"W" for Power

Airmen have long known that U.S.

engine builders had turned out aircraft power plants far more powerful than Wright Aeronautical Corp.'s 2200-h.p. Cyclone 18, the heftiest yet revealed. This week the U.S. Army Air Forces let one of its other builders reveal what one of the new and bigger engines is like.

General Motors' Allison division at Indianapolis announced that it was all ready to produce an engine in the 3,000-h.p. class. Unlike the air-cooled engine builders, who range their cylinders around a crankcase like the spokes of a wheel, Allison turns out liquid-cooled (Prestone) engines with cylinders in banks. The familiar Allison is a V-type, like the famed Rolls-Royce or the twelve-cylinder engine of a Packard motor car.

Allison went from "V" to "W" for more power. Its new engine has four banks of six cylinders each, is twice as big as the "V" engine which powers the P-38 Lightning, some P-51 Mustangs, the P39 Airacobra and some P-40 Warhawks.

Probable first use of the W Allisons: to power super-fighter planes now in design. One of its handiest features: most of its parts are interchangeable with Allisons now in service.

Still unannounced are Pratt & Whitney's super-powered air-cooled engine, at which the services coyly hinted more than a year ago, Wright's secret power plant which has been in the works since before Pearl Harbor.

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