Kelly (9 page)

When the tail was found and brought to the accident investigation center, the rudder was missing completely. Just the control to the rudder tab was hanging there, with nothing behind the hingeline.

The regulatory agencies immediately imposed requirements for lead balances on both vertical tails above and below the horizontal stabilizer as well as some other specific changes.

But I wondered if we weren’t overlooking something. I had seen the tab control, the ball bearing that is supposed to keep the tab in proper position as the rudder turns left or right. The bearing had been broken and there were no balls in it. The whole center race—the track the ball bearings ride in—was gone. And so was the tab—the movable trailing edge of the tail rudder.

Back at the plant, I convinced Hibbard and others that we should run a tunnel test on a full-scale vertical tail and find out what conditions would cause flutter. We built our own wind tunnel in 1939, the first sophisticated one in private industry. But at that time we were able to use the Guggenheim wind tunnel at Cal Tech under the distinguished Dr. Theodore von Kármán and Dr. Clark B. Millikan. The test section was a cylinder ten feet in diameter, obviously a very difficult space in which to work when changing models, but the tunnel had enough capability to exceed by far the speed at which the Northwest aircraft was cruising when it was lost.

That tail wouldn’t flutter in the wind tunnel no matter what we did. But then we disconnected the tab, simulating the
broken bearing, and immediately the rudder blew off the tail assembly. We went ahead with the lead balances decreed by the CAA; but the real cause of the accident in my opinion was that someone, a mechanic on the production line or in the airline’s overhaul shops had not held the bearing properly when he adjusted the tab setting and had cracked the race but not broken it completely. The break occurred later in rough air and caused immediate violent flutter. I had never seen such violent flutter as with the simulated condition in our wind tunnel.

We still had to conduct 50 hours of flying in icing and rough weather to satisfy CAA conditions. And it had to be in the same air corridor where the plane had been lost. So Headle, Holoubek, and I headed for Minnesota. We stayed on the ground when the weather was nice and everyone else was flying, and took off in the worst of it.

We would fly into the roughest air we could find to prove stability of the aircraft, and in the worst icing conditions to prove the new non-icing carburetor. We’d have two to four inches of ice on other parts of the airplane, but the engines kept running. On one of our most exciting flights, we collected so much ice in just four minutes that with both engines on full power our indicated airspeed was just 90 miles an hour. And we landed with full power on.

I was so impressed with the rapidity with which ice can build up and its severe effect on aerodynamics and control that I was prompted to write one of my first technical papers on the subject for the benefit of others. (“Wing Loading, Icing and Associated Aspects of Modern Transport Design,” Journal of the Aeronautical Sciences, December 1940). To this day, the only thing I fear more than ice is hail. A separate icing wind tunnel later was built as another research facility at Lockheed. Pilots who haven’t experienced it do not realize that it takes damned little ice to cause a horrible crash.

Another little detail we had to prove was that the control cables would not go so slack because of the low temperatures that they would allow flutter under certain conditions. To do this we had to measure elevator cable tension, and the only
place to reach the cable was by removing the toilet and reaching down through that space to attach a tensiometer. This was Holoubek’s job as inspector. One day while he was checking this instrumentation, we hit a particularly severe bump. I still can see his feet sticking up through the opening as he yelled for help to get out of there.

The Model 14 had so much power with those new Wright-Cyclone engines that this actually produced a problem. With so much of the inboard wing in the propeller slip stream, it was almost impossible with power on in flight to stall the middle of the wing. So the wing, if it stalled, would stall—that is, lose lift—on the outboard end near the aileron, the trailing edge flap used for lateral control. This was not good, especially if one wing tip stalled before the other. It would cause the plane to roll badly.

All sorts of corrections were considered, including change of the wing shape itself, to control local stall characteristics. In the wind tunnel, we put hundreds of tufts of yarn on the wing so that we could watch stall patterns develop in simulated flight. When would air flow separate and under what conditions? It wasn’t the first time we had used yarn to observe air flow, but it certainly was the most complete such test we ever had conducted.

And for the first time we had an AO, automatic observer. A complete set of instruments was connected to the airplane’s systems. One camera would show the time and all flight conditions—airspeed, altitude, rate of roll—28 different recordings. This was synchronized with two other cameras that took pictures of the left and right wings when a stall developed.

That test program probably was the most thorough for specific aircraft performance characteristics undertaken to that time. And then in flight I joined the pilots in making 550 stalls and falling all over the sky in the San Fernando Valley for several months. It was an interesting way to make a living.

But it was not possible then to make these tests in the wind tunnel because we could not simulate the slip-stream effect of the propellers. When the electric motor models were scaled
down to fit into the proper-scale engine nacelle they simply could not produce enough power for a realistic test. We had no choice but to fly.

The result of this work was the “letter-box” modification already mentioned. A venturi-like opening at the bottom of the wing narrowed as it carried air through the wing, so that it was released over the top surface at much higher speed than normal at that point on the wing. And it was fresh air, not tired of flowing over half the wing. It was able to do this at angles of attack much more successfully than could any wing section alone. There were at the time other retractable wing slots—notably by De Haviland—but we found the complexity and maintenance problems not tolerable.

What we did was based on the Coanda effect, named for the French engineer who discovered that if he blew air on a curved surface, the flow did not separate from it but tended to remain stable on that surface. The principle is used routinely now in boundary-layer control.

These were good times for me personally. In 1938, I became chief research engineer for Lockheed.

When Lockheed’s engineering department began to expand I recruited some of the students I knew from the University of Michigan. Willis Hawkins was first; I had corrected his papers for Professor Stalker and knew his scholastic ability. Rudy Thoren and John Margwarth followed. Carl Haddon, who had been a year ahead of me in college, joined us.

It was almost like a university club. And then in night classes at Cal Tech I met another group of young engineers. Phil Colman was recruited there. With Irv Culver and E. O. Richter, these were the stalwarts I started with as chief research engineer.

The work on the “Lockheed-Fowler Flap” brought me my first major award as an engineer, the Lawrence Sperry Award for “important improvements of aeronautical design of high speed commercial aircraft”, in 1937.

The two major developments arising out of the Model 14 design, the Lockheed-Fowler flaps and the “letter-box” slots—both of which give the airplane excellent handling characteristics—were to become especially important in light of the unexpected role this airplane was to play in history.

T
HE YEAR
1938
WAS TO CHANGE LIFE FOR US
at the growing Lockheed plant as, indeed, it did for everyone around the world. Hitler was on the move in Europe, and the British military—despite their prime minister’s assurances of “peace in our time”—could see the inevitability of war. That flawed mission of Neville Chamberlain’s meeting with Hitler in Munich was flown, incidentally, in an Electra. That airplane and its two commercial derivatives had met wide acceptance.

Remembering the lessons of World War I, the British knew that in event of war with Germany they could expect tremendous shipping losses. They needed, among other things, an antisubmarine patrol plane. In April of that year, they sent a purchasing commission to the United States to buy a training plane and a coastal patrol bomber.

The committee was not even scheduled to visit the Lockheed plant. But the company officers were informed via telegram by the British air attaché in Washington just five days beforehand that the group would come to California. And they decided to do something about it. Our Model 14 was fast, about the right size, and capable of carrying the necessary equipment. We hurriedly built a full-scale wooden mockup of an antisubmarine version.

Kenneth Smith, then working as a sales representative for Robert Gross, studied newspaper photos of the group and memorized their names. When they landed at Glendale airport, he greeted each and invited the group to inspect the
mockup Lockheed had developed. They did—that very day.

Our mockup, of course, was only our guess as to what the British would need. But when they saw how enthusiastic we were about the project, they gave us a better idea of what they had in mind. Their visit was on a Friday. We incorporated what changes we could over the weekend and called them on Monday for another inspection. And we had prepared reports to show the plane’s performance. They were so impressed that this little company had the gumption to address their problem that they invited us to England to talk to their technical people.

Robert Gross’s younger brother, Courtlandt, who had by now joined Lockheed management, led the team. The other three were our lawyer from Boston, Bob Proctor; Carl Squier, then vice president for sales; and I. We sailed on the
Queen Mary
. Courtlandt has insisted that I found this means of locomotion very inefficient and mentally redesigned the ship on the way over. It sounds typical, and I suppose I did.

At the Air Ministry, our proposal lasted about 30 minutes. We had made the mistake of basing our mockup on stacking the bombs and torpedoes in the manner of the U.S. Army Air Corps in racks from floor to top of cabin. The British wanted everything in the bomb bay. They wanted to install their own oxygen system and other equipment so that everything would be supportable directly from their stores. And they wanted a gun turret to protect the plane from the rear and also forward-firing guns. There wasn’t a powered turret that would fire in any direction in the United States at that time. All of these changes affected the entire structure of the airplane—weight, balance, performance. This required almost a complete redesign and we decided to undertake it on the spot.

Following the meeting, we bought a drawing board, some T-squares, triangles, and other drafting equipment, and headed back to our quarters in Mayfair Court. I had to fit in all this new equipment, re-arrange copilot and radio operator positions, make weight and structural analysis, figure contract pricing, and guarantee that the design would meet certain performance requirements.

It was a three-day holiday weekend—Whit Sunday, Whit Monday. I worked a solid 72 hours on this redesign—not taking time for sleep, just catnapping briefly when absolutely necessary. I was a rumpled figure.

When finally I fell into bed for some very sound sleep—in the room I shared with Courtlandt to save on expenses—it was the first time I had removed my clothes in 72 hours. I awoke the next morning to discover that he had had my suit pressed and my shoes shined. How wonderful, I thought, that the head of the company would do something like that for an employee. That kind of consideration was typical of the gentlemen I worked for.

When we reappeared at the Air Ministry with a complete new layout on Tuesday, the British were surprised that we had worked through the holiday. In another week or so of meetings with the British, we were able to answer most of their questions. But they had one for Court Gross. He was called aside by the Chief of the Air Staff, Air Marshal Sir Arthur Virnay, and asked, as best Gross remembers:

“Mr. Gross, we like your proposal very much, and we very much like to deal with Lockheed. On the other hand, you must understand that we’re very unused in this country to dealing—particularly on transactions of such magnitude—on the technical say-so of a man as young as Mr. Johnson. And, therefore, I’ll have to have your assurance, and guarantee, in fact, that if we do go forward, the aircraft resulting from the purchase will in every way live up to Mr. Johnson’s specifications.”

Courtlandt assured the Air Marshal that he and his brother, Robert, had “every confidence” in me and that their trust in Lockheed would not be misplaced. I was 28 years old, quite a mature age, I thought. Courtlandt was 36.

Within a few days, on June 23, the Air Ministry gave Lockheed an order to build 200 airplanes of the model that became known as the Hudson, nicknamed “Old Boomerang” because it so often came back when very badly shot up. The contract also called for as many more than 200, up to a maximum of 250, as could be delivered by December 1939. This was
the largest aircraft production order placed up to that time in the United States.