AIR: Builder of Big Ships

(2 of 5)

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.