Word: wasps
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Requiem. Sherman (Annapolis '17) became a naval aviator after World War I, was soon one of the Navy's best (he won a personal "E" for dive bombing and fighter gunnery). During World War II, as skipper of the aircraft carrier Wasp, he won a Navy Cross for his handling of the ship when she was torpedoed off Guadalcanal. Later, as Admiral Chester Nimitz' chief planner, he devised the Navy's brilliant leapfrog tactics in the fight across the Pacific...
...with a lot of weight-saving and power-boosting tricks. Seven months later, on Christmas Eve 1925, the engine was ready for the big test; it developed 425 h.p., well over the 400 expected, weighed 650 lbs., and sounded so angrily powerful that Mrs. Fred Rentschler called it a Wasp. The Navy promptly ordered...
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...
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...
...regards as the world's finest aviation engineer. Luke Hobbs, a Texas A. & M. graduate and World War I combat infantryman, already knew the fundamentals of jet-turbine work. He had built an experimental jet engine in 1940 but had shelved it to push his development of the Wasp Major. He brought himself up to date on jets by turning out Westinghouse-type engines. Then United bought the U.S. rights to Rolls-Royce's 5,000 lb. thrust Nene, the most advanced jet at that time. "With the Nene," says Rentschler, "we got our hands good and dirty...