Analytical, Imaginary and Real

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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."

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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?

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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.

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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.