Читать книгу The Immortal Beaver - Sean Rossiter - Страница 8

Facing page: Future test pilot George Neal works on an Armstrong-Whitworth Cheetah radial engine in one of the first batch of Avro Ansons reassembled by DHC in early 1940. By 1943 Downsview would build 375 An son Ils with American Jacobs engines from scratch. VIA GEORGE NEAL

The de Havilland of Canada organization that Jakimiuk joined had been among the smallest aircraft manufacturers in Canada at the beginning of the war. During die mid-1930s, employment peaked at fifty-two people in the Downsview plant,¹ many of them women who worked in the DHC fabric shop, sewing, gluing and doping linen wing and fuselage skins for the lightweight stick-and-wire biplanes that Downsview’s parent at Hatfield specialized in. Even then, de Havilland’s aircraft construction methods were falling well behind the times.

The tall, skinny, bespectacled young Dick Hiscocks’s experience working for DHC during the summer of 1937 and for the English parent company at Hatfield the following year impressed him mainly by how wilfully backward the company’s management was-especially compared with its innovative design staff. A University of Toronto student in Engineering Physics 1938. Hiscocks found himself working eighteen-hour days that first summer assembling the Globe and Mail’s “Flying Newsroom,” a twin-engine DH.89 Dragon Rapide mounted on floats.² The Rapide pretty much summed up de Havilland’s design philosophy.

Like the entire DH Rapide small airliner series, CF-BBG was an elegant machine, with slender biplane wings, a minimum of strut-bracing and wires, and good visibility through an almost-continuous strip of windows running halfway back along the fuselage. It was typical of de Havilland products in having evolved through a progression of gradual changes, each of which slightly altered a thoroughly obsolete concept.

Fabric-covered biplanes were already things of the past. Lockheed, Boeing and finally Douglas Aircraft, with its epochal DC-3, had all been building larger, faster, all-metal airliners for years. In fact, wooden wings had been outlawed on commercial aircraft operated in the United States since 1928, when a wood-winged Fokker airliner had crashed, killing, among others, Notre Dame’s famous football and track coach, Knute Rockne.

The Dragon Rapide’s great virtue was its economy of operation. Like many of de Havilland’s small airliners, the Dragon Rapide had found markets as a short-haul commuter airliner and as an executive aircraft for private industry, and would be built in the thousands as a wartime military transport and trainer. The Globe intended to share its flying newsroom with a northern mining promoter.

Another attraction of de Havilland designs was that they could be assembled by relative novices such as Hiscocks, who found himself placed in charge of wing assembly for the Globes Rapide while still in school. The wood and metal parts were shipped from England. The woodwork involved in assembly was considered within almost any employee’s capabilities. Nor did the shipments from England include drawings, “which were considered an unnecessary distraction for any competent assembler,” Hiscocks recalls.³

His foremost qualification for supervising the Rapide’s wing assembly was that he had found a picture of the airplane in a copy of Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft.⁴ There was constant pressure to finish the job, partly because the pilot had already been hired and had nothing better to do than monitor progress, and partly because the customer had all the patience of those who produce the daily miracle that is a newspaper.

According to Hiscocks’s picture, the Rapide’s unusual tapered wings had straight leading edges that ran at right angles from the fuselage. That was in accord with Hiscocks’s textbooks, which, in those pre-supersonic times, abhorred leading-edge sweepback. The possibility that the de Havilland designer responsible for the Dragon series, A. E. Hagg, might not have read those texts occurred to Hiscocks once the wings were assembled and trial-mated to the fuselage. They didn’t fit. The wings’ leading edges did have sweepback, after all.

Repairing the damage was all the more difficult because, before the era of bolts with self-locking nuts, the normal practice in assembling bolted machines was to hammer the ends of the bolts to scramble the threads. “It was an effective technique,” Hiscocks remembers “as we discovered when we tried to take those wings apart.”

An elaborate and fully reported ceremony was held to christen the airplane when it was finished, and its first flight was highly publicized, especially its subsequent arrival back it the Toronto waterfront on August 21, 1937.

One obvious shortcoming of wood-framed, fabric-covered airplanes was demonstrated that evening, when the flying newsroom returned from its inaugural trip and was being refuelled for the next day’s flight. One tank had been filled when a spark from the nozzle ignited fumes from the empty tank into a ball of flame.⁵ The flying newsroom burned too quickly to be saved, and “all that could be done was to float it away from the dock and let it burn,” recalls Fred Hotson, a DHC employee at the time. Up in smoke went the product of Dick Hiscocks’s summer labours.

Hiscocks has often wondered whether the fate of the flying newsroom that summer of 1937 was why DHC was unable to offer him work after he graduated. His visit to Hatfield in 1938, arranged by DHC managing director Philip C. Garratt, was, in its own way, equally disillusioning. De Havilland had its own way of doing things, and the company preferred to train its technicians at its own technical school. These graduates were more highly regarded within the company than engineers from Oxford or Cambridge, who were considered scientists, DH people were hands-on types, hardworking fellows who could use tools.

There were advantages to the way de Havilland operated: the production department was, above all else, flexible. Hatfield could build prototypes cheaply, for almost any market, and could produce short runs of any specific model economically by combining the wing of one type with a new fuselage and powering the result with one of the company’s reliable Gipsy engines.⁶

Garratt had arranged for Hiscocks to work at Hatfield on an advanced project—at least, it was advanced for the prewar de Havilland. It was the all-metal DH.95 Flamingo on which Jakimiuk had consulted with the de Havilland design team.⁷ Just out of engineering school, wanting to keep himself abreast of the latest developments in aviation, Hiscocks remembers requesting borrowing privileges in the company library. This was regarded as an outlandish request, for which he was paraded before Hatfield’s managing director, “no less.”

“He wanted to know what earthly use I would have for technical reports, and to his horror I said that there was a lot of good design data in reports from sources such as the Royal Aircraft Establishment. The office of every senior executive in England had a fireplace in those days, and, pointing to this, the head of the company said that government reports were given an ‘ignition test’ at de Havilland.”

From 1928 to 1939, DHC assembled aircraft using parts supplied from Britain. Here, circa 1933, a two-seater DH.60 Moth fuselage is being overhauled in the foreground while a DH.89 Dragon Rapide airliner fuselage, upper right, awaits its wings. FRED HOTSON VIA DHC

Even after the company’s leap into high-performance aircraft with the 1934 Comet racer, an ancestor of the World War II Mosquito, old habits died hard. In retrospect, Hiscocks saw in the distrust of scientific credentials and the supremacy of the shop floor at Hatfield a style of aircraft design and manufacture that would cause problems for the company’s Canadian branch when it became involved in high-volume production of Mosquitoes during the war.

Installing a 120-hp Gipsy III inverted air-cooled engine in one of the 1,553 Tiger Moth trainers assembled by DHC from 1937 to 1945. Here, Jerome McNamie (left). Ed Loveday and an unidentified worker unite a Gipsy engine with its airframe. FRED HOTSON VIA DHC

Canada’s potential to contribute aircraft to the war effort was recognized in Britain. Most of Canada’s aircraft companies were branch-plants of British armament concerns, such as Vickers. (America’s aviation industry was preoccupied with expanding by leaps and bounds to meet contracts placed by the British Purchasing Commission.) But most of Canada’s industry—and especially the branch-plants of British concerns—was hopelessly behind the times, assembling aircraft that were patently obsolete under licences from foreign manufacturers.⁸

Canadian Vickers, in Montreal, was building stately but slow biplane Stranraer flying-boats, which, though all-metal, were ten years out-of-date in concept. Boeing of Canada, in Vancouver, was building biplane Blackburn Shark torpedo-bombers even as its parent company in Seattle, 120 miles south, was turning out what was then the most advanced heavy bomber in the world, the B-17 Flying Fortress. A consortium of six subcontractors was organized as Canadian Associated Aircraft Ltd. to build the Handley-Page Hampden twin-engine bomber. Hardly the zenith of aircraft design at the time, it was an instructive all-metal structure, useful for bomber crew training. Associated was having trouble building them satisfactorily.

How de Havilland Canada, among the smallest and most technically outdated aircraft manufacturers in a country that was then an airplane-building backwater, became the biggest in Canada, with 7,000-odd employees who managed to build more than 1,130 400-mph Mosquito fighter-bombers, is by itself an impressive chapter in the annals of Canadian industry.

DHC’S growth in size and sophistication was one of those miracles that were routinely accomplished as part of the war effort. But if the word miracle accurately describes the overall wartime picture at Downsview, that wondrous outcome was accomplished by down-to-earth means: equal parts of hardnosed management and the heartbreak that often results from it; a gathering of talent from all over Canada, indeed the world; and exactly the right product. The Mosquito was an aircraft that DHC was uniquely qualified to produce. Among the first of those talented new additions from around the world was W. J. Jakimiuk of Warsaw, Poland.

Barely ten years after having helped found the PZL organization to advance the science of aircraft construction, Jaki Jakimiuk found himself quickly appointed chief engineer of a concern that was building flimsy Tiger Moth biplanes—a huge leap backward technologically.

DHC’s contract from the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1937 for twenty-six DH.82 Tiger Moth trainers was “a rather small piece of the business in a country verging on war,” writes Fred Hotson in The de Havilland Canada Story, “but everyone at Downsview believed an additional contract would follow in due course... but by the time the last Tiger was delivered on April 12, 1939, no new order had appeared.”⁹ Layoffs would have occurred at this most unlikely time—on the eve of a world war—if not for an order from the British parent company for 200 Tiger Moth fuselages.

These orders kept DHC alive during the prewar hiatus between the loss of North America’s illusion of immunity from the unpleasantness brewing in Europe and the flood of orders that was about to transform the continent within months into the arsenal of democracy. However mundane, the Tiger Moth work was a tribute to the persistent salesmanship of the company’s new managing director.

Phil Garratt flew himself to Ottawa almost every week in his personal DH.87 Hornet Moth to drum up business with RCAF procurement officers who as yet had no budget for training aircraft. The Hornet Moth was a true salesman’s airplane, the first DH design with a fully enclosed cabin and side-by-side rather than tandem seating for pilot and passenger.¹⁰

It seems that Jakimiuk consistently saw eye-to-eye with Phil Garratt, who had been involved with de Havilland Canada since 1928, when Garratt volunteered for hazardous work as a test and aircraft delivery pilot “just for the pleasure of it.”¹¹ Like Jakimiuk, Garratt was one of his country’s aviation pioneers.

He had been one of the original student pilots at Canada’s first flying academy, the Curtiss Flying School, Toronto, in 1915.¹² He soloed in a Curtiss Jenny, received his wings with the Royal Flying Corps in 1916 and spent that summer and fall as a fighter pilot with 70 Squadron. Garratt must have been an accomplished pilot; he was posted as an instructor to the noted Gosport School of Flying for the duration of the war. Like so many First War pilots, he became a barnstormer after he returned to Canada in 1919—in his case, with the Bishop Barker Flying Company.

Despite the cachet of its partners’ combined 122 victories in the skies over France (and the Victoria Cross each had been awarded), the company soon collapsed, leaving Garratt clear eyed about aviation’s immediate commercial possibilities.¹³ He managed his own chemical company from 1923 until 1936, when the enthusiastic part-timer was offered the general manager’s post at DHC. This was an opportunity to become the first Canadian to run the company.¹⁴ By then, it was beginning to look as if assembling airplanes might finally become a profitable business in Canada.

Garratt, pilot, salesman and manager, and Jakimiuk, the engineer’s engineer, had a lot in common, including outsized appetites for life. They looked on things from the same six-foot-plus viewpoint. Both were driven by big hearts. Each was, in his way, an aviation pioneer. Both recognized talent and appreciated the value of allowing young engineers free rein.

On December 17, 1939, the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan was launched in Ottawa, and by the following mid-March the first trainees were being taken on strength. Within a year there were sixty-seven training bases and ten advanced flying schools in Canada. The BCATP has been called Canada’s most important contribution to the war effort. As a central commitment around which a vast industrial complex had to be built, the air training plan generated activity far beyond the training of aircrew.

At these schools the most numerous aircraft types were the single-engine Harvard fighter trainer being built by Noorduyn near Montreal under licence from North American of Inglewood, California, and the twin-engine Avro Anson, in which bomber crews would be trained.¹⁵ The Anson was the Royal Air Force’s first monoplane aircraft with retractable landing gear when it was introduced in March 1936. While it was a total failure as an operational combat aircraft early in the war, it used mainly non-strategic materials in its construction and was widely available.¹⁶

DHC’S experience with the Anson started with the assembly of a used Anson 1 that arrived from England February 25, 1940, complete with gun turret and camouflage paint.¹⁷ A total of 264 second-hand Ansons, some with bullet-holes, were assembled and distributed to bases across Canada. This supply was suspended during the spring 1940 crisis caused by the fall of France and the evacuation at Dunkirk. The BCATP plan had envisaged that wingless Ansons would be supplied from overseas and fitted with wings built in Canada because of their wood content. Suddenly even fuselages were unavailable.

Canada would have to build Ansons from scratch. Federal Aircraft Ltd. was formed “almost overnight”¹⁸ to build the Anson 11, a version with American Jacobs L6MB radial engines instead of the Mark I’s British Armstrong-Whitworth Cheetahs and, for climatic reasons, fewer windows along its fuselage, DHC, one of five assembly plants organized under Federal’s program, built 375 Anson us. They were ideal transitional products for upgrading the skills of the DHC workforce, which nearly doubled to about a thousand workers in 1940.

So important was the Anson to the BCATP that an all-Canadian Anson v, which would use a higher proportion of wooden components, including moulded plywood skin surfaces, was developed by the National Research Council in Ottawa under the direction of the same Dick Hiscocks who had worked for de Havilland as an engineering student at the University of Toronto during the summer of 1937. As an ingenious, thoroughly re-engineered improvement on a proven design, more than a thousand of the Anson vs were produced at plants other than DHC.¹⁹

The intense demand for experienced engineers and tradespeople to staff the aircraft plants being constructed, sometimes within weeks, often worked out to DHC’S advantage. People were frequently shaken loose from established companies to work for new ones, but some had trouble adapting to workplaces that were being started from scratch.

One such luminary was the former chief engineer of Fairchild Aircraft of Longueuil, Quebec, a respected supplier of bush planes in Canada for many years. Francis Hyde-Beadle was exactly the pioneer of British aviation his hyphenated surname suggests. He was among the first engineers at Farnborough, the cradle of flight research in the U.K.—one of the first six technicians, in fact, to join the British Army’s Royal Balloon Factory, the origins of which extended back to 1882. Hyde-Beadle was there when one of the organization’s airplane designers and its test pilot was none other than the future Sir Geoffrey de Havilland. The Balloon Factory was renamed the Royal Aircraft Factory in 1911 to reflect Farnborough’s increasing preoccupation with powered, heavier-than-air flight.

Hyde-Beadle preferred working on specialized projects that required original design ideas, such as the combination float-fuel tanks on the Gloster racing planes that competed for the international Schneider Trophy, the epitome of air racing until Britain retired it by winning three consecutive times up to 1931. Looking for that kind of challenge after Farnborough ceded its experimental work to Britain’s aircraft manufacturers, Hyde-Beadle moved to the four-year-old Fairchild Aviation Corporation of Hagerstown, Maryland, in 1928. He was attracted by Sherman Fairchild’s determination to build advanced aircraft. Subsequently he moved to its plant at Longueuil, near Montreal, which opened in 1930 and produced a line of bush planes known for toughness, versatility and the ability to carry five to twelve passengers or a ton of mixed cargo.

In 1938 Hyde-Beadle was hired to head the engineering staff at National Steel Car’s new plant in Malton, built to assemble Handley-Page Hampden bombers and manufacture Westland Lysander army co-operation aircraft (it later became the Canadian Avro plant where the first six CF-105 Avro Arrow prototypes were built). NSC’s problems building the Hampden had less to do with engineering than with adapting methods suitable for producing railway rolling stock to aviation.

When he moved to DHC, Hyde-Beadle persuaded his right-hand production engineers, the Burlison brothers, George and Bill, to come with him. Like Hyde-Beadle, the Burlisons had grown up with aviation, following their father into Canadian Vickers’ Montreal plant. They too disliked the working culture at NSC.²⁰ George joined the burgeoning production department and Bill became an inspector.

The first Avro Anson I of an eventual 264 assembled at Downsview for aircrew training in Canada. Camouflaged, with gun turrets, they arrived from Britain February 25, 1940 and were assembled that weekend. They flew Sunday and were delivered to the R.C.A.F. Monday, VIA GEORGE NEAL

Another distinguished addition from Vickers was Richard J. Moffett, a stress engineer who came to Montreal from England in 1928 and worked on the Vickers Vancouver flying-boat program. By mid-Depression, Vickers was down to four employees, but Moffett brought the company to life again in time to licence-build twenty modern all-metal Northrop Delta transports and the twenty outdated Supermarine Stranraer flying-boats that were Canada’s bicoastal aerial patrol force at the war’s outset. Moffett became Federal Aircraft’s general manager in mid-1940 to put together the Anson production consortium, but was unhappy there and resigned twice before being released to become production manager on Anson IIs at DHC that autumn.

“Suddenly,” writes Fred Hotson, who saw these changes firsthand, “DHC had a formidable factory management team—their own old-timers plus the cream of the Vickers/Fairchild experience. On his arrival at Downsview [Christmas Day, 1940] Moffett saw that the existing machine shop was completely inadequate, and he had a new one set up and furnished with the very latest equipment.”²¹

Hotson recalls that DHC’S two new brick buildings, “smelling of concrete and fresh paint,” were absorbed so smoothly into the expansion program of autumn 1940 that the company was soon being given such additional contracts as the conversion of another batch of seventy-five Anson is from Britain to Jacobs powerplants and the assembly of thirty-eight Fairey Battle single-engine bombers, some of which became target-towing aircraft for air training plan gunnery instruction. So far ahead of schedule was the production of Anson fuselages in 1941 that they became airborne without wings, engines or tails: the Ansons were being hung from the factory ceiling, like model airplanes, for storage.²²

Two of the most outstanding Polish engineers who accompanied Jakimiuk to DHC in 1940 were the aerodynamicist W. Z. Stepniewski and Waclaw Czerwinski, a structures engineer. Aerodynamicist Dick Hiscocks would remember both as “very competent and stimulating people to be with.”²³

Czerwinski, who had designed gliders in Poland, organized a DHC gliding club within the engineering department, members of which built their own glider in their spare time. He also came with plywood-forming expertise that proved invaluable when DHC became committed as a second source for the “Wooden Wonder,” the 400-mph Mosquito bomber from Hatfield that became one of the most versatile combat aircraft of the war. A group of the Polish engineers at DHC formed Canadian Wooden Aircraft to manufacture formed-plywood parts, often shaped into complex curves, that replaced parts made from strategically important metals.²⁴ The Mosquito would eventually bomb Nazi rallies in Berlin with the aid of streamlined formed-plywood drop tanks made at first in a converted piano factory and later at a larger plant on Sorauren Avenue, both in Toronto.²⁵

Czerwinski found himself in wide demand. He was involved with several similar projects at the National Research Council to replace metal with wood, including the Anson v, on which he worked with Hiscocks. He joined Avro Canada after the war and was part of the Arrow fighter project.

Stepniewski left DHC after the war to work for Frank Piasecki’s helicopter manufacturing company in Philadelphia and became one of the most respected vertical-flight engineers in he world. Piasecki specialized in big, powerful, twin-rotor helicopters in which the torque of one rotor was cancelled out by the other. Without the need to siphon off power to a vertical tail rotor to keep them on course, Piasecki’s machines could devote more of their available power to carrying payloads. The Piasecki organization eventually became the Boeing Airplane Company’s Vertol helicopter division.

The cooperation between DHC and the National Research Council on the Anson v project was typical of Downsview’s practical approach to research and development. Before the war they had jointly developed streamlined ski landing gear for the Rapide. The Englist company naturally had little interest in equipping its aircraft with skis, so that was the kind of project DHC interested itself in. But with the coming of war, small experimental undertakings only got in the way of the company’s mass-production goals.

The answer was to set up Central Aircraft Ltd. in London, Ontario. With the arrival of Jakimiuk and the other Polish engineers at Downsview, Francis Hyde-Beadle was freed to do the work he liked best. Phil Garratt’s executive assistant, John McDonough, a former mail and bush pilot who had tested the first Noorduyn Norseman and who was at loose ends after supervising the plant expansion at Downsview, became manager.²⁶

It was by joining Central Aircraft in 1943 that Fred H. Buller first stepped into DHC’S orbit. Buller, who succeeded Hyde-Beadle as chief engineer of Central Aircraft on the latter’s death late that year, had a lot in common with the Englishman. Buller [was a pure designer who preferred doing original engineering and was brilliant at it.

The team that would design and manufacture the Beaver was now almost complete. First, though they had a war to win. Doing so would involve near-cataclysmic changes at DHC. There were Mosquitoes to be built—Mosquitoes to interfere with Adolf Hitler’s speeches, Mosquitoes to make Hermann Goering wish for Mosquitoes of his own.