AIR: Builder of Big Ships

AIR Builder of Big Ships

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The big Consolidated boat was at 18,000 feet over the Atlantic and the oxygen was sobbing comfortably in the crew’s masks. Then it happened. Somehow the automatic pilot jammed. With its right aileron all the way down, the 15-ton Catalina went into a violent left turn, headed for the sea. In the dizzy spiral dive the aileron carried away, took part of the tip of the wing with it. Then the left aileron ripped off. An operator in the United Kingdom heard the frenetic chirp from the Catalina’s radio: “Both ailerons gone.”

He heard no more, expected never to hear. One new Catalina was charged off as “lost on ferry.” Six hours later the boat, with its truncated wing raffish as an empty tooth socket, turned up at a United Kingdom seaport, lurched to a landing. Somehow its pilots had straightened it out, just off the water, flown it in—with no banking controls. It was another incredible episode in the saga of the Catalina, which the U.S. Navy calls the PBY.

One man who was not amazed by this performance was the Catalina’s builder, big, blue-eyed Major Reuben Hollis Fleet, chief executive and chief owner of Consolidated Aircraft Corp. Like all oldtimers in Consolidated’s tightly knit hierarchy, he has long since ceased to be surprised at any feat a Cat performs. But he has not lost his capacity for pride. It has plenty to feed on in the Cat’s nest in a sunlit stretch between crowded Pacific Highway and San Diego (Calif.) Bay.

For there, to “Rube” Fleet’s eye (and to the eye of many a layman), is the most dramatic visual proof to be found in the U.S. that the tools to beat Adolf Hitler, no longer just “on order,” are at work. In the yard, under the sun by day, under floodlights at night (in San Diego climate hangars are unnecessary), sits a score of ships getting their last touches. And they are not little ships. They are whoppers, all of them. Each represents thousands of hours of labor, each is a mighty ship of war. In the three big final assembly buildings, they come off the lines at a rate (military secret) of so many a day; no longer, as big bomber production was once appraised, at so many a month.

Saga. What first catches the layman’s eye in the Cat’s yard is not the wide-winged PBYs with their tapered tails, but the graceful, powerful forms, of immense four-motored bombers resting on tricycle landing gears. These are the newest brothers of the Cat: the B-24s. The British call them Liberators. These big bombers are 4,000 pounds bigger than Boeing’s famed Flying Fortresses. The B-24 has already followed the Cat into the war in Europe.

Across the yard is ranked another group of giants, massive of hull, with long, tapering, twin-ruddered tails. These are Consolidated’s big boats—PB2Ys, four-en-gined big brothers of the two-engined PBYs. Like everything else Rube Fleet turns out, they are built to Fleet’s most important hallmark: long range. These giants, designed for naval patrol, can travel 5,200 miles—possibly more—on a single load of gas. They can cruise at 170 m.p.h. on 45% of the power of their four Pratt & Whitney 1,200-h.p. engines.

In the swarm of workmen in the buildings, in the yard, up the road at the largest machine shop west of the Mississippi, Rube Fleet sees enough to make an ordinary man’s eyes pop ten times a day. Consolidated employs better than 30,000 workers. Six years ago, when Fleet settled down in San Diego, he approved a payroll that had only 311 names. A year ago. when he employed 9,000, he still personally checked the payroll and passed on every request for a raise. But not now. With new employes taken on at the rate of 1,000 a week, and with a payroll that will total 40,000 at year’s end, “The Major” has had to let go some of his beloved details.

Today, as Rube Fleet works his 15-to-18-hour day, driving, berating, wheedling for speed, more speed, the saga of Consolidated craft grows & grows. It was a PBY that found the Bismarck, called up the warships for her destruction. A B-24 crossed the Atlantic from Newfoundland in the record time of seven hours, 30 minutes. This week the Air Forces’ Major Alva Harvey is back in the U.S. after a routine flight around the world in a B24. From the shores of the British Isles (and probably in the Mediterranean), patrols of 24 hours and more by Consolidated boats have become commonplaces, as they have long been in the U.S. Navy.

In Reuben Fleet’s office, overlooking his private patio, a map hangs on the wall. It is labeled, with appropriately concise grandeur: The World. To Fleet’s pilots, the world is all cross-country territory, and crossing it is all in the day’s work.

Flight Operations. Consolidated’s B-24s are now picked up at the factory by pilots of the Army’s Ferrying Command for delivery to Air Forces commands or to the British. But the boats are delivered by Consolidated’s own Flight Operations. Flying boss of F.O. is a huge-boned, broad-faced airman named Russ Rogers, who in 1939 was flying a PBY (the Cuba) for Standard Oil Heir Richard Archbold in New Guinea when Rube Fleet decided to set up his own delivery service. Frank Learman, traffic manager of the new F.O., got him on the radio telephone, told him he was wanted.

“Hell, Frank,” griped Rogers, “I’ve got to fly across Australia and the Indian Ocean and Africa and the Atlantic Ocean and the United States—but I’ll be there.”

In that flight the Cuba made a 3,300-mile hop across the South Atlantic, added on an 800-mile detour around bad weather and landed with gas in its tanks.

Today F.O. flies its boats non-stop from San Diego to Ottawa, and what is more, sets them down on the river with enough gas still in the tanks to swing south and reach Miami. F.O. ferries red-tailed PBYs across the Pacific to the Dutch in The Netherlands East Indies, crosses Pan Am’s route to Pearl Harbor with U.S. deliveries.

Proudest boast of Consolidated’s F.O. is that it has never lost a ship in delivery. In large part, that record is due to its crack personnel, picked by Learman and Rogers. But the prime reason, as F.O. and all Consolidated knows, is that they are working for a perfectionist, and that with him it is only performance that counts. Rube Fleet’s favorite aphorism is painted on the outside of the factory wall, in letters twelve feet high: NOTHING SHORT OF RIGHT IS RIGHT.

The Major. For every military Aircraft builder, times have changed with the war. The whales of yesterday are the minnows of today. But in all the orderly uproar of controlled growth, 54-year-old Rube Fleet is little changed from the boy he was when he came out of Culver Military Academy in 1906. The years have rounded the angles of his bony, six-foot frame, thinned his hair, put spectacles on his massive, dominating nose, ruled deeper the purposeful line of his mouth. He is careful now about the harmony of his ties and shirts, has taken to buying things, as rich men will, such as a house in Hollywood, which he seldom visits. But these are externals, an outlet to a world that intrigues him but has affected him little.

Earnest, tin-voiced, egocentric, Rube Fleet has a world of his own, and in that world Rube Fleet is king. What other people think, what other people do, is simply a backdrop against which he stages his vastly complicated show. He would close that show down in a minute if it did not please him. Said he in a recent speech (at a luncheon in honor of OPM’s Sidney Hillman): “If I thought I were heading a company whose sole purpose was to manufacture instruments of destruction to kill my fellow men, I would quit tomorrow. But I will not quit because I know that, first, it is my duty to stick by my country; and second, the airplane is an instrumentality for building future peace. . . . Since aviation is the only means of guarding our safety later on, augmented by a navy and by foot soldiers, we ought to get at it good and hard and get more big planes out.”

In the company magazine, Rube Fleet lists his son Dave (his assistant) as “of American descent.” He is proud of the fact that his father traveled to Washington on the Oregon trail, that they lost their money and that he himself owned no shoes from the time he was six until he was 13 (when he won a pair in a school children’s advertising contest).

But he did get to expensive Culver (where he made $1,680 running the student paper). After graduation he went back to Montesano, Wash., set up in the lumber-real-estate business and made money. He also began influencing people. Shortly he was an officer in the National Guard, president of the local Chamber of Commerce, the youngest member of the State House of Representatives. Then Woodrow Wilson (whom he admired as little as he admires Franklin Roosevelt) was reelected. Rube Fleet saw the inevitable—war—made a characteristically abrupt decision.

He chucked business, joined the Army, became the 74th man to qualify for his wings in the young Army air service. The Army had got a harddriving, smart officer. Rube Fleet, soon a major, ran the Army’s first Washington-New York airmail service (1918), was head-over-heels in training airmen. After the war he went to the Army’s research center at McCook Field (Dayton, Ohio) to help design a training plane and to straighten out the Army’s tangled relations with manufacturers. He was the man to do both. He had made many friends, like “Hap” Arnold, now Major General in command of the Air Forces, and Major General Herbert Dargue, of the First Air Force, under whom he had trained.

When Rube Fleet resigned in 1923, the Army was sorry to see him go. He went to work for Gallaudet Corp. (airplanes) as vice president and general manager, saw it fold up, with his active assistance, because it lacked the breath of life. Then he organized Consolidated, and settled down in Buffalo. He had a trick of picking good men. One of them was Isaac M. Laddon, onetime Army aircraft engineer who is now vice president of Consolidated and the design genius who turns out Consolidated planes. Another was Larry Bell, now head of Bell Aircraft Corp. When Fleet decided to move to San Diego in 1935, Larry Bell organized his own company and stayed on at the old stand (where he now produces Airacobra fighters). It is characteristic of Fleet that he has never quite forgiven Bell for this “act of disloyalty.”

At Buffalo, after many a tiff with other comers in the devil-take-the-hindmost new industry, Fleet got his start. He turned out a good trainer (the PT-1), a crack flying boat. When he lost a Navy order (outbid by Martin), he helped organize the New York, Rio & Buenos Aires Airline (NYRBA) to use as a market for his flying boats, commercially called Commodores. (He sold the line later to Pan Am, and won himself a reputation in Wall Street.)

By the time he had moved to California, after striking a hard bargain with San Diego for land and facilities, his PBYs were making history in the Navy, and Consolidated was beginning to fatten. Today, with its $750,000,000 backlog, for all its mighty rushing river of production, Consolidated’s San Diego plant is not enough. A factory is being built at Fort Worth, Tex. to turn out more B-24s, under Consolidated management; another at Tulsa, Okla., to be operated by Douglas Aircraft Co.

Through all this humming anthill strides the well-tailored figure of the owner-manager (27% of Consolidated’s stock), imposing the Fleet pattern on men and things. Rube Fleet does not expect other people to know as much as he knows, but he expects them to know the same kind of thing. Because he has a prodigious memory for figures, he thinks his executives ought to know the capabilities of the plant’s fire-fighting apparatus, the floor space of their offices, the date of many an unimportant happening in the past.

At the Hillman luncheon he flabbergasted San Diegoans by bluntly telling the guest of the day: “The aviation industry is being kicked around. We’re being forced to expand more than any other industry in the country and yet we are being constantly subjected to investigations and limitations.” He made Sidney Hillman blink with his cold announcement that he would not sign a new union wage agreement unless the Government backed him financially.

By shrewd, purposeful tactlessness, he spurred the Government into the San Diego housing problem by putting up the biggest defense-housing project (3,000 units) in the country, completed this week. He is now demanding a better municipal sewage system, for the benefit of Consolidated as well as the community. And he will get it.

Rube Fleet sticks close to the plant, has little time for social life. Family gatherings (two sons, three daughters) are invariably dominated by the Major, who discourses on the aircraft industry, Consolidated, the course of the war. Office meetings are invariably dominated by the Major, in no uncertain terms.

He is also dominant in his relaxations, among them poetry. One of his favorite poets is Longfellow, whom he can spout by the yard, accurately and with feeling. If an occasional modernist happens in while Rube Fleet is declaiming his favorites, that is just too bad for the modernist. Rube Fleet knows what he likes, and likes it.

He knows other poets besides Longfellow. To a recent group of visitors he suddenly declaimed from another favorite, Stephen Phillips’ Marpessa. With narrowed eye and deepening voice the Major intoned from memory:

Wounded with beauty in the summer night

Young Idas tossed upon his couch and

cried

“Marpessa, O Marpessa.” From the dark

The floating smell of flowers invisible,

The mystic yearning of the garden wet,

The moonless-passing night—into his brain,

Wandered, until he rose and outward leaned. . . .

Finally he bobbled a line, picked up the book for the first time and in a half-murmured apology said, “Haven’t read it but twice.” When he had finished reading, he slapped the book shut, began to talk about his ships’ range, design, to pour out an endless flood of figures, dates, facts.

On the floor under his desk is a button which makes the Venetian blinds goup or down. Reuben Fleet enjoys working it. It startles visitors.