Robert Howard, Salt Lake City, Utah: an interview by Becky B. Lloyd, April 25, 2002: Saving the legacy tape no. 447

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0 W D that. ut it w an rei in futility anyhow b cau it turn ut hin our war effort one iota. o we wasted a lot of tim and mat ri 1 tr in t h lp th n1 ut. BBL: I would imagine each of those planes-and you rkin n bunch of different planes-I'm amazed at your ability to service any o thos plan . That took a lot of knowledge and skill, I would say. ROB: Well, actually-thanks for the compliment-but they were all basically the, well, there were three basic engines we had in World War II and that was Wright, Pratt-Whitney and Allison. General Motor's Allison was not the best engine in the world; it was only good for about a thousand-hour service before overhaul. But Pratt­Whitney's and Wright, you could go five or six hundred hours between overhauls. But all of our aircraft were powered with those basic engines. Oh, I beg your pardon. Then towards, oh, about the middle of the war when things were going badly in Europe, we were supplying Europe with a lot of stuff on Lend-Lease, you know when we were sending the convoys across the north Atlantic and the Germans subs were sinking half of our liberty ships. Anyway, we starting sending over some P-51 Mustangs. And the Limeys, it was a well-designed aircraft but it had an Allison engine. So the British said they loved the airplanes but they didn't like the Allison engine; it didn't have the performance. So they put one of their Rolls Royce engines into the P-51 Mustang airframe and, man, that was a winner. And then they had a real hot rod and it was knocking the dickens out of the Luftwaffe with that airplane. So then they informed us of what they had done so they sent over all the blueprints and everything and Packard motorcar started producing Rolls Royce engines from their blueprints from that. So we were building a Limey engine here in the United States and then the marriage of that 31