Wooden Ships

From the bowels of a big steel cylinder the men pulled a delicately curved, glass-smooth part of an airplane wing. Bushy-browed, six-foot-six John Carlton Ward Jr. stood by with a father's mixture of modesty, pride and excitement.

Carl Ward, president of Fairchild Engine & Airplane Corp., had good reason for his feelings. One of the great and immediate U.S. aviation needs of 1942 is skilled bomber crews. Without bomber crews there can be no second front, no 1942 or early-1943 offensive. And the plane Carl Ward saw in the making was the answer--a bomber-crew trainer that can be produced at flood speed. More, it is an allwood plane, draining off no great quantities of vital materials.

The plane represented a personal victory. Ward and associates in the wood airplane business had long contended that veneers stuck together with plastic glues could be fashioned into flying machines as big as houses, if necessary. In wooden-wing planes the cautious Army had contented itself with fleets of Ward's little primary trainers. Now the Army has asked Fairchild Engine & Airplane Corp. to make big, wood-veneer, twin-engine planes for bomber-crew training--as fast, as maneuverable as many twin-engine bombers on the war fronts. They will be complete, with bombs in their belly bays and guns at gun stations. Plastic-and-wood planes had come of age.

Making It Stick. Wood veneer (plywood) planes are 25 years old. The first rickety-looking planes were flown in World War I--but mould and temperature changes ate away the casein (milk base) glues which held their veneers together. Not until the plastics industry evolved a phenolic resin glue with a permanent grip were strong wood airplanes possible.

The laboratory-born resins, chief constituent of the new plastic glues, set like concrete, are impervious to weather or bacterial attack. A piece of plastic plywood stuck into the muck of Florida's everglades by the Department of Agriculture was pulled out two years later in perfect condition.

To fashion glued-wood planes at its Maryland factory, where the aircraft industry's first women guards patrol the production lines, Fairchild puts the almost paper-thin veneers under heat and pressure in steel cylinders. Baked and pressed into shape, they are free of the rivet-bumps on aluminum alloy planes, do not wrinkle, as metal does, under the impact of gusts.

Fairchild's process, patented by a subsidiary, Duramold Aircraft Corp., does not greatly differ from others. Boeing Aircraft Co. is also making wood bomber-crew trainers; its planes contain more fabric.

To pertinacious Carl Ward of Fairchild, the twin-engine trainer is only a starter. "We can build the biggest damn airplanes out of wood," said he, "that anyone ever thought of."

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