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But Pratt & Whitney engines have been flying high ever since. The company delivered its first five Wasps to the Navy in December 1926, was soon ready with an even more powerful engine—the 525-h.p. "Hornet." By January 1928, when Lieut. Commander Marc Mitscher made the first landing on the flight deck of the new U.S.S. Saratoga, Pratt & Whitney was ready to supply engines for 402 of the 475 fighters, bombers, and torpedo planes which the Navy wanted for the big carrier .and her sistership, the Lexington. As his business boomed, Rentschler brought Pratt & Whitney, airframe-maker Chance Vought, the Hamilton Standard Propeller Co. and Sikorsky Aircraft into the combine which forms today's United Aircraft. But the heart of the company remained in the Pratt & Whitney engine division, with its pounding concern for watchwork precision. New factory hands were cautioned: "Handle the parts of an aircraft engine as if they were eggs—only more carefully."
Into History. By such careful handling, Fred Rentschler wove Pratt & Whitney into the fabric of U.S. aviation history. In 1930, U.S. Navy Lieut. Apollo
Soucek broke the world's altitude record by flying 43,166 ft. over Washington, D.C. in a Wasp-powered, open-cockpit Apache biplane. Two years later, a Wasp drove U.S. Major Jimmy Doolittle's stubby GeeBee to a ago-m.p.h. victory in Cleveland's Thompson Trophy Race. And when Amelia Earhart flew solo across the Atlantic, she cabled to Pratt & Whitney: "I'd do it again with a Wasp."
From each pioneer flight, Pratt & Whitney translated new knowledge into increased power. By the time World War II broke, the Wasp was buzzing at 2,000 h.p.; Pratt & Whitney became the core of U.S. aircraft production. United's Rentschler-trained President H. M. ("Jack") Horner added two million feet to the Hartford plant, built a new factory in Missouri, licensed Pratt & Whitney designs to the Ford Motor Co. No less than 45 Army & Navy aircraft types were powered by Pratt & Whitney engines during the war, including such famous fighters as Republic's Thunderbolt, the Vought Corsair, the Grumman Hellcat. Consolidated's B-24 Liberators, the Martin B-26 and the workhorse C-47 Douglas transport all had Pratt & Whitney engines.
Blue Fire. At war's end, the biggest engine in P. & W.'s line had been jumped to 3,500 h.p. It was earmarked for the Convair B-36, was installed in Boeing's B-50, first airplane to fly nonstop around the world, and in the commercial Boeing Stratocruiser. Pratt & Whitney had put up the power for 75% of all the world's commercial airlines now flying. But Pratt & Whitney's enforced World War II concentration on piston engines robbed it of five years' work on jet propulsion. To make up for lost time, Rentschler got the license to manufacture the British Nene jet engine in 1947, soon developed it into the J42 power plant for the Grumman Panther now fighting in Korea and into the still more powerful J-48.