Out of Envelope

As a boy I built the Convair Pogo and the Ryan Vertiplane. I held my breath as the fan-in-wing tossed it' tie down cable into the fan!!?? How about the VAK 191 and the Do-241... shucks, Experimental is really tough. My way in had been a bunch of guys in a bullpen in a otherwise empty building. The CX-HLS in Building 13 was a loss as a proposal that became the Lockheed C-5. Then I had a walk up from marketing, "There's a bunch of guys on the second floor of building 35 who are going back to England if you can't get funding by Sunday for one of their V/STOL designs." I rushed down to get briefed in on the KESTREL and the HARRIER. Hey! more low bypass fan engine stuff! Then I was back up to advance Design in building 36 and someone I hadn't met who had a stack of view graphs about 8 inches high. Peggy this could become Peggy that. ??? The SNEB rocket pods were very haunting. The guns were in removeable pods but not DEFA's or Oerlikons, ADENs. So the gift for out of X category was a 50 mile radius with guns only and Vertical up and down at both ends. The ski jumps proposed later did not go to the Falklands, but add a UK flag to your list of winners off a container ship. The old MAC colonel who had been kept away from the C-9A knew some committee members and the Maines wanted to GO!! The build even for the bigger wing went to St. Louis...

Huh??????

Now when even Virgin Galactic is unable to continue at 3855 Lakewood Avenue, it's hard to realize what was on that site where the C-17 emerged from building 54 where the tail tops were put on DC-10's. I shook Mr. Mac's hand before getting on the elevator with him in building 18A. The Harrier? My son was born and walked up to one at the Marine base air show in Orange County, a few years later, and some fool yelled, "Don't touch that! That's the queen's property!"