napier Sabre's power. For General Motors' Allisons the Army has laid out $159,500,000, and it has contracted for $62,448,000 of Rolls-Royce Merlins to be built by Packard. While waiting for General Arnold to report, Air Corpsmen could find comfort in another fact: whatever was done about liquid-cooled engine buying, it would soon be getting a lot more power in a new batch of pursuit planes. Last week Republic Aircraft Corp. put the finishing flicks to its new P-47, powered with a 2,000-h.p. Pratt & Whitney air-cooled engine. Republic designers declared the new P47 (to go into production in a new factory within a few weeks) would top 400 miles an hour, would have a fighting altitude of 40,000 ft. Apparently the Air Corps was convinced that the P47 was good enough, for it threw overboard its policy of buying mostly liquid-cooled pursuits. Before the ship ever flew (but after a lower-powered design had been tested) Republic had a $56,500,000 order, biggest pursuit contract the Air Corps ever signed.

While these things happened, Packard went ahead tooling for its Rolls-Royce contract, expected to go into production by September. From its plant at Indianapolis, Allison was in smooth production (25 a day). General Motors had just adopted a new process for making Allison crankshafts 20-30% stronger than before. Still under test was Allison's new engine that may still match Britain's superpowered, engines: a 24-cylinder power plant (built in a W, not an H like the Napier), designed to equal the Sabre's power.

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