Rentschler shrugged his shoulders in a gesture of hopelessness and reported that George Mead and Andy Willgoos, the Wright engineers, had encountered serious difficulties with piston scuffing. They were struggling with the usual cut-and-try “fixes” but so far with little positive success. Leighton thought that under the criticism of the liquid-cooled partisans he might have specified too small a diameter for the engine and suggested that if I agreed I might modify the requirements if absolutely necessary. Meanwhile, however, he was determined to push the new engine to the limit. Rentschler shook his head in disagreement. He thought the problem went deeper than Leighton had indicated. He had a tendency to probe for fundamentals and it was his considered opinion that, for Wright at least, liquid-cooling offered the better course of engine development. Air-cooling, even though it might have inherent advantages in weight saving, suffered a handicap from the point of view of timing, and he doubted if these could be overcome. He preferred undertaking a completely new design by Wright to trying to get the bugs out of the Lawrance. Leighton twisted in his chair as the flush spread up his neck and flooded through the gray at his temples. He had detected a note of arrogance in Rentschler’s suave statement—an inference of sure judgment on the part of the civilian as opposed to the immaturity of the naval officer. I made a note of this fundamental conflict as Leighton set his jaw. The Navy didn’t propose to let anything stand in its way in realizing on the inherent superiority of air-cooling. Aside from the potential weight saving there was the vital factor of dependability. One-third of all Navy power-plant failures could be charged to liquid-cooled plumbing—leaky water jackets, leaky hose connections, and what have you. “In other words,” he summed up, “in addition to saving the weight of the plumbing we can eliminate the majority of engine failures by going to air-cooled engines. We’re your customers,” he added, “and that’s our position.” Rentschler’s face was a mask. The muscles of his jaw flexed as he faced Leighton. The latter broke the tension. “What do you say,” he queried, “to our taking a look at the new air-cooled engines?” We took a slow-running freight elevator that dropped us to the basement, where George Mead waited for us in the experimental department. A solidly built fellow in his early thirties, with dark bushy eyebrows, George had the serious mein of the well-trained engineer but he combined this with unusual force and driving power. No one in the aircraft industry could drive a project to completion with such remorseless energy. Now he pointed to a large radial engine mounted on a teardown stand with its ignition wiring partly stripped.