Braniff Convair yes Piper Cub no

[2ndsegment]

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.

[rwanttaja]

2ndsegment, I love your stuff, but can you hit the "Enter" key occasionally and break it up into some paragraphs? That solid block of text is hard to read.

Heres' an example:

<Start 2ndsegment quote>

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 wit 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 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.

<end 2ndsegment quote>

Again, I *love* your stuff, but would just appreciate it if you made it a bit easier to read.

Ron Wanttaja

[champ driver]

Please, X2.

[2ndsegment]

My next item is witness to a first flight. My favorites are
1) The DC-10 hanging on the fence at Long Beach airport as Heimie Heimerdinger went through his checklist. Lots of employees there as he flew off to Edwards to complete the flight tests.
2) The YC-15 S/TOL fly-before-buy prototype. My enthusiasm had to coast down from the "Harrier" weekend making a white paper for Congress in 1969 to the cancelled elsewhere LTV XC-142 tiltwing and the Breguet 188 cross-shafted four turbo-prop that Mr. Mac was enthused by. The YC-15 had 4 PWA JT-8D's like the DC-9 and a Liebeck airfoil and blown quadruple slotted flaps. Dr. Liebeck questioned why the aero performance guys introduced him to me. The wingtips of the MD-11 and the Boeing 787 are credited to him. (no winglets, gracefully upswept.)
3) The Space Transportation System (STS) "Space Shuttle" I was there on Sunday with my sons in the little General Aviation airport with the weird rocks with port holes. We waited all night and woke up to follow the countdown. Two minutes before zero, the count was stopped. My kids had to go to school Monday and I watched it far North as a flame from the Otis Elevator Porch at Palm Gardens former RCA computer facility. The engineers had a great cartoon of a guy with a TRS-80 or Apple I wired to a display as the countdown reached zero. I had made a Getaway Special (G.A.S.) payload cannister project earnest payment based on a form I found in "Rolling Stone" magazine in a NASA exhibit at Pompano Beach mall.

[2ndsegment]

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.

[2ndsegment]

Not in historic sequence, it is important to note that my first airline flight in a jet was probably a TWA 720 from LAX to STL with two other Douglas employees. We were headed to Belleville, Illinois where MAC headquarters was. Nothing notable on that flight.

The real test was a flight on a Bonanza Airlines DC-9-10 from Los Angeles to McCarran outside Las Vegas. By this time I had done enough flight planning and the purpose was to further develop the market for the now impending introduction of the C-9A as the other options for 17 more. USAFE and PACAF Aeromedical were a direct follow-on. On this flight I was with a British exchange officer that Douglas had hired to enhance their bid on the USFRG V/STOL. This man had flown helicopters and knew the commander of the USAF Fighter Weapons School. Looking down through the mountains from way up compared to a flight on a propeller airliner I could see the airport and usually that would mean about 30 minutes to make a "jet Penetration" and set up in the approach pattern. Here the pilot must have been ex-carrier Navy as he just drove directly down and before I could realize there was only one segment we were on the ground and the thrust reversers were slowing the airplane.

This was before inflight spoilers for gust alleviation and speed brakes for descent. I had brought some DC-9 takeoff and landing performance hand plots from data in the DC-9 flight manual to show we could operate with fighters on the shorter airstrips with the leading edge and trailing edge secondary flight controls.

We were going to be allowed to brief the "Wild Weasel" F-100 and F-105 pilots and EWO's. Comparisons of the A-4 "Skyhawk" and F-105 "Thunderchief" attrition to ground fire and SAMs opened the door. Our next appointment was in Dayton with a civilian to be shown the latest intelligence on the threat. I was about to sit on the opposite side of the table from my father's radar work in WW-II. My laboratory experiments with a Klystron microwave tube in University Physics needed to gather in the electronic forms.

[rwanttaja]

We were going to be allowed to brief the "Wild Weasel" F-100 and F-105 pilots and EWO's. Comparisons of the A-4 "Skyhawk" and F-105 "Thunderchief" attrition to ground fire and SAMs opened the door.
What was the result of the comparison, and why did one type come out better than the other?

Ron Wanttaja

[2ndsegment]

I am going to take a longer walk. My first examination of survivability to ground fire was using San Bruno Navy Safety Center data on hits on the AD "Skyraider" (A1) to decide whether to reopen the production line. The data showed most of the hits to the forward and rear in a bath tub shaped curve like electronic reliability.

In 1967 from a rather robust fleet the A-4 and F-105 because of Route Package 6 losses to heavy optical and radar guided AAA and SAMs both were getting into the mid 100's. An emergency buy of A-4F's had not filled out the fleet and the A-7 was not yet ready. The F-105 was allowed to trickle out and be replaced by F-4's.

As far as better results for the cost in losses, the Paveway series of Laser Guided bomb superseded the Bullpup and Walleye rocket propelled, and glide weapons. The F-105 at first had only a single mount on a rotary door for a nuclear missile and it gained the Douglas developed triple ejector rack (TER with 3) and the multiple ejector rack (MER with 6) to mount on external pylons including under the wing. The days of flying on the deck and popping up to sight then dive on a target were gone for US to be revived in Desert Storm with the British. Pavetack and TRAM gave integrated laser designation with Forward Looking Infrared (FLIR) detection and track for LGB's on the F-105 and the A-6 respectively.

[2ndsegment]

I can get you a little further in your search for an answer to a day in the 1970's when I briefed the Navy Fighter Study Group in old T-10 near the Pentagon in Arlington. Admiral Whitey Feightner, a WW-II ace was in charge. Captain Tom Cassiday, who had been the F-14 "Tomcat" test pilot and more recently was President (as of 2009) of Unmanned Aircraft at Atomics International and a civilian "Big Bob" Thompson were the attendees. Douglas best offering was called High Performance Advanced Attack System (HIPAAS) and had a supercritical wing and a F-100 augmented turbofan all designed on the USAF F-X winning Computer Aided Design Evaluation (CADE).

Immediately after, the new name was Strike Fighter and the supersonic design was chief with twin engines. The McDonnell team had finished most design on the F-X and the team moved to a license and redesign of the Northrup P-530/F-17 which we now know as the F-18 and later the Super Hornet.

Just before this the proposals for an A-X had shown a turboprop with a bathtub armored titanium nose and high bypass widely separated turbofans. The Light Weight Fighter gave a single F-100 engine pitot inlet for under Mach =1.6 from General Dynamics/Convair the go ahead to skip preproduction prototypes. Really little stuff like the Folland Gnat and the Super Pinto were tested and rejected.

[2ndsegment]

2ndsegment, I love your stuff, but can you hit the "Enter" key occasionally and break it up into some paragraphs? That solid block of text is hard to read.


Again, I *love* your stuff, but would just appreciate it if you made it a bit easier to read.

Ron Wanttaja

I just opened my new copy of "Poberezny" by his daughter and I can see what you are looking for in the bold text in the early chapters. I once read "Earnest Hemmingway, Cub Reporter Kansas City Star" in a borrowed library book and met his punchy style. The other book I acquired after a complaint that I was an "advocate" and did not use "what if." That was "Common Sense" by Thomas Payne which has beautifully concise tables of the cost of every British warship of preRevolutionary days and why the Colonists should revolt because of the impact on taxes. Thanks for the effort to achieve a "more user friendly" thread.

[2ndsegment]

I know you guys think I have weird links and jumps but my follow on to this because of the Convair electical bus drop out was following news about Constant Speed Drives and thus https://www.company-histories.com/Sundstrand-Corporation-Company-History.html# If you read this you will eventually find "Harry Stonecipher" and "McDonnell-Douglas." OK I am reluctant to go to Northwest Flight 255 which is a forensic analysis presented by "Jack McDonnell", someone I met in the mid-1970's related to Engineering owning it's own Digital VAX. https://libraryonline.erau.edu/online-full-text/ntsb/aircraft-accident-reports/AAR88-05.pdf Here the link is to TI KLIXON circuit breaker.

[2ndsegment]

A caution that the DFDR on flight 255 was not a Sundstrand
The recorder aboard the Northwest jet, Flight 255, was made by Fairchild Weston Systems Inc. of Sarasota, Fla., one of three manufacturers of such instruments, a spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration said. according to the New York Times. I am still looking for the TV footage of the reproduction of that trajectory data that was created on a computer display and shown shortly after the event.

[2ndsegment]

Not everything is on the CVR or DFDR. I was showing my father an article in Air & Space Smithsonian about the old kind of FDR's that used a smoke covered glass disk and turned on the TV to see the news of PanAm Lockerbie. My father had been a teacher and the news of falling into a schoolyard especially affected him. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Am_Flight_103_bombing_investigation Robert Mueller is mentioned as leading the US part of the investigation.

[2ndsegment]

While it would nice to be a veteran, even a combat veteran and even an employee of Boeing for a long time after and now retired with two nice pensions, I am not those things so I need to bring up the Convair part of this thread a bit. My maternal grandparents lived in and my grandfather ran a general store and was a partner in a hardware store that sold gasoline and owned farms in upstate New York where the Van Fleet era Consolidated aircraft in my era had been.

I did make one flight on a TWWA Convair jet. One day returning from St. Louis to Los Angeles the aircraft scheduled to take me to LAX was not up. As I looked out the air terminal window I could see a "hangar queen" Convair 880 being dragged out of the hangar. Soon mechanics were swarming over changing all (!) the tires and working on the nacelles and then trying to get what looked like sheet metal that had been wadded into a ball and then straightened and curved to close around the GE commercial version of the J-79. Once again prudence demanded I change my ticket. I now had time to consider the drag of this bird that looked like it had flown through a hail storm and how that affected it's situation awareness and potential path. Flying into LAX the wind was off shore at evening and as we were on final coming in off the engine perhaps when the autopilot was disconnected it did a cross between a snap roll and a lateral jerk that I identified as a "whifferdill." This was the only time in my years of flying I experienced the certainty that it was unrecoverable as it dropped.

Some years after my Braniff Convair flight I worked in a building across from what had been the Vultee Aircraft Headquarters in Downey, California and was then occupied by North American's Space and Information division and was building the Apollo Space capsules. Remember that Jerry Vultee and his wife crashed in one of his products and unlike Benny Howard and his wife did not survive. I had crashed in the desert in the dark of night with two acquaintances who did not want to go home with their new motorcycles. They wanted to ride on the private property of Willow springs Raceway. (IR did not work out in the nose of the F-4B and C but the B-52 was rapidly moving to IR and away from ground mapping radar.)

Consolidated plus Vultee was a merged entity and it was in my era in San Diego and also in Fort Worth, Texas where the Aeroproducts propeller equipped P-51 "Mustangs" had been built that Paul Poberezny flew through WW-II and on into his EAA career. My next flight in a Convair was a Frontier Airlines 580 modified with Allison T-56 turboprops to an AIAA Fighter Aircraft Symposium in Albuquerque, New Mexico where the dinner speaker was Kelly Johnson. The next tie is kind of over the seat backs in a bar in Eglin AFB's nearby civilian airport as a former Convair engineer is regaling me with tales of how he designed the B-58 Flight Control System and I missed my flight on a F-27 turboprop to White Settlement where the F-51's had been made and caught the next only to miss my connection to LAX until the next morning.

Convair won the light weight fighter (LWF) prototype flyoff. Ed Heinnemann designed the F-16 prototype which went into production at Fort Worth. I became directly connected to it when I left Douglas Aircraft, merged with McDonnell since 1969, in 1978 to go to Michigan and then New York before being called to United Technologies, Government Products division, Pratt & Whitney Aircraft in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida where the F-100 augmented turbofan engine for the F-16 was supported.

I actually met the F-16 at Edwards AFB where it was undergoing some tests in 1980. In the middle of July ther it was out on the flight ramp outside the Engine Intermediate Maintenance facility where several former PWA engineers were being converted into Field Service Representatives by taking apart and reassembling an F-100 (2) which would later be a ground asset in Saudi Arabia to train mechanics. The engineer who became one of the reps at Convair Fort Worth and I became friends and took a flight one day in a Grumman trainer from Lancaster to Mojave to look in on Scaled Composites, which was closed and had a few large junk radials on it's front porch slab. (2800's?) Later I took this individual to the Rosamond Glider Port several times to get flight lessons. I think my last contact with Convair was the F-111F Flight Manual which the responsible engineers put on my desk with the recently published "Properties of Products of Combustion", which was done on the PWA computers and was like Keenan and Keynes "Properties of Saturated Steam" I had used as a student in undergraduate Engineering Thermodynamics.

There is one more piece, "Six Pack" tactics which the F-106 "Delta Dart" drivers had made up as their contribution to Dissimilar Aircraft Combat Tactics (DACT) in contradiction of the Combat Hassle library which had been moved from Joint Task force 2 at Eglin to Nellis. I spent several hours with F-106 drivers at Miramar and at Nellis but never really matched the programmed SAGE/BUIC analog computed intercept in it's weapon system computer with a coding on a TI-42 with it's "rock" memory. Bombers were easier than super cruisers and Stealth.

The GE F-110 was programmed into the F-16 while I was at Palm Beach.

Much of what constrained me to Convair was the TFX that became the F-111 that was supposed to show that microminiaturized electronics allowed joint use of one design by all services. I accepted a job as an Operations Analyst in 1965, a profession that had begun with Navy Anti-submarine warfare in WW-II. The later System Analyst profession was more hardware but still very "Whizz Kid" combining cost accounting with effectiveness measurement not just specifications and using things like flow diagrams to tie it all together.