Building the World's Safest Training Planes
One major problem for many early airplanes was “flat spinning” that resulted in numerous crashes and the deaths of many pilots. However, Fleet’s planes never entered a flat spin. When asked why, Fleet responded: “I’ll tell you for $50,000.”
It took Fleet seven years, but he accomplished his goal developing the most successful and safest training plane.

"Not until recently," Fleet said in an interview 40 years later, "have I revealed why the Boeing trainers and the Douglas biplane that killed Barksdale suffered autorotation.

"The Army had asked Col. Clark, 'Have you any theory that will stop autoroation?'

"Clark brought the letter in to me. I said, 'Have you, Ginny?' and he said, 'No.'

"'Well,' I said, 'tell them that you haven't.'

"He did, but also told them 'Fleet has a theory and he's a better pilot than I am. He feels confident he has the answer.' Clark came to me and said, 'They want to know what it is. What is your theory?'

"I said, 'I'm not revealining it. It's one of the secreets of our bisiness.'

"Well, the Army practically ordered me down to Dayton and they said they would give us no more business unless we did reveal it.

"So I said, 'All right. I have taken my life into my own hands a good many times to find out. We will take the flat spin out of theis Douglas airplane for $50,000. If you can tell how we did it, that's fine. You'll then have the secret. If you can't, that's my business.'

"They said, 'Well, how do we know that you're going to take it out?'

"'Well,' I said, 'after I've done it I'll go up with any pilot that is agreed upon, kick it into a spin and if I can't take it out repeatedly - say a half a dozen or a dozen times - and in a turn and a half, I don't get my $50,000.'

"They wouldn't do it. They wanted to know what I was going to do. So they put reverse camber in the Douglas airplane because Clark had reverse camber on the stabilizer of the TW-3. That didn't cure it, of course.

"My $50,000 offer wasn't a bad deal for the Army either, because I would have had to put stagger into the wings of that ship and change all the wing fittings of every kind. It would be virtually a redesign of the ship, you might say. So I wouldn't tell them what I'd do, and they refused to give me the contract. So I didn't care and we kept on our own way, and our ships didn't flat spin. Ours alwasy came out. Therefore, I had it nailed to the cross as far as the answer was concerned. I knew. It was a trade secret which I wasn't going to give away for nothing.

"Autorotation cost Boeing the tarining plane business as I told Claire Egtvedt who had designed the NB-1. Egtvedt, who had been Vice Prewsident and Chief Engineer of Boeing at the time, lived across the street from me in Palm Springs many years later and I told him why his planes had the problem they couldn't solve but Consolidated had.

"The thing that caused autorotation I can now reveal because I am out of the business and the secret is no longer a secret. It was the centrifugal force of the fuel int he gas tanks. We had 28 inches of stagger between the top and bottom wing in our airplane. The upper wing center-section carried the fuel tanks and they were so far ahead of the lower wing that when the ship went into a spin the stagger was such that the nose automatically went down.

"One could always pull the ship out in a turn and a half or, if you let go of it and didn't do anything, it would swing out of the spin of its own accord.

"Now Boeing and Douglas used the cheaper way of building because thier between-wing struts were at right angles with no stagger of the wings. It was the fatal way to do it because any ship built like that was bound to spin flat.

"For a long time I planned to write a technical article on 'Discovery of the Cause and Cure of Autorotaion in a Biplane' but never seemed to have the time to get it done.

"Because I didn't have any college engineering tarining some of the officers at McCook field were skeptical of the practical approach I often used.

"I didn't find the anser to the autorotation from something any college taught because they didn't know it. They didn't take their lives in their hands like I did to find out. And they wouldn't believe you even if you told them. The great Ernest W. Dichman, a brother-in-law of Col. Thurman Bane, was one of the dumbbell engineers of the Air Service. So was major Clinton W. Howard, brother-in-law of then Major H. H. (Hap) Arnold.

"Howard, Chief Engineer of the Army Air Service after Ginny Clark left, had leanred to fly with me at North Island, San Diego, in 1917. One day he asked me, 'How much education have you had?'

"'Well,' I said, 'not too much, but I am a graduate of Culver Militaary Academy, which at the time I graduated included two years of college work. That's all I've had in the way of formal education.'

"'I'm a graduate of West Point,' he replied, 'and also have finished two years at Harvard.'

"'Well, then, I guess if education is any criteria you ought to be a whiz banger when you graduate from the Air Service.'

"To which he responded, 'Thats what I figure.'"

Excerpt from the book, "Reuben Fleet and the Story of Consolidated Aircraft." by William Wagner.

 

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