SECRET AMERICAN WARPLANES

Dominion, Volume 36, Issue 60, 4 December 1942, Page 5

SECRET AMERICAN WARPLANES

Enthusiastic Officer (Received December 3, 10.30 p.m.) NEW YORK, December 2. The United States has secret new planes that are “enough to make the angels gasp,” Major Nathaniel Silsbee, of the Army Air Force, told the American Society of Mechanical Engineers today. Major Silsbee added that a score of new 7 figliters, bombers and transports are under test, and many of them have already been flown. These planes are still on the secret list. In addition to the new designs, the Air Force has developed a method of making wholesale alterations in planes after manufacture. This is done in “modification centres,” of which there are a dozen, and not all of them are aircraft factories. - These centres .make the quick alterations which are demanded by battle conditions, such as installing a different type of guns and refitting landinggear that will not crack up in desert fighting. Such centres altered Brigadier-General Doolittle's planes for the bombing of Japan. They paint planes a dusty pink for the Egyptian desert, and fit others for the Arctic regions.

America is not building planes on a strictly mass-production basis, and is keeping the production fluid. Nevertheless, there are large-scale orders in 1000 and even 5000 lots.