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United did the job swiftly because, for years, it had turned over the manufacture of almost half of its parts to outside suppliers. Thus, it could put much of the burden on them, did not have to spread its own staff too thin. United expanded its own engine-making twelve times, turned out 137,436 engines in all. It expanded its propeller-making ten times, boosted its plane-making from 72 to a wartime peak of 2,677 a year. Its production was so important that the Government arbitrarily ruled it out of experimenting with jets; it did not want anything to interfere with engine & plane output. Instead, the Government got the plans of some British jets, turned them over to General Electric and Westinghouse for further development. Result: in the early postwar years, United again was the unquestioned leader in piston engines, but it was years behind in jets.
Dirty Hands. When United was at last free to turn to jets, the job was turned over to Leonard S. ("Luke") Hobbs, whom Rentschler regards as the world's finest aviation engineer. Luke Hobbs, a Texas A. & M. graduate and World War I combat infantryman, already knew the fundamentals of jet-turbine work. He had built an experimental jet engine in 1940 but had shelved it to push his development of the Wasp Major. He brought himself up to date on jets by turning out Westinghouse-type engines. Then United bought the U.S. rights to Rolls-Royce's 5,000 lb. thrust Nene, the most advanced jet at that time. "With the Nene," says Rentschler, "we got our hands good and dirty in jets." Then Pratt & Whitney, working with Rolls-Royce, developed a much more powerful jet, the J-48. Boss Engineer Luke Hobbs was also blueprinting the designs for a different type. Last year his men finished the axial-flow T-34 Turbo-Wasp, an intermediate jet type which drives a propeller. Hobbs pushed on to the pure-jet J-57, last January had the first model in a test block. As its blast shook the concrete floor of the test cell, Jack Homer said: "Well, I think we have overshot the field." Solemnly, an old Pratt & Whitney hand interposed: "We may have trouble with the landing gear." Asked the puzzled Horner: "What landing gear?" "I mean," said the Old Hand, "when we let the building back down."
Road to the Top. For all his one-man rule, Fred Rentschler has picked a team which can carry on without him. "Anybody who can run Pratt & Whitney," he says, "can run United." Jack Horner, 47, moved from Pratt & Whitney to United's presidency in 1943. William Gwinn, 43, who came to Pratt & Whitney at 19 as a kid "crazy about aviation," now bosses Pratt & Whitney. (Of Rentschler's original team, he alone is active in the company.) Though United is primarily an engine-builder (more than two-thirds of its dollar sales), its other divisions are fast expanding:
¶SIKORSKY in ten years has mushroomed from a small experimental shop, working on a handmade product, to a 365,000-sq. ft. plant employing 2,000 people. Its S-51 four-place helicopter has so proved itself in Korea (where it has evacuated 2,993 wounded men) that it now has more than $100 million in military orders. Sikorsky is now concentrating on its bigger (ten-place) S-55, and a secret ship-based helicopter believed to be the biggest ever built.