At first everything had gone swimmingly, but the day the first ship to fly over the lines essayed to take off with full load from the high-altitude field at Cheyenne, serious trouble developed; the airplane just could not handle full load satisfactorily from such elevations. At first, Boeing had been inclined to blame Pratt and Whitney and the Wasp engine for insufficient horsepower, but when that attempt failed, both parties shifted the blame onto Hamilton-Standard propellers, claiming faulty propeller design. This was the old Indian game of passing the buck around the eternal triangle of engine, propeller, and airplane. When we sent Frank Caldwell to Cheyenne to investigate he went quietly about a demonstration that, we hoped, would prove convincing. First he adjusted the duralumin blades at best setting for take-off to show how well the ship would perform even at high altitude. This setting, however, was so inefficient at cruising speeds that the nearby mountain peaks echoed and reechoed the whining complaint of whirring blades. To meet this defect, Frank reset the blades to the best angle for cruising, where the airplane, its load having been reduced for take-off, performed perfectly. After this convincing demonstration, he unwrapped his drawings of a controllable-pitch propeller for the 247. While no such prop had yet been air-tested, Boeing brushed the objection aside, confident now that between the two companies, the airplane could be salvaged. So it was that Frank Caldwell’s controllable-pitch propeller not only saved the whole string of Boeing 247’s, but in doing so, it opened up the new era of “three-mile-a-minute” air passenger travel and started air transport on its way. After that, even the Army and Navy began to recognize the potentialities of the new propeller; it paved the way for low-wing monoplanes with their high-wing loadings and thus marked the passing of the biplanes. But prior to the Cheyenne demonstration, Hamilton-Standard propellers dragged bottom. Ray Walsh, who had taken over its management, closed the Pittsburgh plant, reduced the organization to a handful of the ablest men, and moved the shop into a corner of Pratt and Whitney’s ample building in East Hartford. Later, when success acclaimed the genius of Frank Caldwell, Ray began expanding his organization to meet new demands and finally built an additional wing on the Pratt and Whitney building to house his new shop. Still later, we moved Chance Vought Aircraft down to Stratford to bunk in with a much deflated Sikorsky, and turned the whole Vought shop over to Hamilton.