WOODEN AIRPLANE PROGRAMS COMPARED

The American, Canadian and British wooden aircraft programs present striking contrasts in both attitudes and outcomes. Within the technical branches of the national air forces, American personnel displayed clear antipathy towards wooden airplanes, while Canadians expressed varying degrees of enthusiasm, and the British demonstrated more neutral sentiments. The British produced the most successful wooden airplane of the war, and Canadians made significant design innovations, while Americans were unable to produce first-rate airplanes in wood. Americans seemed to find the maintenance peculiarities of wooden airplanes intolerable, while the British and Canadians treated these difficulties as manageable problems.

The technical branches of the U. S. Army Air Forces expressed consistent hostility to wooden airplanes through rearmament and war. This hostility is not apparent from the published record, which was tightly constrained by the needs of wartime propaganda. The archival evidence, however, reveals that the technical branches of Army aviation remained hostile to wood despite the aluminum shortage, and despite the official endorsement of wood construction as a solution to this shortage. There appeared to be no supporters of wooden construction in leadership positions at Wright Field, either among the civilian engineers or the officers. In mid-1942, J. B. Johnson, the Army’s chief expert on aircraft materials, continued his opposition to wooden airplanes, invoking the familiar arguments of poor durability, moisture absorption, and lack of uniformity. A senior engineering officer at Wright Field echoed Johnson’s assessment a few months later, advising a prospective manufacturer of wooden airplanes that “the Army Air Forces prefers all-metal airplanes to those constructed of plywood.”49 Within the Army, support for wooden airplanes came not from Wright Field but from Washington, where the Air Corps was under intense pressure to make at least a show of meeting the President’s massive production goals.50 General Arnold repeatedly pushed Wright Field personnel to buy more wooden airplanes despite their strong objections. Arnold criticized Wright Field’s “apparent procrastination” in promoting the use of wood and plastics in airplanes, and even threatened personnel changes unless the situation improved.51

Maj. General Oliver P. Echols, commander of Wright Field, defended his organization against Arnold’s criticism, insisting that wooden airplane work “has been prosecuted most vigorously.” But top officers at Wright Field showed continued hostility to wood. In December 1942, H. H. Kindelberger of North American Aviation telephoned General К. B. Wolfe, chief of the Production Division at Wright Field, to complain about the wooden fuselages that the Air Corps was requiring for the North American AT-6. Wolfe responded by condemning the entire wooden airplane program, arguing that it would be better to have fewer planes than to buy wood trainers. “We fought, bled and died over this wooden program,” continued Wolfe, “and we were finally sold down the river on it…. So far as I am concerned, I would like to just push a few of these [wooden] jobs out into the training crowd and let them see what they are up against.” Wolfe took the opportunity to complain about other wooden airplanes, and concluded that “we are just making a lot of trouble for ourselves on this wooden program.”52

Among the British, attitudes towards wood were more neutral. Despite extensive technical discussions, British officials rarely engaged in general condemnation or praise of wood in aircraft structures. In the late 1930s, the RAF had converted to metal as thoroughly as the Army Air Corps, at least for combat types. But when the Air Ministry began debating the Mosquito project in late 1939, the main objections were to lack of defensive armament rather than wooden structure. At a high-level meeting of the Air Ministry’s Research and Development staff, for example, the Mosquito’s designers claimed that “the wooden construction was so perfected as to produce a smooth skin and eliminate sources of drag;” none of the government officials questioned this claim. Geoffery de Havilland himself was willing to build airplanes in either wood or metal; he choose wood for the Mosquito to get the design into production quickly, because wood required fewer design details and less complex production tooling. In 1943, de Havilland told the British historian M. M. Postan that “there is nothing to choose between wood and metal construction from the point of view of performance, and the weight of the two materials is also similar.” This neutral attitude was the rule among the technical branches of British aviation, even when dealing with problems related to wood structures.53

Attitudes toward wood were even more favorable in Canada. Canadian authorities voiced considerable enthusiasm for wooden airplanes, an enthusiasm found within the RCAF as well among other government entities concerned with aviation.54 The strongest enthusiasm for wood came from J. H. Parkin at the National Research Council, which performed most of structural testing and research needed by the RCAF. In a report dated May 1940, Parkin proposed a program for developing wooden military airplanes in Canada. Parkin’s memo marshaled the best technical arguments available on the advantages of wood construction, using the analysis developed by wood’s most enthusiastic proponents in the late 1930s. Wood had its supporters within the RCAF as well, among them Air Vice-Mai shall E. W. Stedman, the chief technical officer in the RCAF. In sharp contrast to the American officers at Wright Field, Stedman and other RCAF technical officers strongly supported development and production of wooden airplanes, and cooperated closely with the NRC in the development of the Vidal Anson.55

When it came to designing and building wooden airplanes, American incompetence seems remarkable. British firms had little trouble designing effective wooden airplanes, though there were some failures, such as the Albermarle. In the United States, the C-76 fiasco was apparently the direct result of Curtiss-Wright’s unfamiliarity with wooden airplane design. Curtiss-Wright engineers clearly thought in terms of metal, and had little understanding of how to use wood effectively.56 De Havilland engineers, in contrast, emphasized the importance of their prior experience with the Comet and Albatross airliners, whose wooden structures were similar to that of the Mosquito.57 The Canadian success demonstrated that lack of design experience could be overcome by consistent government support and effective applied research. Despite well-founded British skepticism about the abilities of Canadian designers, the Vidal Anson was the only successful molded plywood airplane produced by the Allies during the war. Even more ironically, the Vidal Anson was based on technology developed in the United States, technology that the U. S. Army and Navy rejected.58

With regard to production, American aircraft firms seemed unable to take effective advantage of woodworking machinery, while woodworking subcontractors had little sense of the exacting standards required in aircraft manufacturing.59 The British, in contrast, had no more trouble achieving quantity production with wooden than with metal aircraft. Canadians showed that the Mosquito was adaptable to assembly-line production, while they had little difficulty finding Canadian firms competent to produce the Anson fuselage with its novel molded construction.60

One finds similar differences with regard to maintenance. Most sources agreed that wooden airplanes suffered more from exposure to the weather than all-metal types, though some argued that higher maintenance costs were balanced by ease of repair. In Britain, durability problems in wooden airplanes received high-level attention from engineers at the Royal Aircraft Establishment. These engineers worked closely with airplane manufacturers to develop modifications to reduce weather-related maintenance problems.61 The Canadians paid particular attention to the durability of molded plywood components, conducting careful exposure tests under harsh Canadian conditions.62 In the United States, in contrast, repair personnel had little patience with the specific maintenance requirements of wood airplanes. In September 1943, the Air Service Command went on record with a memorandum strongly opposing wooden training airplanes, citing their high maintenance costs and a tendency “to disintegrate from time to time.”63 Yet this assessment may have reflected high-level antagonism as much as actual experience with wooden aircraft. A very different picture emerged from a 1944 British mission that gathered “first­hand” information on the durability of wooden airplanes in the United States. The mission reported “no serious difficulties” with the maintenance of wooden aircraft in the United States, despite “less thorough” maintenance procedures and more widely varying climatic conditions than in Britain.64