The Sky is no Limit

Behind the attractive red brick front of a modern factory located on the edge of Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport a team of all-American victory workers is turning out to win the war magic on a twenty-four hour a day schedule. Magic is the proper term, for these products of AiResearch are the machines that couldn't be built. Three years ago intercoolers, elliptical oil coolers and cabin pressure regulators were no more than wishes expressed by hopeful but despairing aircraft designers.

Since that day in 1909 at Kitty Hawk when the Wright brothers gave wings to the world, man has sought to climb higher and higher. This struggle for altitude presented new problems not only in aircraft and engine design but in new control and appliances necessary to make aircraft function at high altitude.

In the late thirties Air Supply Company was selling special material to meet the expanding needs of America's infant aviation industry. The services of a score of upward looking young engineers interested in solving the problems of this new field, were enlisted and the aircraft industry beamed at the birth of AiResearch Manufacturing Company. Virtually every important manufacturer offered the new unit access to his unfortunately meager store of knowledge, developed by the first explorations into high altitudes.

After Pearl Harbor the War Department wisely frowned on the expansion of aircraft industry on the vulnerable Pacific Coast. More than a dozen other communities were anxious to secure the second projected factory which was to be known as AiResearch. After inspecting the field, the officers of the company selected Phoenix.

The reasons which influenced their decision should be catalogued for use in the future. Phoenix is close to the parent plant in California. Ideas, mechanical facilities. and certain manufactured parts could be easily exchanged. A factory site was available near an airport, and AiResearch believes that aviation is the transportation of the future.

AiResearch was incorporated in Arizona in March, 1942. Ground was broken in June, and some of the machinery inside was put to work during December, 1942.

The factory was designed to meet the needs of the AiResearch unique production problem. It is air-cooled in the summer and heated in the winter. Not a foot of floor space is wasted, but at the same time there is none of that sense of crowding characteristic of so many of our war plants. Day and night the work area is shadow free, illuminated by cool dependable fluorescent lights. From the raw materials room to the shipping department every operation is organized into the continuity of production.

The magic gadgets flowing off this production line do almost impossible things. The all aluminum intercooler weighs less than a third of the old type for the same job. The oil coolers and exit-flap controls actually anticipate what is going to happen when engine oil at lubricating temperature mixes with the sub zero cold of high altitudes, and the cabin pressure regulator has made sub stratosphere flight possible.

You will never read a news dispatch telling of a squadron of intercoolers flown by American pilots returning from a successful high altitude raid on Berlin. You will never read of a dog fight in which a flight of oil coolers downed Jap Zeros with a loss ratio of one to ten. American pilots in American planes are doing these things, and in every battle on every front AiResearch is contributing to victory.

These products don't have a popular name and a silhouette against the sky familiar to every American boy. At first glance there is nothing very challenging about an intercooler. Most of us wouldn't recognize one if we found it in the living room. Yet without it the Boeing Flying Fortress, the Lockheed Lightning, the North American Mustang, and the Navy's Douglas dive bomber would probably be no more than so-so airplanes instead of the outstanding superior aircraft which they are.

There are still some secrets about these magic gadgets, but what they do and how they do it can now be told. To the Germans and the Japs, they are flying vengeance, death and punishment, screaming contradiction of the totalitarian lies about the decadent democracy of the United States.

The men of AiResearch deal with heat transfer and controlled air, and the total of their knowledge and experience in this field equals that of any similar organization.

The superior high altitude performance of American aircraft is due in part to superchargers. Engines, like human beings, must breathe. The mixture which burns into power inside an internal combustion engine contains approximately sixteen parts of air to one part of gasoline. At sea level the weight of the atmosphere forces necessary air into the fueling system, but as an airplane climbs the weight of the atmosphere diminishes.

This earth on which we live is enclosed in a large gaseous envelope. The gas is the air we have taken for granted for years. That part with which we are familiar is called the troposphere and it extends upward to an altiAltitude of about thirty-five thousand feet. Here is a line of demarkation called the troposphere. Above this is the stratosphere.

In the stratosphere, the atmospheric pressure decreases at the rate of approximately one inch of mercury per each thousand feet ascended. Temperature decreases at the normal lapse rate of three and one-half degrees Fahrenheit per thousand feet.

Scientists express this pressure of the atmosphere in millibars. At sea level the atmospheric pressure is approximately one thousand millibars, and the oxygen pressure in the atmosphere approximately two hundred millibars. An aircraft engine, like a human being, is accustomed to near sea level atmospheric pressure.

At ten thousand feet the atmospheric pressure is reduced to seven hundred millibars, and the oxygen pressure is down to one hundred and forty millibars. When we are that high on the mountains, the least exertion is tiring and we gasp for breath. When engines gasp they lose RPM's and the power output drops.

At twenty-four thousand feet the atmospheric pressure is four hundred millibars, the oxygen pressure eighty millibars, and without added oxygen human beings lose consciousness.

At forty thousand feet the atmospheric pressure is only one hundred eighty-eight millibars, and a temperature of sixty-seven degrees below zero is normal.

Every day and every night American fighters and American bombers fly off on missions with operational altitudes set at between thirty and forty thousand feet. Cabins can be pressurized, pilots given oxygen, but motors must be supercharged, The Turbo-supercharger is an extremely complicated device. Reduced to simple essentials, it is a rotary fan which increases the volume of air entering the intake manifold thus feeding the air and gasoline into the motor at the same pressure in millibars found at sea level.

Pressure and temperature are co-related and complementary functions which act together. Supercharging creates a terrific excess temperature. For each millibar increase in pressure there is a complimentary increase in temperature. The outside air which was sixty-seven degrees below zero when it entered the veins of our super-charger, comes out se hot no motor could breathe it.

The intercooler built at AiResearch is the answer to this technical problem. Installed between the supercharger and the carburetor venturi, the temperature is reduced to a proper operating figure. Outside air is used to cool the supercharged air within the intercooler and this part of the operation is automatic.

The intercoolers built by AiResearch look much like rectangular radiators. There are hundreds of aluminum tubes surrounded by an air duct. The hot supercharged air flows inside these tubes and heat is transferred through the aluminum walls to the cold outside air channeled through the intercooler.

In 1939 when the first Flying Fortress was test flown, intercoolers weighed ninety-two pounds each. Today, they weigh only one-third of this. And our flying forts can carry two hundred pounds additional in gasoline, bombs, or personnel.

Building the intercoolers is not simple. The cooling tubes must first be extruded from flat buttons of aluminum. This is a cold operation. A mechanical hammer with a striking force of a hundred and twenty tons slugs a flat piece of cold aluminum about the size and thickness of a coat button through a die. Under this extreme pressure a thin walled, seamless tube of constant dimension more than two feet long is extruded. The aluminum extruding hammer at AiResearch is the only one of its kind in the west. And much of the production line technique used in inter-cooler assembly has been developed by AiResearch.

After being cleaned and straightened the tubes reach the final assembly line where flat drilled spacing blocks of aluminum are jigged into position to receive them. The tubes are dropped into place and women using mechanical hammers swell the tube around each head block. Each tube must be swollen in four places.

The ends of the tubes are then crimped and the inter-cooler is ready for testing.

Under water and air pressure it must be tested for leaks, for supercharged air must not be wasted. Because of the number of tubes in each intercooler, there is hardly a one made which isn't repaired or doesn't have some tubes or ferrules replaced before it can pass final test.

The first oil coolers used on airplanes were a simple adaptation of a water radiator used on your car. Hot oil was piped through a grilled radiator and cold air flowing through the radiator was used to cool it. This system without control worked very well up to about fifteen thousand feet. But high altitude engines must function through a temperature range of from one hundred twenty degrees Fahrenheit above zero to seventy or eighty degrees below zero. In the lower altitudes radiators must be wide open, but when the air begins to cool down it becomes necessary to screen off part of the radiator. This was done with shutters manually operated by the pilot.

Fighter pilots have other things to do, and the aircraft engineers of AiResearch built an automatic control which would close or open the shutters and keep the oil at a constant temperature. Actually this control had to anticipate temperature change. It wouldn't be safe to wait until the oil was near its cold limit because in that second or two while the shutters were being closed oil would congeal.

From the first square radiators, the air industry turned to a round radiator easier to recess in the wing. Designers admitted the perfect shape would be elliptical to conform with the airfoil, but no one had ever built an elliptical radiator, not until AiResearch did it.

These elliptical radiators recessed within the wing, take their incoming air from the leading edge and exhaust it through an exit flap on the wing. Shutters on the front of the radiator control the temperature, but so long as the exit flap remained open drag was set up and the airfoil design was distorted.

The answer was to open and close the exit flap and thus control the volume of air over the radiator which would in turn control the temperature of the oil.

AiResearch built an exit flap control with an automatically controlled motor to do the work of moving the flap, maintaining it at the proper setting for the desired volume of air.

With air and oil temperatures controlled, cabin pressure was still a problem at high altitude. Engineers knew it was possible to pump air into a sealed cabin and maintain sea level pressure. But to regulate this machinery a new control must be built.

Plane crews could withstand some change in pressure without discomfort and without loss of efficiency. Consequently the control had to be devised to permit pressure change within certain limits.

In the high altitude strato-chambers at AiResearch engineers began to experiment. As early as 1939, Boeing had pioneered substratosphere flight, above the clouds, above the storms where terrific speed could be maintained economically through the use of controllable pitch propellers.

The inner workings of the cabin pressure regulator built by AiResearch are still a military secret, but it can be said that this gadget, no bigger than an office typewriter, controls with uncanny precision the pressure inside the cabin for high altitude airmen.

Other AiResearch miracle gadgets have technical func-tions in the operation of the aircraft. The cabin pressure regulator adds immeasurably to passenger and crew com-fort. It will actually make post war flying safer and easier. The forecasters of aviation's future predict that most long distance passenger flights will be made above twenty thousand feet, thanks to pressurized cabins.

There is one factor which makes all the products produced by AiResearch extremely important. The research knowledge, the production marvels, the magic gadgets produced are not primarily tools of destruction. True, they were developed speedily under the terrible urgency of war, but their functions are vitally important to aviation, and when the war is won, they will be a necessary accessory for every aircraft built.

Americans generally are accustomed to spectacular accomplishments in the field of mass production, but the problems at AiResearch were considerably more difficult than those encountered in most new factories.

Everything built by AiResearch is a precision instrument. Compared to the standards of the automobile industry, the tolerance and material strength margins of the aircraft field are much more exacting. Weight and bulk are vitally important factors in aircraft, calling for all the talents of the engineers in the use of light weight metals in compact design and finished to accurate tolerances.

As the raw material moves forward, each succeeding operation carries it one step farther toward the final assembly section. Since both copper and aluminum are extruded and since both metals must be heat treated many times, they move side by side through the dies, the furnaces and the cleaning vats which complicate the transition from raw materials to finished parts.

Grinding, drilling, all machine tool operations have their own corner of factory floor space, and while the final assembly gives meaning to the finished products, the intermediate steps are just as important.

Across the paved court behind the factory a modern cafeteria was built. AiResearch went out to hire the best kitchen staff possible and they didn't spare expense. A hot meal served in pleasant surroundings can send a worker back to his job refreshed physically and mentally.

The cafeteria serves more than a thousand meals a day and operates twenty-four hours a day to feed the three shifts. The bill of fare is surprisingly select and the AiResearchers pay only thirty-five cents a meal.

Satisfied that the workers will be happy on the job, the management has gone even further. They provide housing and transportation services, group insurance, arrange for utility service, for the transfer of household furniture, and the plant personnel division interests itself in each worker's personal problems.

Starting a new life in a community is always a strain on a family, but new employees at AiResearch and their families are made acquainted with their neighbors, with the available medical service, hospital facilities, and schools, and in the event of an emergency, loans are made to workers from employee funds.

As factories go, AiResearch is not a big plant, and perhaps the reason for this friendly feeling is its smallness, but the workers at AiResearch will deny this. They say that the personalities of the organization staff don't permit big business formality.

Side Trails miscellany ... meditation... mirth

Mrs. Henry Stevens, rancher's wife, had hung no rags out to dry. Yet from her kitchen window she saw a strip of calico on a shrub. Without hesitation she put down the batch of biscuit dough she was kneading, and reached for her loaded shotgun.

Boom! The roar of it shook the dwelling, and out there an Apache Indian leaped upward then fell and died.

That was in the wilderness of northern Arizona, 26 miles from Prescott, in the yesteryear when self reliance was not a lost art. And from Mrs. Stevens' story comes all the precedent that you and I need for personal grandeur.

Her shot was a signal for nearly fifty Indians to attack. They had crept up to surround the dwelling. Only she and her children and one elderly man were on the place. She kicked the back door shut, turned to her babies. "Go right along with your playing," she ordered, calmly. "Play there on the living room floor."

The elderly man took the front of the house, she the rear. With their guns they fought in valiant way. Creep to a window-Bang! and reload. Open the door a crack-Bang! and do it again. For six hours they stood off the siege. And then a group of passing cowboys heard the shooting, rode over and drove the savages away. When it was all ended, the cowboy foreman spoke.

"Well now," said he, "this here is something! Where at is Mr. Stevens yore husband, ma'am?"

"He is in town on business," the lady said.

"Then I'll ride in with the news, ma'am. Only you better just take and write down what you want to say to him, and I'll deliver it direct."

Mrs. Stevens agreed. She wrote and that night her husband received it from the faithful cowboy's hand. And what had she told him? What lamentation, what cry of helplessness, what piteous plea had come from this poor woman in a frontier home? Her note read:

Dear Henry:

The Apaches come. I am almost out of buckshot. Please send me some more.

Your loving wife.

My work is finding such incidents as that and writing about them, adapting them to fiction or screen in whatever way I can. But I am not good at it, not good enough; because I have to tame down the best true stories from Arizona's past, or people will not believe them!

In New York City I told an audience about two men I knew. One, I said, had ridden into Arizona astride a burro, with scarcely enough money to buy a dish of beans. The other, a green young lawyer, had brought his bride to Phoenix and to keep her from starving had worked as carpenter's helper in the governor's office of the new Territorial capitol under construction then. And both men lived to occupy the governor's chair in that same building, under statehood. One became world's champion governor, serving seven terms.

My New York host said, "What an engaging liar you are! Have a drink then spin some more yarns."

The man on the burro was the late George W. P. Hunt. The carpenter's helper was the late John C. Phillips.

The last time I saw Floyd Pyle he was mumbling and grumbling. Floyd is not concerned unduly about ration points or Japs or Germans or taxes or any of the other writhings of civilization. Civilization, says he, over the years manages to take care of itself. Floyd is a professional bear hunter (and a darn good one) who lives beside a stream in a forest under Arizona's Tonto Rim, 100 miles or so from civilization.

His troubles? The wild elk were leaping his garden fence at night, eating his strawberries as fast as they ripened.

My 80-odd-year-old friend Uncle Hades Temple came out of the hills recently for a week of riotous living. I bawled him out for thus being profligate and not saving his money. You know what the old coot shot back to me?

"Bub," he said, "let me tell you something. I'm a ragged individualist." (Which was surely true!) "I been through many booms and many depressions, and here's the way I look at money: There was a young man who saved up for the future, and put in his money bags all he could spare But alas for the poor economical moocher-the future arrived and the man wasn't there!"

In my part of Arizona rain is a rarity, an emotional experience, an economical caviar, an esthetic rejuvenation. I love the old timer at Yuma who said, a bit wistfully, "I've seen rain, but I've got a 15-year-old son and I'd like for him to see some." And I enjoy the amazement of eastern tourists who, fresh from crossing the Hudson, the Monongahela, the Missouri and the Mississippi, pause at bridges in Arizona to wrinkle their brows over maps and dry sands. My favorite author and good friend, Ernest Douglas, has captured all of this in his "The Rivers We Have Out West," worthy of encore here from The Arizona Farmer: "I dreamed of a town called Wickenburg, where surges the Hassayamp' A full half-hour when rain above has left all the mountains damp. I long to linger at Cottonwood where the Verde fills its bed From bank to bank after every storm, and the rest of the time plays dead. My thoughts roam back where the San Simon, majestic and broad and grand, Flows on serenely six feet or so down under the rocks and sand. Another river I greatly love is old Bill Williams Fork, Which in wet seasons is deep enough to hold up a small-sized cork.The Auga Fria is quite a rill, and likewise the Santa Cruz; If you cross either on foot, look out! you may wet your socks and shoes. And after a cloudburst one time I heard the San Francisco roar A mighty torrent of tossing waves from three until almost four. The White and Blue, and San Pedro too, are fierce and terrible floods Whenever there's rain, but when there's not, as streams you might call them duds. Give me the rivers we have out West, the kind that are good and dry, But now and then go on a tearing spree even as you and I"