Power: The Pratt & Whitney Canada Story by Kenneth H. Sullivan and Larry Milberry (review)
1990; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 31; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/tech.1990.a901677
ISSN1097-3729
Autores Tópico(s)Defense, Military, and Policy Studies
Resumo896 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Power: The Pratt & Whitney Canada Story. By Kenneth H. Sullivan and Larry Milberry. Toronto: CANAV Books, 1989. Pp. 320; illustra tions, appendixes, index. Kenneth H. Sullivan joined Pratt & Whitney Canada in 1951 as a graduate in engineering and went into the marketing department. Twenty years later he was elected to the board of directors and served thereon until his retirement in 1984. He was also the senior vice president of marketing and product support. Larry Milberry, coau thor and publisher, is known today as one of Canada’s foremost aviation historians, with a string of well-illustrated, accurate technical histories to his name. What these men have produced in Power is a solid example of a company history that neatly swings back and forth from corporate policy to technical development, with human interest stories sprinkled along the way. As a small corporation that started out as the supplier of Hamilton Standard propellers in Canada, Pratt and Whitney Canada eventually, through careful study, positioned itself in a number of niches which neither its bigger parent in Hartford, Connecticut, nor its British or other rivals had found. At first this was in the overhaul and repair and the spare parts business for the famed P&W radial engines used in the many trainers in the British Com monwealth Air Training Plan of World War II and then again in the Korean War training. But during the latter phase, while making fine profits, P&WC proceeded to develop the second generation of the new gas turbines and successfully created what became the PT-6 series. This originated in 1956 with a team of ten handpicked engineers. The production engines were delivered to the first cus tomer, Beech of Wichita, Kansas, in 1963. Once profits from that venture had built up and sales could be foreseen, the company launched the development of their first small, true jet engine—the JT15D series. There are several fascinating aspects to this undocumented story (there are no footnotes and no bibliography). The reader can see the way in which the smart small company worked within the shadow of its American owner, used second-generation technology, and refined it carefully and cost-consciously to produce niche products just when needed—De Havilland of Canada wanted new reliable engines for its bush planes, Beech new turboprops for its new business aircraft, and Cessna a new small jet engine for its Citation executive jet. In the latter case, with its close knowledge of propellers and engines, P&WC succeeded in producing a jet engine that was so quiet the FAA exempted the Citation from night noise restrictions at a time when noise controls were throttling air operations. The fascination extends to the management approaches revealed. Small design teams had limited funds, but when it came to develop TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 897 ment, Hartford insisted on thrusting in a hard-nosed manager with unlimited funds to get the engine right and on time, with three-shift, rather than one-shift, testing. And when CAD/CAM-trained engi neers appeared at the bottom end of the scale, it was P&WC that insisted that all senior executives visit Hartford for a three-day immersion in computers, returning home to find the new personal computers on their desks along with instructions that they could take them home if they wished to practice. Those interested in the Canadian tale may wish to look also at Bill Gunston’s story of Bristol engines’ Sir Roy Fedden, ByJupiter (1978), the large collection of works now available on Rolls-Royce, Fred W. Hotson’s The De Havilland Canada Story (1983), and Klaus-Richard Bohme’s scholarly The Growth of the Swedish Aircraft Industry, 1918— 1945 (in English, 1987). Each covers certain aspects of the method ology of technology in large and small countries. One story not mentioned, on which there is now a technical and a political study, is that of the Avro Arrow and its Orenda Iroquois engines—it was their cancellation in 1958 that suddenly made available to P&WC the right personnel just when expansion for the PT-6 required such people. Sullivan and Milberry cover the story from 1928 to the present both in text and...
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