Brewster's urban Queens factory was a converted automobile plant spread across four stories. A single freight elevator had to bring parts together for assembly. Completed aircraft were then taken apart, trucked to Roosevelt Field on Long Island, and reassembled for flight testing, a journey described earlier as about fifty miles. That physical flow could not efficiently support contracts for hundreds or thousands of aircraft. The financial model compounded the bottleneck: Brewster was accustomed to upfront cash-and-carry export payments, whereas Lend-Lease required it to wait for US government money that its weak working-capital position could not comfortably absorb. The payment delay therefore added another source of production delay to the factory's handling problems.
Chapter · 49:35-51:10
A four-story factory built for bottlenecks
A converted Queens automobile plant, one freight elevator, and a remote test field made Brewster's workflow unsuited to mass aircraft production.