Kelly Read online

  Professor O. W. Boston was a pioneer in the field of machining metals, and the author of a book on the subject. He also worked with the automobile industry on methods of cutting such materials as high-strength steel and other metals to improve machinability and thereby improve efficiency in automobile production.

  He was, I believe, the first to imbed thermocouples in a tool on a lathe or milling machine to measure tool temperatures. He also worked on the design of tools to remove metal rapidly. Much later I was to apply his methods in the approach to machining new metals, specifically, titanium and stainless steel.

  The two Timoshenko brothers, Russians, were professors of structure. The study of vibration and structure was very important, basic for me, in learning how to make aircraft wings and tails that wouldn’t flutter. That was a bugabear of a problem in those early days.

  There was Professor Milton Thompson in aeronautics, Professor Walter E. Lay for engines, others whose names escape me now, each an expert. This was heady stuff for the kid from Ishpeming who wanted to be like Tom Swift. It was an exciting adventure, associating with some of the best minds in every field important to a would-be engineer.

  Respectful though I was of the great experience and knowledge of my professors, I yet was not so deferential that I would not argue back if I disagreed. And I did.

  With Professor Pawlowski, who had given me a B grade on my computation of wind-tunnel tests on a little biplane—I didn’t like to get less than an A— I argued that my numbers were correct. I proved it, and he changed the grade to A. He kept an open mind himself, as he advised.

  When Professor Stalker published a new text, I had the temerity to write out all the answers to all the problems and proposed to publish them. I was persuaded not to do this since it would undermine the book and considerably diminish sales.

  These men were not only my mentors but my friends and companions, and not because their losses at poker gave me another small added income.

  But most of the time I was working or studying, correcting papers or tutoring. I completed three years’ university work in two. There was little time to play. I knew I had to work hard to become a good engineer, and I enjoyed it.

  There were lighter moments. Like the time Don and I were cleaning the wind tunnel and became so high on gasoline fumes and so noisy that we disrupted nearby classes.

  And lonely times. Trudging back across campus after dinner—which cost perhaps as little as fifty cents or as much as $1.25—for more wind tunnel work or correcting papers for the professors.

  Those were the days of Prohibition and home brew. I was very much against drinking then, believing the stories of my hard-drinking Swedish ancestry, but my colleagues in the boardinghouse imbibed the stuff they brewed—fermenting fruit juice in a can. Returning from campus on a winter evening, I found one fellow sitting outside in the snow wearing only his shorts, and mumbling to himself. Another convincing argument against drinking.

  I had my first ulcer in high school, but in college I had one all the time. I’ve always been a worry wart. I discovered that if I kept something in my stomach all the time I felt fine. I did that with repeated ingestion of two doughnuts and a glass of milk—at a cost of twenty cents. One semester I computed that I had consumed 647 doughnuts—at five cents each.

  In all my time at the university, I went out on dates just twice. Once to a good movie—I don’t remember what it was. And to a class dance. Dancing came easily to me, fortunately. When would I have had time to practice? I had learned in high school. But I didn’t have time for romance either, and I deliberately avoided any entanglement. There would be no detours from my goal.

  The year 1932, when I was graduated with a bachelor’s degree in aeronautical engineering, was not a propitious year for job hunting. My friend Don and I investigated opportunities on the East Coast—Sikorsky, Martin, Curtiss—with no encouragement. We decided to join the Army Air Corps and become aviation cadets. We would learn to fly and test airplanes and learn all about them. I had passed every other entrance requirement and then took the eye examination. My left eye, the one nearly lost to the arrow in a childhood game of cowboys and Indians, was not up to the standard required by the Air Corps although it never had given me any trouble. Once again, an accident changed the course of my career. If I’d been accepted as an aviation cadet, I would have taken that route and stayed with it.

  Don and I then borrowed Professor Walter Burke’s Chevrolet and set off to tour the aircraft plants in the West looking for work as engineers.

  We were short of money, of course. Our earnings in the tunnel and elsewhere had gone toward school expenses. To get better mileage from the professor’s car and save money on fuel, we drilled a one-eighth-inch diameter hole in the manifold inlet and inserted a valve, so while driving we could open it and lean out the fuel in flight, so to speak. We did get three or four more miles to the gallon.

  To hold down expenses, we’d buy milk, bread, and sandwich meat to make our lunches. We camped out in schoolyards, by the side of streams, in fields, wherever we could, and nearly ended our careers early when we picked a site in the dark one night and were awakened by a passing railroad train uncomfortably close. We decamped hurriedly.

  That was the most excitement we encountered until we got to Lockheed in Burbank in the San Fernando Valley of California. The company had been purchased from receivers by a small group of aviation enthusiasts just that June for $40,000.

  The company was in the process of being reorganized. Lockheed already was a big name as designer and builder of fast plywood aircraft flown by many of the famous names in early aviation. There were no jobs for engineers yet, but Richard von Hake, chief engineer at Lockheed when it was part of Detroit Aircraft and who was to become production manager of the new company, suggested:

  “Look, something is going to come of this. Why don’t you go back to school and come out again next year. I think we’ll have something for you.”

  Well, there were no other job opportunities that year; we’d tried all the principal companies.

  So, we returned to the University of Michigan for a year of graduate study. To afford this extra year to get my master’s, I applied for and was awarded the Sheehan Fellowship; the $500 paid my expenses. I majored in supercharging of engines, to get high power at high altitude, and boundary layer control, how to control airflow around fuselage, wings, and tail. It later proved a fortunate choice. Of course, aerodynamics is basically boundary layer control. And I always loved engines and aerodynamics. It was a natural choice, as well.

  In our graduate year, Don and I did much more wind-tunnel testing on our own as well as for the university.

  The local newspaper reported, “Five of the qualifying cars which will race at Indianapolis Memorial Day have bodies designed by two University graduate students, C. L. Johnson and E. D. Palmer. All of the cars are semi-stock Studebakers and all qualified for the race at speeds ranging between 110 and 116 miles an hour.…”

  We managed to improve the miles per gallon on these cars from seven to 11.6 at 113 miles an hour. That was important, because in those days fuel-tank capacity was limited.

  A few proposals we explored, such as streamlining wheels, the drivers refused to accept. I was given a demonstration of the argument against that one day when we were at the track for tests.

  It was very exciting circling the track at speeds of 130 to 140 miles an hour; but if you had solid-disc streamlined wheels, the wind across the track would just pick up the car and set it down again about four feet off course.

  Another idea I tried to sell was dive brakes on the side of the car, because the streamlined cars would reach such high speeds on the straightaway that they would lose all their advantage by having to brake at the turn. This was a difficult effect, too, because if one brake opened a bit earlier than the other, the car would just swap ends. They still don’t use dive brakes today to my knowledge; but many other ideas from aerodynamics have been incorporated in the design of ra
cing autos.

  The experience was a liberal education for me in the practical application of aerodynamic theory.

  Among the airplane models tested by the university was a new design from the recently-reorganized Lockheed company. The chairman of the board, Robert Ellsworth Gross, 35, had decided that the company’s future was not in the single-engine wooden aircraft that had been so successful in the past, but in the newer all-metal designs with twin engines and the capability of carrying more passengers.

  The new model was the Electra. It developed some very serious problems, I thought, from what I then knew of aerodynamics. It had very bad longitudinal stability and directional-control problems. But most aircraft of that day had similar failings. Professor Stalker, in consultation with Lloyd Stearman, already a recognized top-notch designer at age 33 and first president of the company, decided the figures were acceptable.

  When I left college with my master of science degree in 1933, I owed only $500 and had enough money to buy a used Chevrolet sedan to try again for a job in California. Don went with me, and once again we modified our car to stretch gasoline. Thanks to our work in the wind tunnel and the Sheehan scholarship that last year, I was relatively wealthy. We didn’t try to continue our consultancy work with the wind tunnel because it now was so lucrative that it was attracting the professors’ attention. Besides, at the university we certainly weren’t going to design aircraft—and that was my goal. But I didn’t make that much money again until 10 years later.

  When we got to California in 1933, I was hired at Lockheed by Cyril Chappellet, one of the original investors and now secretary of the company, assistant to the president, and personnel officer, and by Hall L. Hibbard, chief engineer. Both were young men themselves. I think an important reason for my being hired was that I had run the wind-tunnel tests on the company’s new plane. I was to receive $83 a month to start in tool design until they could assign me as an engineer. There were five engineers at the time, counting Hibbard. Don Palmer was hired at Vultee Airplane Company in Glendale.

  Practically the first thing I told Chappellet and Hibbard was that their plane was unstable and that I did not agree with the university’s wind-tunnel report.

  4

  A Growing Airplane Company

  WHEN I ANNOUNCED AT LOCKHEED that the new airplane, the first designed by the reorganized company and the one on which its hopes for the future were based, was not a good design, actually was unstable, Chappellet and Hibbard were somewhat shaken. It’s not the conventional way for a young engineer to begin employment. It was, in fact, very presumptuous of me to criticize my professors and experienced designers.

  Hibbard didn’t comment on that first day, but he thought about what I had said.

  He grilled me thoroughly on my background. Could I draw? How much math had I had? Well, I’d had quantum theory and had tutored in calculus. I had good grades, recommendations from my professors, and the wind-tunnel experience.

  Hibbard himself was a fine engineer, with a degree in aeronautics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an outstanding institution. And he wanted to get some “new young blood … fresh out of school with newer ideas” in the engineering department, as he explained many years later in an interview.

  “He looked so young,” he said. “I was almost afraid that he couldn’t read or write!… We got some fresh ideas, believe me! When he told me that the new airplane we had just sent in (to the university wind tunnel) was no good, and it was unstable in all directions, I was a little bit taken aback. And I wasn’t so sure that we ought to hire the guy. But then I thought better of it. After all, he came from a good school and seemed to be intelligent. So, I thought, let’s take a chance.…”

  As a start, I was assigned to work with Bill Mylan in the tooling department, designing tools for assembly of the Electra, until there was more space in the engineering department and a job for me there. Mylan was an old hand and knew his business.

  “I’ll build them, kid, and you can draw them later,” he explained to me.

  I learned some useful lessons. For one, I learned to read the fine print. One of my first jobs for Mylan was to design a heat-treat furnace for the new dural aluminum materials that would be used in production. I didn’t know much about such furnaces, so I went downtown where there were several in operation and studied them, then went back and drew up what I thought we would need. A few days later, I went out in the shop to see how it was coming. The workmen were standing up to their ankles in brick chips. They had a big, powerful band-saw and were trimming bricks.

  “What are you doing? Just lay the bricks in there. Why are you cutting them?” I wanted to know.

  “Mr. Johnson, we’re just following your orders.”

  In the corner of the shop order was a line in small print, “Unless otherwise specified, all tolerances are to be met within 1/32 of an inch.” So they were sawing the bricks because I had listed 2½ by four by nine inch brick.

  I discovered that there was a lot to learn about tooling. My first design for a jig—that’s a pattern or framework in which the airplane and its parts are built—allowed room to work on one side only—unless the workmen crawled under it and worked over their heads!

  After a few months, Hibbard called me into his office.

  “Kelly, you’ve criticized this wind-tunnel report on the Electra signed by two very knowledgeable people. Why don’t you go back and see if you can do any better with the airplane?”

  Hibbard sent me back to the University of Michigan wind tunnel with the Electra model in the back of my car. It took 72 tunnel runs before I found the answer to the problem.

  It was a process of evolution. On the seventy-second test, I came up with the idea of putting centrollable plates on the horizontal tail to increase its effectiveness and get more directional stability. That worked very well, particularly when we removed the wing fillets, or fairings onto the fuselage—put on apparently because they were coming into style and being used successfully on such airplanes as the Douglas DC-1. And we avoided the trouble others had with them when not used properly.

  We then added a double vertical tail because the single rudder did not provide enough control if one engine went out. That was so effective we removed the main center tail. And there you had the final design of the Electra. The distinctive twin tails on all of the early Lockheed metal airplanes, and the triple tail of the familiar Constellation airliner of the mid-’40s and ’50s, were the result of these tunnel tests.

  I have saved a letter Hibbard sent me while I was still working at the university wind tunnel. He had airmailed some cowls for a more powerful engine, with 550 horsepower, that Pan American Airlines wanted in the airplane. The airline was “very, very much interested,” he wrote. “… in fact, want them so badly that they are actually going to pay for these last tests which you are running up there now.”

  “Dear Johnson,” the letter began. “You will have to excuse the typing as I am writing here at the factory tonite and this typewriter certainly is not much good.

  “You may be sure that there was a big celebration around these parts when we got your wires telling about the new find and how simple the solution really was. It is apparently a rather important discovery and I think it is a fine thing that you should be the one to find out the secret.… Needless to say, the addition of these parts to the horizontal surfaces is a very easy matter; and I think that we shall wait until you get back perhaps before we do much along that line.” Some specifics followed on the cowl tests for Pan Am. Then,

  “Well, I guess I’ll quit now. You will be quite surprised at the Electra when you get here, I think. It is coming along quite well. Sincerely, Hibbard.”

  It was typically generous of him to stay at night and type a letter himself in appreciation of the work of a new, young engineer. It meant a great deal to me.

  When I returned to the plant, I was a full-fledged member of the engineering department. I was number six. There were James “Jimmy” Gersc
hler, George Prudden, Carl Beed, and Truman A. “Tap” Parker. The quarters weren’t much, the roof leaked, but I was an honest-to-God aircraft engineer. I worked not only on the aerodynamics of the airplane, but on stress analysis, weight and balance, anything and everything they threw at me. And, of course, more wind-tunnel testing. From that, I became the logical choice to be flight test engineer on the airplane when it was ready to fly.

  And because I had the latest advanced mathematical training, I was given the job of analyzing the retractable landing gear for Jimmy Doolittle’s Lockheed Orion 9-D, a modification of the basic Orion. That was my first contact with any of the famous early aviators who would frequent the Lockheed plant. Others included Amelia Earhart, Wiley Post, Sir Charles Kingsford-Smith, and Roscoe Turner. Doolittle, of course, was an early record-setting pilot, both military and civilian, with a master’s degree and doctorate in science from M.I.T. Then he was flying for Shell Oil Company, landing in out-of-the-way fields, cow pastures, and other unprepared strips.

  Retractable gear was standard for the Orion; it was the first successful application to commercial aircraft. It streamlined the plane considerably and allowed a top speed of 227 miles an hour. It was the fastest plane in service in its day and flew for Varney Speed Lanes between Los Angeles and San Francisco on a schedule of 65 minutes.

  For the kind of service Doolittle required of the plane, however, the gear needed to be strengthened. This job was tough. It required the best math I knew. To be sure the gear wouldn’t come off, I doubled all the tube gauges. It cost us about 15 pounds in extra weight, but the gear worked reliably.

  Every six months, Doolittle would bring the plane back to the factory to have everything tightened up. He was a hell of a good flyer and always the finest type of person. He and I are friends to this day.