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Don Berlin left Curtiss in December 1941.
Was that a large reason for the fall of Curtiss?
Also, not direct from Wiki, the last Curtiss designs were not very good. The end of the line was XF-87 Blackhawk. It performer acceptably except for being a bit slower than desired. Orders were palced for 57 but were cancelled in favor of the Northrop F-89 Scorpion.
Maybe when people produce maps of your empire you are too big for your boots and attract a few powerful jealous enemies. just sayin/
<SNIP> He helped guide Curtiss-Wright into successful business diversity in the Aerospace industry away from airframes<SNIP>
Maybe when people produce maps of your empire you are too big for your boots and attract a few powerful jealous enemies. just sayin/
The "jealous enemy" was United Aircraft, which was made up of Pratt Whitney, Hamilton standard props, Vought aircraft and Sikorsky at the time. Pre 1934 the corporation had included Boeing, Stearman, what would become United Air Lines and perhaps a few smaller outfits.
With all those resources to bear, too bad United Aircraft couldn't have developed and fielded the F4U sooner.
Not sure the F4U was going to get developed any sooner that it was. The first production F4F-3 with a two stage supercharger flew in Feb 1940, roughly 4 months before the first flight of the F4U. There was only one prototype and it crashed in July of 1940 but was rebuilt in 4 months. Hundreds of changes are made between prototype and first production model. Navy Issues a letter of intent to buy Feb 3, 1941 but does't place (sign?) actual contract for 534 planes until June 30th,1941. By Dec 1941 both Brewster and Goodyear have been brought in as extra sources but the first F4U is still 7 months from being flown.
P W only built 6 of the two stage R-2800 engines in 1941 and went from building 13 single stage R-2800s in Jan to over 160 in Dec. They built 509 of the two stage R-1830s in 1941 and 285 of them were in the last 3 months. P W almost doubled theri production of R-1830s in 1941 over what it was in 1940.
What should Aircraft stopped work on in order to put more effort into the F4U?
Vought had been building aircraft for the Navy since the early 20s.
The trouble is that there just weren't that many "large" companies in 1938-41. Just about every company was expanding as fast as possible. P W quadrupled their floor space in just a few years. Other companies showed similar growth.
Boeing might have had some spare capacity (they built A-20s for the British under sub contract to Douglas) but it is around 2400 miles from Stratford to the Boeing Plant.
many of the companies in the "cancel this or that" thread had built under 200 planes in their history (some had built under 2 dozen) in the spring of 1940.
Chance-Vought did manage to crank out 579 Kingfisher observation planes in 1940-41. The Naval Aircraft factory took over production and built 300 more planes.
Things were not happening in a vacuum or bubble and diverting resources from one project to another could have wide ranging consequences. Kingfishers may seem like an unimportant plane or something that could be pushed aside for the more important/glamorous big fighter but the intended supplement/replacement for the Kingfisher was the Curtiss Seamew. It was such a failure that the Navy went to the extreme of pulling the older Curtiss Seagull biplanes out of storage and issuing them rather than continue using the Seamew. Cutting Kingfisher production to work on the Corsair and planning to make up the difference with Seamews could have left the Navy in a real bind.