AIR: Builder of Big Ships

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When Rube Fleet resigned in 1923, the Army was sorry to see him go. He went to work for Gallaudet Corp. (airplanes) as vice president and general manager, saw it fold up, with his active assistance, because it lacked the breath of life. Then he organized Consolidated, and settled down in Buffalo. He had a trick of picking good men. One of them was Isaac M. Laddon, onetime Army aircraft engineer who is now vice president of Consolidated and the design genius who turns out Consolidated planes. Another was Larry Bell, now head of Bell Aircraft Corp. When Fleet decided to move to San Diego in 1935, Larry Bell organized his own company and stayed on at the old stand (where he now produces Airacobra fighters). It is characteristic of Fleet that he has never quite forgiven Bell for this "act of disloyalty."

At Buffalo, after many a tiff with other comers in the devil-take-the-hindmost new industry, Fleet got his start. He turned out a good trainer (the PT-1), a crack flying boat. When he lost a Navy order (outbid by Martin), he helped organize the New York, Rio & Buenos Aires Airline (NYRBA) to use as a market for his flying boats, commercially called Commodores. (He sold the line later to Pan Am, and won himself a reputation in Wall Street.)

By the time he had moved to California, after striking a hard bargain with San Diego for land and facilities, his PBYs were making history in the Navy, and Consolidated was beginning to fatten. Today, with its $750,000,000 backlog, for all its mighty rushing river of production, Consolidated's San Diego plant is not enough. A factory is being built at Fort Worth, Tex. to turn out more B-24s, under Consolidated management; another at Tulsa, Okla., to be operated by Douglas Aircraft Co.

Through all this humming anthill strides the well-tailored figure of the owner-manager (27% of Consolidated's stock), imposing the Fleet pattern on men and things. Rube Fleet does not expect other people to know as much as he knows, but he expects them to know the same kind of thing. Because he has a prodigious memory for figures, he thinks his executives ought to know the capabilities of the plant's fire-fighting apparatus, the floor space of their offices, the date of many an unimportant happening in the past.

At the Hillman luncheon he flabbergasted San Diegoans by bluntly telling the guest of the day: "The aviation industry is being kicked around. We're being forced to expand more than any other industry in the country and yet we are being constantly subjected to investigations and limitations." He made Sidney Hillman blink with his cold announcement that he would not sign a new union wage agreement unless the Government backed him financially.

By shrewd, purposeful tactlessness, he spurred the Government into the San Diego housing problem by putting up the biggest defense-housing project (3,000 units) in the country, completed this week. He is now demanding a better municipal sewage system, for the benefit of Consolidated as well as the community. And he will get it.

Rube Fleet sticks close to the plant, has little time for social life. Family gatherings (two sons, three daughters) are invariably dominated by the Major, who discourses on the aircraft industry, Consolidated, the course of the war. Office meetings are invariably dominated by the Major, in no uncertain terms.