Planning of invention 3: Westinghouse Gas Turbines

I like to write about technical triumphs, but it's also worth remembering giant failures. We have had plenty of examples of technological failure in recent times, but most of them are familiar, or are some variation on the sexy marketing vaporware trope (nanotech, quantum computing). There's scance remembrance for the Westinghouse Gas Turbine Division. It was  important historically; the Westinghouse company delivered the country's first native design jet engine, based on its long expertise with steam turbines. This was in 1943 before any knowledge of British or German (or other American) jet engine research. GE was its only native competition. GE had both a turbo/supercharger division and a steam turbine division. Pratt & Whitney got its start as a contractor for Westinghouse (it was also good at turbochargers). GE and P&W are still around making jet engines. Westinghouse isn't. There's a reason for this.

Jet turbines are almost comically a black art. For guys who think science and technology is all about muh papers, jet engines are a great counterexample. Jet engines are all trade secrets. You can trace  of the lineage of most of these things to Whittle and Rolls Royce; they gave the Russians their start, and ultimately GE and P&W as well, as these firms manufactured RR designs on contract. The Russians taught the Chinese (who are still behind the Russians). SNECMA (frenchies) might have developed their own using BMW scientists, but they're so tied in with the Americans and British it's would be difficult to credit them with independent creation.  GE was the supplier for the Air Forces; the Navy wanted Westinghouse to be their supplier, I assume for similar reasons they have different football teams.

The Westinghouse J30 was the first successful non-German axial flow turbojet: this was a legit home-grown first in the USA. Almost all jets are now Axial flow; the early ones by Frank Whittle  were "centrifugal" aka more like turbochargers. So, this was a real leapfrog in a way: they got the ultimate design form of the jet engine correct. Mostly, I think, because steam turbines were axial. The J34, a larger version, powered the F2H Banshee and Douglas F3D Skyknight:  successful first generation  carrier jet fighters. The J34 gave about 3000 or 3400 lbs of thrust; 4000 with afterburner (which, FWIIW was  designed by somebody else). The first GE Axial turbojet (the J35) made comparable thrust. The next jet Westinghouse designed, the J40 was supposed to  double this to 7500lbs, or 11,000lbs with afterburner with pie eyed ideas that it might hit 16,000lbs one day.

The Navy bet big on this engine: it was supposed to power several of their most futuristic looking planes (of all time) to supersonic speeds. These planes should have been as good as the Century series of the Air Force. They were unfortunately turds in large part because the J40  failed. Westinghouse jet engines in general are a great case study of technological development failure. Not only were they turds which didn't deliver on the thrust requirements (which Westinghouse cravenly lied about), they were unreliable turds. It was a huge scandal at the time and resulted in Westinghouse getting out of the jet engine business.

Westinghouse failed at jet engines in part because it failed to recognize that it was a substantively  different technology and business from the steam turbines they evolved from. It was a small team, entirely converted from steam turbine research; none of them knew anything  about combustion (people at GE and P&W did).  They even attempted to  use oiled babbitt sleeve bearings on the turbine instead of ball bearings; worked in steam turbines bro! The other thing the steam guys never did was  a mass production line; their peak wartime production of steam turbines for naval shipping was something like 4 per month. Jet engines required hundreds a month.  Steam turbines could be tinkered with in production due to the smaller number. Not so with mass produced jet engines.

That's how Pratt & Whitney got involved with jet engines: they knew how to do mass production (and combustion). Their management was also more serious than Westinghouse management about jet engines, so P&W's team was given space, resources, even a R&D lab to produce the Westinghouse J30. They were literally called in to the project by the Navy to save Westinghouse's bacon. Westinghouse's engine design group was only given a corner in the steam turbine factory for both R&D and production, which was insane. Westinghouse CEO Gwylim Price was ideologically against investing company funds in government projects, hence lack of investment in the program. It is amazing they were able to pop out any working engines under these conditions. Apparently they did so in part by relying on enormously skilled old machinists that used to work with George Westinghouse himself. Most of the Westinghouse manufactured engines were unworkable, but most of the P&W made versions of the J30 worked. This was an early hint the Westinghouse engineering team weren't doing something right and P&W were.

Eventually an assembly line was leased from the Navy in Kansas city and the J34, a larger evolution of their J30 was successfully mass produced there by Westinghouse. Unfortunately it was half a continent away from the R&D section (which was in a corner of the steam turbine plant) in Philadelphia. This production shop did work for the J34, probably because Pratt & Whitney engineers had already worked out the production bugs on the J30.

This didn't work for anything else; the subsequent J40 and J46 engine projects were failures. The Westinghouse people just assumed they could wing it and would get a J34 like outcome. Incidentally the Soviets were able to put their factories far from the design bureaus, but they were disciplined Soviets who understood production engineering, not corporate apparatchik nitwits who were waiting to be promoted to the more profitable washing machine division. For all I know they frog marched the engineers to the production line to make sure there were no problems, and sent them to the gulag if there were (feel free to speak up if you know: Soviet high technology groups were quite successful somehow).

J40 had a higher compression stage, and the turbine was two-stage; neither of which the Westinghouse Engineers had done before. If you look at successful R&D to production programs, you put the engineer next to the machinist; not in different cities. GE, Rolls Royce and Pratt & Whitney were all doing this. There was also a clownish Naval Bureau of Aeronautics which prevaricated on requirements and seemed to think it could plan things without, like checking progress, or even doing basic reality checks. They were the ones that assumed the J40 would go smoothly and ordered a bunch of aircraft types based around the J40, despite their earlier experience with J30 production failures. They were also enablers; treating Westinghouse with kid gloves in many ways rather than holding them accountable. To complicate things they also didn't sign any contracts with Westinghouse: just letters of intent, which required Westinghouse, run by a nickel and dime ideologue, to pony up the rest rather than take a loan out against the contract. The same Bureau of Aeronautics tried to shut down the Sidewinder program BTW; they were across the board as bad as Westinghouse. By contrast, P&W engines were internally funded at 10x the level of the Westinghouse project, and were given one of their top engineering managers, Perry Pratt (no relation). P&W management recognized that, in capitalism you had to invest in new products instead of whining about taxes, winging it with a corner lab and engaging in petty swindles designed to defraud and outrage the customer.

Westinghouse dealt with their failing J40 project, not  by investing further resources in the project or changing management to someone more aggressive, but by placing old fashioned newspaper ads trumpeting the triumph of their J40. This ought to be recognizable as the standard Silly Con Valley vaporware approach used with AI, VR and autonomous vehicles.  Unlike current year stenographers for tech and military companies, everyone laughed at this ridiculous imposture. Contemplate this the next time the gibbering dummkopf at yoyodyne tells you about the wonders of his new vaporous quantum neural metaverse bullshit. This preposterous marketing campaign of course cheesed off the Navy as they knew better than anyone that it was false and the J40 was a huge basket of failure. The Navy had also just subsidized construction of a new engine facility in Columbus Ohio which Westinghouse promptly used to manufacture refrigerators: a ridiculous swindle which probably didn't make Westinghouse any new friends.

This failure by Westinghouse caused a congressional inquiry. Contrast this with our present den of whores who vacuum F35 Lockheed peen0r when they're not busy taking it in the keister from their favorite foreign government who has kompromat on them diddling teenagers or whatever. Back in the 40s and 50s you could become Vice President by looking for fraud and waste in military contractors. Now I assume it would only get you unelected or worse. It's fun to read this historical stuff, because the Westinghouse swine were actually considerably better intentioned than any current year defense contractor I can think of. Yet the congress of the people took them to task for it, and very much rightly so; the Westinghouse executives were both incompetent and scumbags.

The steampunk clowns of Westinghouse never delivered a working production J40, and their next venture, an upsized J34, the J46, was also essentially a failure: giving a fraction of its advertised power and regularly breaking down spectacularly. It was deployed in the F7U "Gutless" Cutlass, which had other problems, but a shitty underpowered engine didn't help matters any. Same story with the Convair F2Y Sea Dart supersonic  seaplane.

This used to be my screensaver image

The McDonnell F3H Demon was almost sunk because of its reliance on the J40; they were able to be fitted with a GE J71. This airframe eventually more or less evolved into the wildly successful F-4 Phantom II.

The batlike Douglas F4D Skyray was also supposed to use the J40, but they eventually shoehorned a P&W J57 into the thing, setting it back years and changing the airframe considerably. Looked cool; might have been better if they didn't have to fatten up the fuselage to fit the J57 in it.

The early swing-wing/variable geometry jet, the Grumman XF10F Jaguar was also supposed to use the J40, and failed in part because of its lack of power.

Westinghouse failed at jet engines in part by being ahead of its time and overconfident. It acted much like current year Lockheed; asking for the government teat to take on all the risk, and offering up rampant excuses for their failures to invest human and capital resources in the new line of business. Westinghouse (like Lockheed) also simply lied about performance characteristics and costs. Various commentators have stated that one could attribute the failure to so and so's theories of organizational capabilities. The reality was pretty simple: the engineering team was too small, under resourced and had insufficient experience with both combustion and mass production, and they got somewhat lucky the first time. The management was mildly retarded, and had an ideological commitment to not investing in government projects or recognizing that the new technology wasn't just a sort of steam turbine. The weird layout of production and R&D, lack of experience in combustion and production and inability to predict the obvious fact that the military would eventually want faster jets didn't help either. GE and P&W succeeded because they were more bloody minded, experienced in related problems, and had better management which invested in the new technology.

Very interesting thesis on Westinghouse jet engine development (where most of this comes from):

https://www.enginehistory.org/GasTurbines/EarlyGT/Westinghouse/WestinghouseAGT.pdf

The website is also good.