Short cuts effecting an immense speedup in the mass production of airplanes are being accomplished at the Glenn L. Martin plant by a revolutionary method involving the use of a gigantic camera. This camera takes pictures on a heroic scale of the engineering drawings. The negatives are developed and the images projected on a sensitized surface which may be metal, wood, cloth or paper; actually large sheets of aluminum alloy metal form the usual surface. Placed in a huge developing tank, the photographed drawing appears in exact scale on the sensitized aluminum sheet. Thus drawings which might have required days in redrafting are reproduced in a few minutes on metal shgets as large as five by ten feet. Multiple/copies go to the tool department for tool designing, to the production department for assembly line planning, and to various engineers. A vast amount of time is saved in building full-scale mockups of new airplane types by projecting the photographed drawing directly on the wood from which the mockup is then built. In building an experimental plane, the master drawings - precise in every detail - are photographed directly on the metal and the parts are cut directly from the material, itself. To build a model, the camera is used to scale down the lines to any proportion desired, a simple calibration of the camera saving perhaps weeks of redrawing. The Martin company has a “loft,” a long floor raised slightly above the building floor, on which engineers draw full scale airplanes and airplane sections. Detailed drawings are made on loft layouts, sheets of aluminum alloy coated white; then the drawing is photographed and copies made on other metal sheets.