Braniff Convair yes Piper Cub no
Two doctors interests in aviation differed. One was a GP and owned his own airplane and flew it regularly. He offered to take me up but my father said no. The other was a obstetrician/gynecologist that had once worked for the Bureau of Public Health and was then a gynecologist with patients who preferred his care to Navy doctors in Corpus Christi Texas. When the time to drive back from Corpus to Ann Arbor he bought tickets for his son and myself on an airline where he owned stock.
Night was approaching and one of the generators kept dropping off the buss. Finally, the pilot announced that anyone who wanted to go should remain on the airplane and the others would have to wait for another airplane in the morning. I was familiar with dynamotors and various surplus gear my father had had converted for his HAM radio. We taxied out and the generators stayed online. My anxiety was with the vibration from the 2800's in climb. When we got to cruise altitude the cowl flaps closed on the nacelles and the engine note pacified. Was that all? We landed in Houston Hobby and were put up in a hotel.
The next day we flew to Dallas Love and boarded a DC-6. On the way to Detroit a thunderstorm built up, It was Spring near Easter. The airplane shook and rolled from ear to ear as flashes lit up the sky. I could look out the windows alternately on the starboard and then the port. Straight down I could see the ground out the windows. There was no Dutch roll as in a swept wing jet. At one point the pilot put the landing gear down to control any wild excursions in speed as we made big excursions in altitude. What folks in those days called "air pockets."
Recently, I have seen that the AH-1 "Cobras" are limited to 120 degrees of roll. I can walk a long ways on my hands and did in the aisles at work, Inverted tank? what time limit? I am not a show off. I left that to Blue Angels Leader Captain "Zeke "Cormier USN (re'td) who carried the Aeromed proposal to Washington, DC the day I parked my car in Jackson McGowen's spot planning to pickup from litho hand it to him and be gone by 6:00AM before the missing Visitor spots caused me to be late for his flight.
More backing away from VTOL and STOL
The "Harrier" project became a real airplane for the Marines when the British decided to build a ski jump carrier for it. It became the AV-8A in U.S. use. Then McDonnell took over the project from Douglas and made a larger carbon fiber wing to become the AV-8B. The weapon delivery system was the Angle Rate Bombing System (ARBS) in common with the one I chose the components and made the evaluation for on the A-4M which added inlet guide vanes to the PWA J-52 to make the P-408 version.
The YC-15 gained the CFM-56 joint GE-SNECMA smaller version of a big fan compared to the TF-39/CF-6 but waited until the C-141 retired to gain support of the generals for mainline use. It could carry one main battle tank XM-1 "Abrams" or two armored personnel carrier XM-2/3 "Bradleys". How many 463L pallets? No underfloor cargo containers like a passenger jet except on the main deck.
I had gone to Pratt & Whitney by then in pursuit of titanium technology I had been briefed on one day in Long Beach by a PWA engineer on the F-100 augmented turbofan. There was magic to something with 11:1 thrust to weight with fuel cooled and fueldraulic systems.
A new initiative to create a second airlifter for Military Airlift Command to give numbers after rewinging and reengining the C-5A "Galaxy" arose. I was handed the Boeing "Airlift Loading Model" and knew just what to do when an opportunity to fly again to the Pentagon arose to pickup an Order of Battle created by a new Army Command Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) it included subspecies for the Rapid deployment Force and Marine Expeditionary Battalions.
I was on a strict "Do Not Fly" policy as Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Strategic Arms Limitation built a whole new overhead. I only got to go once to East Hartford as engineers and analysts from UTC Research Laboratory came to meet with Pratt & Whitney Operations Research (myself, a grade 46 and Frank Little, a grade 50). I did get to headquarters where Colonel Donovan from a Nellis project about the F-16 and MIG-23 had been hired based on my favorable review of his classified report. (Up a few grades the new boss of all the analytic groups including Fred Staudt's Cost and Joe ? AeroPerformance and ours asked me very firmly to declassify the report so he could use it with foreign customers he met with, I said no and asked that my clearance I had downgraded from Top Secret and a subset be completely removed)
We had some new AMDAHL V-8 computers and they used the Houston Advanced Scheduling Program (HASP). This was 10 times as fast as the IBM 370/75 with (ASP). The programmer I was assigned then changed the interface to Binary Coded Decimal (BCD) and the overall time to make a run after I added notations to the printout we had to work from for keypunch to allow for context on spelling and numeric errors for the key punch operators got the hundreds of runs for gross weight and engine speculative prototypes finished.
A design with 4 clipped fan JT-9 big fan commercials at 34,000 lb thrust was the optimum. Amusingly, my former boss at Douglas was on a call to coordinate after. A few years later he and my friend who had been YC-15 analytical manager and told me about a potential practice load of the XM-1 prototype into a wooden mock up both told me quite firmly, "We replaced that Pratt & Whitney engine." I did not argue. The C-17 "Globemaster III with 4 Pratt F-117' engines in wooden 1:100th scale sits over on my art cabinet over my right shoulder along with a wooden 1:100th scale C-9A "Nightingale". The C-17 did not get the quadruple slotted blown flaps of the YC-15, nor the CFM-56 engines to cool the flow a bit.
I ended up in Michigan after a short employment in big aerospace of 16 years. To keep on the effort after the Army warmed up in Granada in 1983 when I was in Washington, DC and heard about the invasion on the radio as a recording of a Radio Moscow program. I kept in touch with the Army Tank and Automotive Command in Warren as the media scathed the Bradley for it's aluminum armor and silly "swim skirt" on the Cavalry version.