“We have no organization chart, let alone a bureau manual. Somebody is supposed to be working on one but somehow it never gets beyond the admiral’s desk. His organization is personal rather than functional—based on loyalties. Every man or woman in this Bureau,” he asserted with emphasis, “would go to hell and back for good old Billy Moffett. And loyalty works both ways; the admiral’s most striking quality is his loyalty to his subordinates. Sometimes I’m not so sure about it to his seniors; he loves to needle the old whales on topside.” Leighton smiled as if in recollection of specific instances. “No,” he went on, “there is never a dull moment in BUAERO. It reminds me of that old adage handed down from the days of iron men and wooden ships, ‘When in trouble or in doubt, run in circles, yell, and shout.’ And that, my dear successor,” he concluded, “is BUAERO in a nutshell—or should I say bombshell?” The Bureau had set up as its number-one project, the job of “selling aviation to the fleet,” and a fleet full of sales resistance at that. The Bureau had designed catapults—big compressed-air guns, for launching airplanes from the decks of battle wagons at sea. It had designed or procured new seaplanes to be launched by these catapults. It had trained aviators to man these planes, and incidentally, to try to sell them to the ships. In this they had met hard sledding because those unwieldy catapults had cluttered up the decks, destroyed the symmetry of the ships’ silhouettes, and shed grease all over the precious teak decks. However, the aviators had penetrated the cold front by learning how to spot the fall of shot in long-range battle practice, and how to signal the ship the correction that would put a salvo on a target. Ships with planes had thus gained an advantage in the gunnery competition over those that had none, and besides, their pilots had been trained for deck duty and could share watches at sea or in port. Meanwhile, BUAERO had pushed on with its plans to match the British in carrier aircraft. Under the leadership of Kenneth Whiting, who as Commander of the Northern Bombing Group at Killingholm, Scotland, during the war had sent Godfrey de Chevalier down to the Grand Fleet to observe carrier operations, the old electric-drive collier _Jupiter_ had been converted to the experimental carrier _Langley_, and pilots had been trained in deck landings, to gain experience from which to design new carrier aircraft. Here, too, the air-cooled engine offered important advantages, provided it could be made dependable. That job was to become the first order of business for the new chief of the Engine Section.