AVIATION Mr. Horsepower
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Trundled out of Pratt & Whitney's experimental hangar at East Hartford, Conn. one day last week, the huge, red-tailed bomber looked like any other B-50. Actually, it was like no other plane in the world. The earth shook as Test Pilot Gil Haven revved up the plane's four Wasp Major engines, each one as powerful (3,500 h.p.) as a diesel locomotive. Then he sent the big silver plane thundering down Rentschler field, pulled it up into the air.
Quickly the plane climbed to more than 20,000 ft. There Pilot Haven opened the plane's bomb bay and lowered into the airstream a shining mass of metal. It hung 5 ft. below the plane, like a stubby cigar. Like a cigar, it began to bum at the tip, and it let out a whine like the wail of 10,000 banshees.
Pilot Haven idled his four piston engines, but the B-50, instead of slowing up, flew even faster, on nothing but the power of the whining metal cigar. The bomber's air-speed indicator edged up to 370 m.p.h. Over Bangor, Me., an F-86 jet fighter, part of the air-raid interceptor defense, streaked up through the clouds, swept in close to investigate the B-50's strange, roaring belly-pod.
The pod was Pratt & Whitney's biggest, newest jet engine, the J-57, and Pilot Haven was putting it through a flying test. When he landed again at Rentschler field he gave a laconic report: "That monster's got a lot of pizzazz."
Frederick Brant Rentschler, boss of Pratt & Whitney and its parent United Aircraft Corp., thinks the J57 has more pizzazz than any other engine. Says he flatly: "It is more powerful than any jet engine ever flown." Moreover, he thinks the J57 has gone a long way to overcome a great handicap of jets, their enormous fuel consumption. United's engineers say that it uses less fuel than anybody else has even promised for an engine of its size.
The Key to Supremacy. The engine is of enormous importance to the U.S. in the global race to dominate the skies. As Rentschler and every other airman knows: "The engine is the key to air supremacy." To help the U.S. gain air supremacy, the armed forces are already rushing plans for production of new fighters and big intercontinental bombers—Boeing's giant B-52 and a sweptback-wing version of Convair's B-36—to use the new jet's fuel economy and power.