Transport: Kites to Bombers

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Since then things have gone a-humming. Soon after he moved into the plant Martin told friends he had a ship coming off the drawing boards that would revolutionize military aviation. It did. The ship was the Martin B10, a two-motored monoplane. With a range of 1,800 miles and a bomb load of 2,400 pounds, it could pull away from any pursuit ship then in the air at a top speed of 250 miles an hour. The U. S. Army took 151 of them, the Argentine 35, The Netherlands 117. The last of the Netherlands order is being set up for flight this week in Java. Altogether 340 B-10s rolled out through the factory doors, to be flown to nearby purchasers, or to be packed in crates for overseas shipment. They were so far ahead of bombers of the day that they won Builder Martin the Collier Trophy in 1933.

Sandwiched between military and naval orders the Martin plant also turned out the first clippers for Pan American's Pacific run, huge, four-engined flying boats. Meanwhile, with pursuit ships getting faster & faster, practical, businesslike Glenn Martin laid down another job for his designers. What was now needed, he said, was a bomber that could defend itself against fighters. Since it could no longer outspeed them, its only chance to stay in the air lay in giving it enough maneuverability and fire power to hold its own in aerial combat.

The answer was the new 167, a sleek, mid-wing job. Most expensive of Martin's war babies, the first one cost $882,000 before its tests were completed. Last January, while Douglas was under scrutiny in the Senate for showing its new attack bomber to France before the U. S. had a crack at it—by and with the consent of President Roosevelt—Martin calmly went ahead with his order of 1675 for France.

Also he entered a 167, fitted with U. S. instruments and equipped for Air Corps tactical missions, in the Army's attack-bomber competition. Douglas, which has also been one of the big Army contractors, had lost its entry when it started the Senate asking questions: at Santa Monica Test Pilot Johnny Cable cracked up the new Douglas ship, with a French observer aboard, and was killed. Re-entering the competition late, Douglas turned up with a slicked-up job, reputedly with a speed above 400 miles an hour, and, in a Garrison finish, last week took first money.

In the midst of 1939's war-scared aircraft manufacturing boom, Glenn Martin remains, as usual, priestlike and detached. To his office he goes every morning, hurling along in a 16-cylinder, seven-passenger Cadillac ("they cruise better when they're big") at speeds that make motorcycle policemen wince. But they make no arrests for Martin is the second largest employer of labor in the Baltimore industrial area. (The largest: Bethlehem Steel.)