The Design Section of the Matériel Division, under which the Engine Section was set up, was headed by a grand old man of aviation, Capt. H. C. Richardson. “Captain Dick,” one of the early pilots, a member of the crew of one of the NC boats of 1919 transatlantic fame, and a skilled engineer, had inherited Design from “Jerry” Hunsaker, a classmate of mine, when Jerry resigned from the Construction Corps to go to Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a professor. Jerry had founded the Design Group, and had built up a large drafting room and staff with which to carry on naval aviation design. His designs were to be built experimentally at the Naval Aircraft Factory at Philadelphia and then farmed out to the factory, or perhaps to some willing private manufacturer. It was right at this point that Leighton stressed a difference between the Engine Section and the Design Section. There were but a handful of people all told in the Engine Section: Leighton himself; his assistant, Lt. Frank Maile, who had once served with me on the _Old Ark_; Lt. Ricco Botta, a former Reserve officer and a skilled engineer; Lt. (jg) Ralph M. Parsons, a former student under Dr. Lucke and my assistant at the Aviation Mechanics Schools at Great Lakes; and two secretaries. The senior secretary was Miss Alma Quisenberry, a quiet, soft-spoken young woman from Nashville, Tennessee. And this handful of people not only had no desire to design or build its own engines but had a clear conviction that the hope for the future lay in the Bureau’s placing its dependence for design, development, and production entirely upon private industry. In this respect, the Engine Section now stood quite alone. After the Armistice, the Army Air Service had devised a plan for setting up a great government production center at McCook Field, near Dayton, Ohio. Army aircraft were to be designed by brain trusters in government employ. The institution would be surrounded by a complex of interested private manufacturers who would produce aircraft to Army design and specification. The plan had fallen through, largely because ambitious young men had preferred to risk their futures in chancey private industry rather than rest secure in the dead end of a government establishment. But the idea still persisted, and many in both Army and Navy were still sold on nationalization for the aircraft industry. I could tell from Leighton’s development of this knotty problem that he was still uncertain as to where I stood. Conceivably I might be one who would want to build up a great engine-design group in BUAERO and another big production group at the Philadelphia Aircraft Factory and thus establish for myself quite a respectable empire. However, I had developed a few positive ideas of my own on the subject, and, curiously enough they had come out of the old rifle shooting competitions. I now relieved Leighton on this subject, obviously so close to his heart.