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How to build 300,000 airplanes in five years

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  1. skybrian
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    This article has interesting facts about just how nuts American manufacturing was in World War II, and how difficult it was, and how scaling up takes time, even under emergency conditions: ... ......

    This article has interesting facts about just how nuts American manufacturing was in World War II, and how difficult it was, and how scaling up takes time, even under emergency conditions:

    Despite the continuing escalation of the war in Europe, the U.S. was reluctant to prepare for large-scale mobilization. Existing mobilization plans assumed that any future war would be smaller in scale than World War I had been, and that only half of the already-small existing aircraft manufacturing capacity would be devoted to war production. As late as 1940 the U.S. military had just 2,665 aircraft, around a tenth of what Germany’s Luftwaffe fielded.

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    The first push to grow the U.S. aircraft industry came well before the U.S. entered the war. Desperate for more planes to counter Hitler’s territorial ambitions, both Britain and France placed large orders with U.S. aircraft manufacturers in 1938 and 1939. In 1938 Britain placed an order for up to 250 of Lockheed’s Hudson bombers, worth $25 million. The order, then the largest order ever received by a U.S. aircraft manufacturer, was several times Lockheed’s annual revenues of $2-3 million, and Lockheed quickly doubled its workforce to fulfill it. Engine manufacturer Pratt & Whitney was rescued from the brink of bankruptcy by a French order for engines worth $2 million in 1938, followed by an even larger order worth $85 million in 1939. North American Aviation grew from 150 employees in 1935 to 3,400 employees in 1939, partly due to British orders for its AT-6 “Texan” training aircraft.

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    French upfront payments allowed Pratt & Whitney to build a new facility at its Connecticut factory (dubbed “the French Wing”) which doubled its floor space, and a similar French investment allowed Wright to triple its factory space. Altogether, by 1940 the British and French had invested $72 million ($1.6B in 2024 dollars) in U.S. aircraft factories, estimated to have sped up the process of scaling up aircraft production by a year.

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    The next great push for aircraft production came in 1940, after Germany invaded western Europe. On April 9th Germany invaded Norway and Denmark, and on May 10th Germany invaded Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and France. On May 16th Roosevelt asked Congress for $1.2 billion in additional defense funding ($26.8B in 2024 dollars) and called for the U.S. to build 50,000 aircraft a year, roughly as many aircraft as the U.S. industry had produced in the entire history of aviation to that point.

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    It was soon realized that the scale of expansion required was far too much for the existing industry to finance (in part because banks were reluctant to provide loans), and ultimately most new aircraft factories were built by the government as GOCO (government-owned, contractor-operated) facilities. While some factories were built by the War and Navy Departments directly, much of the expansion was financed by the Defense Plant Corporation (DPC), the brainchild of Bill Knudsen, who had left his job as president of General Motors at the request of President Roosevelt to work for free helping U.S. industrial mobilization.

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    Roosevelt’s production targets were far greater than what the existing aircraft industry could handle, even after they greatly expanded their workforces, and manufacturers in a variety of different industries ultimately contributed to wartime aircraft manufacturing. [...] Roughly half of the weight of aircraft produced during the war was produced by subcontractors and licensees, compared to about 10% in 1940. The car industry alone produced about 56% of the more than 800,000 aircraft engines built during the war.

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    [...] aircraft were far more complex than other mass-produced goods. While a car had around 5,000 parts, a B-25 bomber had around 165,000, not including the tens of thousands of parts in the engines, instruments, and other equipment, or the 150,000 rivets needed to stitch the plane together. And the performance requirements for aircraft were much higher: An aircraft piston engine, for instance, was much more powerful, much lighter per horsepower, and was pushed much harder than a car engine. A 1930s-era Ford V8 could generate about 85 horsepower, while aircraft engines generated 1,000 to 2,000 horsepower, and a car engine weighed about 6.9 pounds for every horsepower it generated, compared to 1 to 2 pounds for an aircraft engine. And while a car engine rarely exceeded 22% of its maximum power, an aircraft engine regularly ran at maximum power, or even above maximum power.

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    One of the reasons for this poor state of production control, and another difference between aircraft manufacturing and other types of manufacturing, was that aircraft designs were constantly changing. With conventional manufacturing, design of the factory took place once designs were “frozen” and no more major changes to the design would take place. Mass-production factories achieved their high efficiencies by having carefully arranged and timed flows of material, which would be disrupted by major design changes that might require new tools, different parts, and changed material routing.

    But while attempts were made to “freeze” aircraft designs to make manufacturing easier, ultimately this proved infeasible. Designs had to be constantly improved to address deficiencies, improve performance, and deliver aircraft that were capable of overcoming the enemy. Engines were upgraded to be more powerful, parts that were found to fail frequently were redesigned, and new guns and other equipment was installed.

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    Early on the main problem was simply the lack of factories and machine tools to produce the necessary aircraft. As more factories came online, the problem became one of finding sufficient material: The huge increase in output and the fact that manufacturers were incentivized to hoard materials created constant shortages. And finally, the primary bottleneck became finding enough labor to fill the factories. Not only did the aircraft industry need to hire a huge number of workers, but so did every other major war industry, made worse by the fact that the workers they did have were constantly being drafted or volunteering for service.

    The biggest source of untapped labor proved to be women. Though aircraft manufacturers were initially reluctant to hire women, women eventually made up roughly 40% of the aircraft labor force, and in some plants were as high as 90%. But using large numbers of female workers required completely redesigning the production process.

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    [...] ramping up volume manufacturing for new aircraft models could only take place after a long period of testing and development. Most aircraft the U.S. fielded during the war took two to three years between when design started and the 5th aircraft was produced. Nearly every aircraft the U.S. produced in large numbers during the war started design work before June 1940, more than a year before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.

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    [b]y 1944, U.S. aircraft production was so voluminous that the Army and Navy were having trouble dealing with them all. Not wanting to shut down the plants for fear of losing the expertise contained within them, the U.S. simply began to dispose of old planes to make way for new ones.

    As a measure of the industrial might of the United States in 1944 and 1945, the subsequent whirl of destruction told a better story than a thousand pages of statistics. If a plane needed minor repairs, it was pulled off the flight line and junked, and a shiny new replacement unit flew in to take its place. Hundreds of airplanes were flown into remote Pacific island airstrips, parked in a vacant clearing, and abandoned. Many such aircraft “boneyards” were later used for target practice by U.S. bombers on training missions. Scrapped airplanes were bulldozed into pits, and the wreckage compacted by running tanks over them. Marginally damaged carrier planes were pushed off the flight decks into the sea, and new replacement units flown in from escort carriers. This mass-junking of perfectly serviceable warplanes occurred at the height of the war, when the Japanese were falling well short of aircraft production targets and struggling to keep their assembly lines in operation at all. - Twilight of the Gods

    4 votes