On The Other Hand

Not the song, the aircraft design. I began my career in aircraft with an older senior engineer in a two-man office. He survives in the names I use now online (therunwaybehind, 2ndsegment) that are iconic for "stretch" aircraft. This is because according to him the 707 could not be stretched like the DC-8. Thus, I offer today my meeting with the peek that was into Boeing as it appeared as a flight I needed to take. There outside the terminal at Dayton, Ohio just arrived was a TWA 707-320C. We were going to take this to Los Angeles. The cabin was no bigger, but the wing held all the latest secondary flight controls as used on the 727-200. It had Kruger flaps, leading edge slats, triple slotted trailing edge flaps, but did not yet have roll control by spoilers as well as ailerons. The purpose was to access airfields back from the coast and other takeoff limited situations with climate and weather. My more detailed access to this airliner had been ordering KC-135A and KC-135B USAF DASH -1's for the A and B models and maintaining the supplemental pages and later obtaining the newer versions as pages based on flight test replaced calculated performance as depicted on graphs in the appendix. The KC-135A had straight jet engines and the KC-135B had turbofans and at first was only for the 89 AMAW which had a Special Air Mission (SAM) in Washington, DC. My thread took me to the eventual landing on the moon in 1969 after I had met the modification of the KC-135 that Douglas made in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The nose at the time was offered as a potential structural concept for the coming wide-bodies, the 747, DC-10 and L-1011 after first being used on the C-5A and more informally on the AeroSpacelines "Pregnant Guppy" and "Super Pregnant Guppy." At some point one of the noses of the Guppies caved in inflight and had to be strengthened. Their original mission was transporting The Apollo Saturn S-IVB stages from California to Florida including Skylab, later. so now you know why most folks at EAA are not interested in my posts. Yes, the first offer to take me up was my doctor in his Piper "Cub" but my father said no at the newly paved airport in Bad Axe, Michigan in the late 50's but I didn't really embrace full size aircraft until June, 1965 and even then, I had to drop an offer to work for Rocketdyne. What more recently gave a life to my communications with other engineers was the helicopter that flew on Mars. Two of the engineers I talked with at lunch at Douglas founded a company to produce a piloted version of the Bendix DASH patent counter-rotating rotor helicopter they called Lift Systems Incorporated. You can find it in Jane's all the World's aircraft back in the late 60's. Thanks, for your curiosity.