Perfect Wing

From the sprawling Consolidated Aircraft Corp. factory on Lindbergh Field a huge flying boat waddled down to land-locked San Diego Bay one day last week. In the bright California sun her slim wing looked absurdly frail, her huge hull with its upswept stern grotesquely fat. Nevertheless, her little band of professional observers knew they were watching a plane designed to be the last aerodynamic word of 1939.

With her two 2,000-h.p. Wright Cyclones rumbling, she taxied out to open water, swung into the wind and poised for flight. Spindrift ripping from her slim stern, she was up on the step. Then she was in the air.

From the beach, factory executives in shirt sleeves, mechanics in overalls watched the new 52-passenger ship as she swung out past Point Loma. Among them, none watched more intently than Engineer David Richard Davis, because none had a bigger stake in her than he. For David Davis had designed her slim no-foot wing, had calculated on the drawing board and in the wind tunnel that it was close to perfection.

What Pilot Bill Wheatley had to say when he landed confirmed Designer Davis' calculations. Consolidated's new 25-ton Model 31 had a high speed of 275 m.p.h. (75 miles faster than Boeing's four-motored 314 clipper), handled nicely in the air. Gasoline consumption showed that she had a range of 10,000 miles with a light passenger load, that she could lug 28 passengers in Pullman accommodations across the Atlantic at a speed unprecedented for commercial flying boats.

Designer Davis' wing, flush-riveted and smooth of contour, had justified his prediction that it would be 20% more efficient than any in the air today. The product of ten years of work, it had been tried in Caltech's aeronautical laboratories and in test rigs of its designer's own devising. Whether he had achieved a smooth flow of air over virtually its entire surface as National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics has done with its new wing curve (TIME, May 15), David Davis modestly declined to say.

With the Davis "perfect wing" as a starter, Consolidated in ten months built its new boat from the ground up without help from Army or Navy. Long before the ship had flown, however, the news of its spectacular 10,000-mile cruising range was out, and the Navy, one of Consolidated^ best customers, poked in its nose. At week's end it appeared likely that Model 31's first assignment will be as a patrol bomber for the fleet.

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