Analytical, Imaginary and Real

In the analytical world I have flown F-4 Phantoms, a FX that fit a proposal, and the various Adversaries in tactical situations up to and including launch and flyout of AIM-9, AIM-7 and a hypothetical AGILE with opposing adversary IR and Radar air-to-air missiles. This world was located at MACAIR, DAC and MDAC-WEST. The computer code had been supplied to AFSC in the winning FX prototype proposal. Some of the decks were Classified. When used by USAF and MACAIR most of the work was to support selection of an inboard gun. There were manned simulator spheres at MACAIR St. Louis where the same software and data decks were used as adversaries against actual pilots.

I began my effort to support the QUICKTURN project at MDAC-WEST where presentation to the Navy resulted in a request to obtain an advisor to avoid criticism which was standing in the way of use for evaluation at Navy facilities. I was asked to travel regularly between Long Beach DAC and McDonnell-Douglas-WEST to work with the consultant to settle things. I was also invited to attend an early Top-Gun class at the newly constituted Navy Fighter Weapons School, class 70-1 starting in December 1969. "Zeke" Cormier a former Blue Angels Commander and Navy "Ace" drove me down and introduced me to the commander of the school, who was an F-4 back seater Radar Intercept Officer. I had been taken off a project to develop a Navigator Trainer version of our successful C-9A Aeromedical Transport because the learning curves I developed from Undergraduate Navigator Training courses were different from a recently complete Navy Pilot training study done by a different contractor. The Air Force took all the navigator rated airmen out of their F-4's and other similarly staffed aircraft at that time and replaced them with a second pilot as their F-4's had pilot controls in both seats.

As the years progressed I began to get a lot of negative over hears from what I later determined to be related to the M-16 inventor's last name being the same as mine. He is now in the Hall of Fame at the Ordnance Museum in Aberdeen, Maryland. I dropped by there when I lived in Washington, DC for a time. I did not look in at the nearby FAA in Atlantic City.

Reading the most recent AOPA magazine, I saw I needed to disclose any enforcement actions that resulted in Felony or Misdemeanor convictions and the punishments imposed as well as any investigations related to any temporary hospitalizations or schools, such as for alcohol treatment to apply for pilot training with or without medical exemption.

Is my potential application out of the extreme for an EAA member to receive in person instruction to make the feel of the airplane real to correspond with my work with analytical flight.

I'll exclude experiences I have had with digitally simulated flight using video screens and physical pilot controls while standing or sitting in a chair.

My world once was on an IBM-360-85 and was submitted as a group of 80 card data decks about 3-1/2 per run and came back as late as three days later.

The last data I worked with was the analytic derivatives for the various axes of an aircraft. The earlier work only had limits on rate and angle. Bob Watzke of Aerodynamics at Douglas Aircraft Long Beach when it was part of McDonnell-Douglas in 1978 provided these as mathematical forms and I turned them into digital forms to use with the earlier data. They were only for a A-4 "Skyhawk". The purpose was to explore configurations of a new Navy Trainer in 1978.

At this time I was able to use the TSO system to build an Euler equation form of the dynamics and integration by Runge-Kutte which Terry Moore obtained from McDonnell where he knew people and had been an intern at Houston. Francois Reider had built the IBM-2250 display presentation of what had been hand ribbon plots in 1974. In 1978 he left to go back to Seattle where his wife was. This new version of core dynamics was not added to the display version before I myself left to go to Pratt-Whitney to give support to "an engine too expensive because it is pure titanium and nickel" according to the briefing shown to the team developing a High Performance Advanced Attack System (HIPAAS).

After a meeting in building T-10, in Arlington near Washington, DC with the Navy Fighter Study Group (NFSG) including Admiral Whitey Feightner and Captain Tom Cassidy that led to the F-18 which obtained a pair of GE-F404's I was headed for the winner of the Air force Light Weight Fighter prototype, the General Dynamics F-16.

Now on my model shelf the F-18A is with an AV-8B and others in 1/72 and the T-45 "Goshawk" is over on my art cabinet top with the F-15A, the C-17, the C-9A and the F-16A all in 1/100th. The transports are so big they are wooden. Each area has at least one adversary model. In 1/72nd it is two items, a MIG-25 "Foxbat" and a TEL of a SAM-6 with 3 missiles. In 1/100th it is a MIG-29 as if East German but in Soviet markings. There are still an AV-8A and EF-18G boxed models in 1/72 I don't have the correct paints for.

What was really in my way getting to the flight line in 1965 and continues to censor even today? I had an English teacher in Freshman year who was not Honors English. I opted out of Honors as maybe for big city students. He was enamored with "stream of consciousness" writing. He encouraged us to read James Joyce "Ulysses." I also had a roommate my Senior year at the Boy Scout master's cottage at Whitmore Lake. He had vinyl LP's of Joan Baez. I especially remember "Copper Kettle" about a moonshiner. This was before the anti-War protests mostly of 1968 but when the government investigators at single out those two as "anti-American." What if the FAA flight examiner found this out? Better to have it a chat element outside the main EAA member space. Watch out guys I knew someone in the trailer park near Knoxville, Tennessee who had a hawk on his shoulder and was best friends with a lady in a double-wide whose husband had had a '40 Ford with a moon tank.

The first official data I held in my hands in 1965 was printouts on fan fold 124 character wide computer print outs. It was the trajectories of the proposed Apollo capsule for various orbits to make the lunar transfer ellipse align at a time with the moon's orbit at parametric values of the moon's declination as seen from earth. This was not science fiction. Nor was it full of mathematical imaginary values as was once the way airfoils were developed in the 1930's by transformations of a circle. The connection to NASA was made by Arvil Gentry of Douglas Aerodynamic Research. He developed sailboat sail profiles in his outside life. I had an almost whole former production line building with abandoned drafting boards end to end long enough for a full size cargo aircraft wing or fuselage. I needed, to avoid interpretation. I needed an area at least 21,600 n-mi divided by pi = 6875 n-mi as earth's diameter to be my paper size until I needed one 239,000 miles in size for the lunar transfer ellipse to the moon. Maybe I would just accept that is what was in the computer memory I held in the print out. It was later with simulation as a topic that Apollo was highlighting and was leaking over from Missiles & Space, the manager of Human Factors said to me, "do not feature only the face valid."

The heat of summer had passed. The contract for the Apollo Range/Instrumented Aircraft was ours. Now the task was to configure a Military version of the new DC-9 airliner and sell it to the USAF. Management was preoccupied with the DC-8 modification that could be an Airborne Warning and Control Aircraft. Our team was congratulated by the Vice President of Military marketing and then asked who wanted to move to Tulsa, Oklahoma to continue with the program. I elected to stay in Long Beach where I had actually been offered a job in Operations Analysis working for the Chief of Methodology. I soon learned this meant bean counter and midnight and weekend shuffler of figures for the Vice President of Plans & Analysis who was sure he could win on price. It wasn't all just data sheets, there was also the Pilot Operating Manuals for the DC-9-10 and DC-9-30 from Dale Siegele who was in charge of the group of Aerodynamicists who were gathering the wind tunnel data and preparing the flight test collection points. It was now very early 1966. John Correz of Military Marketing had come from Engineering and his wife was trying to keep him home. He now said the future 737-100, which had not yet flown in Seattle had better take off and landing field lengths than the DC-9-10. This DC-9 had only double-slotted trailing edge flaps and no leading edge devices. The 737 had the full complement of what are now called secondary controls from the 727. It had triple-slotted trailing edge flaps and Krueger leading edge flaps inboard with slats outboard. To match that minus the Kruegers with a DC-9 configuration one would have to wait another year for production. When did I fly on an airliner that had the Boeing wind configuration? Sometime later on a TWA 707-320C that had come from Paris and was headed to St. Louis I sat in a seat. This is where you get my handle of "2ndsegment". It actually applied to a DC-7C "Seven Seas" that my office mate was waxing poetic about with bigger engines and what would later be called a "stretch." It's all in rhythm today maybe in the Long-EZ version of the Vari-EZ by Rutan. Can I meet those at Osh-Kosh I had hoped until I fell June 16 this year and am just out of re-hab for my left hand?

One Sunday in 1980 Jim Beaver wanted to charter a Grumman Trainer in Lancaster and fly to Mojave to look in on Bert Rutan. We ate the $100.00 hamburger and then sauntered over to the porch of Scaled composites. A very modest hangar confronted us with a collection of what looked like junked twin row radials. Pratt & Whitney 2800's were scattered among Curtiss-Wright 3350's. It looked to me like when one drag racer had a 55 gallon drum of nitromethane delivered to his next Sunday's rival.

Now that Bert Rutan has shown you don't need a B-52 to fly around the world non-stop and has ventured to the edge of space, lately in a stretch of his original design I wonder at my timid looks at DAR's and the BD-5J and the more recent supersonic Kit as the Fox Jet with Williams engines was blocked by the government.

My mocking ways have more to do with Jack Welch and his stretch goals than any specific design or record attempt. I downloaded a 737 digital model on Grab-CAD and modified it to include a stretch and SNECMA-GE engines. Then came the grounding.

I had hoped that my long experience of flying simulators from a chair or standing up might lead to a real flight with me in the pilot-in-command trainee status like the Cessna 152 in Sedona in MS-FS 2020. Now after over 1000 hours of hands on the latest mod fails to load and my flight records are not accessible. I cancelled my 2022 AOPA membership and received a refund. I guess I'm not even going to try to go to a Chapter meeting to set up something in San Marcos, Texas.

The major obstacle to my saying "I know how to fly" is the flat panel displays "roll the wrong way" in the real sense rolling the on screen display instead of the seat while adding seat forces to simulate g's. In the McDonnell spheres in their simulation laboratory there was a g-cushion. In the hardware-in-the-loop simulation I viewed at a company near the Navy Training Device Center in Orlando, Florida, the technician "flew" the mission while the Electronic Warfare Officer inter acted with actual components from a wrecked A-3 which had digital drivers for indication and accepted switch, knob and dial settings from rheostats and switches. The out the window pilot display used a dished foam reflective panel and an upside down SONY 13 inch Television. I kept my mouth shut as I looked at the movement opposite to my motorcycle trained body and mind. All the way home I kept my peace and did not mention it to the other engineers in the car. No one else commented. More recently my sons have used game controllers to fly toy drones and also to use the same controller to fly in an APP on their computer that simulates the exact drone.

Yesterday my grandson was showing me his new Air Force One book and when we got to the cockpit, he expressed some anxiety and I pointed to the partial wheels and further on the rudder pedals as well as explaining the wheels were on yokes that pull back as far as the seat cutouts. When he had his first bicycle, he learned to ride without the training wheels so he could ride on grass and dirt ?? but insisted I put them back on as the bike was "too tippy." Eventually his mother bought him a scooter with treadles and he rode that on the sidewalks by his house why swooping around on a RAZOR that was like a Big Wheel with casters instead of rear wheels. I has been some years now and he got out all his spacecraft die casts my sister and I bought a Stennis Engine Center in Mississippi as we drove from Florida to Texas and back for several years. He really wants a Dreamchaser for passengers like the original prototypes.

My own take away is the wheels in the cockpit are cutaway to match the 45 degree bank angle limit of civil aircraft and only in an emergency would approach the 60 roll angle of a 2 G load limit. The 120 roll angle limit of a helicopter Cobra gun ship that surprised me when I found it is far and away from civil practice. So not only must I note the airspeed under 10,000 feet and not update to 18,000 feet and a different value as I jump from various versions of simulators I have used since 1990 when I got my first Windows versions of computer. The instructor will find this a burden.

There are times that I almost miss Bill.

Ron " " Wanttaja

LOL - The forum's "Ignore List" is a wondrous thing. So I have NO idea what this thread contains, and in this case, ignorance IS bliss. LOL.

Here is something most folks here would want to ignore. When I worked for Pratt & Whitney in 1978-1981 it was before a Full Authority Digital Engine Control (FADEC )was a common form of engine control. I might use terms like Unified Fuel control (UFC) or EEC (Engine Electronic Control) which are more Bendix and Hamilton-Standard than even USAF, Navy or USMC terms. Horrors! CENC or Central Engine Nozzle Control is another.

More common terms like Main Fuel Pump (MFP) or (AFP) Auxiliary Fuel Pump do not refer to pilot accessible accessories but might interface with an Airframe & Powerplant mechanic of the right era. Nice things mounted on piston aircraft engines like gryos and generators are familiar to me only through inertial guidance like the LTN-51 that was used for polar navigation in both military and commercial aircraft. The (AMAD) or Airframe Mounted Accessory Drive on the McDonnell F-15 "Eagle" held an AC Alternator but the engine had it's own DC generator on it's gearbox along with an N2 hydromechanical sensor.

Writing about hydromechanical brings up a different way of working with big aerodynamic surfaces, jack screws. Multi-slotted flaps and all moving stabilizers used these. The two person DC-9 cockpit crew is more common now than the early 737 three person crew with a Flight engineer. For those who are bearing with me. I truly appreciate your patience.

Where I am no longer present is automotive technology. I parked the yellow MPG Pinto my sister gave me when she couldn't get good money on a trade in 1987. My driver's license expired two years later in 1989. "Some places you can only get to by walking." I could walk to Big Beaver Airport while the widow still owned it and provided training with Cessna 152's and Robinson helicopters. I wanted to go to Sarajevo mostly on a "mortar detection radar" concept but that was way too far. I could also walk to Troy Executive Airport looking for where and when the North Koreans would arrive in 1990. The fence was down was the news to change my mythical participation at the Panmunjom table where the other side could placed loaded revolvers at their place.

Marines infantry kept my ideas humble. Not until 1992 did I join Powerhouse Gym and gradually build an ability to run again from 15 second sprints recommended in an Olympic Weightlifting text as I was working with the IWF in Budapest and learning to write in appropriate script alphabet. Women finally lifted at the Olympics in Sydney in 2000 after missing in 1996 in Atlanta. State wide I met women from Ohio and Michigan in 1995 and 1996 and helped them to get weighed in.

I just finished reading my Aviation Week & Space Technology, specifically the "Fixed Focus" article by Graham Warwick, their Washington reporter. It says the Alia is only being tested by pilots. It only expects to be in vertical flight mode for 40 second total and will never hover. In the gray panel at the bottom of page 152, it says, "The pilot has an F-16-style force sensing sidestick and a lift lever that resembles a helicopter's collective control. Light fore/aft stick force provides pitch control, left/right force for roll and twist for yaw. The fixed pedals provide only differential braking for steering on the ground. "

My youngest son had a Microsoft stick with haptic forces. I had to show him it needed to be "adjusted" to calibrate after he could only fly a helicopter by skidding it off the top of a tall building and then struggling to remain in the air. My stick now is a Freedom 2.4 cordless by Logitech. Fore/aft for pitch and lean left/lean right for roll with yaw by twisting. It has a throttle as flipping a small lever at the left base forward is + and aft is -. Brakes are on the trigger.

It seems to me if I got a U2 and a Harrier which have bicycle landing gear I could deal with my grandsons need for outriggers. Jump into the air to fit this new Beta Technologies design and use my glider experience from FSX to continue, using my own GECAS previews from my 1969-1978 computer work. !!! Then I look on page 49 at a text tape on the bottom. "Beta has resumed hover testing after completing extensive fixed wing flights with the Alia engineering prototype."??? I knew Stanley Hubbard ex RAF Wing Commander who was hired by Douglas to test their Joint US FRG/ V/STOL until Republic won that and then it was cancelled. He was a member of the American Helicopter Society and had been a shared officer at the Air Force Fighter Weapons School and took me to meet the "wild Weasels" there in 1967.

Jumping ahead another foreign exchange pilot that came from Indonesia where his family owned Bauxite mines. Jan Schallig brought slides of the Northrup P-530 "Cobra." Now sliding back I was told to work with Frank Posch (retired rank unknown to me) a former Navy VX-5 test pilot when I had a weekend to prepare a pitch to Congress on the Hawker-Siddely AV-8 "Harrier" which was just entering test or was the "Kestrel" well tested sufficient? This had been after I was disgraced for using the word "onset" to discuss learning curves based on procedure trainers at Mather AFB. That was in 1968 and Jan Schallig appeared before I went to "Top Gun" in very late 1969 with former Blue Angels commander Captain "Zeke" Cormier (USN-ret'd).

Do I know how to fly? The plot thickens. Who totally ignored me? DDR&E, DARPA, ARPA and the US Coast Guard, why? They believed in guns. Who thought I was flying upside down? the AIAA; But flying in a F-15 from Than Son Nhuit on my side in the dark in min-augmenter all the way to Hanoi? Maybe, before my post about stability derivatives almost anyone.

I watched Charles Howell III on the EAA podcasts and actually used my EAA member ID. He is 2 years younger than I and got to do some truly great stuff on instrument landing never using terms like CAT I, II or III but moving to Autoland. The right way to succeed with the openings in electronics. Well worth my membership.

When I first opened my mind to where I was in 1965, I had been an office mate of Don Brimley who was a friend of Don Douglas Jr. He spent most of his days working out reliability predictions for rockets and puzzling about life predictions for reciprocating engine, propeller equipped large transports and helicopters. The media was all into Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense and how he could now quickly make new systems very cheaply with developments in microminiaturization in Avionics and turbofan engines. The examples most focused on were the F-111 and the A-7. The A-7 had been known as the VAL the year before I arrived at Douglas. By the time I arrived, the joint view was becoming frayed as the Air Force version was overweight for intended runways and the Navy version of the F-111 was overweight even with a new engine that was going into what would be called the FX. How could this happen? Mostly, because of a desire for much longer range radars with bigger antennas the nose of the aircraft had to grow. Even today, folks remind me of steps along the path to complete the McNamara era hope.

You should not be surprised then that one of the things I sought out in EAA when I came was how flat panels in the cockpits and GPS navigation would combine with RoTax engines to free up the line between VFR and IFR in general aviation. Carbon fiber fuselage and wings? Supersonic using hexcel sandwiches? It's over 20 years since I stopped buying Kitplanes on news stands on travel with my parents. They both are gone. I needed to do whatever I was going to do in July of this year at Osh Kosh. Now Windows 11 is in the way of even flying common simulation.