American planes

[leo]

Stephen:
No intent to bust your chops. I found your thread interesting and it caused me to do some research on some of the things you said. I agree with your assessment of the economic capabilities of the US.

Incidentally, Standard Aircraft did build some Capronis with Liberty 12 400 HP. Evidently it was a very satisfactory build.

So far no mention of the Martin Bomber, it did not see action but it did play an important role, by sinking the Battleship Ostrifield after the war during the Billy Mitchell tests, and was powered by 2 liberty engines, it was America's first designed Strategic Bomber

hmmm, the impression that I'm getting is that from a technological and production standpiont the US contribution was negligible--whereas the supplying of that extra manpower was essential for winning the war expeditiously (pun intended). There is little doubt in my mind that the Germans would have lost either way, but that the American intervention helped make it a certainty. Unfortunately for the world at large, and Europe in particular, American intervention had very little affect on the post-war outcome... Germany should never have been expected to pay for everything... but the world needed a scapegoat because nobody was willing to admit that they were all part of the problem...
oops... kinda went off on a tangent there.!
Jarrod
and does it necessarily matter if the US didn't produce any great original designs, they still cranked out some awfully good pilots...

The SPAD building program in the U.S was cancelled quite early in it's life in the Spring of 1918. (See Maurer Maurer: "Recommendation of Pursuit Planes": "..no single seater machines should be built in the United States for service at the front." That was also the end of the SE-5 program I'd surmise. The comments concerning this cancellation as voiced by experienced "overseas aviators" were of the mostly "unprintable" type. Incidentally, reading Maurer is a bizarre experience: He tells us that it was evident that the SPAD XIIIs in service were to be replaced by- and here a direct quote: "the SPAD Monocoque with the 160 H.P Gnome Monosoupape engine." The SPAD S.XV was the only attempt to use the Gnome in a SPAD product and only a few were manufactured- nothing of merit was observed and the company's subsequent products reverted back to Hispano power. How Maurer writing after the war's end could have misconstrued the nature of the abortive flirtation with rotary engines by SPAD as an important development is mystifying!

A recent article in "WWI Aeroplane" states the Allies would have been desperate for Pursuits in 1919. The article should be read for it's full effect but the essential message is that an unwarranted enthusiasm for the "Dragonfly" radial (not "rotary")led to the phasing out of all contracts for "rotaries" and the failure of the "Dragonfly" would have left the English without a air-cooled engine as successor to the discontinued Bentley and LeRhone types. The French weren't looking to good either: There were "10,00(!) 220 Hissos that were stockpiled in France and seen as unusable due to their gear-box failures (as per Jean Kerisel'a biography of the engineering genius Albert Caquot: "Createur et Precurseur") My thanks to that good man (and fellow "Forumite") Lucien Morareau for making this study available to me!. All-in-all the tactical German A-C coming into the conflict (I exclude strategic aircraft here) were seemingly of better technical promise(ie Siemens-Schuckert pursuits, Junkers all-metal ground attack ships)than were the Allied equvalents.

I am sorry if my message is contradictory but I see nothing to justify the assertion that there was any production program around that was going to send U.S. built SPADS and SE-5s into Europe.

The great tragedy of all this confusion, including volumnous and unrealistic optimism concerning the "Liberty engine"- is that we wouldn't build "Mosquitoes" in WWII in the U.S. because of the unfortunate experiences we had with European equipment in WWI. In WWII,the bomber version of the "Mossie" had the same range and capacity as the B-17 and twice the speed, It had 2% losses throughout the War. We had more bomber crewman lost on single raids (Ie. "Schweinfurt") than the DeHaviland losses were for the entire war! This is the greatest unacknowledged scandal of our military history and has its roots in our Air Service's leaders inability to make rational determinations in 1917-18..

To be fair to the USAAS and military procurement types (now there's an unusual position for me to be in!), it wasn't just a matter of making mistakes in selecting aircraft types, or in setting up production plans. The aircraft industry in the UK was run on a pretty casual basis, at least from the viewpoint of US industrialists accustomed to assembly line manufacture. One example I can think of off the top of my head concerns the Bristol F2B -- if I remember the type correctly. The relevant fact is that the design drawings provided to the US licensee by Bristol turned out to be completely unusable. Bristol factory workers essentially built each Brisfit by hand, so the drawings weren't as important to them. Rather than trying to reverse-engineer a Brisfit to come up with proper production drawings, the license was dropped. (Perhaps this explains the appearance of the LUSAC two-seat fighter.)

Glad you brought up the LUSAC, Michael. There is one at Wright-Pat, and with a 400 horse Liberty and all those guns it would seem quite formidable as a fighter-but haven't read how well it actually flew. Maybe it was a dud. A couple had already been sent overseas and were undergoing tests when the war ended.
Regards,
Steve

Right you are, the US matelots started first, but not on Curtiss, but with French seaplanes Donnet-Denhaut, Tellier and Hanriot...

[leo]

I found the following info on the Packard-Le Pere LUSAC-11.

Although no warplane of US design saw active service in the 1914-1918 war, wo examples of one design did reach France before the Armistice.

The aircraft in question was the LUSAC-11 two seat fighter in the classic tradition of French and Italian designers of the period. The obvious European inspiration for the lines of this good loooking two bay bi-plane is not difficult to explain, since its designer was Capt. Le Pere a member of the French aviation mission to the US.

The plane was designed around the 400 HP Liberty engine and utilized a plywood fuselage and box interplane struts, which made it possible to dispense with incidence rigging wires. An unusual feature was a tilting radiator in the upper wing center section. Two .30 cal mg's were fixed to fire forward and two more on a Scarff ring in the rear cockpit.

Production of the LUSAC-11 was handled by the Packard Motor Car Co. which built two prottypes and a production batch of 25.

span 41' 7"
length 25' 3"
Height 10" 7"
Weight 3,746 Pounds
Speed 133 at sea level
ceiling 25,000'
range 320 miles

Re: "Brisfit"plans non-standardization and British production procedures. Sir Stanley Hooker (one time chief of Rolls-Royce) wrote in his autobiography "Not Much of an Engineer" of how U.S. Ford production specialists came at the invitation or RR in, I believe, 1938, to establish mass production of the "Merlin". The colloboration was not getting anywhere and the British suspected that the high standards inherent in their machining "specs" were a problem for the Ford people. The British presumed that perhaps Ford's experts with their emphasis on the high volume production concept couldn't incorporate the stringent standards of RR into their "mass production" concept. Hooker said the Rolls people, himself included, were pretty chagrined to learn from Ford that the problem was not the high standards of RR, but quite the contrary. The reason the Merlins were custom built was because rigid conformity to dimensional tolerances etc. had never been mandated at RR. If you had a exhaust valve with a oversized stem, well you took a bit of time and looked for a exhaust guide that was similarly oversized in bore and installed it. Packard built "Merlins" here before our entry into the Second War and they did not find it difficult to establish a quality control standards program. I think similarly it would have taken very little time in WWI to complete a revision of Bristol drawings from various sources into a standardized set for universal distribution in the U.S. I think a great deal of it was political and economic in nature. You may recall how Rickenbacker wanted to import a large number of surplus a-c here after the Armistice and was foiled by the manufacturer's lobby that wasn't going to allow that type of competetion in the post WWI aircraft market. I had access to Gerald Vultee's personal library when I was at General Dynamics in the '60s and I specifically recall seeing ALCOA ads from the around 1940 urging "This time American planes for American boys!" etc. BTW "Hap" Arnold briefly dismisses the effort to incorporate the "Mosquito" into the American WWII production program with the single sentence: "We couldn't have the engines they required." This was news to a great many people producing "Merlins" at the Packard plant. Maybe if we had redesigned the "Mossie" using ALCOA aluminum, instead of wood, they would have gone into production?! I'm only semi-serious of course, but it is tantalizing to look back and see how different and better the efforts in either war could have been. Hindsight is of that nature of course. Nevertheless the experienced pilots with experience at the front should of had their say welcome or not. On this last point let me mention how aghast Arnold was when told by Leo Nomis (ex-Eagle Squadron volunteer) that "the best U.S. bomber operating in Europe was the P-38." Meaning that several of them could do the same damage as a four-engined ship with more accuracy, less risk of crew membership fatalities and as soon as the bombs were off the racks it could revert to being the deadly adverary to German fighters that it was designed to be. I enjoy the interchanges here - lottsa fun. Seasons greetings to all etc. LEB

Forumites: Thank you for this thread. I have
missed its kind the last several weeks (months?).