The end of the summer found us back behind the breakwater at San Pedro, when one day a message came that Fred Rentschler and Bill Boeing had flown down from Seattle in their Ford Trimotor and were at the Los Angeles Biltmore where they would like me to have dinner with them. I knew from the newspapers and from letters that great things had been going on in the aircraft industry. Not only had some of the companies made money on operations, but some of the leaders had become rich as a result of the increased values of their stocks. This was the beginning of the end of that mad period of speculation in which all sorts of mergers and consolidations had prompted the public to get into the market and make a killing. In the aircraft industry, Curtiss and Wright had led off with a merger that had brought together two of the greatest names in aviation and had put two of the biggest operations under the same tent. In reply Boeing, Rentschler, Chance Vought, and others, fearing the giant thus created, had consolidated in a merger of their own. Unlike the Curtiss-Wright consolidation, which, to them, smacked of Wall Street, the new one was to comprise only sound companies, those which had already proved profitable or seemed likely to continue to do so. The big idea was to bring together, under one leadership, the best in airplanes, engines, propellers, and transport systems in order to coordinate engineering experience in a way that would speed progress. For passenger air transport still seemed to hang on a dead center: it was impossible to reduce rates unless volume could be stepped up, and volume refused to step up until costs came down. The new outfit, which had taken the name of the United Aircraft and Transport Corporation, planned to get its engineering heads together and create improved aircraft designed to break that log jam. Fred Rentschler and Bill Boeing had come to Los Angeles to look over some of the western companies like Northrup, which had already joined up, and Menasco, which would like to. Reading about the Curtiss-Wright consolidation, I had to smile at the idea I had once had of depending upon those two for air-cooled engine competition. Save for Fred Rentschler and Pratt and Whitney, they would now have us by the neck.