The admiral listened attentively until I had finished and then made a quick decision. “This Bureau,” he began, “is wide open to criticism for supporting an engine monopoly. We know it isn’t so, but that won’t prevent our being smeared by headlines. I realize we haven’t the necessary appropriations, but you leave that to me; I’ll wangle them out of Congress. If you can work out anything reasonable with these men, go ahead; I’ll approve whatever you recommend.” As I turned to go, the admiral called me back. Some time earlier he had instructed me to prepare a statement for his presentation to a Congressional committee in support of his proposal to junk the war-surplus Liberties and Hispanos and buy new engines. I had given him a rather technical treatise, pointing out the superior aerodynamic performance to be had with the new engines. This he had promptly tossed back in my lap with a remark that Congress had no interest in performance; they wanted to save cash. Now that incident came to his mind and he inquired if I had made any progress. “Yes, sir,” I replied, “I’ve looked up the records and found that it costs about a thousand dollars to convert an old Liberty into one incorporating all the new changes. After that we can get seventy-five-hours flying time out of it before we have to put in another converted one. For three hundred hours flying time, we spend four thousand dollars on conversions. Meanwhile we can get a new Wright Whirlwind for about the same money and run it for three hundred hours without overhaul.” The admiral smiled. “That’s more like it,” he said. “Even I can understand that kind of engineering, and so can a Congressman. It’s cheaper to scrap junk than try to save it!” “Exactly,” I replied. “Well,” the admiral smiled, as he waved us out the door, “see if you can dream up something like that on this new engine.” When our party returned to the Engine Section, we gathered once more around my desk. Rentschler asked what size engine we thought he should build and I gave him the background of the Wright R-1200 Simoon, especially the basis on which Chance Vought had written the prescription. However, I intimated, Wright had been working on that nearly a year and might have a prohibitive head start. Rentschler wasn’t so sure; Wright had a heavy load with two new engines and the task of developing the third, the Whirlwind. A good engineering outfit, with no production problems and only one project, ought go places; starting off with a clean sheet of paper and no commitments as to old tools or techniques, they might even have the advantage. But they must be sure of their basic design principles. The Wright R-1200, a scaled-down P-2, would suffer certain handicaps inherent in the process; the new engine might generate the 350 horsepower on less weight.