Meanwhile, we got on with the Pan American S-40’s, as they came to be called, though this project proved to have more angles than the Kohinoor diamond, and threatened to cost about as much. While the specifications for the first Pan American Clippers had been reviewed by Col. Charles A. Lindbergh, Pan American advisor, and incorporated into the contract, they didn’t mean a thing. Before Pan American would take delivery on the plane it must be passed by the Department of Commerce and given an Approved Type Certificate as to its airworthiness. Without this ATC, Sikorsky might be left with a million dollars’ worth of airplanes and no market. Now Pan American, our sole customer, used this advantage to insist on our incorporating in the ships everything its own engineers or our prolific innovators could dream up, from swivel-handled toilets to back-lighted card tables. Thus our designs were kept in a state of continuous flux—at company expense. Save for the redeeming qualities of Igor Ivanovich Sikorsky himself, it is hard to imagine what might have become of us. A man of strong convictions, for all his humbleness, he was a brilliant engineer though never a “clever” one. Thoroughly grounded in science and mathematics and accustomed to reason from fundamental principles to valid conclusions, he possessed to an astonishing degree those powers with which to divine a true course even when the signposts were not clearly marked. This capacity he once called “intuitive engineering” without for the moment ascribing that quality of genius to himself. Thanks to Igor Sikorsky’s personal leadership, we finally completed delivery of the first three Pan American Clippers. While United absorbed a heavy loss on them, none of this resulted from changes made necessary by official ATC tests. Unlike other companies that later suffered severe losses from this cause, Sikorsky always managed to pass the tests in a remarkably short time, even though radical design features were involved. As for Pan American, that company used the airplanes to lug tons of mail, cargo, and passengers over the high seas for many years. The ships paved the way for a later model that disproved “Dick” Richardson’s formula, hurdled the last long barrier, San Francisco to Hawaii, and pointed the way to overseas air transport by land planes. It is not unlikely that Fred Rentschler’s investment paid off in the long run, if not on the books of Sikorsky, on those of Pratt and Whitney and Hamilton-Standard.