Word: grummans
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Despite this offhand management Grumman is adept at finding his way through the jungles of governmental red tape. What he cannot cut, he blandly ignores. When the Army tried to get rumman to camouflage his plants, he objected, said it was unnecessary and would interfere with production. When the Army insisted, Grumman said: "From the-air, we find the plant by flying over to Mitchel Field and taking our directions from the runways there. Maybe you ought to camouflage them first." The Army quit bothering him. The Navy lets Grumman do things much as he wants, sure they will...
...been sent to Massachusetts Institute of Technology for training in aeronautics. When he was discharged, he was expert enough to get the job of general manager of the Loening Aeronautical Engineering Corp. at $4,200 a year. In 1929, the flurry of plane company mergers made Grumman's job a poor one. Jake Swirbul, who was works manager at Loening, and Bill Schwendler, just getting started as a designer, were in the same boat. The trio decided to start their own company to repair planes. Grumman plunked $16,875 into the new company, Swirbul $8,125, and Schwendler...
Thanks to the recklessness of sportsmen pilots, the Grumman plane repair shop did a brisk business even in 1930. The partners bought one plane which had dived into a lake until only its tail was visible, for $450. They fixed it up and sold it for $20,000. They also made aluminum trailers, and finally landed their first Navy contract for two amphibian floats...
...When Grumman built these floats, in an unconventional design, the Navy said they were too light, would collapse. Roy & Jake staked their lives on their design. They climbed into a Navy plane behind a Navy pilot, were catapulted successfully from a battleship. The Navy ordered six more floats, and then gave Grumman a contract for an experimental fighting plane. This turned out to be the first Navy fighter in the world with retractable landing wheels, and it dazzled the Navy with a speed of 206 m.p.h. Grumman landed its first big Navy order for 27 fighters, worth...
Carriage Trade. But Grumman could not live on Navy orders alone. He began to build de luxe amphibians for sportsmen and corporations to hustle bigwigs around the country.* By 1937, Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corp. had so much business on the books it almost went broke. The company had run out of working capital, and owed the banks $450,000 (mainly because it had lost $100,000 on an amphibian-plane contract). To raise cash, Grumman got ready to float his first public stock issue. Then the market crashed. Wall Street's famed Bernard E. ("Sell 'em Ben") Smith...