Word: grummans
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Williams, now flying a Grumman Avenger torpedo plane from an escort carrier in the Atlantic, was credited with the destruction of three U-boats, "possible damage" to a fourth. His squadron insignia: a Disney-designed Black Cat. He made one of his attacks on the 13th of the month...
...Hellcat is strictly a war baby and the first fighter in combat service which was designed and built after Pearl Harbor. Shy, introversive "Roy" Grumman already had his engineering staff working on a bigger and better craft than the Wildcat when the war began, but they rubbed a lot of it out and started over again after they had talked to pilots who had met the Jap in combat...
Report from Butch. First of these returns from the front was brought in by the Navy's "Butch" O'Hare. What the Navy needed, he told Grumman men, was a fighter aircraft that could outclimb and outmaneuver a Zero, carry more .50-caliber guns than the Wildcat (four), lug a decent load of armor, and range farther than any Navy fighter had ever ranged before...
This was all Grumman's balding chief engineer Bill Schwendler wanted to hear. He went back to work, revamped his de signs, reviewed them with many another Navy fighter pilot as the job grew. By August, less than four months after O'Hare had laid down the fighter's law, the prototype was flying...
While test pilots were still wringing out the last of the bugs, Grumman Production Boss Leon A. Swirbul started to get the factory tooled. Three months after the first test flight, "Jake" Swirbul had rolled the first production model...