Word: vought
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...even then, quarreled with his directors because they wanted to pay dividends instead of plowing money into engines. He resigned and decided to go into competition with Wright by building an air-cooled engine far more powerful than the 200 h.p. of Wright's. An old friend, Chance Vought, the brilliant pioneer plane designer, told Rentschler he could build a new naval plane that would win them contracts if Rentschler could provide a 400-h.p. engine weighing no more than...
Empire Building. In Chance Vought's first Corsair observation-fighter, and in William E. Boeing's fighters, the engine proved itself so conclusively that the Navy almost entirely abandoned liquid-cooled engines, and the Army also bustled to get Wasp-powered planes. Bill Boeing, quick to grasp what the Wasp would do to commercial air transport costs, grabbed the first Chicago-San Francisco airmail contract by underbidding everybody else by nearly half. To everybody's amazement, he made money doing it, and gave commercial flying a tremendous boost. Explained Boeing: "We would rather carry more mail than...
Fred Rentschler's dreams soon ranged far beyond engines to a great air combine. He, Bill Boeing and Chance Vought decided to merge their plane and airline companies into United Aircraft & Transport Corp., rounded it out by adding propellers (Hamilton Propeller Co. and Standard Steel Propeller) and large amphibians (Sikorskys). When National Air Transport, holding the Chicago-New York mail route, balked at merging with them, Rentschler said imperiously: "The air between the coasts is not big enough to be divided." He bought up National's stock in the market until he had a controlling interest; its bosses...
Flying Windmill. The upshot of the Black investigation was the Air Mail Act of 1934, which divorced aircraft builders from airlines. Boeing and United Airlines went their separate ways while Rentschler held Pratt & Whitney, Vought-Sikorsky and Hamilton Standard together in truncated United Aircraft. Trouble of a different sort now struck Pratt & Whitney. By 1937 it had lost the lead it once had over Wright Aeronautical, largely because it spread its engineering talents trying to develop nine different engines, while Wright concentrated on its famed Cyclone, grabbed much of the transport and military market...
Doggedly, Pratt & Whitney went back to improving the Wasp, got back into the running. Furthermore, Rentschler had not lost his prophetic eye. He decided to stop making flying boats in his Vought-Sikorsky division (they were competing with his planemaking engine customers), and decided to start pouring millions into a brand-new type of aircraft, the helicopter. In 1940, Igor Sikorsky made the first helicopter flight in the U.S., and opened up another field of air transport. But soon, the helicopter, and most other experimental projects at United, were swept into the background. World War II came...