The Turboprop Disaster vs. The Delta Wing Wonder: Douglas Aviation’s Cold War Pivot The Cold War race for air superiority drove engineers to the absolute limits of physics, resulting in some of the most fascinating and dangerous aircraft ever built. In the early 1950s, the legendary designer Ed Heinemann—the mastermind behind the SBD Dauntless—found himself at a crossroads. The US Navy needed to bridge the gap between the propeller age and the jet age. The result was two radically different mach