Don Berlin?

[Stephan Wilkinson]

Donovan Berlin, Curtiss's chief engineer and the lead designer of the Curtiss P-36 and P-40, rather suddenly left Curtiss in December 1941 and went to GM, where he was responsible for the dreadful Fisher XP-75 Eagle. And reportedly GM didn't straightaway hire Berlin, they were ordered by the Government to do so.

What prompted Berlin's resignation, if that's what it was, from Curtiss? Was it his final two designs there, both of them pretty bad--the Curtiss Seamew and the Ascender? Wikipedia says he left because Curtiss wouldn't support his desire to refine and further develop the P-40.

It's interesting, as a side note, that Berlin's most important contribution to aviation--not as a designer but as an executive--might be the Boeing Vertol Chinook.

[Kyleb]

Wikipedia says he left because Curtiss wouldn't support his desire to refine and further develop the P-40.

Strange, since they continued developing that basic airframe all the way through the P-40Q, which was a 1943 development.

[Stephan Wilkinson]

I think they meant not so much that he wanted to develop upgrades of the P-40 as that he wanted to develop the P-46 to supersede the P-40.

[Kyleb]

I think they meant not so much that he wanted to develop upgrades of the P-40 as that he wanted to develop the P-46 to supersede the P-40.

Unfortunately, the P-46 was no improvement over the P-40, so I can’t imagine management letting him spend more time and money refining a design which apparently started out with just as many limitations as what was already in production. Given that the P-40 was basically a warmed over P-36, it is amazing that Berlin’s new design wasn’t markedly superior to one that had its roots in 1935.

[Stephan Wilkinson]

So maybe he has for a long time been wildly overrated?

Sounds like his best design was the mid-1930s P-36, which he turned into the semi-obsolescent P-40 by re-engining it. (And remember, even the P-36 was beaten in the fighter flyoff by de Seversky's P-35, though de Seversky was unable to actually manufacture the 77 airplanes for which he won the contract.) Then Berlin went on to design the bad Seamew and the worse Assender. And got pushed out of Curtiss because he insisted on trying to make a not-very-effective P-46. Went to GM and created perhaps the worst warplane of all time, the Fisher P-75.

This is a great aircraft designer?

[Saville]

So maybe he has for a long time been wildly overrated?

Sounds like his best design was the mid-1930s P-36, which he turned into the semi-obsolescent P-40 by re-engining it. (And remember, even the P-36 was beaten in the fighter flyoff by de Seversky's P-35, though de Seversky was unable to actually manufacture the 77 airplanes for which he won the contract.) Then Berlin went on to design the bad Seamew and the worse Assender. And got pushed out of Curtiss because he insisted on trying to make a not-very-effective P-46. Went to GM and created perhaps the worst warplane of all time, the Fisher P-75.

This is a great aircraft designer?

Well maybe he wasn't an awesome designer. But the P-40 held the line for quite some time and had some success.

And let's remember that there were other manufacturers/designers that generated designs contemporary with the P-40 that were also inferior to the other team's aircraft. The F4F-4 and the P-39 were also mainstream designs that held the line but were inferior to the Zero, Spitfire and the ME-109.

Nobody calls the Grumman design team inferior. Not everybody is a Schmued or Johnson.

And remember also that the F4F Wildcat was an evolution from a biplane...so a P-36 evolving into a P-40 was not unusual . For that matter so was the Hurricane an evolution from a Biplane.

Still one has to admit that even with the P-75 Berlin kept those very strange rearward retracting gear (Yes I know they were on the Corsair and F6F but they still look outdated and less efficient to me). And according to Wiki, the "design" was really a bunch of airplane parts from other planes all thrown together. So it wasn't so much a "design" as a Lego assembly job to attempt to make a high performance airplane.

So while I agree that Berlin was not the most talented or forward looking designer, I wouldn't denigrate the fact that the P-40 evolved from the P-36.

[bdk]

The "designer" doesn't really have full design authority. I have no direct information whatsoever other than to say that Berlin was an employee. You can have personal disagreements with your employer as well as issues with company investment in the design and development. You may not be able to get enough resources (i.e. employees- draftsmen, etc.) to get the job done. If the company was raking in the cash for the P-40, maybe they didn't want to invest in many improvements to the design or fund an entirely new design for which here was no defined contract.

Curtiss had a lot going on and maybe they didn't think that building airframes was where the corporate profits were going to come from in the future. Berlin could have been quite frustrated with the company and moved on to greener pastures. These were very tough times and there were instances where aircraft were limited by the availability of engines they were designed to use. It takes a village to design an airplane and all the elements might not have been in the right place at the right time.

Last edited by bdk on Tue Sep 10, 2019 9:41 am, edited 1 time in total.

[C VEICH]

I am not here to say Berlin was, or was not, a competent aircraft designer as that is above my pay grade. However, I imagine that there are thousands of factors that need to be accounted for and a simple review of the designs that have his name attached to them may not be an accurate indicator of the man's talent or lack thereof.