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Man with a Mission. Few men ever approached aviation with more devotion to that job. Fred Rentschler thinks, talks, breathes and dreams engines. Like an engine himself, his tall (6 ft. 2), lithe-muscled figure is as straight as a master rod, his face, which looks younger than his 63 years, as emotionless as a cylinder head. Like an engine, he carries a normal workload easily and can turn on extra power when needed. A shy man, he seems to shrink from human contact, uses memos to notify his top men of raises. Even United Aircraft's President H. M. ("Jack") Horner, Rentschler's close aid for 23 years, still calls him "Mr. Rentschler."
But in his machine-made ivory tower,
Fred Rentschler is a farsighted, practical dreamer. "Every five or ten years," he says, "there comes an opportunity for a complete reversal in aviation power plants. That is the sword always hanging over our heads."
Lest he miss opportunity, Rentschler scans five newspapers daily, reads aviation magazines and technical papers tirelessly, greets friends by saying: "What do you know?" They have long since learned that this means: "Do you know any new developments affecting my business?" When any conversation strays far from engines Rentschler's eyes glaze over, and he stops listening. Wherever his men travel, he expects them to send him constant memos on anything they hear. If one hears an admiral say, "The Navy needs more engine power," Rentschler wants the dope by wire.
Though he runs all United Aircraft-whose other divisions are Chance Vought fighters, Hamilton Standard propellers and Sikorsky helicopters—Pratt & Whitney is his first home and he roosts there. He picks able younger men and gives them their head—up to a point. But on big decisions, he runs a one-man show; the committee-governments that run many big corporations merely baffle him. Says he: "I don't see how a soviet can run a company." He may stay at his nine-room, Norman-style house, high on a hill above Hartford, for days, brooding over a problem, then stop at the office some morning and say: "This is it." Then things move.
Tight-Rope Business. A fierce individualist, Rentschler fights shy of Government-financed expansion, is currently spending $40 million on expansion from United's own funds. "There's a lot of difference if you're using your own money or playing with someone else's," he says. "The one thing that would destroy our country's leadership in the air would be for Government to take a dominant part. I've seen that happen in other countries. France dominated the air in the First World War . . . then the government stepped in and we've never heard from France again." Like all heads of plane companies, he works closely with the U.S. Government, but he wants to be free to do things his own way.