[ARC5] Re: SCR-183 and the Air Mail

[Gordon White]

   There is a misunderstanding here. The SCR-183 was Not, repeat NOT in 
use in '33 for the air mail.  It was rushed into service after the air 
mail fiasco showed how woefully prepared the Air Corps was, radio-wise. 
Without doing some digging around in boxes of old papers I cannot be 
sure what the Air Corps had in early 1933. Western Electric and GE were 
both much larger competitors and were building avionics (not a word in 
use in the 1930s) but just what was in the military planes and what was 
in the commercial aircraft is not at the tip of my tongue. I am pretty 
sure the Model B was not a production set, but do not want to say I am 
certain, as I am working on 30 year ago memory.

    The Baker Board was headed by Newton B. Baker, former SecWar.

    Most of what  Dave has written I agree with, with one exception.  
During all of my conversations with folks in Boonton (I lived next door 
in Mountain Lakes, NJ for many years)  I was consistently told that it 
was the ARMY, not the Navy, that  generated the Aircraft Radio Corp. 
work on both the TRF Command Sets (SCR-183) and the Type K that led to 
the SCR-275N.

    I do agree that when Oscar Westover was Chief of the Air Corps 
things stagnated. "If the SCR-240 is too heavy use the SCR-183" and 
stuff like that.  But it was Hap Arnold who flew up to the A.R.C. field 
on weekends, it was Jimmy Doolittle, an army flier, even though he was 
employed by Shell Oil Co.in the 1930s, who would play poker and drink 
with  the executives and engineers in Boonton and persuade them to 
design the Type K with their own money. It was the Army that got Western 
Electric declared an "unqualified bidder" on the SCR-183 in order to 
give the contract to A.R.C.  Doolittle had a great deal to  do with 
encouraging the Type K development. While what I have kept in my own 
files does not deal directly with Type K, I have a lot of 
Doolittle-A.R.C. correspondence showing how closely he was working  with 
Boonton.

    I have never seen any correspondence or heard any tales about Navy 
fliers in Boonton. (May have happened.) The Navy correspondence I have 
seen is only the usual bureaucratic contract stuff.

    And yes, the Navy bought the GF/RU sets and when the Army delayed 
buying the Type K for bureaucratic reasons, it was the Navy that did the 
first flight tests and bought it as the RAT version, with the idea in 
mind to buy the entire set of eight receivers as RAV. The Navy picked up 
what the Army had set in motion. And of course the Army had to adopt the 
ATA/ARA as the SCR-274N when things came down to looming wartime needs.

- Gordon