Hi All!
From page 5-6:
"It was now evident that a new generation of monoplane fighters was necessary. Looking forward to the funding for fiscal 1936 (the budget year from July 1, 1935, to June 30, 1936), the Army Air Corps planned to buy new fighter types. On January 15, 1935, the Air Corps announced a design competition for pursuit planes. An all-metal monocoque fuselage and cantilever monoplane wings were desired. Bids were to be opened May 6 on proposals to fit two specifications: X-602 for pursuit, two place, and X-603 for pursuit, one-place.
In a design competition, the Air Corps invited private companies to offer preliminary drawings of proposed aircraft to fulfill an Army specification. The winning designs would be given an Army designation and a contract for engineering data, an experimental prototype, or perhaps even a service test contract for 3 to 15 planes.
At the same time, the Army needed to buy about 80 pursuits in fiscal 1936 to replace aircraft in service, so bids were also requested for two-place and one-place pursuits, to be opened May 27 and August 9, 1935, respectively. To enter a production contract competition, private builders had to submit a sample aircraft, built at their own expense, for testing at Wright Field. As it turned out, the result of this complicated procedure, required by the law intended to encourage competition among private enterprises, was that not a single aircraft was purchased during 1935.
The winner of the design competition for two-seaters had been designated XP-33 and was essentially the Consolidated P-30 with a new air-cooled, Pratt & Whitney Twin Wasp R-1830-1 twin-row radial. For the production contract, a colorful Russian immigrant, Alexander de Seversky, offered the only sample plane, but it was damaged on the way to Wright Field and didn't arrive in time.
Meanwhile, service tests were convincing the Army that two-seaters were too lacking in maneuverability to be good fighters and that the single .30-caliber hand-operated gun in the rear cockpit was unlikely to be of much help in a battle. No more two-seater fighter production contracts were to be made, and the Consolidated XP-33 was canceled while still in the blueprint stage.
The single-seat fighter competitions were much more active, and the patterns of World War II fighters were firmly established. No less than 16 bids were opened in the May design competition. After five months of evaluation, an unexpected choice was made. The fastest American plane then was the Wedell-Williams racer, built in a Louisiana hangar, without blueprints, by a pair of brothers who were amateur engineers. Although they had no real factory, the little company was awarded a development contract for an XP-34 design based on their racers.
No XP-34 ever appeared, due to the death of the Wedell brothers and their backer Williams in flying accidents and the inability of their survivors to complete the contract requirements. The lesson learned was that a company with mass-production capacity was needed. Fortunately, the next production contract competition produced prototypes the unfulfilled XP-34's promise.
The most successful pursuit effort of 1935 was the Curtiss design, by Donovan R. Berlin, that became the P-36. Berlin had been hired away from Northrop as chief engineer by the Buffalo, New York, firm because of his experience with all-metal construction. Born in Romona, Indiana, on June 13, 1898, he was a mechanical engineering graduate of Purdue University. His P-36 would be the first American fighter to down German planes, the first to pass the 1,000-plane production total, and was developed into the P-40, the principal U.S. production fighter of the war's early years."
Source: Mustang Designer, by Ray Wagner.
and X-604---Bell XFM-1 and Lockheed XFM-2 (proposal).