This decision in itself was perhaps indicative of the audacity of one of aviation’s immortal enterprisers, for none knew better than Reuben Fleet what the handicaps were; as a former procurement officer at McCook Field, Fleet had played the old Army-Navy game hard. And it took a swashbuckler like Fleet to dare intimate that anything designed for the Army could be worth hell-room to the Navy. And he probably would not have got to first base either, save that he had been smart enough to use the air-cooled radial Wright instead of the war-surplus Hispano engine. The Engine Section, at least, could be expected to favor the adoption of the Army PT, in order to increase the use of the air-cooled engines. And Reuben Fleet was right on that score. But there were formidable obstacles. Naval air training was centered at the Air Station, Pensacola, Florida, where the N-9 seaplane was well established as a local favorite. Nearly every pilot in the Navy had qualified on it and now cherished for it the affection of a kid for his first pony. In order to keep the ancient aircraft flying, the station had built up an assembly and repair department manned entirely by civilians from the town of Pensacola—skilled carpenters, riggers, and fabric workers, fully competent to overhaul the stick-and-wire N-9’s. As a matter of fact, they could build them new from the ground up, and this was where the rub lay. After an airplane had been washed out in a crack-up, it was supposed to be stricken from the list, an action that in due course would have absorbed all the war surplus and led to new construction. But at Pensacola, there were no washouts. In the local jargon, they just “jacked up the number plate and built a new airplane under it.” And so in addition to the natural reluctance of the old-timers to make a change in type, there was the powerful vested interest of the Pensacola workmen. This fact, however, was never brought into the open. It appeared rather that the Consolidated NY had a nasty flying characteristic, probably inherited from its Army ancestry: it possessed an “abnormal spin” as compared with the N-9. If the “good old N-9” lost flying speed and stalled, it whipped suddenly into a spinning nose dive that would lead to a crash if the pilot did what came naturally and opened his throttle. If, however, he “cut the gun” and dived to regain flying speed, he could recover control. The object of much of the student’s early training was to get him to disobey that impulse and cut the gun in a spin. This, to our old-timers, was a “normal spin.”