Slipstream: the autobiography of an air craftsman

It was a day in March of 1924 when I first stepped across the threshold of the anteroom to the office of Rear Adm. William Adger Moffett, Chief of the new Bureau of Aeronautics...

Down on the second deck of the third wing, I looked through the doorway into a long room that housed my new billet, the Engine Section. Three flat-topped desks stood deployed as...

Next morning we resumed my indoctrination, as we did on subsequent mornings. Leighton began by expounding the advantages of air-cooled over liquid-cooled engines, especially fro...

By the time the Japanese cherry blossoms had come and gone around the Tidal Basin, my wife and I had settled in our apartment at 2301 Connecticut Avenue, and joined the social w...

The summer of 1925, like most summers in the nation’s capital, was almost unbearably hot and sultry. Even after one of those violent electrical storms had whirled up the Potomac...

The “Affair Fleet,” as the celebrated episode of the Consolidated training plane came to be called in BUAERO, not only marked the advancement of the Engine Section from the limi...

Billy Mitchell, handsome, dynamic, fast on the draw, and breathing the spirit of the offensive, personified the knight of the air of World War I. An outstanding pilot, a bold ho...

The Morrow Board policy, for all its wisdom, might have lapsed easily into innocuous desuetude save for the dynamic character of William A. Moffett. Whereas the Army Air Service...

Rear Adm. F. Brooks Upham, Commandant of the Naval Air Station, Pensacola, reached across his flat-topped desk for my formal orders. Behind him through the window, the sun glint...

Back in Washington, the admiral welcomed me with a grin and promptly assigned me a new job as Chief of the Airplane Design Section. This was a naval constructor’s stronghold, an...

Among the aviation phenomena of the late 1920’s was the outbreak of glorified stunt flying. Barnstormers and wing walkers of the earlier half of the decade now began vying with...

As the summer of 1927 came to a close, I began to sense that my own work in BUAERO was coming to its end. The fact was crystallized for me one evening when Fred Rentschler, Chan...

When, next morning, I buckled on my dress sword and reported at the Naval Air Station, I found Admiral Reeves had gone to Denver to make a speech at the Navy Day celebration the...

When later the Commander in Chief, Adm. Louis R. de Steiguer, once my captain on the _Old Ark_, finally released his statement of the fleet problem, the attention of all hands w...

The return of FLEET AIR to San Diego coincided with the commencement of the summer concentration period of 1928, and now with the two big carriers _Lexington_ and _Saratoga_ anc...

When the commander in chief released the preliminary statement of the 1929 fleet problem, we in COMAIRONS staff wore broad smiles of satisfaction. For while the exercises contem...

Up until this moment, everything done had been in rehearsal. Now, with the possibility of enemy contact at any instant, the flag bridge took on a new atmosphere of high tension....

Admiral Moffett did not miss the opportunity, afforded him by the _Saratoga’s_ performance, to press for his reappointment as Chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics. He countered fr...

When, shortly after the first of January, 1930, Tom Hamilton took me up to Milwaukee to look over the Hamilton Aero plant there, the stock market crash had already enveloped the...

On the ninth floor of the New York Central Building, at 230 Park Avenue in the city of New York, Frederick B. Rentschler, president of the United Aircraft and Transport Corporat...

One of the important considerations that had influenced my decision to resign from the Navy had been my desire to work on constructive tasks with men whose competence I had admi...

During the protracted period when Hamilton-Standard, Sikorsky, and Chance Vought found the going rough as they endeavored to create new products that could be sold to a reluctan...

In the spring of 1938, Tom Hamilton, our United Aircraft representative in Europe, came home on one of his periodic visits, to bring himself up to date on new products and to le...

Don Brown, our president, who had been in ill health for some time, was now unable to give personal attention to the multitude of matters, and it fell to me to try to get some c...

As I backed my convertible out of the garage, and eased it from the driveway onto Albany Avenue, I speculated as to what might have brought Secretary Morgenthau to Hartford in t...

Don Brown’s death left a big gap in our ranks with no file closers available to fill it. United Aircraft, once the only company in the business with real depth to its management...

The selection of Bill Knudsen to head up the agency charged with coordinating war production was a happy one. Just as George Mead knew his aircraft, so did Bill Knudsen know his...

The German attack on Russia immediately converted a lot of former pacifists into bloodthirsty warmongers. With that everybody began trying to get into the act. We, who had once...

In the anteroom to the office of the Secretary of the Navy, Fred Rentschler and I waited our turn. A stream of visitors, mostly naval officers of high rank, swept in and out of...

Having developed a certain gun shyness before such Congressional inquiries as the Nye inquisition and the air-mail investigation conducted by Senator Hugo Black, now Mr. Justice...

The Finletter Board, convened by the President under date of July 18, 1947, held extensive hearings and on December 30, 1947, submitted its report, “Survival in the Air Age.” Li...

Early in 1949 the Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee of the Senate, under the chairmanship of Senator Edwin C. Johnson of Colorado, began inquiring into the ills of the a...