Where I coming from in GA development.

I've learned from the great of airplanes I have no creative focus in style. I sort of just meandered in. Start with the Vespa Gran Sport 160 that another resident in Huber House at the University of Michigan in 1961-62 rode and hop on my room mate's Lambretta 125. What? Look later in the mirror finish of a LEAR 4 track tape recorder and what appears? Piaggio I found out later is the Italian parent of several brands, including Vespa and Lambretta scooters. What then surfaces after I graduate and look over the glass-topped partition into Avanced Design at Long Beach in 1965? A little wooden model of an executive jet has clay on the windshield area.

Someone walks up behind me and asks, " Can you get the FAA to impose the same bird strike requirement for this Piaggio-Douglas 808 as for Commercial airliners, and even for the Learjet?" I mumble a bit. One of my later roomates joins Douglas in Engineering Laboratories and shoots anethesized chickens in ice cream containers from an air cannon at DC-10 windshields. The PD-808 has become the PD-888??

The project I was hired for, the military DC-9, has become a USAF Aeromedical Transport with options for other missions. My dive into routes and data has become too deep when applied to training of bombardiers and navigators, trying to set the parameters of simulators of FB-111's and B-58's. I am out on my ear!!

Wait, a mere whisper, I can calculate maintenance pipeline fraction for the stripped down TA-4J that is going to block the development of the TA-7. My visits to the CAB to pickup the form 41's to see how the utilization of the first commercial DC-9-10's has gotten me to AFR-710 for the C-XX and AFM 374-5 full system engineering later is out and years later I am sitting as a source for the AGILE air-to-air missile after the AIM-82 is first cancelled. The Air Force Systems Command General Kent is looking at me.

What is my answer? The Director of Advance Design says ,"We rewung it!" telling me about my beginning that the stretched DC-9 is going beyond just longer and with uprated thrust. Dont' doze off yet! Jack Welch will set off a whole flurry stretches with the CFM-56 and French partners. Me, I drifted off to reengine the B-52 and chose the PWA F-117 for the F-17 STOL. So as I approach EAA AIR-Venture my mind thinks that a Burt Rutan EZ has a stretched version. No, not the VARI-EZ? No? Time to ween me from the Grumman A6E and the common J-52-P408 of the Skyhawk and the Intruder and look more closely at Scaled Composites now in the Grumman fold.