One of the important considerations that had influenced my decision to resign from the Navy had been my desire to work on constructive tasks with men whose competence I had admired. Among these were Fred Rentschler, Bill Boeing, George Mead, Claire Egtvedt, George Wheat, Don Brown, Phil Johnson, and Chance Vought. As fate dealt the cards, however, the decade of 1930 saw the passing of Chance, George, and Don, and of these, Chance was the first. During the summer of 1930, after I had added Sikorsky to my responsibilities, Chance died of septicemia, something which today would respond quickly to the new drugs. With him, much of the sparkle went out of United Aircraft. By the time I joined United, Chance had already come to realize that his famous Corsair two-seater, which had done so well on battleship catapults and carrier decks, had all but been outmoded by the passage of time alone. And he was at a loss to know what to do about it, and talked far into the night about that problem. His untimely death relieved him of all necessity for further worry, but it also handed the job to me. Worse still, the Vought company, like most other aviation concerns, had always been a one-man show and there were no more Chance Voughts standing around to be hired, even with more jobless men around than the country had ever known. And so we faced the task of creating a new organization—one of a type then new to aviation—of developing some new product and of marketing it in what was becoming a tough market indeed. In this job we pinned our hopes on some of the old-timers in the Vought organization and on a relative newcomer, Charles J. McCarthy. “C.J.,” as we called him, to differentiate the airplane engineer from “J.F.,” the financial wizard, had been in BUAERO in charge of the new department called “Stress Analysis” at the time when I had been chief of the Engine Section. It was C.J. who had flown to Norfolk with me the day the Wright T-3 engine jumped out of a torpedo bomber when the wooden propeller flew apart, and it had been out of that experience that we decided to standardize on metal propellers. It was curious how, in the aviation slipstream, we milled around, each trying to add his little push to the effective forward thrust. For Chance had offered C.J. a job in his company, and C.J. had accepted. Now I began to look upon him as my second there, and between us we decided to bring in a new chief engineer.