PART
V. Aircraft Engineering
During
my second year of college at the University of Oklahoma, I took any part-time
job I could get. I worked in a gas station, a men's clothing store and briefly
as a car salesman. I dropped out of college for two semesters while in Ohio,
but returned to enroll at Oklahoma City University that summer and took a job
at Hayes Aircraft on the night shift.
As a
self-taught photographer, I had learned to develop and print my own black and
white photos, even winning a couple of amateur photo awards. Hayes needed a
photo lab technician in their publication department and hired me. The lab
burned photographic plates to print AF parts manuals using a large darkroom
camera with a focal length of about twelve feet. One person outside the lab
mounted the masters and the person inside the lab loaded the camera and
developed the negatives.
A
most interesting old fellow worked with me at the Hayes photo lab. He had served
in the cavalry with General Pershing when the U.S. Army was chasing Pancho
Villa all over northern Mexico. He’d tell us stories about how they would ride
into town and ask the locals which way Pancho Villa had gone and then they
would go the opposite direction because the villagers would always lie to
protect ‘ol Pancho.
According
to the old timer, the Mexican-American War started when Pancho Villa rustled
some cattle in south Texas and Pershing's cavalry chased him halfway to Mexico
City. When the Mexican government heard that a large military force was moving
towards the Capital, they assumed the United States had declared war on Mexico
and the Army was on its way to attack them.
Within
a couple of months, the manager at the Hayes Aircraft facility on Tinker AFB
asked if I could read blueprints and write technical reports. After all, I was
an engineering student, of course I could. I was promoted to night supervisor
and transferred to the Hayes Aircraft on-base operation.
In
addition to technical publications, Hayes had a contract to remove corrosion
from aging Air Force aircraft that were cycled through the air base for repair.
The laborers, who wore heavy rubber suits and sprayed the aircraft with
solvent, were referred to as corrosion engineers. It therefore, followed that
my new title would be Technical Publication Engineer. Hey, someone actually
called me an engineer for the first time. The week before I couldn't spell it,
now I are one.
The
project I worked on was called the Federal Item Identification Reduction
Program. Its purpose was to find and eliminate duplicate part numbers in the
Air Force material supply system. For example, a mechanic at Tooly AFB might
order a fuel nozzle for an engine by part number and get an officer’s club
ashtray that had the same vendor part number.
Many
parts had also been put into inventory with typographical errors. Sometimes the
same part was in inventory under two or more part numbers. We spent hundreds of
hours pulling drawings and looking up parts in the Illustrated Parts Breakdown
(IPB) manuals. After a year or so, the Air Force came to realize what we
already knew. It was a futile effort. We could reconcile about three parts an
hour and it was estimated that the system errors were being created at a rate
ten times that fast. The contract was cancelled and everyone working on the
project was laid off.
During
this time, I continued to attend regular day classes at Oklahoma City
University and my wife worked as a secretary at the First Presbyterian Church
in Midwest City.
Carl,
a friend from college and I owned a Luscombe 8A/F high-wing monoplane together.
We took turns working weekends at South Shields Airport fueling airplanes in
order to pay our gas bill and the hanger rent.
Founded
by Chauncey Vought in the early days of aviation, Vought Aircraft had been a
primary Navy aircraft supplier during WW II and Korea. Vought merged with
Tempco, an aircraft parts sub-contractor who had built the little Swift
aircraft. In the late 1950s a Dallas commercial electrical contractor, Jimmy
Ling, gained controlling interest in the company. The reorganized corporation
was called Ling-Tempco-Vought for a while, but soon shortened to LTV.
After
four years of college and three years active duty in the military, I went to
work as a design engineer for Chance Vought Corporation in the Human Factors
Engineering Group, a pseudonym for Cockpit Design. Several other young
engineers, some of whom I have remained friends with all these years, and
myself all went to work there about the same time.
We
all thought we were going to design the world's greatest aircraft only to find
out that we were relegated to doing drawings of brackets for mounting hardware
and writing technical specifications on various installations. Sometimes it
took several hours for the hands of the clock to move between 4:15 and 4:30
quitting time.
The
first aircraft I worked on at Chance Vought was the C-142 four-engine Vertical
Take Off and Landing (VTOL) transport. There were only two C-142s ever built.
The cargo plane had a tilt-wing with four turbo-prop engines. All four engines
were tied together with a drive shaft running the length of the wing. The
concept being that if one engine failed, the others would continue to power all
four propellers equally. The aircraft could be flown with the wing in the
standard fixed-wing position or it could lift off vertically with the wing
rotated into the up position and then transition into wing level flight.
At
best, the plane was unstable and underpowered. The prototype crashed south of
Hensley Field near the shore of Mountain Creek Lake when something failed and
the plane started to roll over on its side. The flight-test aircraft was
equipped with ejection seats and the pilots both ejected.
Like
many designs of that era, the C-142 lacked the control provided by the modern
computerized fly-by-wire systems. The remaining C-142 went to an air museum.
Northrop Aviation pioneered the building of flying wings in the late 1930’s.
The AAC withdrew funding for the design citing stability problems. Aero
engineers are now able to design and build aircraft like the B-2 and V-22 due
to computerized flight controls.
The
Corsair II, basically a smaller F8U without a secondary after burner, was in
design development, but not yet ready for production. So the second project I
worked on was the French Crusader. LTV received and order for fifty F8Us from
the French government. We assumed all the nomenclature on the aircraft would be
changed to French, but when the French Air Force reps arrived, they told us it
was easier to teach the pilots English technical terms than it was to ID an
entire aircraft.
All
the airframe drawings were done on white Mylar with dark green backing using a
scribe. If mistakes were made, a kind of whiteout liquid was used to remove the
scratch and a new line was scribed. This wasn’t as bad as in the old days when
they were scribed onto aluminum.
Some
of the hardware we used dated back to the F4U Corsair. One time, I asked the
blueprint crib for one of the old F4U Corsair drawings and they advised me that
it would be a day or so before it could be retrieved from the archives. When I
went to pick up the drawing, it was on a large piece of metal. I told them
thanks anyway and I eventually found a drawing of the part I needed on
microfilm.
After
both of these projects ended, I was assigned to work on an upgrade to the
Martin-Baker ejection seat. The ejection seats currently being used were
100/100 seats. What this meant was that the aircraft must have at least 100
feet of altitude or 100 knots forward airspeed for the pilot to eject and the
chute to deploy properly. The goal of the new project was to develop a seat
with zero-zero capability.
In
other words, if the aircraft was cranked up on the ground and burst into
flames, the pilot could eject and be rocketed high enough into the air for the
chute to deploy safely. Most of the testing had been completed at the Navy
proving grounds and what remained to be done by the engineering group was to
complete the drawings and specifications for the installation. I am sure my
signature would still be on some of the old seat installation specifications.
The
pilot had two options depending on how much time he had to eject. If there was
a fire in the aft engine section, the pilot had several minutes to correct the
problem, but if it was a fire in the compressor section, the pilot had less
that sixty seconds to eject. The pilot could pull the lever between his legs or
the face curtain handle located overhead. Sometimes, due to positive G-force,
it was impossible for the pilot to reach the overhead handle.
The
pilot had the option of manually releasing the canopy before ejecting, if there
was time. Otherwise, a shotgun shell would blow the canopy a fraction of a
second before the seat charge went off. If the canopy did not blow, the pilot
had the option of ejecting through the canopy. The top lever had a face curtain
and in this scenario, gave the pilot some protection over his face when ejected
through the canopy. However, even with a crash helmet on and the seat hardware
overhead, this was risky as it most always broke the pilot’s legs.
The
new zero-zero seat added a small rocket motor to the seat to boost the seat
higher than the explosive charge could.
Part
of my job was to read all the detailed reports of successful and unsuccessful
pilot ejections that came in from the fleet, a large number of which occurred
on carriers. We would then issue a service bulletin or warning to prevent
subsequent failures of a similar kind, if appropriate.
Many
of these reports were almost unbelievable. One such report described a Navy
pilot who missed the tail-hook and upon applying full power, failed to get
minimum airspeed for a go around. Just as his Crusader went over the side of
the carrier, the pilot ejected. The carrier's crew immediately went into man
overboard procedures. The crew could see the Crusader slowly sinking into the
ocean as the carrier passed by, but no one could spot the pilot anywhere in the
water. Then someone looked over the side of the ship and the pilot was dangling
from his chute hung up on one of the ship's yardarms, the poles used for
loading cargo onboard the ship.
The
most fantastic report came in from a Marine Corps Major and read like the
description of a Rube Goldberg invention. The pilot flamed out at high altitude
somewhere out over the China Sea and could not get a restart. With no hope of
returning to the carrier, he pulled the lower ejection seat lever and nothing
happened. The problem was the firing pin cap for the canopy shell had not been
screwed in all the way and had failed to make contact with the explosive shell.
He could have elected to eject through the canopy, but opted not to. Next, the
pilot manually released the canopy. If he had pulled the face curtain ejection
lever at this time, his seat would have fired.
Convinced that nothing was going to
operate, the Major unbuckled his harness, rolled his F8U over on its side and
bailed out the old fashion way. The chute on the Martin-Baker ejection seats
were packed extremely tight and designed for the weight of the seat to actually
pull the ripcord, but the Major’s seat was not attached. Falling at terminal
velocity, he fed the chute out hand over hand. Finally, a few hundred feet
above the water, he managed to get a squid, but the chute did not fully deploy
before he hit the water. The squid broke his fall enough that he only sustained
a fractured collarbone and bruises. Needless to say, that was one mad as hell
Marine Corps pilot when he got back aboard ship and went looking for the
seat-man.
Kennedy Assassinated
Most
adults living at the time John F. Kennedy was assassinated recall where they
were when they heard the news. I was sitting in a dentist's chair when Walter
Cronkite broke into a regular daytime broadcast to announce the unconfirmed
report President Kennedy had been shot. Several in the office commented that it
must be a hoax, in other words disbelief.
Unfortunately,
the rumor proved true and Kennedy died minutes later on the way to Parkland
Hospital only a few miles from where I was at the time. Many Dallas people were
amazed that martial law was not declared and that the area where the shooting
took place was not cordoned off immediately. We do not apparently have that
type of response capability then or now.
My
friend Bobby and I were both NRA members and had fairly large gun collections.
Both of us owned Italian Terni-Mannlicher rifles, the same exact model rifle
that was used by the assassin. They could be bought mail order in good
condition for $20. Bobby was an expert marksman and later tried several times
to fire three rapid shots at a target about the same estimated distance with
his rifle. He was not successful in consistently hitting the target, but the
rifle he was using did not have a scope, as did the rifle used in the Kennedy
shooting.
Rumors
abounded among pilots and workers at Love Field that a pilot and a Bonanza with
foreign registration was waiting at Southwest Airmotive and shortly after the
assassination, a Cuban military officer boarded the plane and departed. The
rumor probably had some basis in fact as it persisted for some time, but was
never verified or publicly reported.
Convair,
short for Consolidated Vultee Aircraft, built planes during WW II, airliners
and the B-36. Now affiliated with a submarine company back East, it was known
as General Dynamics. The large factory was located across the airfield from
Carswell AFB west of Tort Worth. In the mid-1960s, they finished building the
B-58 Hustler. The B-58 was a minimum-crew, high-speed bomber designed to
deliver a nuclear bomb carried in a pod under its belly. The B-58, like
fighters of that era, required the crew to wear pressure suits and oxygen
masks. Rumors were the B-58 was cancelled because SAC commander, General LeMay,
disliked flying in a non-pressurized cabin, another urban legend I’m sure.
General
Dynamics won the contract to build the new AF/Navy all-in-one F-111 fighter.
All Navy fighter projects with Grumman were put on hold. The word fighter was a
misconception from the beginning because the plane was more of a medium bomber.
It outweighed a World War II B-17.
General Dynamics was hiring engineers
at twenty percent over the market rate. Several of my buddies had already left
Chance Vought and gone to General Dynamics in Fort Worth, so I joined their
ranks. Roy, an AF bird Colonel now, had been one of the early project engineers
on the F-111, but retired shortly before I went to work at General Dynamics.
I
was assigned to the Environmental Design group. I knew nothing about the
systems to be used on the F-111, but remember the engineer's credo, Don't tell them you don't know what you are doing
because by the time they figure that out, you will.
The
aircraft were to be assembled on the main floor called the mile-long assembly
line. A half dozen F-111s were already in airframe jigs. The engineering design
groups were located upstairs above the assembly line. The area was five acres
in size filled with wall-to-wall desks and drafting tables lit by overhead
fluorescent lighting. In those days, engineers wore the traditional uniform of
dark slacks, white shirt and tie. Even wearing a colored dress shirt was
considered in poor taste.
My
first drafting board was located right at the top of one of the main stairwells
coming up from the assembly area and I soon found out why no one else wanted
it. Several times a day, a liaison engineer or lead man would hit the top of
the stairwell with anger on his face and a death grip on a drawing that
obviously didn't work. The first words out of his mouth upon approaching my
desk would be, "Which one is this guy?" pointing their finger at the
name on the inaccurate drawing.
Eventually,
I began to handle these situations with a little humor. I would look up briefly
from my work and point out over the several hundred desks on the floor and say,
"He's the guy in the white shirt and tie just over there," and go
back to my work. The shop guy with the problem would get a few steps away
before realizing that he’d been had and generally would not return to ask for
additional assistance.
One
of the projects entailed taking 2,000-degree bleed-air off the jet engine and
rapidly decompressing it in order to provide air conditioning for the cockpit
and avionics. Of course, it also involved routing a lot of ductwork and the
installation of valves. The main decompression chamber off of the engine was
located just below one of the main fuel lines. If the line were to leak and drip
fuel onto the extremely hot chamber, it would probably ignite and explode.
They
were not going to change the engine design so the problem was posed as to how
to best insulate the chamber. After the theoretical engineers wrestled with the
problem, I suggested there were only two materials commonly known that would
stand up to those temperatures. They were silicone and asbestos.
The
3M vendor supplied me with some asbestos cloth and some spray-on liquid
silicone. I laid out a pattern for an insulator blanket and took it to the
upholstery shop. Luckily, I found an elderly lady who used to be a parachute
rigger sitting at a sewing machine.
After
getting permission from her lead man, I explained to her what I wanted. She
proceeded to construct the blanket like she was following a Butterick dress
pattern. With the blanket of asbestos completed, I sent it to the paint shop to
have it spray-painted with the silicone. The blanket was baked, temperature
tested and otherwise abused. It worked.
When
signing a contract to go to work as an engineer with most firms, one signs away
any claim to patent rights for work done on company time. A few months later, a
full-page ad appeared in Aviation Week announcing the new 3M high-temperature
insulating blanket material they had developed.
Robert
McNamara, Secretary of Defense under LBJ, was the one who had decided that the
Air Force and the Navy would share the next generation of fighter aircraft
jointly. This is the guy that gave Ford Motor Company the Falcon, in more ways
than one.
The
Falcon was to be the common man’s car and boy was it ever common. The most
ho-hum car ever built, with the possible exception of the Kaiser-Frazer’s Henry
J. This should have told us something about Mac’s simplified designs concept.
The
F-111 was grossly overweight and almost too heavy to land on a carrier. The
Navy had requirements like tail-hooks for catching the arresting gear. The Air
Force had requirements like large wheels for landing on unimproved airfield.
The F-111 soon acquired the nickname McNamara’s Folly.
Management
began offering a bounty to employees who could suggest weight savings, in some
cases as much as $50 an ounce. When we made a bracket to mount something, we
drilled lightening holes in them to save weight.
It
was, however, a no win deal to suggest a weight savings on one of your group’s
own installations as you would be told that it was part of your job. So the
only guys who made out on the money thing were the stress group and the drawing
checkers. Did I mention that design engineers hate drawing checkers?
Standard
procedure for revising an engineering drawing was to issue an Engineering
Change Order (ECO). The effectivity on each drawing was controlled by dash numbers
and became a mystery unto its own. Our drawing effectivity system was complex.
The
build of materials read like part -1 goes on AF1 and part -2 goes on NA1 and so
on. In other words, each aircraft was being customized for its mission to the
extent that we were really building two different models of the same aircraft
design. There were days when all I did was write ECOs.
One
Navy rep commented, “The F-111 is so heavy, it will go through a carrier deck
instead of landing on it. The plane had been jammed down the Navy’s throat
politically and they were looking for an opportunity to cancel their part of
the contract. At aircraft serial Number Five, the Navy finally managed to get
out of the contract completely and re-entered into negotiation with Grumman
Aircraft to build a new carrier-based fighter.
The
order of the F-111s was finally reduced to only a hundred planes. Actually, the
plane was a pretty good medium range bomber. With mid-air refueling, it could
cover great distances to deliver its bomb load. The two-man crew cockpit could
be severed from the aircraft in an emergency, which made high-speed ejection
considerably safer.
During
the bombing of Libya, the F-111s flew twelve hours to their targets. France and
Spain would not approve the over-flight and the U.S. pilots had to take the
Atlantic route around from England to complete their bombing runs. One aircraft
was lost due to engine failure possibly damaged by Libyan anti-aircraft fire.
Technology
had passed the F-111 by. It was too heavy and underpowered. While we were
building the F-111, Northrop disclosed some of the new technologies they used
on the A-11 Blackbird, the fastest airplane in the world. If some of the
titanium technology used on the Blackbird had been applied to the F-111, it
would have greatly improved the design.
Years
later, my wife and I were at an air show and there was an F-111 on display. We
went up under the aircraft and I was showing her the chamber and the insulator
I had worked on when I realized that this was actually Air Force serial number
one. It was the very prototype I had hand-fitted with the first high-temp
cover. A young Air Force Captain stuck his head into the wheel-well where we
were standing and said, "This is a classified aircraft. I’m sorry, but
you’ll have to leave."
My
wife smiled politely at the Captain as we left.
While
at General Dynamics, in order to make a few extra bucks, I started working
weekends selling real estate. After a few months, I came home with my paycheck
from General Dynamics and my real estate commission checks. I set my wife down
at the kitchen table and showed her the checks for one month. My check for a
month from General Dynamics was $650 and my real estate commission checks,
working weekends, totaled $1500.
She
looked at the checks then at me and said, "What you’re telling me is that
you are going to quit your job in Fort Worth.” Thus ended my early years as a
junior engineer.
Before
long, I bought my first Lincoln Continental, a gunmetal blue sedan with suicide
doors.
That
winter, we took a vacation to Florida. Never before and never again have I felt
as affluent as cruising down the Sunshine Parkway with the power seat rocked
back in that Continental puffing on a fifty-cent cigar.
For
the next few years, I built and sold houses in the Mid-Cities area of the
Metroplex. The new DFW airport had been announced and investors were buying up
every spare tract of land I could get my hands on to sell.
I
got back to flying for pleasure again using a rented Bonanza or Skylane. For
business, I’d occasionally use a plane to survey or show land for sale in the
North Texas area and up at Medicine Park, Oklahoma. Our custom home building
projects in the Stonegate Addition proved very successful for years, but in the
late 1960s the real estate market cratered.
PART
V. Aircraft Engineering
An
expert is the guy who shows up with a resume’ and a briefcase. An out-of-town
expert is the same guy more than twenty-five miles from home. For the next
several years, I worked as a hired gun, called job-shoppers in those days. The
term did not imply shopping for a job, but its origin dated back to when jobs
were sent out to a contract shop. Now days they are referred to as contract
employees. Anyway, I had a briefcase, drafting tools and would travel.
Lockheed
Aircraft at Marietta, Georgia was cranking up to produce the C-5A, the largest
military jet transport ever built. Lockheed was hiring contract engineers for
top dollar, so we left for Smyrna, Georgia, where I went to work once again in
an Environmental Design Group.
Upon
arrival at Lockheed, part of the indoctrination was to tour the full-scale
static mockup. Looking out of the cockpit of the C-5A was like looking out of a
third story window. Four greyhound buses, two abreast, could be parked inside
the cargo bay of the large jet.
Lockheed
was way behind on their engineering drawings. Some components were already
being fabricated using preliminary drawings, but the contract called for pen
and ink drawings on white Mylar. Every newly hired engineer spent their first
two weeks trying to learn to draw in ink without it running under their ruler
and smearing the drawing. Strips of masking tape under the T-square and
triangles to hold them off the drawing surface were the secret.
At
Lockheed Marietta, I met a North Korean national named Wong. He was a graduate
of MIT and worked in an unclassified position. He held the distinction of being
the pilot who turned over the first MIG-15 to the U.S. Air Force. A lot of the
engineers had very little to do with Wong, but I befriended him and to my
benefit, he told me a lot of interesting stories.
He
was born to an aristocratic family in North Korea and went to the Korean Naval
Academy. When war in Korea was imminent, the Chinese demanded that Korean
officers be trained by the Soviets. A government official assembled all academy
cadets and officer candidates. He lined them up and had them count off by
fours. Ones and twos were Army, threes were Navy and every fourth officer was
assigned to the Air Force. Wong was a four.
After
going through flight school, Wong was assigned to a squadron whose commanders
were Russian officer pilots. His MIG squadron was based north of the Yalu
River, the bases General MacArthur wanted to bomb, but was prevented from doing
so for political reasons.
The
U.S. Air Force dropped leaflets offering a large reward and political asylum to
any North Korean pilot who would deliver a MIG to South Korea. The Russian
officers had orders to shoot down any member of their squadron who made a break
for the South during a mission. One afternoon, Wong found himself separated
from his squadron and feeling no loyalty to the North Korean government, he
turned south.
Two
F-86D fighters quickly intercepted his aircraft. He slowed his aircraft and
dropped the landing gear. These had been the instructions on the leaflet. He
was escorted to a landing field in South Korea. The aircraft was turned over to
the U.S. Air Force for study. To his credit, he refused the reward, but did
accept a four-year scholarship to MIT and political asylum.
While
I was working at Lockheed Marietta, we rented a temporary apartment in the deep
piney woods, but also purchased a small home in Winter Haven, Florida were we
hoped to move eventually. I was commuting home on weekends.
The Lockheed Air Service Division at JFK
International Airport on Long Island, New York obtained a contract to build the
first Airborne Warning And Command (AWAC) aircraft. The earliest models used
the C-121 Lockheed Constellation airframes. Later, they evolved into the now
famous Boeing 707 AWAC version.
Lockheed
Air Service desperately needed engineers with a secret clearance and offered to
send me to Lockheed at JFK for more money. New York was a Great place to visit, but… Available
housing didn’t exist and I was lucky to find a motel room at a weekly rate. My
wife and daughter flew up when school let out. We visited Manhattan on weekends
and enjoyed our brief stay, but we missed home. By home, I meant Texas not
Florida.
The
project was stalled and the lead engineer was over his head, so I gave my
two-weeks notice to the job shop company. The shop asked if I would report to a
job in Jersey the next day for more money than I was being paid at Lockheed.
When
I first drove into New York and passed through a half a dozen toll roads and
bridges, I recall thinking what if a person was broke, how would they ever get
out of this place?
Our
minds were made up. We were going back to Texas, but we had to return to
Florida first to sell the house. We headed back to Florida in the almost new
Camaro Super Sport I purchased from a dealer in Fort Worth.
We
stopped in Washington DC to visit Suzie’s brother, a Naval officer who had been
assigned to the Pentagon. Leaving DC, somewhere in Georgia, a patrol car pulled
us over right out of a line of moving traffic. The constable told me I was
speeding. Of course, mine was the only car with out-of-state plates. It was a
speed trap, one of those old Southern traditions of deriving a little income
from those passing through.
The
constable ignored my argument that if I was speeding, then so was the entire
line of traffic. He didn't say a word as he wrote out the ticket on what look
more like a grocery store receipt pad. He handed it to me. The fine was $20.
I
hadn’t cashed my last paycheck and had been using a gas charge card. I fumbled
through my pockets and my wife's purse, finally coming up with $17 and some
change. I slammed the money down on the hood of my car so hard that some of the
coins rolled off onto the ground. I told the constable that was all I had!
Without
even cracking a smile, he took the ticket back from my hand, wet the tip of his
pencil on his tongue, drew a line through the $20 and wrote $17. He handed the
ticket back to me, picked up the $17 in bills, left the remaining change on the
hood of the car, got in his car and drove off. True story!
As
soon as we arrived back in Winter Haven, I put our small house with a screened
in porch and orange trees growing in the yard up for sale. Kissing my wife
good-bye, I jumped in the Camaro and headed for Dallas where I returned the
Camaro and boarded the Braniff Red Eye Special to Los Angeles.
My
brother moved to L.A. and had taken the red Volkswagon Beetle that I had
co-signed for him. He had bought a Mercedes Roadster and no longer had any use
for the VW.
After
a couple days visit, I headed up the San Bernardino Mountains in the VW bound
for Florida. The Pacific Ocean was in my rear view mirror. Seventy-two hours
later, I would be almost to the Atlantic Ocean. No one has ever really had an
adventure until they have driven a VW Beetle from
sea to shining sea.
The
hot afternoon sun beat down as I started across the Mojave Desert in the Beetle
with no air conditioner. Whenever I could find a café or filling station, I’d
stop and fill up a Dairy Queen cup I had with water. The cup fit neatly between
the seat and the emergency brake handle. Dipping my handkerchief in the water,
I would drape it across my head and in the few minutes it took to dry, it would
temporarily cool my brain.
I
had heard of mirages, but had never seen one. Cruising along across the sandy
desert of Death Valley, I looked out across the wavy heat lines of the sand and
saw a large lake. This was not good, I thought. As I got closer, a cabin
cruiser came alongside me on the road. When my eyes finally focused, I realized
there actually was a giant span of water out there and then I passed a sign
that identified it as the Sultan Sea.
The
old VW was doing about 80 mph with the accelerator on the floorboard. In my
rear view mirror, I could see an old Chevy sedan coming up on me like I had
that VW in reverse gear. When they went by me, it rocked my car and I noticed
the car was loaded with what I assumed were Mexican nationals.
A
short time later, I heard a siren. In my rear view mirror, I could see a
highway patrol car gaining on me rapidly. Figuring that he was after me for
running eighty, I slowed down to pull over. The patrol car went by me rocking
my VW, as had the Chevy. It was then that I realized the patrolman was chasing
the Chevy that had passed me earlier.
In
Las Cruces, New Mexico that evening, I slept for about four hours in a K-Mart
parking lot. The next day, crossing into Louisiana, I was passing through a
small town and kept hearing a siren, but couldn't see a police car or ambulance
anywhere. All I could see in my rear view mirror was a Cadillac sedan on my
rear bumper. The driver was motioning me over.
A
large gentleman in a gray Stetson got out of the car and I met him halfway.
"Boy," he said, "don't you know a police car when you see
one?" The gentleman who stopped me, it turned out, was the local sheriff.
Biting
my tongue because I knew if I laughed out loud I was in trouble. “Nice car you
got there,” I said. I explained I was from Texas and not from California as the
expired out-of-state plates on the VW clearly indicated.
I
started to show him my ID, but he said he didn’t need to see it, as he was a
good judge of character. We visited for a while and then the Sheriff said he
was late home for his supper. He told me to drive safely and have a good trip.
Later
that night somewhere in Louisiana, I pulled into a roadside park. I was sound
asleep when the beginning of the end of the world commenced. I finally fought
myself awake and realized I had parked about ten feet away from a railroad
track and a freight train was rolling past. That put enough adrenaline in my
system to drive for the next dozen hours.
Early
the following evening, I pulled up to my house in Winter Haven. Realizing I
didn't have a door key, I rang the bell. When my wife came to the door, she
looked at me and broke into tears. She hugged me and said I was quite a sight
with those bloodshot eyes, wrinkled clothes and a 3-day beard.
We
sold the house in Winter Haven back to the builder we had bought it from. After
renting a U-Haul, a tow bar for the VW, the California turnaround and paying
off a bunch of bills, I was broke again.
With
a ready-to-expire Enco credit card and no cash, we hit the road for Big D.
Using the credit card at trucks stops I added a few dollars for cash to each
fill-up. By eating five for a dollar McDonald's hamburgers and sleeping that
night in the truck cab, we arrived in Dallas none the worse for wear. You can
do things like that when you’re young.
I
stopped in Euless to check our old post office box. To my surprise, there was
an income tax refund check for several hundred dollars in the box. We used the
check to rent an apartment in Irving and I took a vow that very day that I
would never be that broke again and I never have been.
It
was now the height of the Cold War era. Space programs and government military
contracts abounded and there was a great demand for engineers of any kind.
Because I seemed never to be able to maintain a job more than a year or so
without getting laid off, I became a permanent contract engineer.
The
first job I was offered when I got back to Dallas was at Texas Instruments
where I never figured out what the hell it was we were working on. One day, I
just threw my badge on the desk and walked out.
Next,
I went to work at Recognition Equipment Company in the Research and Development
Department. They were designing the early prototype for what is now the post
office optical reader system. The guy that founded the company had only one
claim to fame, he had invented a remote control lawn mower. In my entire
engineering career, never was I involved in building so many failed prototypes
as I was at Recognition.
We
did leave Dallas one more time. I took a contract job at Beech Aircraft in
Wichita. Beech was not used to running large engineering projects or prime
government contracts like many of the larger aerospace companies. The cockpit
design group was part of the electrical engineering group and both had a
backlog of accumulated problems. The career employees were pensive about making
decisions and stuck their head in the sand. Thus, they called in the
out-of-town expert, me. I was assigned to review a series of electrical
complaints with the Queenair and Kingair.
For
example, the old style inverters used to generate three phase AC outputs from a
DC power source were motor-driven field and armature type units. On the
Kingair, the inverter was mounted in the wing near a fuel tank. A field report
described an incident where there had been a fire from a small fuel leak in the
wing. Suspicion was a spark from the inverter had ignited the fire.
Fortunately, the plane was on the ground at the time and no one was injured,
but there was extensive damage to the Kingair.
After
reviewing the problem, I recommended that all Kingair be retrofitted with the
new solid-state inverters now on the market. When Beech management estimated
the cost of the retrofit, they squelched my recommendation. I sure hope they
also burned my report because if there ever was a smoking gun, that was one.
On
occasion, I would have a need to go to the corporate offices and would
intentionally walk down the hall where Mrs. Olive Ann Beech's office was
located. Her office was decorated in French provincial furniture and everything
was done in pastel colors. Everyday, a vase of fresh flowers was placed on her
desk whether she came into the office or not.
Walter
Beech had been gone for several years when I worked there. The old timers in
the factory told some funny stories about Mr. and Mrs. Beech. Seems ol’ Walter
had a weakness for pretty young girls and would hire them for a job, qualified
or not. The details of which were hidden from Olive Ann, at least until she
found out and fired the bimbo.
While
we were in Wichita, John Frankenheimer came to town to direct a movie starring
Burt Lancaster called The Gypsy Moths.
Burt went jogging on the school track behind our apartment every morning about
5:30am. The neighborhood ladies would get up early to go watch him. Not even
Burt Lancaster could get my wife up at that hour of the morning.
On
the weekend the filming was to wrap up, we went out to the little country
airport where the movie was being shot to watch some of the aerial stunts.
During the week, if anyone wanted to be a spectator in the air show scenes, they
had to agree to wear the same clothes everyday, so we just watched.
It
was the only time I had seen two aircraft with identical N numbers. The movie
company had two DH Howards painted with identical red and white color schemes
and the same side number, allowing then to film two scenes simultaneously.
The
engineering group I was assigned to was also assigned responsibility for some
problems with the military U-21 twin, designated the Ute. The Army and Air
America were using these planes in Viet Nam. Air America was the front for a
lot of clandestine operations in Southeast Asia at the time.
While
they flew routine supply missions, they were also used extensively by the CIA
and for transporting politicians around the country. The U-21 and U-22 were
hybrids, part turbo prop Kingair and part non-pressurized Queenair.
The
engines were rated for several hundred more hours than the service life they
were getting out of them in the field. After talking to some of the Army pilots
who leveled with me, I began to understand the problem and the supposed mystery
became clear. There were air filters on the engines that were used to keep the
dirt out of the intakes. These filters could be bypassed by use of an override
switch for short field takeoffs, i.e., an unfiltered-air jet engine produced
more power.
On
the airfields in Viet Nam, snipers often shot at the aircraft. The pilots would
bypass the filters with the override in order to get more power and a shorter
takeoff run to get airborne and get the hell out a there. In fact, they left
them in the unfiltered-air position most of the time. Wouldn’t you? The result
was a high intake of dirt and dust into the aircraft's turbo prop engines,
especially during taxi.
In a
conference between the Army reps and Beech, I proposed that we put a weight on
gear (WOG) switch in line with the override switch. Thus, the filters would
stay on during taxi and initial roll, but as soon as the gear strut expanded,
the WOG switch would allow the bypass to operate and the aircraft could then
develop maximum horsepower for liftoff and climb out.
The
new twin-engine Duke was undergoing final flight-testing at the time. The Duke
was a pressurized, turbo-charged, reciprocating engine, light twin designed for
speed. Tests were required to prove the Duke could make a short field landing
loaded at full gross weight.
The
top gun test pilot at Beech was known as a kind of hot rock and for showing
off. I met him and I swear he swaggered when he walked. Anyway, he attempted to
slow the Duke down and land it in shorter than required space. As he came over
the fence, he was in a full stall and the tail hit first bending the rear
fuselage. He and the copilot walked away, but I understand all of the sandbags
onboard were DOA.
The
new Model 36 was an extended cabin six-place version of the straight tail
Bonanza and had recently been flight-tested and certified. The FAA had wanted
the aircraft to demonstrate its ability to recover from a spin with the
aircraft loaded at the full aft CG limit. On the first attempt, the aircraft
never recovered from the spin and the test pilot bailed out.
Weber, who I had flown with several
times, was the guy who had bailed out of the Model 36. He told me that he
wrenched his back pretty bad when he hit the ground because he was looking up
to see if the plane would recover from the spin by itself before it hit the
ground, but it did not. From the Model 36 incident a long running joke
developed.
After a pilot bailed out of a test
aircraft, the pilot was called before a board of engineers to ascertain
firsthand what had happened when the plane went out of control.
The first engineer asked what
altitude had it occurred. The pilot indicated he didn’t know for sure. The
second engineer asked what the plane’s airspeed was at the time. Again, the
pilot didn't know that either. The third engineer, who had grown intolerant
with the pilot's replies asked, “What were you doing at the time, looking at
your watch?”
“Yes sir, I was. I figured some
engineer would ask me what time it happened,” the pilot replied.
During
my first several months at Beech, I attracted some unwanted attention from
engineering management. The department manager called me in and offered me a
fulltime position at Beech. I turned the job down. We had bought a new home in
Garland and didn’t wish to relocate. This bounced me back under a group lead
engineer who would have been under my supervision had I taken the offer. He
made it crystal clear that he thought I was a prima donna and he’d welcome any
opportunity to terminate me.
Knowing
this, I had nothing to lose so whenever I could, I’d boogey out to the flight
line, usually under the pretext of checking on something and jump in with one
of the pilots going up to test-fly the new aircraft prior to delivery.
Flying
with Weber one afternoon, I questioned him about aerobatics in a Model 35 like
we were flying. He told me, “Any airplane is aerobatic if you keep the G-forces
centered so that it won’t overstress the airframe.”
To
prove his point, he put the Bonanza into a slow roll. This guy was so good, he
could probably rolled the plane with a glass of water on the panel and not
spill a drop.
Beech
was producing the Model-99 stretched fuselage twin turbo-prop commuter for a
growing market. I got a chance to fly the right seat in one with Weber. On the
shakedown flight, we shot several instrument approaches over at Salina and then
again at Olathe before returning to Beech in Wichita.
From
10,000 feet, Kansas always reminded me of one of my grandma's patchwork quilts.
Except for where someone had planted and cared for them, there wasn't a tree on
the horizon. I remember someone telling me one time the state tree of Kansas
was a telephone pole.
On
the east side of Wichita, there were three runways almost all in a line, Beech,
Cessna and McConnell Air Force Base where Boeing was located. Needless to say,
at times, the traffic got a little confusing. While I was in Wichita, there was
a mid-air collision between an Air Force jet fighter and a Cessna. As I recall,
the fighter was able to return to base, but the Cessna and its pilot were less
fortunate.
It
was fun working at the old Beech factory for the short time I did if for no
other reason than the history and nostalgia that surrounded the place. I always
thought it odd that three of the great pioneers of civil aviation, Walter
Beech, Clyde Cessna and Lloyd Stearman all founded their aircraft companies on
the plains of Kansas.
Upon
returning to the Dallas area, I took a consulting job with Crescent Industries
located in the old Luscombe aircraft facility in Garland. In fact, my first
airplane might have been built there. Founder, Don Luscombe was a German
national. When World War II broke out, the government confiscated his plant.
After the war, Luscombe Aircraft was never really able to get back into postwar
production and failed financially in 1949.
Crescent
Corporation was building bomb casings and specialized armament for the Viet Nam
War. Although I had been educated as an industrial engineer, this was the first
and last time I ever worked in the discipline.
My
prior engineering jobs had been in cockpit design and environmental systems. My
experience in the Navy gave me a good foundation in electrical and electronic
systems. Thus, as aircraft systems moved from mechanical to hydraulic and then
to fly-by-wire systems, I learned avionics and computers the way the industry
learned them, one failure at a time.
While
in Wichita, I found out about volunteering to ferry aircraft from the Cessna
plant into Dallas. I was able to build flying time and log a good number of
hours ferrying aircraft. Beginning in the early '70s, I abandoned engineering
completely in favor of fulltime flying. Over the next decade, I was airborne
several times a week, in good weather and bad and it was then that I finally
learned what flying was all about.
PART
V. Aircraft Engineering
In
the late 1960s, the management of the aircraft division of LTV, formerly Chance
Vought, decided they wanted to get into the helicopter manufacturing business.
I was not part of the company at that time and after their experience with the
C-142, I often wondered why? LTV formed an alliance with the helicopter
division of the French company Aerospatiale who built choppers for the military
and for export to third world countries.
King
Hussein, the ruler of Jordan and the current monarch’s father, purchased and
personally flew an Alouette helicopter built by Aerospatiale. The aircraft
division of Aerospatiale also designed and built the SST in collaboration with
a British aerospace company. The Shah of Iran ordered two SSTs for a new
worldwide airline he planned to expand. The Aerospatiale commercial jet
division developed and presently markets the Airbus, which continues to
successfully compete with Boeing for a share of the airline passenger jet
market.
LTV
eventually divested itself of their helicopter interests. French management
being somewhat socialistic in their approach to business simply continued to
operate the company under the name Aerospatiale Helicopter Corporation (AHC),
which allowed them to continue having an inroad into the U.S. market.
AHC
sold a few Alouette and SA315 Lama helicopters in the US, but only had a small
share of the market, which was largely monopolized by Textron’s Bell division.
The Lama was a lifting platform or utility type helicopter and the Alouette was
an antiquated military model similar to an early Bell Huey.
In
the 70s, Aerospatiale introduced a civilian version of a military attack
chopper called the Gazelle. The small, four-place helicopter was what a Jaguar
is to a Buick Riviera. The Gazelle used a unique turbine blade tail-rotor
called a Fenestron completely enclosed in the tail assembly and a three-blade
rotor for less of a whap-whap ride.
When
I arrived at the facility in south Grand Prairie for a three-month contract
assignment, Eddie, an electrical engineer (EE) and avionics lead had just
completed the certification of the Gazelle for IFR flight, a milestone in
helicopter evolution.
The
AHC facility at Grand Prairie was located at the back of a large LTV warehouse
north of the Grand Prairie airport. There was no ramp for the helicopters so we
used a portion of the chain-link, fenced-off south parking lot. In order to get
the helicopters in and out of the warehouse being used for assembly and
maintenance, they had to be lifted by a small elevator to the loading dock
level and then into the warehouse.
Eddie
had only a liaison type and a contract draftsman working for him in the
avionics engineering group when I arrived. We had a two-room hut with two
drafting tables and desk on the floor of the assembly line. Eddie’s boss CJ was
the Director of Engineering. CJ along with other upper management staff were
located in another building complex across the way. AHC was a fast growing
organization, but still small enough that most everyone knew one another.
The
first time I met the president of the company, I was doing a layout at the
drafting board and this older gentleman walked in our shack and struck up a
conversation. We visited for a while and when he left. I remarked to Eddie, who
was coming in as the gentleman left, "Nice guy. Who was he anyway?"
“The president of the company you mean?”
Eddie replied, “Yeah, he’s a great guy to work for.”
Eddie
had a desk over at corporate and worked between there and the assembly hangar.
The avionics liaison guy stayed out on the floor most of the time running down
missing parts and our trusty draftsman seldom showed up at work on time and
when he did, he usually wasn’t sober enough to draw a straight line.
There
were plans underway by management to build a new facility just south of the
present location on the west side of the Grand Prairie Municipal Airport. The
Bell Customer Training and Delivery Center was located on the west side of the
Arlington Municipal Airport a few miles to the west.
One
of the conditions of the lease agreement with the City of Grand Prairie would
be that the large drainage ditch would remain between the new AHC facility and
the airport's FBO. Thus, preventing any type of aircraft other than helicopters
from utilizing the west side of the airport. Ironic indeed because only ten
years prior to this time, I had held the lease on the fixed-wing FBO facility
at that very airport.
A
heavyset Italian fellow, a mechanic who often taught training classes, claimed
that helicopters don't really fly, they just beat the air into submission.
A
helicopter owes a lot of its stability to gyroscopic action, not unlike the
same stability provided a moving motorcycle. Many early aviation pioneers
attempted to build and fly a successful rotary-wing aircraft. Even Leonardo da
Vinci made a drawing of an airscrew several hundred years before the concept
was actually tried.
A
Russian American by the name of Igor Sikorsky figured out that the input to the
spinning rotor was 90-degrees out of phase unlike others who had tried and
failed. With this knowledge, he built and flew the first controllable
helicopter. This can be demonstrated by spinning a toy top on a table and
touching the top with your finger. The result is that the top will move ninety
degrees out of phase to the direction it is pushed.
After
being around helicopters for a while, most rotary-wing aircraft can easily be
identified by the approaching sound. A two-bladed or 2-per revolution (rev)
rotor like on a Bell has a whapping sound. A 3-per rev, like on the Astar has a
smoother sound and the 4-per rev like on the Puma has a steadier more powerful
sound. By the time you get to the 5-per rev like on the small Hughes
helicopters it starts to sound more like a giant hummingbird fluttering through
the sky.
For
me, a guy who never liked helicopters and never even wanted to transition to
them when I was in the Guard, there was a certain irony that I was now helping
to build and equip them. Don’t get me wrong, I believe in a strong national
defense, but I always had a twinge of guilt building combat planes knowing the
mass destruction of which they were capable. At least now I was part of
building aircraft for peaceful development.
Each
year AHC attended the annual Helicopter Association International (HAI)
convention. The first HAI I attended was held in Atlanta. The demo helicopters
were flown in and out of a parking lot behind the convention center, but we had
to return them to the civil airport for fuel and overnight parking.
Our
pilots would struggle to get our large helicopters onto a committed approach
pattern for the parking lot, but those darn little Hughes helicopters would
come darting in and out of the parking lot like hummingbirds, sitting down
wherever they chose.
Commuting
to the convention center each morning in the Atlanta traffic was certainly not
a problem. I’d catch a right-seat ride with one of our pilots, tree topping all
the way with the bumper-to-bumper traffic below.
France
had perfected a design called the Starflex rotor-head. It was a
state-of-the-art, three-blade rotor assembly made of extremely strong composite
materials. For years, Bell had stuck to the two-blade rotor design pioneered by
their founding design engineer. The Bell design had trouble with vibration and
fatigue and on rare occasions, the Bell rotor would hit the locks and cause
catastrophic rotor-head failure. However, in lawsuits by survivors, mostly
military veterans’ families, Bell claimed excessive abuse to the aircraft.
The
vice-president of marketing, a fellow named LeFluer had been a helicopter pilot
in Viet Nam. He came up with the idea of designing and marketing a reasonably
priced six-place jet helicopter, basically a streamlined fiberglass shell
around the already proven technology used on the French military choppers. This
concept became a marriage of convenience between the American facility and the
French manufacturing company.
AHC
had just begun receiving the first shipments of the newly designed and
developed Astars from Aerospatiale France when I arrived onsite. The Astars
were shipped with the unpainted airframe complete. The Grand Prairie facility
installed a Lycoming jet engine and then fitted the airframe with the options
ordered by the customer such as avionics, custom interiors and air ambulance
equipment.
Although the American facility
considered itself a manufacturing plant, it was more of an elaborate
modification and customizing center. With the introduction of the Astar,
marketing received orders for 600 helicopters, which back-ordered the assembly
line for three years. The bulk of the orders for new helicopters were destined
for oil exploration operations, mainly offshore drilling companies.
The
Astar sold in other parts of the world were completed in France and had the French
made Ecureuil engine. The French name translated to squirrel, which did not have the same unique connotation in
French as it does in English. Aside from the name, the little engine enjoyed a
reputation of being reliable.
The
early installations of the Lycoming engines experienced several incidents of
engine failures resulting in forced auto rotations. This caused delays in the
delivery of the Astar during the first two years, so a few of the early
American Astars were delivered with the Aerial engine.
Whatever
the reliability problem with the Lycoming engine was, it was eventually
resolved and also became a dependable power plant. Engine failures prompted a
demand for a twin-engine version of the Astar called the Twinstar and the
twin-engine Astar was introduced a year later. The Twinstar failed to be
delivered in as great a numbers as the Astar, most likely due to the increased
cost of the twin-engine model.
The
President of Mexico ordered three Puma helicopters to be custom fitted with
executive interiors and the latest commercial avionics. One of the three Pumas
we eventually delivered to the Mexican Presidential fleet would be loaned to
the Pope when he visited and toured Mexico several years later.
The
job I was hired for was to custom design the instrument panel and flight deck
avionics on these three Puma helicopters. The Puma was AHC’s top-of-the-line
turbo jet helicopter based on one of the most successful French military
designs. Its twin-engines developed 3,200 horsepower and the Puma was the
absolute Cadillac limousine of private helicopters available.
Jim
Creighton, a great pilot and fine fellow had been a corporate pilot for LTV
before becoming Director of Flight Operations at AHC. We got along well and
whenever possible, I would fly copilot on the Puma test flights. The first time
Creighton let me fly the Puma I took the controls at cruise with a good forward
air speed. The Puma handled much like any of the light, fixed-wing twins I had
been used to flying.
As
we returned to the landing pad and I began to slow the Puma down to approach
the landing pad, it became less of an airplane and more of a flying gyroscope.
I knew to add rudder for lateral directional control and how to lower the
collective.
Instinctively,
I eased back on the stick like I would in a fixed-wing aircraft landing, as we
were about to touch down. I had also been holding a little collective so as to
touch down easy. The Puma slowed to a zero forward airspeed and started backing
up like an old cow pony after roping a calf.
Creighton
looked at me and said, "You know there’s a chain link fence back there
don't you?" He pushed the stick slightly forward, dropped the rest of the
collective and the large Puma settled gently onto the ramp.
Eventually,
I overcame my apprehension of approaching a full stall and falling out of the
sky like a rock after a few more flights.
After
about three months of preliminary design and layouts for the President’s Pumas,
we were ready to present the final proposal to the Mexican Air Force. The
proposal included color weather radar provided by RCA and a Sperry flight
director system. The order was quickly approved and the go-ahead given.
The
President's personal pilot and flight crew arrived at our facility for avionics
and flight training for the first time. It was at this time that I first met Cap-e-tan Chicone.
In
the classes I instructed, the chief disappointment to the Mexican pilots was
that the actuators on the flight controls could not be coupled to the flight
director. The helicopter had to be manually flown by the pilot observing the
flight director.
The
French contractor that built the autopilot actuators for the Puma had not
provided for electronic inputs from flight directors. They were eventually
forced by market demands to build such an actuator, which were eventually
retrofitted onto these three Pumas, the Golden Nugget and other Pumas.
These
Pumas would have the distinction of being the most elaborately equipped
helicopters built to date. The VHF communication and navigation equipment was
Collins Pro-Line. The avionics was rack-mounted with remote control heads like
the latest airline aircraft.
I
designed a custom audio switch box system and sought out an outfit in Coral
Gables, Florida to custom build them. Cables Engineering traced its avionics
history backed to building radio panels for the old Pan American Flying
Clippers.
An
Omega navigation system, built by Canadian Marconi, was installed. The seven
powerful Omega stations positioned around the world transmitted on ultra-low
frequencies (ULF), which followed the curvature of the earth. AHC had no
equipment for skin-mapping to identify the best location for antennas. Previous
trial and errors had determined the best location for VHF COM and NAV systems,
but no one had any idea where to place the antenna for the Marconi system.
Early
one morning, I was walking around the Puma trying to decide where to put the
Omega antenna when my eyes fell on a removable panel just below the pilot's
rudder pedals. If this location didn’t work, it would not be an extensive
repair to patch or replace this non-structural panel. Handing the small round
flush mounted antenna to a sheet metal mechanic, I instructed him by pointing
and said, "Mount it there."
After
the Marconi Omega installation was complete, the Puma was towed out on the ramp
and we fired up the ULF. Channeling through the station signals, we received
every station in the world except the one in Tokyo while the helicopter was
still parked. Once airborne, even the Tokyo station came in. The latitude and
longitudinal positions were accurate to within a quarter mile. This doesn’t
compare with what modern satellite (GPS) systems can do, but was darn good for
those days.
The
avionics installation on the first Puma to be delivered to Mexico was completed
and we began extensive testing of all the avionics and electrical systems on
the aircraft. Unlike some of the smaller helicopters that used only 28-volt DC
systems, the Puma had a lot of three-phase AC voltage that would bite. However,
even the 28-volt systems had enough amperage to burn you real good when shorted
out. I quickly got in the habit of not wearing jewelry around them.
With
the Hobart ground Auxiliary Power Unit (APU) plugged into the Puma, we were
running the avionics systems in the hanger. One of the electricians had just
finished installing a circuit breaker in the overhead switch panel and dropped
a lock-washer. What were the odds of it rolling into the electrical bay next to
where I was working, but it did. It was like sitting next to five Roman candles
going off.
The
washer fell exactly across the contacts for the APU solenoid, the only circuit
without a fusible link or breaker protection in the whole aircraft. That ol’
Hobart APU just hunkered down and kept on supplying power.
The
Hobart was parked about 12-feet away from the aircraft. Other workers in the
hanger kidded me later about only touching the hanger deck one time between
bailing out of the side door of the Puma and hitting the power-off button on
the Hobart.
During
the time the first Puma was under going flight-test, it was parked on the ramp
outside the chain link fence. The aircraft were usually towed to the
warehouse/hanger through the fence by a tug. The weather bureau called saying
that a severe thunderstorm with a possible tornado was headed our way.
Creighton
took off running for the Puma with me right behind him. He cranked the Puma and
lifted it about 200-feet in the air and asked if I thought that new color radar
we had installed could pick up the heavy cells. I was already turning the radar
on when he asked. Creighton pointed the Puma's nose directly at the storm and
held it in a hover against the wind. We painted the actual red cells in the
center of the storm.
Creighton
landed the Puma on the loading dock lift. The waiting line crew pushed the Puma
into the hanger with us still in the cockpit as the first few hail pellets
started to fall. I’m not sure I would’ve trusted jumping that fence into that
narrow loading lift with any other pilot except Creighton.
When
we completed the first Mexican Presidential Puma, it was sent off to the paint
shop with patches and primer all over. I hadn’t given any thought as to how the
Puma might be painted. When the Puma came back, the ugly duckling had become a
swan.
The
Puma was painted off-white with wide brown stripes trimmed in gold. Both sides
of the Puma and the tail boom were painted with a giant multicolored serpent.
From an earlier trip to Chichen Itza in the Yucatan, I immediately recognized
it as Kululcan, the feathered serpent god of the Mayans.
Chicone
was one of those flamboyant, jovial people. He would have been successful in
any endeavor he undertook, in any language and any country. He and several
other pilots returned to Grand Prairie to pick up the first Puma that was ready
for delivery. Chicone had a roll of $100 bills that would choke a horse and a
shopping list a foot long.
When
the Puma was ready to depart for Mexico City, we could barely get the door
closed as it was loaded with exercise bikes, microwave ovens and cases of all
kinds of goodies from K-Mart and Wal-Mart. I think it’s referred to as
diplomatic privilege.
After
the three Pumas had been delivered to Mexico, there was a request to modify the
VHF transceivers to accept .25 MHz frequencies. The Collins equipment that had
been installed already accepted those frequencies and so all that was needed
was a minor modification to the control heads. Additionally, one of the Loran
systems needed to be replaced under warranty.
Instead
of sending a technician, I elected to go to Mexico City accompanied by my wife.
Deplaning at the Mexico City International Airport, we were walking toward
customs when a Mexican Air Force Major introduced himself and asked for our
luggage claim check, one of which was for the new Loran. He handed them to his
driver and instructed him to pick up our bags as he escorted us around the long
customs clearing line. Didn’t even get a souvenir stamp on my passport.
My
wife and I were dropped off at a luxury hotel in La Zona Rosa, which I think
means Pinkies. The well-kept hotel still had cracks in the hallway walls from
an earthquake that occurred only a few days before our arrival. I was told an
officer would be assigned to escort me back and forth to the International
Airport to the Major de Presidente,
main hanger.
The Pumas were housed in one of two
large executive hangers with several medium and large corporate jets belonging
to various government agencies. Lieutenant Aguilar was assigned to accompany me
throughout my stay. The first thing I did was take the control head panels out
in order to modify the channel changer. When I asked for a soldering iron, the
first one they brought me had a one-inch head that could have been used to
solder sheet metal.
The
control head modifications were accomplished in quick time and the Loran unit
exchanged. The rest of my visit was mostly social calls with the unit commander
and training for some of their mechanics. I found words like tape and
screwdriver are the same in Spanish as English. Just pronounce them with an
accent and/or add a long O on the end.
The
next day, Chicone and I took one of the Pumas for a test flight. Chicone let me
fly after we were airborne. As he was checking out all the frequencies he
asked, “Anywhere you want to go?” I pointed to the smoking volcano to the
south. Chicone laughed and waved his hand for me to go ahead on.
We
circled the volcano and headed back to Mexico City. It was interesting seeing
the large city from the air as it spreads across an entire valley. The air
pollution was far worse than any I had ever seen in Los Angeles.
Legend
has it that the founders were told by prophecy to settle in the place where
they came upon an eagle sitting atop a cactus with a snake in its beak. This is
the symbol seen on the Mexican flag and coins today. The place this occurred
was on a dry lakebed in the giant valley of what is now Mexico City.
On
the last evening we were in Mexico City, I asked Lieutenant Aguilar to escort
my wife and I to dinner and requested that we go somewhere that tourists would
not normally go. Aguilar replied that he knew a very nice restaurant in the
city, but that I would not particularly care for the part of town where it was
located.
We
stopped by the military barracks where he checked out a sidearm and shoulder
holster to wear under his jacket. We then went to pick up a young Air Force
WAF, his date for the evening. The evening was uneventful and the nightclub
style restaurant where we dined that evening was exceptional by any standard.
The
next morning, we were delivered to the airport terminal and were graciously
thanked for our visit. My wife and I boarded the waiting American Airlines
Boeing 707. There were only about a dozen people onboard. My wife was the only
female on the flight. As the pilot cranked the engines, the pressurization
system gave out this awful gasping noise and the pilot shut the engines back
down. The Captain came into the cabin and announced there would be a slight
delay while some repairs were made.
It
was Sunday morning and there were no regular mechanics on duty. The two linemen
who boarded the aircraft scratched their heads and said they would have to call
another mechanic that was off duty. The Captain was a wiry old gentleman with a
white moustache who reminded me of Sam Houston. He had probably been flying for
American since the DC-3 days.
The
Captain told the two linemen to get him a screwdriver. He knew what the problem
was and he would fix it himself. The Captain explained to us that some seats
would need to be removed and one of the floor-plates pulled up. As it turned
out, there was not a man onboard that was not either an engineer or tech rep. In
about five minutes, we had the carpet up and the floor-plate open.
The
ol' Captain dropped down into the hole while the copilot cranked the engine.
After a few minor adjustments, the pressurization gasped one last time and came
on. The floor, carpet and seats were quickly replaced and our flight back to
Dallas was uneventful.
PART
V. Aircraft Engineering
The
AHC engineering department consisted of two sections under CJ, the Director of
Engineering. The mechanical engineering group was supervised by a chief
engineer, but closely overseen by CJ. My group, the avionics and electrical
section was more autonomous. Eddie, the Chief of Avionics Engineering was
working on the proposal for a new U.S. Coast Guard search and rescue helicopter
based on the Dauphin model 365, designated the 366.
With
little or no supervision, I started working on whatever custom commercial
orders came through. When the Coast Guard awarded the contract to Aerospatiale,
Eddie was transferred to the newly formed government division, which resulted
in my being promoted to Chief of Avionics Engineering.
Aerospatiale France was ready to
release the commercial version of the Dauphin 365. The plan was to introduce
the Dauphin at the next HAI convention in St. Louis. France shipped us a
mock-up fuselage, which the upholstery shop finished with a plush interior.
Working with all of our vendors, I acquired the latest avionics control heads
and displays available and had them mounted in the dummy instrument panel and
console.
For
the static display, we installed a cabin stereo system and played the theme
music from the movie Superman, a
popular movie at the time. The mock-up passed as a real cockpit, except to the
most discerning eye. It was a big hit on the floor of the convention. A 36-inch
framed photograph of the mockup cockpit, which was given to me by the Flitephon
vendor, still hangs in my office to this day.
The
avionics group had a much closer relationship with the aircraft assembly area
and flight-test than did the mechanical group, which primarily designed
interior and structural modifications. The plans for the new facility on the
west side of Grand Prairie Municipal Airport were being finalized and I was
able to get the avionics engineering offices built into the main hanger
adjacent to flight-test. This was a real coup on my part, not having to be
located in the new corporate office building on the other side of the assembly
area.
With
my promotion to replace Eddie, my duties quickly broadened to cover all of the
commercial helicopter models. The Pumas would remain my personal favorite of
the fleet and I did most of the design work on them. Not being real keen on the
Astar and TwinStar line, I promoted one of my newly acquired avionics types to
lead man over those two aircraft, only reviewing the planned installations
prior to starting the projects and signing off on the drawings before being
released.
Aerospatiale
did not really have a good drawing release system, so I implemented a standard
drawing sign-off and ECO procedure. Of even greater value for delivery and
support was a system of configuration control drawings, which I implemented, a
top drawing that referenced all of the sub-installations. A drawing package was
compiled and shipped with each helicopter.
Relations
between engineering and marketing were poor at best the first year I took over
the department. Basically, the sales people and demo pilots didn’t know what to
tell the customers what options were available. So I assigned Bill, my best
draftsmen, the task of making a series of simple three-dimensional drawings of
various optional avionics packages.
Bill,
a contract draftsman, had worked as a truck driver before learning mechanical
drafting. He had a gift for being able to visualize how a thing would fit and
then put it down on paper. A description of each of the installation packages
was added and I assigned an option number to the drawings.
These
info sheets, complete with a drawing of the option were copied and placed in a
three-ring binder for the sales people to carry with them. For the first time,
they were able to make an informed presentation to the customer on available
avionics options. Needless to say, this made us real heroes over at marketing.
Not only did our orders for custom avionics installations increase, but the
profits also followed as everything we quoted had about a forty percent markup.
The end result was that the avionics portion of the company was no longer
overhead, but a self-supporting entity.
The
next thing I set out to do was hire some really good employees to add to the
department. The first two people I hired were a clerk by the name of Gail and a
circuit designer by the name of Bruce.
It is
difficult to recall Gail, one of the most organized employees I have ever had,
without recounting the story of her purchasing a new Toyota. Several of the
engineers were having fun kidding her about the headlights being slant-eyed and
one of them told her that the shocks were made of bamboo. That noon, when we
were all leaving for lunch, we caught Gail bending down looking under the front
end of the car with skepticism.
What
we really needed was a good circuit and theory man. Eddie, an EE met those
requirements, but he was busier than a one-arm paperhanger with the Coast Guard
installations.
Although
trained as an industrial engineer, I had picked up electronics over the years
both in the Navy and on various engineering jobs. However, I knew my
shortcomings and heavy circuit design was certainly one of them. A HAM radio
license had been no problem for me. I had passed and held KA5WKL for years. The
second-class radiophone license was another story entirely. I flunked the
written exam the first time.
At
my request, employment put out a search for a designer and Bruce applied. Bruce
had been managing a Cessna dealer's avionics shop in Texarkana. When he came to
work for me, Bruce remarked several times that he thought he knew me from
somewhere. Of course, he did because we had met briefly in the Navy and we had
talked on the phone about some warranty claims when I worked for Cessna, but I
held off telling him exactly where he remembered me from.
Several
of us from the avionics group joined the Avionics Electronics Association
(AEA). The second AEA convention that we all attended was held in San
Francisco. Bruce had worked for me about a year by that time. On the first
night of the convention, there was a cocktail party and reception at the host
hotel on Embarcadero. Both Bruce and I had already had a couple of martinis
when Bruce said, "I just can’t get it out of my head that I know you from
somewhere."
It
was time to put an end to my little charade. "Bruce," I said, “You
really don't remember me, do you? Think back to 1961 when we sent the NAS
Dallas reserve VP squadron to the A-bomb tests in the Pacific." Bruce
began to smile as I continued, "I was the aircrew training instructor that
assigned the crews and when you were late the morning of departure, I was the guy
who grabbed your bags and ran for the last P2V on the ramp with you and boosted
your young ass onboard."
Bruce
yelled out, "Yes! That's where I remember you from, why you sorry..."
He laughed so hard he spilled his drink.
The
FBO at Conroe, Texas was doing additional modifications on some Astars for an
offshore oil-drilling operator, a regular customer of theirs. Our mechanical
group was assisting on the project, but none of their designers held a pilot's
license.
On
occasion, the company would rent a Piper Cherokee Six and I would fly some of
the group down to Conroe for the day. Conroe Airport sat right in the middle of
the Piney Woods and was hard to find. The best way to locate the airport was
with an ADF as there was a low power marker located on the field.
The
young low-time flight instructor who had to check me out in the Cherokee Six
said, “I’m a little embarrassed to be checking you out,” when he handed me back
my pilot’s license with all the ratings which he did not have.
Reflecting
back on this, I can recall that during routine flight checks when asked to
demonstrate a stall, it was always difficult to force myself to stall the
aircraft when my subconscious was telling me not to let this happen. Those who
learned to drive on a manual shift car can remember how at first they would
jump the clutch and the old car would lurch forward. Then after having driven
for years, shift smoothly without even thinking about the process. Man and
machine become one after a period of time and thus the controls of the
aircraft, like other devices, become an extension of our own bodies.
A
jet helicopter rented for about $650 an hour at the time and the insurance for
a low time student pilot cost… well, if you had to ask you couldn’t afford it. So
logging solo flight time and going for an FAA check ride were financially out
of the question. Even though I was not jet helicopter rated, most of the pilots
were pretty good about letting me fly. It was also nice to have one of the
experienced Viet Nam veteran chopper pilots along with me anyway because I
would have been hard put to make an autorotation under 1,000 feet AGL.
In
an autorotation with a failed engine, the pilot allows the rotors to coast on
descent and just before touchdown the pilot must add collective for lift. This
is similar to an engine-out glide to landing in a fixed-wing aircraft, but
requires practice as once up collective is applied, rotor speed decreases
rapidly. Timing and coordination was the key.
There
is always one large boisterous know-it-all pilot and ours was George, a real
hot rock. He was always buzzing the hanger and things of that sort. George and
Eddie were personal friends and in fact, they owned a sailboat together. Ol'
George didn't like me and indicated it at every opportunity. I was in good
company, as I don’t think he liked anybody that showed a dislike for his
flamboyant style of flying.
Without
intending to, I had embarrassed him badly one afternoon. A new IFR Gazelle was
ready for delivery and needed its final flight-test. These tests were flown
over on the Meacham Field ILS. George was the pilot scheduled to make the test
flight and as this was one of the last IFR Gazelles we would deliver, I asked
to go along and observe.
Inbound
on the approach, George was all over the sky trying to intercept the ILS and
once even executed a missed approach. Heading back around for another approach,
I suggested that he let me shoot the next one. I got lucky, it happens, and I
nailed the approach all the way down.
What
made matters worse was one of my junior engineers was riding in the back seat
and witnessed the whole thing. I wouldn’t have mentioned it, but my engineer
blabbed the story all over. After that episode, hot rock George refused to fly
any check-rides with me and I had to get one of the other pilots. George
eventually killed himself. I was told his helicopter had gone into a lake up in
the Seattle area, but it was never clear exactly what had happened.
The
Astar, although it had some early power plant problems was a fairly dependable
aircraft. Most crashes were due to pilot error and not mechanical failure. The
local Dallas radio and TV stations were all starting to want their own
eye-in-the-sky reporters, more for prestigious reasons than public service.
Some
of the radio stations used the cheaper non-turbine engine brand of helicopters.
WFAA, the big-dog TV station in Dallas, had to have the best, its own brand new
Astar.
My
wife was friends with the wife of the EVP at the Dallas Morning News, which owned
the TV station WFAA. However, I am sure this had nothing to do with their
choice of buying an Aerospatiale instead of a Bell Helicopter.
One
very early Sunday morning, my home phone rang and it was Herb, the VP of
manufacturing at AHC. He explained that I needed to drive out to a location
south of Cedar Hill where an Astar had just crashed. The FAA and NTB were
already on site conducting an investigation of the crash, but had requested
additional AHC factory representation.
When
I arrived on scene, there were no parts big enough to identify as being a
reasonable facsimile of a helicopter. The largest chunk of metal on the ground
was the core of the jet engine. The crash debris was, however, contained in
less than an acre of land. It was immediately apparent that the helicopter had
gone almost straight into the ground.
The
weather was overcast that morning. The pilot had likely been flying under a low
ceiling and gotten into the clouds. Thankfully, the mortuary had already
removed two bodies, that of the pilot and of a female accompanying him. It was
not very pleasant picking through the wreckage and occasionally coming across
things that I would rather not discuss.
The
young pilot flying the WFAA chopper may have been instrument rated, but the
apparent cause of the crash was the old suicide spiral. More than likely, the
pilot had lost orientation and made a left turn straight into the ground. It
doesn't take long traveling at a hundred miles an hour to cover the distance of
a couple of hundred feet in elevation.
An
Americanized Frenchman by the name of Orsetti was our Executive VP at AHC.
Because my group worked closely with the manufacturing floor, it was not
unusual when the company bid a new contract to receive a call from Orsetti or
even from the VP of Marketing under the pretext of it being a social call. What
they really wanted to know was if I though we would be able to meet the
proposed delivery schedule.
In a
frame over my desk alongside some photos of various models of aircraft hung
this saying "I'm an engineer. I don't blow the whistle and I don't drive
the train, but let the darn thing jump the track and just see who they
blame."
My
boss CJ and I always had a good working relationship. He claimed he didn't
worry too much about piling new stuff on my department because if we didn't
know how to do it, by the time we finished the project, my avionics gang and I
would have figured it out.
I
was over at corporate one day in the men's restroom and one of CJ’s mechanical
engineers was obviously hacked off about something. He began unloading all his
complaints about the engineering department and management on me. As luck would
have it, I consoled the guy by halfway agreeing with some of his complaints,
but added no criticism of my own.
Later
that afternoon, there was a phone message that CJ wanted to see me in his
office. When I arrived at his office, we discussed some of the various problems
facing the department, but I remained confused as to exactly what the meeting
was all about. As I got up to leave, I am certain that I must have had a
puzzled look on my face.
CJ
grinned and said, "You know when you're in the restroom it might be a good
idea to watch what you’re saying or at least consider who might be in one of
the stalls." I was almost out the door before I caught on and started
laughing.
The
year that the HAI convention was held in Las Vegas, I was assigned to the
convention floor to assist marketing with avionics questions, but they had
plenty of help and I wasn’t doing a lot of good standing around. AHC, along
with the other helicopter companies, were giving demo flights to potential
buyers in a couple of our helicopters. I managed to slip away from the
convention center and headed out to the airport.
The
old Starship facility on McCarran Field, which I mentioned in an earlier
chapter, had finally been converted to and FBO as I predicted. We were
operating our helicopters from there. When I arrived at the airport and located
our motor home, chaos reigned. People were just walking out to the next
arriving helicopter and climbing onboard.
I
took the waiting list from the hand of the inundated flight department
secretary and sent her for cold drinks and ice. Next, I screened the waiting
crowd and divided them into two groups, the potential buyers and those after a
free joyride. It was easy. I just asked a couple of simple questions like,
“What type of helicopter do you own now?” or “Which model have you been
considering for purchase?”
I
gave the legitimate prospects a priority number and asked them to wait in the
air-conditioned terminal lobby and enjoy a soft drink or their beverage of
choice. I asked the secretary to hold the prospects there and visit with them
until I called on the walkie-talkie to send the next group to me at the motor
home. I turned away the tire-kickers saying we were booked, gave newly arriving
prospects a number and sent them to the lobby. I did recognize a couple of
fleet owners and expedited them like high rollers. What the heck, we were in
Las Vegas.
When
we had a light passenger load and someone I knew was a buyer, I’d hop in the
back seat and ride along giving them a sales pitch as we flew around Las Vegas,
down the Strip and over Glitter Gulch. It was a heck of a lot of fun flying
over Las Vegas at low altitude, especially at night.
That
evening, after one heck of a busy flight ops day, I told the chief pilot I
would be going back to the convention center the next day. "No way!"
he replied, “You’re coming back out here tomorrow and help us!"
French
engineers are a breed all to their own. About the time we began working on an
idea for a product improvement on one of the helicopters, miraculously all of a
sudden, the French engineers would be working on the same problem and they would
ask us to stop. It got so bad I started not releasing any drawings until we had
them fully developed.
For
example, a lot of the harnesses we installed for avionics equipment were very
similar. A lot of wiring and a little bit more weight was being added to each
aircraft due to all the multiple runs of common wires like grounds.
To
solve this problem, I laid out some of the most common harness drawings and
started marking them up to see how much wiring could be eliminated. By adding
prefabricated harnesses that could be installed in the aircraft we could
connect the avionics through a common junction box. This was not a new concept.
Boeing had been doing it for years. On our drawings, we specified a
Mil-Standard (MS) cannon connector.
Word
came down form management that the lead avionics engineer, my counterpart from
Aerospatiale France, would be arriving in a few days to show us their newly
developed version of a common avionics connector for harness installations.
Most of the French engineers who came to AHC spoke English of a sort, but
communication more or less ended there. The standard answer to any problem
posed to a French engineer was "No prob-liem!"
A
couple of my engineers and I sat down with the French engineer when he arrived
and he began to explain the connector design which they proposed to install in
the Astar and Twinstar.
The
MS connectors that we were proposing were keyed. In other words, they could
only be connected one way. The first thing we noticed about the French
connector was that it could be connected 180 degrees out. Bruce asked, “What if
the mechanic plugs the connector in upside down? A hot wire could be connected
to a ground wire and short out the system.”
The
Frenchman replied, "Ah, but it is color coded!"
My
other engineer asked, “What would happen if a mechanic was working in the
dark?”
Again
the Frenchman replied, "Ah, but it is color coded." After a dozen
similar questions, which all received the same reply, we thanked the gentleman
for his time and took him to lunch. A little wine solves a lot of problems.
The
standing joke for some time after that when something didn't work was to simply
say, "Ah, but it was color coded."
Another
example was when our avionics vendors introduced their new lines of digital
displays referred to as glass cockpits.
The flight director HSI, DG and other readouts were integrated into (CRT). The
Dauphin 365 commercial aircraft were being delivered with elaborate interiors
to compete with the new Sikorsky executive helicopter line, the Dauphin’s competition.
France
contended that there wasn’t room in the 365’s panel to mount a CRT. Bill, my
best mechanical draftsman, did some layouts showing how the system could be
installed at a slight angle to the existing instrument panel. As soon as I told
marketing we could do it, word came down for us to stop work and to send our
layout drawings to France. Within a few weeks, the French released their
version of the all glass cockpit for the Dauphin. "No prob-liem!"
My
wife was on staff at the University of Dallas, so I took the opportunity to
enroll, at no charge, in the MBA program. Attending UD night and weekend
classes, I began to get the feeling that I should be teaching the classes
instead of attending them. The one class I did enjoy was a computer management
class. This class gave me access to the mainframe Hewlett-Packard at the
university.
Bernie, a math professor at UD and
friend, got me a cradle-type phone modem and a workstation terminal to use from
home so I could sign onto the university’s computer. This was in a time when my
TI home computer used a cassette drive for data storage and my Apple computer
at work used a 180k floppy.
After one year, I dropped out of the
MBA program, mostly for lack of interest, but I had maintained a 4.0 grade
average. Having never done that before, I thought I’d just quit while I was
ahead. Besides, Peter's Principle had set in on my engineering career a long
time ago.
The
last HAI convention I attended before leaving AHC was held in Anaheim. On a
free afternoon, my wife and I had gone over to Disneyland. We were walking down
Main Street when I heard the distinctive pronunciation of my name, "Mar-veen,” being hollered from out of the
crowd somewhere. I would have known that voice anywhere. Looking around, I
spotted Cap-e-tan Chicone with
his family and entourage up from Mexico City.
We
visited about old times and he told me about the Puma that had crashed some
months back. The Puma and another helicopter were taking off from a dusty
baseball field crowded with spectators. The rotors kicked up so much dust that
the visibility went to zero.
The
two choppers clipped rotor blades. Both helicopters went down, but due to a
rotor out-of-balance condition, the Puma went over on its side resulting in
extensive damage to the Puma and several fatalities.
A
longtime engineering friend of mine named Jerome applied at AHC to go to work
in the mechanical group after being laid off at Bell. He and I had started as
junior engineers at Chance Vought together and had crossed paths several times
over the last twenty years and I gave him the highest recommendation.
Jerome
had studied to be a Catholic priest, but ended up getting married and having
six kids. Why he ever wanted to be an aeronautical engineer (AE), I'll never
know, but he was a good designer and above average in mathematics. He put all
six of his kids through college working as an engineer.
New
helicopter sales were starting to taper off by the mid to late ‘80s. I had been
at AHC for the better part of a decade and began to think in terms of been there, done that. There was one
opening for a project engineer at corporate, but it was going to involve a lot
of traveling.
One
of the delivery pilots held an AE degree and was a former Viet Nam chopper
driver, he was also being considered for the position. Even though he did not
have the years of experience I had, he was younger and more energetic. I was
sure he was the best candidate and would do a better job. I withdrew my name. In
my gut, I was starting to think about leaving AHC even though I was well on the
path to becoming a VP. Corporate management just never had been a serious goal
of mine.
It
has always seemed retirement is wasted on the old, we should retire when we’re
50 and then go back to work and work the rest of our lives. So I decided to do
just that. I took a year off to restore an old 1942 Continental Coupe, which I
had been trying to find time to work on for years.
When
I did give my two weeks notice at AHC, I guess upper management was pretty well
blind-sided. There really was no one to replace me. CJ asked if I’d stay an
extra month while they reorganized the engineering department and I agreed.
Three years later, AHC merged with BMG and/or some other helicopter company. I
understand that many of the older AHC engineers and managers were offered
employment buyouts.
Over
the years, every so often, the phone would ring and it would be Bruce, Jerome
or one of the other designers I worked with calling just to shoot the breeze.
Sorry to say, I’ve now lost track of most of them.
During
the next couple of years, I kept my hand in aviation engineering by serving on
the board of directors for Terra Avionics in Albuquerque. Terra’s hottest
selling item was a hand held aircraft transceiver. The company was in an
excellent position to move into the King and Narco market, but the management
was reluctant to move into the TSO certified market.
A
Technical Standard Order (TSO) certified that an item had gone through FAA and
FCC compliant testing for use on IFR aircraft. I obtained a TSO for Terra and
did some design drawings for some low-end, non-TSO avionics for Terra. I also
purchased some surplus audio switchboxes and marketed them.
Collins
Radio had a low-end avionics line called Microline and most of the units were
TSO. Collins decided to discontinue Microline and I negotiated with them to buy
their patent rights and remaining inventory for only $160,000. At the same
time, Mr. King, the founder of King Radio retired. The new acting president of
King was a real jerk. He got wind of my offer to buy out Microline and offered
Collins a merger. Of course, King’s management trashed Microline immediately
after getting control to squelch the competition with the low-end King radios.
Dal-Fort
was the overhaul and modification center at Love Field that used to be part of
Braniff Airlines before they went bankrupt. Dal-Fort, now on it’s own, did a
lot of work on old Boeing airliners for various non-scheduled air carriers.
Mainly they did interiors. Some of the jobs required rewiring a lot of the old
avionics harnesses and I worked there on contract a short time doing some
re-wiring diagrams.
Those
old jet airliners had been modified and re-modified several times. Anyone who
has ever worked on a modified Boeing aircraft can appreciate what a nightmare
it was trying to trace wiring through pressure bulkheads when the diagrams no
longer agreed with what was in the aircraft. If there were an award for Rube
Goldberg aircraft wiring, the winner would have to be one of those old modified
Boeing airliners.
Aerospatiale
France had a couple of reps at AHC who worked for the civil aviation
single-engine, fixed-wing division. This division built and marketed a little
four-place, low-wing GA aircraft. Their marketing approach was really poor.
After I left AHC, I contacted the VP of Marketing at Beech.
Beech
management indicated a real interest in marketing the Aerospatiale light
single-engine aircraft in the US. In fact, they might even consider
discontinuing their low-end Aero line, if something could be worked out.
Production costs were making the line unprofitable, but they needed an
alternative product to market through their Beech Pilot Center dealerships.
Two
guys, representing themselves as upper management from Aerospatiale France,
flew into DFW for a meeting. I refused to divulge my contact until we signed an
agreement. The Frenchmen continued to pump me for information, but I declined
to divulge anything until they gave me a letter of intent. Our meeting broke
up, as did their marketing aspirations in this country. You can always tell a
Frenchman, but you can’t tell him much.
One
very hot summer afternoon while I was out in my garage working on one of my old
cars, the phone rang and it was Bruce. He had left AHC and was working for
DynCorp on a night vision modification project on the C-141 Lockheed Starlifter
and C-5A. Odd that I would revisit the C-5A I had worked on in Marietta after
it had been in service for lo these many years.
Seemed
that DynCorp in Fort Worth, the contractor on the project, was desperate for
people who held recent secret clearances and I was one. The hourly rate they
were offering for this short-term project was extremely attractive. I signed on
to the project knowing that my wife and I were planning to move to the Texas
Panhandle as soon as she completed the school year.
Bruce
had rounded up several of our old AHC group and we completed the major portion
of the project in short order. In fact, we worked ourselves right out of a job.
I spent the rest of my time with DynCorp supervising the Computer Aided Design
(CAD) group and learned the discipline myself.
The
manager was a former Navy supply officer whom everyone referred to as Captain
Queeg behind his back. This was the last aircraft-engineering job I ever worked
on.
While
I was at DynCorp, a car dealer and old car buff friend of mine by the name of
Blessie was involved with the Kruse collector car auctions in Dallas. He called
and asked if I could write some computer software programs for the auction
company and for his three used car dealerships.
One
day I was studying the software I had designed and realized that with minor
variations the programs could be made generic. From that, I launched a business
software company, which was a leader in its field for almost two decades.