The moment arrived when Chance Vought Aircraft was running out of work. In order to extend the useful life of the old Corsair, we had replaced the Wasp engine with a new Pratt and Whitney Hornet 1690. This gave us a breathing spell while we assembled our engineering team and dreamed up a new model. But BUAERO had now revived the old two-seat fighter project and thrust it on us. Worse still, they had designed the airplane themselves and now looked to us to detail it and build the prototype. Recalling the old fight between FLEET AIR and BUAERO on this subject, back when I had been Admiral Reeves’s chief of staff, the whole thing had elements of poetic injustice in it that now aroused me to action. I decided to build their old two-seat fighter, according to all specifications, to exceed their designed performances, and at the same time build the structure strong enough to be used as a dive bomber. This would take a lot of doing, for the performance guarantees were already high, but it would leave us with two strings to our bow, a two-seat fighter that would probably not go into production, and a two-seat dive bomber that probably would. In the latter event, Vought would give the Navy a distinctly new type of airplane, one that could depend upon its guns to penetrate enemy fighter cover and then use its bombs on ground targets. One of the complications involved was the specification that called for the installation of the new Pratt and Whitney two-row radial, the R-1535. The two-row feature would have introduced excessive drag and cooling difficulties, except that I chanced to read an article by C. G. Grey in _The Airplane_, a British magazine devoted to aviation and to running down everything American. Mr. Grey had recently visited the great Bristol airplane factory and had been impressed with a project for cooling air-cooled engines. Unlike certain foreign engine builders who insisted on blowing large quantities of air in the general direction of their cylinders, Bristol had devised an ingenious contrivance through which they had succeeded in directing a “mere trickle” of air at precisely the required spots, thus saving much drag and improving the cooling no end. After this tip-off, we set up a joint project using the Sikorsky wind tunnel and staff, under the direction of Chance Vought engineers, to develop a cowl for a Pratt and Whitney engine. Out of this cooperative effort came a new power-plant installation using the “cowl-flaps” which any passenger in any American transport can still see by looking out the window at the engine nacelle and watching the opening and closing of the “gills.” This development not only made the two-row radial a success but proved so effective that it has been rated by discerning observers as a development quite as revolutionary in its way as was the controllable-angle propeller.