(See Cover]
"Donald Douglas [is] the cornerstone of American air power"
—Major Alexander P. de Seversky.
Donald Wills Douglas is a tall, good-looking, brown-eyed, brown-haired, brown-tweedy sort of man, who acts as if he doesn't really believe in the future of aviation. He dislikes flying, and flies as rarely as possible. Prophets of "the coming Air Age" bore him. Two examples of his attitude toward aviation's future:
On one of his grudging plane trips, he landed at air-minded Oklahoma City. Up rushed a reporter. He wanted Planemaker Douglas' opinion of Oklahoma City's project: a $25,000,000 airport. Said Douglas: "If you really want to know, I think you're crazy."
Although Douglas Aircraft is his own one-man show, he now owns less than 1% of 600,000 outstanding shares—compared to the 200,000 shares he was given when the present company was incorporated in 1928. No one knows just why he dumped his stock. But some believe that at one time he actually lost faith in the potentialities of aviation.
This attitude has roots in the strange, cool personality of Donald Douglas—and illustrates exactly the present plight of the airplane industry, which is crowding the skies of the world with warplanes, and dreads the day when it must convert to making a dribble of peace planes.
Douglas himself, at 51 president of the biggest aircraft company in the world, has a very simple postwar plan. Last week he stated it: "You shut the damn shop up."
Precision Instrument. Donald Douglas thinks this way partly because he is a hardheaded manufacturer, with no room in his head for nonsense—or for dreams—but mainly because he is an engineer, with a passion for airplanes as things embodying engineering designs, and a passion for precision. Dreams may be vivid but blueprints are precise.
Douglas is a precision instrument himself, a man of almost fantastically unvarying habit, and of a simple efficiency that is metronomic in its ticktock exactitude.
Last year he made one-sixth (by weight) of all the airplanes made in the U.S. This is how he does it:
In his $150,000 white-brick, Spanish-style home near Santa Monica he wakes every morning at exactly 7:30 a.m. He has no alarm clock. Beside his bed, as poets have paper & pencil on which to catch a night thought, he has an adding machine on which he can punch out his own mathematical visions. At 8 o'clock he has his invariable breakfast of one egg, one piece of white toast, one cup of black coffee. Shortly before 9, he walks to his four-car garage, steps into his 1941 black Lincoln Zephyr, swings around a fishpond in his front yard and out through wrought-iron gates. In ten minutes, he drives to his Santa Monica factory. He steps from his car, walks an exact 24 steps into his walnut-paneled private office, sits down behind his carved walnut desk covered with his own pattern of letters, engineering reports, and half a dozen straight-stemmed pipes. On the front of the desk is the Douglas coat of arms.* On it is inscribed his Scottish forebears' motto: Jamaiz arrière (never behind).