Shooting the Sun

Only a month ago, Douglas Aircraft's tiny, rocket-powered Navy Skyrocket broke all altitude records by hurtling higher than 77,000 ft. at a speed greater than 1,000 m.p.h. (TIME, Sept. 10). But things never stand still in an aircraft factory. Next week Donald Douglas will trundle out a spectacular successor to the spectacular Skyrocket.

The new X-3 has twin jets initially in its small, almost wingless body, looks more like a guided missile than an aircraft. As a "flying laboratory" for the Air Force, it is designed to top 1,800 m.p.h. and climb as high as 200,000 ft. For the X-3 and Planemaker Douglas, it looked as if the ceiling was just about unlimited.

Yet the ceiling was close to zero six years ago when Douglas engineers first went to work on plans for the Skyrockets, the week of V-J day. War's end sent Douglas' $2 billion Government backlog tumbling to $60 million, shut down three of his war-built plants, cut his labor force from its peak of 167,000 to a mere 12,000. Douglas thought the future looked so grim that he considered branching out into other products, checked into the possibilities of making everything from mailboxes and cream separators to prefabricated houses. By 1947, he had gone $14.7 million into the red ($2,000,000 after tax credits), the first deficit in his company's history.

Out of the Clouds. After a couple of unsuccessful attempts at other products (aluminum skiffs, automobile fenders), Douglas decided to sink or swim with aviation, began his comeback with his DC-6, his bigger C124 Globemaster, which can carry everything from trucks and bulldozers to heavy artillery, and AD attack bombers for the Navy.

With rearmament, Douglas Aircraft began fleshing out to something like World War II proportions. It now has a whopping $1 billion backlog-- outranked only by Convair and Boeing--for fighters, transports and attack bombers. Douglas is now the only U.S. planebuilder making planes driven by every existing form of aircraft propulsion: piston engines, turboprop, jet and rocket. Employment has climbed to 45,000 and is expected to reach 100,000. Moreover, Douglas has plowed $1,000,000 into a Santa Monica, Calif. plant, where it is now building guided missiles for the Navy (the Sparrow) and the Army (the Nike).*

Into the Unknown. The transformation at Douglas Aircraft goes far deeper than quantity. The problem of building today's vastly more complicated planes has turned Douglas engineers, of necessity, into inventors who range far beyond aeronautics. For example, they had to turn out new type of refrigeration to cool the cockpit and entire fuselage of the supersonic X3; otherwise, the friction heat at 1,800 m.p.h. would kill the pilot and melt the metal. To whip the problem of windshield fogging at great speeds, they are helping devise a water-repellent coating which prevents fogging for long periods.

This week Don Douglas' inventors-of-necessity announced a new device which may well save hundreds of lives: a sea-rescue life raft which can be shot torpedo-like from a plane. On contact with the water, it inflates itself, starts its own outboard motor, can then be guided by radio beam from the mother plane to floating survivors. Now Douglas engineers are working on a brand-new project. Douglas Engineer Ed Heinemann, who thinks the aircraft bomb is the one piece of equipment which hasn't kept pace with aviation's modernization, is working on a new design. Says he: "Putting these potbellied bombs on the sleekest fighter is like using a Cadillac to haul coal."

* Last week Douglas faced a big threat to its production when 9,000 United Auto Workers struck the Long Beach, Calif. plant for a 10-c--an-hour cost-of-living bonus instead of the 6-c- Douglas had offered.

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