Red Actor

In 1960 the Air Force was safe at high altitude. Operating above 50,000and soon to at 70,000 feet, no guns could reach the bombers. This was the structure of the cold war.  A news event gave this strategy an expected jolt in that year. When Eisenhower met with Khrushchev, a prisoner was shown to the startled entourage.  His name was Francis Gary Powers. At first the reason for his presence in Moscow was hushed up. Then the Russians revealed that a surface-to-air missile had hit his unarmed U-2 spy plane while it was operating above the ceiling of known interceptors. This called into question the so-called “Open Skies” Doctrine. I remember the brown wood paneling in the hall and the courtroom a week later where Powers was arraigned.  He was a tall dark-haired man with no striking build or movie star features to set him apart. His gaze was fixed.  Powers received a life sentence.  I remember the television coverage. At the time I was seventeen.  Looking back now years after Powers death in a news helicopter crash in the San Fernando Valley I can see the way policy created a need for me that first day.  It took five more years for me to finish high school and then a Physics degree.  After college two more years of the five led me through communications to understand what I would hear, see, smell and taste. The rocket didn’t kill powers. He didn’t eject. He crash-landed in a field. Whether he was brainwashed or signed a phony confession now appears in the rules. His peers deemed him a traitor much like the Korean prisoners of war. It was in 1967 that I arrived in Las Vegas, Nevada on a brand new Douglas DC-9.  The mountains around McCarran Field were spectacular. The Air West colors of yellow and orange set off the new airplane and new airline at the flight ramp. Stanley Hubbard picked up his Gladstone bag and we set off from the baggage cart. Two men in suits, we walked out the glass door into the early evening darkness. Cabs swung up in the yellow splendor. The drivers leaped out to pop the trunks and grab the bags of waiting passengers.  Our bags went into the third cab in line.  We opened the door to a Spartan interior of brown plastic bench seat and doors with chrome grab handles. We rode down the approaches to the McCarran field out into desert vegetation.  The only habitation in the area was the airfield terminal.  The bright desert sky still held some electricity in the heat.  The ground was dark, nearly black with sparse desert plants silhouetted toward the East. We passed a street sign, which could just be made out under a street light in the middle of nowhere.  The sign said, “Thunderbird Ave.” This was the famous Las Vegas strip.  Built away from the downtown were glitzy neon signs and searchlight lit facades. The Fontainebleau, The Palace, The Sands, the Sahara and then the low white building like a villa with statues and a fountain. This was Caesar’s Palace. No tourist joints for us as we were going to stay at accommodations fitting for an Englishman.  “I say, bloody Hell’s Teeth, dare we pass up a trip like this?” Stan was on his way out. He had been hired to begin a vertical takeoff and landing program at Douglas.  He had been a Royal Air Force (RAF) exchange officer with Tactical air Command (TAC). At retirement he improved his retirement pay and stayed near his reserve assignment by working in Douglas Aircraft marketing. He was a member of the Society of Experimental Test Pilots (SETP) and of the American helic9pter Society (AHS). My task was to keep him from blowing up.  He was that angry at his assignment. We checked in and walked to our rooms to settle. [All of the afore is true except the cab, Stan drove a rental car and asked me to look at the sign as we approached it near lost.)   About seven o’clock Stan called to say we were going to the colonel’s house. The director of training at Nellis Air Force Base also ran the Tactical Fighter Weapons School. I remember his name as Col. Gunderson (This may fit only my birthplace) we went out to a car Stan had rented while I was settling in. The trip through town and then West of town ate up about forty-five minutes. We were a little late so no drinks. We met “the Mrs.” Who was going out to play cards and then followed the Colonel’s car back to Caesar’s Palace. Our plan was a lobster dinner with oysters on the half shell and fine wine. Both men laid out their taste with aplomb. I was on the expense account that night as the fare was beyond my means.  I don’t remember the conversation.  It was accompanied by much laughter and ribald comments about security and fences. The next day we again drove through town and toward Nellis. This time instead of turning into a subdivision of low ranch homes we went a little farther and turned into the main gate. [Actually the subdivision was further]  As we drove up in the dark before 6:00AM, an F-105 took off screaming and booming in afterburner to a long rolling thunder as it faded to the North in the distance. The searing white torch or the engine flame remained in the sight for a few seconds. [It was still dark] Stan asked the guard to personally guide him to visitor parking. Our car sat on an asphalt lot up against a split rail fence. He went into the reddish brown guard shack and the light went out as the he closed the door. I sat in the car for quite a while. It was warm and silent. An abrupt opening of the driver’s door woke me up and Stan was back with package pass, car visitor’s pass and advice to look official as we pas through the gate. He backed out and pulled up to the guard. A flash of retirement card and we were in. Now to remember the streets from habit and we were in the traffic going to work on a busy day.  The stop and go ended as we found the road to TFWS Tactical Fighter Weapons School. It was a vanity site. There were wood paneling of the quick veneer type and a bold escutcheon of the TFWS with its squadron number all looking new and professional.  Clearly media had n important place in the Air Force.  Stan went into the colonel’s office and that might have ben it. The conversation continued for about an hour as phone calls and junior officers interrupted. Finally Stan emerged and said, “I got the colonel’s attention it’s all set. We’re going to Shaw, AFB.”  We need to get past the staff meeting here and then set up a trip. We walked down the hall and into a small paneled conference room.  A large long table nearly filed the room.  Stan and I tried to stay out of the way until the staff was assembled.  We were offered coffee and stood with it, waiting for the director ‘s entrance. I glanced at the men now in the room.  All wore flight suits.  Most had one or two patches on the left upper sleeve. Century Series F-100, 100 missions Viet Nam.  A few had Thunderchief patches. I would have to have the next one alluded to “Wild Weasel” The colonel strode into the room puffing on a big cigar and keeping it lit with a match. As soon as he introduced his staff to us the meeting started. Stan clicked off the lights and showed some hastily put together slides on the recent Aeromedical Transport purchase by Military Airlift command (MAC). It included reference to a possible Advanced Tactical Electronic Warfare System (ATEWS). “Within our grasp is the capability to win the current war in Southeast Asia. The enemy has failed to halt our air attacks and has not been able to recruit sufficient regulars to mount an offensive in the South. (This was before Tet).” They listened in troubled silence. Then they offered to tell us what they had tried and why they needed more aircraft. It was true that the Air Force operating from Thailand could attack daily at will.  Using the F-105F two-seater aircraft especially configured with a chin interferometer they could home in on SAM and GCI emissions. Once tracking they could fire anti-radiation missiles, which home in on the enemy radars.  Seldom were the sites destroyed but they would go suddenly off the air and stay off until he strike had passed delivered ordnance and returned.  In spite of this there were regular losses of an infrequent nature both operationally (due to reliability of the F-100’s and F-105’s) and also to ground fire. The resulting attrition had depleted TAC to where only a single wing of F-4’s newly arrived was at Langley. [The rest were in SEA.]  The F-105 fleet was under 150 and shrinking. At the current rate the air asset would be gone in under a year. Stan listened quietly to this and reminded them we had no answer to the need for tactical fighters.  The on-going McDonnell F-4C, and D would have to supply that. I took some charts out of my suit coat inner pocket and unfolded them. They showed takeoff distances and runway lengths required for a C-9A compared to an F-4C with and without afterburner. The high lift wing, triple slotted flaps and leading edge slats along with the engines gave ability to operate right along with the Phantoms.  The pilots were impressed and explored their surprise. Was I sure? How would this be possible?  We passed the test once again. We walked out with an invitation to visit Shaw. Now thirty years later I can tell you I was near at Shaw. I never saw the dark camouflaged shapes of RB and EB-66’s and the C-130’s and other support they required. I never slept in the visiting officers quarters (VOQ) and I never heard the hum heralding morning as the base woke up. I never met Colonel William Armstrong or Ervin Heald at that base. As a matter of fact I can’t remember one building, word or face from that visit. It was an auspicious flight. We landed at Raleigh-Durham in our jet airliner in a rainstorm, which was changing to fog. Our next leg was to Sumter. No planes were flying. We were a party of five. We split up and the design team got standby passes for the last plane to Sumter. It flew they would complete their journey. Stan and I as the Marketing and Operations Analysis team were less important. We could get standby tickets for a hundred mile leg and then we would have to wait out standby on the final leg to Sumter well after 2:00AM. The design team made their flight as the fog briefly lifted. We took off about a half hour later. It was our tough luck when we touched down. The field was closed. No flight to Sumter until 10:00AM or so tomorrow. Stan took a chance and rented a car. We would drive through the night and stay in the VOQ after hours. He would use his charm with the sentry and get us past. Do you sense something of the intrigue of the mission in this travel?  My real purpose came the next day when we got together with Jack Highwart, George Mass and Ervin Heald. They were all very experienced engineers in their late 40’s and 50’s. They had made up a configuration of electrical power, sensors, and jammers with antennas to utilize the EB-66 configuration, which was a copy of the B-52G. This was SAC configuration. The assembled officers hemmed and hawed.  I had to show that the C-9 at 3g could split-S like a B-66 and generally use agility when needed to avoid terminal end game.  So I described what I understood of the TFWS briefing and what I thought the C-9 could do.  We had looked at in-flight thrust reversers for rapid descent as well. I was going to get my chance to check out all this preliminary design.  Bill Armstrong was going to join Douglas in the Washington office and I was going to Aeronautical? Systems Division (ASD) at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. Robert Grower the tactical systems manager in advanced design would go with me as Ervin Heald’s designer and Jack Highwart would be the first wave and George the second. So I was into eavesdropping in a big way. The next day we flew out of Sumter to Charlotte, North Carolina where Douglas had a C-124 facility. We cleared the airport and flew to Raleigh-Durham and then home to Los Angeles.  It was to be a month or so before the trip to Dayton. I had little to do to prepare. Stan located an inventory of active and surplus B-66’s and then went to his going away party. He got out a big card with a pastel painting of a helicopter dropping a piano from a cable. It was signed by a lot of RAF types from Wing Commander to Squadron Leader. The card had appeared at his retirement bash in London. Now the celebration was dimmed. He was going out into the darkness alone. USAF had closed up to foreign personnel. When I arrived at Dayton the visitors pass routine was much more elaborate. This was a base that watched thousands of vendors. They were alert to civilian rouses. The passes had to be returned that very day. There were strict controls on time between buildings and appointments. No unscheduled contacts and no unscheduled meetings could be assembled. If things changed you had to return to visitor control and reset up your pass. Any violations and the AP’s would show up at your hotel. (AP’s is Air Police) We got all our passes had our briefcases checked by an older civilian woman and then drove to another fenced area of the base with Gene McIntyre the Dayton area representative for Douglas aircraft. The building we wanted sat on top of a glass walled bunker set into a hill. We entered checked in with a guard and waited for an escort. The escort took us down the stairs into an anteroom where the glass wall looked out. We waited there and set up our slides. The briefing was cancelled and an older civilian employee was introduced to me. He had the look of a civil servant in the middle pay grades. Heavy set, balding with wisps of hair combed back and a non-descript wool suit. His demeanor was of a caretaker. His purpose soon became clear. He was going to show me a threat document he kept. I could look at it and take notes. I couldn’t get a copy of the whole document or receive copies of any pages. If I agreed to that we could proceed. Other wise we were all going home none the wiser. Grower was nonplussed. Jack Highwart said he didn’t need anything from the description and they decided to call George Mass. He wanted certain items which e couldn’t discuss over the phone. I decide we were stable and I could risk the exposure. So I went into the office with the civil servant and he pulled out a thick document of reproduced pages about five inches thick and 8-1/2 by 11 in page size. I wasn’t allowed to look at the whole thing and by its size it would have taken hours. Instead he turned to a section pointed out what he thought was wrong and let me plow through. There was data on Ground Controlled Intercept (GCI), Early Warning (EW) and Anti-Aircraft Artillery (AAA) radars for Europe, Southeast Asia and the Northern Pacific including Korea. Each threat radar had a profile later in the book. I was allowed to look at the order of battle and take notes and then to look at each individual and take notes. It was a challenge to my authority and organization. I began in a somber mood and grew sad as I reviewed the data. After an hour or so I took a break. The rest of the tour decided to leave. Another hour and I went to lunch. I had to recreate my pass at the gate to return and I read until late afternoon. That was it and I met Gene McIntyre at the entrance to the building. He took me to my flight. The notes I took went in a folder to be checked and sent to us if approved. It was blind Judas playing devil’s advocate tag as I hopped my flight and breathed the fresh air. In my usual way I worried how I would show the defeat I needed to prove my case. When I got back to Long Beach, California I needed a way to stall off questions until my notes arrived. They had the only formal tracking of the data. No one else had been cleared. I wrote my trip report leaving out details of what I had seen and waited. A large entourage of people greeted me.  Airborne Instruments laboratory (now part of Eaton) and Sanders Associates (now a part of Martin- Lockheed) were in the plant. The proposed configuration had taken another turn. The United States Marine Corps (USMC) EA6-B “Prowler” was nearing development completion. It had a very capable passive “look through” system on the fin cap and active jammer pods with high gain antennas on up to four pylons. This could cover the total threat spectrum.  We listened to the briefings and asked questions. Bob Grower asked me how much vulnerable a C-9 was than an EA6-B. That began my second look at survivability. The first had been an examination of A-1 “Skyraider” losses.  This occurred when the navy transferred entire fleet of A-1’s from the carrier decks to Pacific Air Force (PACAF) Now in addition to hit data vs. aspect I had to look at vulnerable area.  It was a tough question, which would breed R & D for the next ten years. Naval Weapons Center and Ballistics Research Laboratory and the Air Force Armament Development Center would build new facilities and a major project like the Bikini and Eniewietok Joint Task Force One would be set up as Joint Task Force Two. Thousands of contractors and thousands of tests would be made through 1975.  When my secret notes arrived I had a very short time to decide how many jammers should be put on the c-9 and whether it could survive even in the now projected standoff mode.  This was to begin a short lived argument which was at first rejected then allowed to rekindle ands never resolved in my presence. The briefing went as scheduled. The decision to procure was made. A wild scramble for B-66 assets showed that although scarce an eB-66B version could be based o older and now obsolete configurations sent through Inspect and Repair As Necessary (IRAN) and Modification (MOD). It could hold the number of jammers (20) I picked whether 10 were omni directional to counter threats at a frequency at long range or whether all had to be directional for nearer press-in was left to an EF-11 later called “Raven”. (It has just retired along with th4 RF-4G’s which replaced the F105F “Wild Weasel” [when I wrote this]). The EF-111 got postponed and the EB-66E’s were built. Exactly how they are configured I don’t know except they use all the same gear as the EA6B and the EF-111 when it was bought. One further visit was necessary. Bob Grower knew someone at Raytheon Santa Barbara where the EA-6B “Prowler” jammer pods Traveling Wave Tubes (TWT) were made. We went to find out about the proposed low frequency versions in UHF and VHF as well as HF bands. These would cover Communication, Navigation and some height finder and acquisition threats. Again we did the wait in the lobby while the leader goes in then join a briefing in progress. This time the cheer was louder when we arrived and lunch at the “timbers” in Goleta gave us time to meet Raytheon Marketing. This restaurant was constructed from timbers of a pier shelled by a Japanese submarine in World War II. Now I had all the answers anyone was ever going to give me.  I had to construct my own way to go on.  I really didn’t have the answer until 1970.  All along I was scratching my head for how the airplane could pull 5-8 g’s and duck a SAM, which could pull 30-50 g’s. Sure the difference in speed mattered but so did tracking rate and lead. I was continuing to set up the same problems over and over in my head.  First the A-1 head-on and tail-on hits prevailed. Next the SAM/ECM question appeared and as things got tougher the bomb delivery and air-to-air dynamical analyses loomed large.  All along the question really was this. Should we redeploy the PhD’s from looking at ballistic missile exchanges in the think tanks and universities?  They began to refuse even those contracts as the war ground on and peace demonstrations closed campuses.  Should we train more engineers to answer questions? Are you physicists with undergraduate degrees telling the truth?  Can computer analysis and simulation replace the work you are doing?  So I continued on for sixteen years as one man with no compatible peers. Always asymmetry persisted. Myself and an aviator, myself and procurement, myself and a few electrical engineers, myself and a Phd mechanical engineer and a myself and a few aerodynamics engineers with advanced design and middle management all performing for marketing. Finally I failed a test. Project RAND had an undergraduate physicist who wrote a program called TACTICS (-II). I don’t’ know if he worked alone or had programmer support or engineering or math assistance. Certainly he worked with Air Force labs and commands to analyze air-to-air combat one-on-one in a simulated air engagement on a computer. This led to a development of a version of TACTICS-II called TAC-AVENGER.  TAC-AVENGER became a group that played war games at Air Force Systems command Headquarters (AFSC).  They were all former TAC pilots and they played frequently. Lt. General Arthur Kent, the author of the 375-5 manuals on Systems Evaluation and Systems Engineering was Deputy Chief of Staff Systems and head of AFSC.  I had laid my groundwork well.  In 1970 I finally drew a plot of the region off the nose of the aircraft which a given missile capability could not control for a given aircraft speed and maneuver level.  I also looked at straight and level and lead and lag pursuit. I shoed the plot to Frank Posche a former navy Commander and test pilot at Naval Weapons Center (NWC). China Lake, California.  Frank was highly respected in the A-4 community and was Grower’s right hand man.  A new man now held the threat helm where I had started with a folder of notes. Leo Petka had a huge library of Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) limited access classified including the entire Cornell Aero Labs (CALSPAN) Penetrator Evaluation (PENVAL). Leo got out some new data on the SA-6 and SA-4 in Europe to complement reports of SA-6’s being seen on the ground in Egypt. The word was these latest SAM’s with their integral rocket ramjet motors and higher frequency guidance could operate closer to the ground from highly mobile tracked vehicles. The earlier truck mounted and tripod mounted SA-2/3 were still present now serviced by radars on hundred foot tall towers to look down low to a distant horizon.  Wow!! The jig is really up for the Israelis. So it was in the Israeli Air Force as Skyhawk and Phantom deliveries began to augment the Mirages.  (Mirages no longer supported by France.) Without being overly simplistic or constrained I said to Frank, “I think the aircraft can still beat the SAMs.  He called Leo to refute this.  Frank was shocked. He recoiled from the heat. I don’t believe it. Grower had just heard Petka’s briefing and he wants to pull all our own personnel off the A-4’s for Israel.  It’s time to move to AWACS and this hope is groundless. First he called Dr. Walt Hackler to debunk my work.  Walt just brushed it aside as naïve. I had been working with Huntington Beach Missiles and Space Division or Astronautics as it was now called. Do they agree with this?  I had not conducted a very exclusive campaign and the massive force against was about to sweep away my conclusions.  Still I had solid support form Ervin Heald who was AWACS program manager and from Bill Yop the Aerodynamics Director.  Later I was to find Orville Dunn the Vice President of Engineering was an ally.  In the mean time McDonnell Aircraft, which now owned Douglas, was fearful the F-15 “Eagle” would be cancelled.  Already manned bomber analyses were faltering and the B-1 had not yet been created. It was not the strength of my opinion but the unwillingness to chillingly undercut the fighter-bomber community unless the threat actually overwhelmed them that kept us in the fight. So I got a mauling which led to a takedown after the AGILE AIM-95 was lost by MDAC –West and then cancelled as a Hughes contract.  The type of aircraft, which had begun their role in combat with air attacks of ground targets in Libya before 1916, was to continue. The ten foot tall missile, which could slay it, was put on the shelf even when it was ours. I began to really annoy people. Really I was dancing on a shoestring and I had my own see- through which was different than anyone else’s. What was true then and is true now is no one had a clear vision of when current cycle of planning aircraft modification and systems development would end.  Unlike rifles or boots or helmets or artillery there was a hard-core nook in Europe that rejected aircraft as a vital force in war.  Fog, storms, snow, rain, mud, hail and if needs be SAMs and AA would make aviation a waste of personnel and manufacturing assets in any major war.  I had some physical confrontations with returning GI’s whom I did not know that clearly made the point that I was being tipped.  While at work some managers and peers might be mildly annoyed there were clearly people including my USMC corporal GS missile technician brother-in-laws who wanted to retaliate against what they viewed as uninformed influence to proliferate a fraudulent capability. The heat has never let up in the keep it simple stupid, you’re too smart for your health, and you’re just plain crazy under current of slurs and innuendoes. Meanwhile the facts if they presented a clear consensus would be classified and unavailable to public forums and meeting rooms.  The threat sees a dead heat on military matters. Fortunately he always chooses brute power over finesse and precision.  Even where his scientific and engineering prowess presses the state of the art he has chosen to withhold the means for his forces to win.  It remains secret to him.  After the protracted attrition without success in Viet Nam our own forces are highly protective of the mind set and the aggression of the adversary.  The school of thought exists that if the enemy sets out to accomplish something by guile and deceit and if he hides the guile and deceit in a natural cover u so deep and impenetrable that years of B-52 strikes can not reduce it to a potholed waste land then we as civilized men will withdraw thus confusing our own forces of guile and deceit.  They will want to know why abandon a strategy even if untrue which succeeded for the enemy?  While a sophisticated structure in Washington sees destruction of enemy command and control as the key to success and is sitting on the Bosnian strikes with a major armored forces, a second primitive commando structure abhors the phony war and stalemate of a retreat without casualties which leaves major threat forces intact while our own force depletes due to lack of opposition.  Into this power vacuum we now insert the Chinese army.   This force is a barracks force.  It has tested Russia, Viet Nam, India and Formosa.  Each time it has backed off with small aims.  It is a garrison force taking over Hong Kong to assert a territorial claim by turbulence.  Leaders fear our force is unchallenged and lacks political will even as it holds refugee areas once considered beyond bounds of attrition.  It stops Iraq without a fight. The whole world is in danger 9of being managed by a diplomatic corps. Electronic typing keeps forces form mobilizing and assembly by using female aggression and coldness to identify and isolate the practical means to establish overt rule.  So it is we pick up the former Eastern Europe now free form its Russian cloak.  These areas are now more important. They act as a marriage of buffer states within sight of a crumbling confocus of states that is old USSR. Resources now dominate the old Caucasus states. Production and political unity decline as a colonial state approaches.

The 1973 Arab-Israeli War began on Yom Kippur. It was foggy in the Sinai in October that year and snow fell on Mt. Hermon in the Golan Heights. The Israelis pressed home attacks with their Skyhawks using the 309mm f

Gun installed to strafe Egyptian armored columns and Syrian positions. A lot of these aircraft got hit in the tail by infrared-guided shoulder fired missiles. The hits were very damaging but the Skyhawks returned to base. The engine in a Skyhawk is in the middle and only a tail pipe runs back to the rear. There have been operational losses of A-4’s due to engine to tailpipe clamp coming loose and starting a fire.  I caught this in the EA-6 (which also uses a shorter tailpipe) and the C-9 vulnerability comparison. Somehow the fires went out in the Israeli planes. A massive airlift of tails cannibalized from U.s. navy assets by C-5A returned these aircraft to service when the U. S. decided to assist Israel after the first week of fighting.  The SA-6s reaped a few low flyers before pods arrived and the F-4s flew countermeasures formations at middle altitudes.  One of the messages was old ways die hard. The other was the U.S. does share its tactical secret with new believers. Now some twenty-five years of peace later the turbulent lessons of fact bought through combat in 1948, 1957, 1967, 1973 fade. I was to meet one last hold out. McDonnell-0Douglas Astronautics Corporation-West (MDAC-W) the new division name at Huntington Beach was investing in telemetry codes. They built a Honeywell controller for an analog computer to create an early hybrid digital-analog machine. Using a software version of the fast Fourier transform (FFT) circuits in the Proteus the Navy built AWG-10 an air-to-air missile envelope real time calculator.  These new ventures depended on two dimensions and linear algorithms to beat old analog circuits to the punch.  Once again the missile guys were convinced they had the aircraft by the throat.  This time I had done a lot of work on the three dimensional tactics characteristic of air-to-air combat since World War I.   I could clearly see that is was possible for the two aircraft to define ball or helix geometry where there was no plane, which contained the two vector projections of their flight. (A Missile and aircraft would have similar constraints or planar forms) Yes at any time a plane could be made which contained one vector projection and the current point for the other aircraft (or missile). This of course showed a termination of lead and could only be achieved by speculating about the other aircraft maneuver. This further explained the early missile misses. Not only was angle rate involved at short ranges but also now the effect of 3 dimensions on the lead projection traded with angle rate. When combined with electronic counter measures the aircraft could fly most missions with out jettisoning ordnance, aborting or maneuvering out of ordnance delivery considerations. A game of hardball ensued which continues to this day. Unable to prove their case bankers, pension plans and insurance companies lost fortunes in an alley.  Their lawyers have bungles the settlements in court as judges take intuitive and juries find visceral justice palatable. A bully, assault and even life taking thrust of chances have replaced the determinant sovereignty of overwhelming force. I had one last chance to complete the assignment. This time the TAC analysis had caught up.  What was missing was the ability to show the real weapon delivery modes. I received a copy of the Air Combat Evaluation (ACE) program from China Lake.  A problem with the throttle pegging out at 90% ed me to call the real originator at air Force Weapons laboratory at Kirtland AFNB in Albuquerque, New Mexico.  He had programmed a control theory problem for solution with Lapalace transforms. Apparently the old chemical saw of 90% theoretical air had plugged in a bug. I made the airplanes fly racetrack approaches and then break and wingover into a dive at a perpendicular to their course sort of radial to what would have been the turn circle. We tried different engine thrust levels and cycles to see the effect of quad 23mm radar control and SAM radar both radar and IR hits and kills. The tactic showed that that vulnerability was low enough that engine thrust increase had values. I pulled up while jinking. Now Dr.

Walt hackler had shown this tactic worked!  Why didn’t he continue and believe the rest. In a last hurrah Dr. Herbst a German interspar from Messerschmitt-Boelkow-Blohm showed up to promote a “cobra” maneuver as practiced by the new Mikoyyan- Gurevich (MIG) 29. It was a way to rapidly change pointing angle independent of the velocity by slowing way down popping to vertical, rolling to the new heading with yaw coordination and then dropping down to point and fire a powerful radar controlled missile. I disagreed with this as it made the shooter a sitting duck. I could still see the value for a harrier with thrust vectoring in a terminal maneuver close-in. Norm Ko and I had examined relative range and first hit approach in 1970-71. This was a better first shoot tactic in my view as it not only assured survival rather than mutual exchange but it also kept maneuver level up for a second or subsequent shot at the same or another adversary.  That was my last error. I closed the books on for hire. From now on I had to make it on my own.  Now seventeen years later the reality of a conventional war in Europe is nearly gone. Whatever conflict grows out of Serbia or one of the Turkish Republics is mostly police action. ECM are good. TPQ carries the day. Go with the flow. Three servants with no doctors deny the gut feel and daggers in the tents. Probably explosives as revealed by ECM are the field most curious. Several attempts to make directed energy under the names high-energy laser, magneto-hydrodynamics, and traveling wave tube have come and gone. AVCO-Lycoming made a nozzle fed by powdered coal that generated electricity directly from heat in Roxbury, Connecticut. United Technology made a light-generating source with opposing mirrors using rocket nozzles to produce the initial light. This Gas Dynamic Laser was evaluated as an airborne kill mechanism before being replaced by hydrogen chloride and fluoride chemical lasers. [The recent chemical oxygen iodine laser (COIL is in the project)]  The electron beam proposals and electromagnetic guns seem to have flourished and dimmed. [Recently for electronic blinding of networks at close range]  X-ray fluxes from nuclear reactors have been explored in this same pumped or continuous resonance mode. A test of an Army ground based laser failed to damage a target satellite. Another test of a theater high altitude airborne defense (THAAD) shows attempts at point target kill fail to make an intercept [a few have succeeded now] the contact kill is denied. This is a blow to ballistic thinkers who continue to insist it is all a matter of time before bigger is better and might makes right.  What a strange justification that kick boxers defend the ivory tower!! The truth is now coming out that the world of objects was just too unwieldy.  Having to adjust the FM radio for maximum corner, while maneuvering the toothbrush around molars to reach wisdom teeth and at the same time choosing your lotto picks for the day was just to clumsy.  There had to be a way to cut through the clutter. That new approach was called stealth. In order to counter navy arguments that submarines re invulnerable while B-1’s are sitting ducks on the runway, concepts to reduce radar cross-section and IR cross-section in flight have been proposed. Just a minute!! Tactical signature reduction makes the B-1 invulnerable while on strategic alert? OK so the B-1 doesn’t go to the Persian Gulf until this one clears up!! Peacetime is a wonderful time to just let those unsolved riddles swelter and glint in the sun. [The B-2 had not been used in Kosovo at the time this was written nor was a F-117 lost] Long after the guns are silent, the orchestration of doubt continues. Aspersions are cast on highly regarded thinkers. Cherished institutions built on engineering principles stagger and then fall. It is a toss–up whether more V.I. Lenin statues fell in the Gorbachev revolution or more smokestacks and grain elevators have fallen in the U.S. as rust belt and price control give way to down sizing and the internet.  It’s a good excuse to once again let electronics control a decision. The watts per megahertz of the jammer have resurfaced as bandwidth in the information blitz.  Instead of legally entangling guns and violence to control immigrants the frontier and Indians now we patrol the pathways of commerce for flames and Spam, hackers and viruses. Each category of truth in code has a thousand detractors in permanence. The evolution of a concept called the bus from multiple warhead reentry to scientific parlance about memories and microprocessors has shifted its original meaning as electrical bus, secondary electrical bus and emergency bus in aircraft power circuitry.  Now when it might reappear in computer connections both local and long distance it becomes not circuits but networks. This coming from television and radio where conversion to radio frequency waves prevents feed through. The corporate firewall then becomes sort of virtual wireless link to the client. The tamer links like IR and optical that could also interrupt the physical electron link are shunned as easily blocked by physical screens. Thus our dependence on image o sustain organization contradicts real time predictive or adaptive line techniques.

The nonsense of Marshall McLuan’s “The medium is the message” becomes “one man’s band width is another man’s digital link.”  This gets across the idea that bandwidth is an old term.  It is an old engineering term.  Not ruled by axioms or science it gathers more bandwidth even when falling and pummels the unsuspecting coder like hailstones from on high.  The point is that in a multiprocessing environment when one processor gets overloaded other processors will stack predecessor code in parallel as bandwidth. Suddenly, in a telescope, light years become horizons and all the stars become bar code for a digital scanner at a grocery store. Copy protection flys in a loop as it reexamines the holdover forms. In real time the patent and copyright law becomes a sort of time machine as invention and artificial intelligence supplies parents and grand parents for every child. Precedents are supplied faster than insight can be ruled on. The predictor becomes the law. [This was written before the Napster decision] Communist state planning prevails in the cane fields and rice paddies of human intervention to resolve interparty play. In encryption anything that can be sent in parallel can be sent in serial and any thing that can be written down photographed or recorded can be sent accelerated or slowed to an unrecognizable crawl.  Is gibberish and chaos just an intermediate state of conscious ness rather than a cradle of boorish behavior?  In airflow turbulence and shock represent stable forms, which complicate simple explanation of relations of pressure, velocity and density.  The first law of escape is then “motion denies capture.” [No standing army?] Like Planck’s law of minimal measure and minimal uncertainty this non-static corollary proposes that all effort to make motion a state of rest creates an information paradox.  This then may finally be the way to refute Newton, Hooke, Einstein and the other inertia adapters. This new law says that not only do bodies in motion remain motion but for an observer in a frame moving with the body or with a camera subject to rigid focus able to feature the moving body in a static image due to the neutrality of the frame inherent in light the captured image can be shifted ahead of the body and played on screens before it to predict the body as a simple paste thus through this reverse vapor trail giving the phantom the greater reality in the minds eye.  As an example propose this experiment. Project an image through air onto a screen and at the same time capture that image by a photodetector array into a fiber optic line and splay it out as fiber ends in the screen to reflect the object. Let light and dark play on the object and thus confuse the interplay on the screen of the “real” object and its transformed beam formed and accelerated fiber optic transform. "Firstest with the mostest" replaces "At the wrong place at the wrong time, for the wrong reason" as a test of loss. Why would you choose the fog over the click?  “Where the dirty writes the clean” is the model of Utopia I am proposing. With the pixels of digital transmission being noise packets and ultimate image on the screen being a combination of this accelerated noise and the clean projection, the law for digits is a combination of singular forms of Planck’s law recalibrated for information and the binary nature of optical projection by a lens where dark matter imposes itself as fringes. After accounting for distance traveled, speed of propagation and quantization of frequency what will the image look like?  This saying if the chaos in the image is treated as one huge noise source and quantized can any purity be gained compared to introduction of another chaos from liquid, air ad interface of air and liquid where the chaos is controlled by mechanical and hydraulic means?

This once looked like the missiles are deadly because they can hit the unseen and a corollary they can hit the unseen because the unseen has been surveyed or illuminated with an invisible radiation.  In this scenario dynamic and transmissive effects surprise static or reflective objects.  An unusual element to this is the effect of random effects and chaotic measurement.  

Like Saint Louis where the clear water of the Mississippi meets the dirty water of the Missouri and it all becomes dirty gambling gets a good name. [A thought about speed in the myelin sheath in an emergency getting a punch there first just came to me] Fermi developed his model of electron capture on a probability process we would call binary or bang-bang.  Only when the probability of capture was one did the electron enter the nucleus.  For all other states it remained outside in a stable orbit or in a trajectory.  To believe in spectra of expectations for capture and create a game with other particles is another matter.  These particles discovered later and called mesons for their table or book behavior have been studied in cyclotrons and other high-energy machines. Collision machines more popular in Europe employing storage rings to improve capture probability have also resulted in artificial transmutation of natural elements.  Then our mission slows down again as the information boundary is reached. No more neutrinos can be added to the parking ramps to vote the immature and unconfident into existence. When Lambda decay is explained and the last colored quark is in existence what more can come into view?  Are all the old physicists now engineers dedicated to introductory ever more genius machines to the technology for manufacturers and the unskilled?  And are layers the inheritors of technology gone awry?  Is philosophy reducible to a graph? [Plato forbade geometers to enter his home]  Can objects remember philosophies now dormant? Must civilization transfer solely from man to man to survive?  Is there a clash between players, models, switches and glyphs?  Where no intelligent hypotheses are kept do the organs, the nerves and their beats function as storage and transfer for the wise?  For reasons of reputation many modest engineers took economics degrees or business degrees to mask their opposition to the war in guns vs. butter and macroeconomic questions of store siting and franchise in quest. The vagaries of research development test and evaluation (RDT &E) had caused knowledge to leap from place to place and rage from faculty to faculty in a competition to keep pace. Call contract and second source gave trusted colleagues the edge.  When the war with the pagan was lost both foreign in a jungle and domestic in an opium den the academics demanded an inquisition of the Renaissance. Was gravity ballistics and chemical propulsion the stronger or was the newer hegemonies wind and water derived wave mechanics greater. Both were assisted by concepts of electricity, both by military discipline, chivalry and chauvinism. The eclectic challenge of motivation to fight in a remote and hostile void slowed preparation for battle. When the armed helicopters defeated the offshore platforms and mines a second guess was made at simple land blitzkrieg using armed helicopters against a docile foe made now the sponsor of foreign exploitation. The massive city bombing of, and industrial target destruction of World War II with the stalemated fighting in forests, fields, and steppes was left out. The media presented the action as a cunning puppeteer adding strings and beginning to manipulate his puppet. To Sadaam Hussein the world was a child to be punished. First held hostage and then reduced to an even crueler fate Sadaam played the emotions on TV. Journalists described the modern self-propelled artillery, the mobile SCUD launchers and the discipline of his private republican guard. When the strike came cameras covered the greenish blackness streamed with fiery tracer seeking cruise missiles, which ducked under blanked out radar screens.  Television stations and communication lines to the invading army in Kuwait were severed. Then the assault on the buried tanks outside Baghdad and in the hills to the South began.  Using satellite imagery of where the tanks had stopped and infrared sights the night bombers dug out the vehicles and fortifications in the cold February. Airfields were bombed and the Iraqi Air Force fled.   Whatever sophisticated radars and missiles the Iraqis had were quickly neutralized or over whelmed.  Then came the tank thrusts to force the Iraqi Kuwait force out of defensive positions to be cut up by guided munitions from aircraft, helicopters and HUM-V’s.  One final firebombing of the long convoy of looter vehicles headed North from Kuwait City and the adversary surrendered.  Now after our forces have down-sized and bases have been closed, after SALT-I and SALY-II have cut up B-52’s and cruise missiles the remainder stood once again as Sadaam tried to break out to the South in late 1997. Even with these successes who can forget the Lon Nol prison incursion where everyone was gone, the Tehran rescue effort, the Somali blunder, recently the in 1998 the failure to observe the Pakistan and India nuclear tests. These failures would seem to be curable by the same intelligence, which insured our success. Instead they show an innate desire to quickly dumb down as hot war comes to a close.  The cutting edge of defense of democracy begins to be formed of door kickers and station desks. Because these forces are nearly as alien to the population as an Army on the move they are blind to the location of the leadership of the adversary. This continues to be the rule as “big brother” surveillance methods are implemented by organizations with only mob appeal. As intimidation the threat succeeds. The general populace withdraws from the institutions of their country and an armed presence of warlords and their minions wreaks havoc to show it has no fear of intelligence, sophistication or gentility. This is quite different than in our own country where avarice is only rewarded in polite circles. The meek are condemned as improbable and impish. The aggressive are condemned as boorish and rude. Only the master lock out set for the impassioned entreaties of pomp and circumstance allows passage to any one. Thus it is that the automobile creates the striker plate in the lock. The latch becomes safari vehicles in dusty poor nations.  The polite thus runs directly on the rude watched by a United Nations presence.  How is it then that the wealthy that once learned this as law and the courts have graduated to a free form international street tribunal?  Fearing that a miracle would end their power the hierarchy of world leaders has imposed the Arab street even as their Armies subdued the Arab populace. The work ethic that forged the industrial revolution has now merged with the craftsman’s bazaar of intricate labor once done by mason’s ornamental ironworkers.  The emphasis on façade covers over the nakedness of the modern skyline. Yet this is only an ideal.  Though professional offices and restaurant interiors make monstrous wood lattice and brass network no one expects to see a skyscraper in imitation of a Hopi pot or a Malaysian basket.  A small group can confirm this while a larger group is put off. The primary order seems to be one of tangible fuel.  Wooden houses, offices and retail stores filled with carpets, drape fabrics and paint present an eyesore of virtual heat. The cool spaces of marble, granite and onyx which were once banks, public buildings and railroad stations have been replaced mostly by parking lots with a potential bonfire in the center.  Air conditioning substitutes for mass. Lack of circulation replaces the deep basements for constant temperature. What was once the earth and solid state has now become electronic sound? Somehow the whole uniqueness of this “school” shocks the conscience. Rather than a totally human and emotional experience like riding in a womb this becomes, “won’t talk” and “won’t give answers.”  The woman interior designer and member of Association of Interior Designers (AID) are disappointed with this review.  Her interior was to escape the toothy plaster walls of a million urban apartments. It lost the soft tongue of pile carpet. So where did she go wrong that even her own house was lost? Her business is trapped in a printer’s in-basket.  My own has toppled into landfill as an urban slum. An obsession with growth heaves a sigh of relief as Asia stumbles and the Europe contemplates collapse in its investments to the East.  Not so subtle shifts create bargains that become even sweeter as rescue fades with time.  Now the microeconomic law that regulates monetary t5rades has been reenacted. Devaluation and possibility of devaluation precede riot and demonstration. This time the line holds. The tanks do not roll in the streets to crush the students. My own perspective is unusual. I worked in a place where talent in assembling monster projects prevailed. Whether the project was innovation, production or support the paperwork, the management was in units of 100,000 people. Sadly, now this stair step has plummeted. Innovation left first, then production and now support. American industry is not tolerant of the ageing. It hates to feel the shrinking call. It is unlikely support can prevail alone. Minor industries will first buy up the stragglers. Machine shops will forget the techniques of production. The ageing fleet will become a boutique of dowagers and ornate rakes. In 1978 I took my children to Florida’s Gold Coast after reading that 50% of the people would be retirement age or above after 2000. It gave me a way to look at population predictive of that statistic.  That they were wealthy colored the model a bit. Now my sons have chosen Denver [now Florida] and it’s growth model and Silicon Valley in Sunnyvale, California [now Austin, Texas] the heavy dullness of that demographic has built airy mansions near me in Troy. To suspend the childless gloom open space prevails inside even as children playing outside cease.  The space to raise children has replaced solid urban values. The little bungalows that appeared outside the fringe of row houses and workhouses have stopped to skip through ranch houses and split levels to today’s English manors. What threat is war to this society and its children?  Sure any French Provincial or English Tudor could spit out a pilot. What dingy Moscow suburb or yellowish mawkish walls would dump his counterpoint?  Is this our defense? Or will it be that viewer of cable TV laid by boring with oil field tools who rises in an armed helicopter to ferry troops faster than tracked cavalry can run.  Does a passing motorcycle mud splatter his counterpoint even now as he walks beside a twig fence in the Ukraine?  They have never met as enemies before. Is our airlifter loadmaster working out at a lifestyle gym while he stakes his claim for a billet?  His rival plays soccer on a dacha lawn then kicks the goal of his life.   Certainly, the U.S. and Russia are planning to stand their Air Forces for the foreseeable future. Each will field new systems testing the resolve of smaller nations. As export properties they will surely clash again. Deep in the soup is the answer to; will SCUD-like forces multiply to a casualty force from their attrition status? , Likewise will an anti-aircraft or air-to-air missile be developed with the ability to deny airspace to anything but the most unsophisticated.  My air Force began in my immediate presence as an all weather interceptor F-100. It was barely supersonic and had an afterburning engine which kept its reliability and availability low.  The radar must have been in a pod as the nose was completely occupied by a shovel nosed inlet and the long pitot boom.  Its wing had the heritage of the successful F-86 used in the Korean War by the first jet aces. It ended the line when then F-108 with inlet above the fuselage was cancelled.  The other part of my Air Force was a nuclear balance fighter- bomber. Its rotary door with bomb rack inside gave clean internal carry.  It had a very large after burning turbojet also used without A/B on the U-2.  The nose radar had a large parabolic antenna primarily for air-to-ground. These two single engine airplanes were the front line of TAC in 1967. Two more combat aircraft carried heavier loads but had no combat ole. They were the C-130 a four-turboprop transport still in use. These could airdrop and land on short soft fields. And the second was the B-66 a twin jet bomber with an internal bomb bay. These had large nose radar with unspecified capability. There was a pitot boom and tube sticking right out of the tip so what value the radar had I don’t know.  The wing was high mounted and very swept for transonic penetration and the engines hung on pylons in nacelles. This sturdy force soldiered on almost unnoticed until the outcry against napalm drops.  This set the public against the USAF and joint command.   Until B-52 bombings of the tunnel complex at Chu Lai near the suburbs of Saigon publicity was absent.  The B-52 raids on Hanoi and successful use in an SA-2 environment in 1973 led to another media endorsement. The B-52D had been fitted with external bomb racks and given a new base at Andersen AFB in Guam.  From there it carried out nightly strikes on suspected troop concentrations and truck parks in the panhandle no man’s land area.  Sometimes it dropped mines in Cambodia and Laos or later in waters off the South.  The pilots who flew these planes ranged from SAC, TAC, and MAC to reservists. Because of the limit of 100 missions per pilot over the North and 200 over the South a lot of crews and pilots were rotated through Thailand. When the A-1 “Skyraider” a single propeller attack aircraft was transferred to USAF it operated out of Saigon with AT-37 and T-28 assets. The AT-37 was a twin jet small trainer with a large side-by-side seating bubble canopy.  It had no radar and was for day use only. The T-28 was a single reciprocating engine propeller trainer once used for basic training.  Only the “sky raider” could carry a large bomb load.  Without radar it had to depend on slow speed and maneuverability to fly through the overcasts and low ground fogs common to Viet Nam.  It was used for Rescue and Recovery of downed pilots where it could escort “Jolly Green Giant” HH-3 helicopters, which had a single turbine engine. After the Cambodian invasion came out in the media the A-1’s and T-28’s were given to the Viet Namese Air Force along with some of the AT-37 “Dragonflys.”  About now you are wondering how I dropped out as the F-4, pod formation and ECM pods became big business with avionics vendors. Mainly it was a lack of production contract for a USAF AC fighter.  Even the laser guided bomb pods remained an avionics subcontractor component. I looked briefly at the PAVE SPIKE, which featured a Forward Looking Infrared (FLIR) turret slaved to a laser designator. These appeared on the F-111’s, which hit Tripoli Libya in 1987. So when I arrived at Nellis AFB for the second time in 1976 it was to survey an air-to-air missile threat model.  I had pretty much decided not to attempt to build such a computer model unless some new method appeared for treating errors and error damping. Huntington Beach was exploring a covariance model using Ricatti equations.  It was too linear to obtain the solutions I had identified. I also went to Offutt to meet the Electronic Warfare officers (EWO), as the B-52D seemed to be the only other candidate. By this time the F-4 was tying up St. Louis production and Douglas had decided against a role in the manned bomber.  Instead they hung their hopes on the AWACS and a direct competition with Boeing. The studies after this point became very shaggy dog.  Airlift languished as the XC-142 Vertical/ Short takeoff and landing (V/STOL) transport was cancelled and the CX was for prototyping. A navy patrol study opened up when the B-52 was fitted with Harpoons for an anti-shipping role. This pretty well used up my credibility with any one above the operational command in a training role.  I had been impressed with the Pratt and Whitney Aircraft (PWA) briefing on the F-100 (an engine not the Super Sabre aircraft) in the “eagle” but then found the MACAIR model lacking in smoothness and reliability of engine and after burner use. I had aerodynamics make me up an engine acceleration graph and after cleaning up the code for the after burner use the aircraft ran much better. About this time MACAIR ran some Air Battle Simulation (ABS) III and ABS –II comparisons and said ABS –II gave a more favorable exchange ratio for the Eagle. This was not unexpected as some inputs created extreme bias in the runs. The failures in the integrator and in the engine use then “softened” the conclusion so that the tow programs were not that far off finally. Squire Brown at Air Force Flight Dynamics Laboratory misinterpreted this to mean an ABS-ii logic fighter could beat and ABS-II logic fighter. This was far from true as had ben shown in red vs. blue runs several years earlier. I really wanted to get on with the missile vs. Missile like TFWS was now showing in F-5E adversary runs simulating Floggers. All in all I decided to kick it out of gear and look for a new job probably with avionics.  That seemed closed so I made a call to UTC field service in Beverly Hills and made a contact in West Palm Beach. That really knocked management over. Why would you go to a subcontractor after so much success at a prime?  The answer was I needed to finish the rule I had begun with those TAC pilots in 1967.  The lightweight fighter prototype was hot and I eventually worked on the F-100-200 for the F-16.  Bode stalls and trim settings was a big issue. Stall/stagnation worried the team, as the need for stability in a single engine installation now was a matter of life and death. Think of my career this way. I started with a company facing extinction, then I entered the life and death struggle to fly airplanes. In the hardball world of military systems this meant my car was attacked by ominous strangers, parts were stolen, and house was nearly broken into.  My former roommates car was stolen and stripped and rebuilt on recovery. He was with me during the attack by six steel round rod-armed men. Later a man with a rifle shot at me. At two other times, men pulled pistols on me. I ended with the life and death struggle to keep an engine running.  Even though a saboteur damaged my rifle I managed to get tit to fire. That repositioned me for the future.  It definitely has been an all weather mission in the worst scud with jammed guns and a continuous missile lock-on tone.  The fortunate few months when the sun is shining and the clouds are big below makes it all worthwhile. I’m happy the Air Force got some use out of me in writing its rule.

The VC-9c is a nice footnote to history. It is painted in the blue and white colors of air Force One and has the shield of the 89^th Special air Mission wing on the tail fin. There were originally five of them. There is some uncertainty in my mind whether they were taken from the seventeen original options in the Aeromedical Airlift aircraft the C-9a.  The designation as “C” models indicates they came from a different specification and was known by C-9B. What happened here is a major from Military Airlift Command (MAC) headquarters talked to norm Stevens the Douglas St. Louis representative about an aircraft for the SAM other than the president’s VC-140 replacements. Previously ex Col. William Armstrong was obtaining information on a configuration of the C-9 to be flown to and from the LBJ ranch. He was on good terms with the president’s pilot and they played golf together.  When LBJ died of a heart attack those discussions ended.  It must have been a few months later but maybe a year when the request came.  I flew back to St. Louis and drove out to Scott AFB alone.  I had been there before but was only known to Dr. Dryer, John Roper and one of the Aeromed Evaluation team from the question and answer session Major Graetch.  This other major was very tall young and ebullient.  He had an office in the bullpen hell behind the command post. It took a special clearance to enter the command post so we met in his office. He said Congress wanted aircraft to replace the C-131 and C-118 aircraft they used to fly to Europe and South America. I talked to him about the work on cost analysis and scheduling models for the Aeromedical Transport.  He asked me to put together for him a similar justification for these aircraft. It was to be difficult to quantify the requirement because some trips were classified and not on the regular mission logs.  He wound have to supply that in his testimony.  I offered to travel to Andrews to obtain the required schedule elements and any special cost factors. I only had two weeks to do the whole job. The next day, after calling the office in Long Beach, I revised my itinerary and flew East to Washington DC. There I met Bill Armstrong and he drove us to the gate.  We could not enter the base and had to wait for a sergeant to drive out and pick us up. He had a new Buick hardtop convertible. Bill had met him before and they regaled me with stories about retirement and Air Force life. We passed the hangar where the C-135’s assigned to the presidential mission sat.  Those had no windows and were silver but with presidential seal. Henry Kissinger made them famous in his shuttle diplomacy to the Middle East.  Bill went in and talked to the President’s pilot while I waited in the sergeant’s office. After about an hour bill came to say I could look at the data and begin to prepare the attachment. Every thing was very official. I was given pages from a years mission logs. I also picked up copies of the maintenance summaries of the C-131 and C-118 for a few months.   These were rare reports and I had to return the data to the major at Scott. For some reason I remember His name as Farquahr? Hopefully that is not the name of one of the characters on MASH TV show!! I worked all morning making copies and we went to lunch.  The command wanted us off the base by 2:00PM so I hurried to finish and the sergeant drove us out to the gate. When I returned to my hotel I put the data in my suitcase and checked out. I decided to put the data back in my briefcase at the airport for carryon. In Long Beach I opened the package and looked over the data. I didn’t see any obvious structure to the data even after repeated study. The C-131’s flew to locations, which could have been congressional districts. The Navy band flew on these aircraft to South /America. This used two C-118's for almost a month. Considering peaks and the inability of the Air Force to deny, amend, or postpone the missions, I finally decided five C-9’s could do the job. I began to document statistical reasons and the loads the aircraft would carry when combined or flown in a single day. Some judgment about departure time to give the same arrival time was required. That was the only method. The cost analysis followed the same guidelines of What Bob Hull, Maurie Platte and I had done on the C-9 preproposal effort. I scheduled a tip back to Scott to go over the completed work and took the finished typing slide art to presentations. The next day it was done. Bob Jackson signed off the work as Bob hull was on vacation. At MAC headquarters the Major asked me if he could show our work to Boeing. He offered to show Boeing work to Norm Stevens. Otherwise he would protect both sides as proprietary and not reveal either to the other party. I thought about what the public nature of the work was and said he could trade views. With that he said the books would be included as his sole submission to amend the Aeromedical Contract and that was that. Later I heard from marketing that the buy was “a breeze.’ The designation VC-9C was given to the aircraft. I remember seeing them on the ramp two years later painted in the blue and white with the Untied States of America painted in letters high above the windows on the side. The “Nightingales” were quite a striking contrast in gray with a white cap and a Red Cross on the tail. Of the original 25 C-9’s I don’t think any have been lost. [An inventory I saw in an Aviation Week annual shows this to be true]  Similarly of the 5 VC-9C’s I never heard of one lost. The loss of the T-43 with Ron Brown reminds me that each trip held its own hazards. I reported to the gate at Andrews and addressed the guard in this fashion. “Are the VC-9C’s all well supported can I assist the command today?”  He said, “Get lost!!” which did not surprise me. Thus through the years I have appeared at Wurtsmith which I never visited while working and at Randolph where I left off an autographed major league baseball.  I spoke to a nurse in the /Surgeon General’s office at Scott AFB about the casualty staging unit (CASU) at Clark AFB after the Mt. Pinatubo explosion and the pull back.  She said even Yokohama was closed and the CASU was at Elmendorf. This I made a mental note of in the PACAF briefing memory area.  Someday the C-17 or the C-9 might need these facts. I’ve never been back even to the towns where the combat bases were. They would be Castle, Mather, Nellis, Shaw and Wright-Patterson. [Mather and Castle are closed]  I missed Kirtland and Eglin on my route across Interstate 8. Holloman also escaped my attention. The ones I talked to on the phone in field service Hill, Mac Dill, Edwards, Langley, Luke, Kadena and Bitberg supplied presence of fatal crashes and tail number strikes. The Nothr Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) partners had no early losses with their small fleets. So the safety of aircraft grew on my tour. Could it be true a C-9 is safer than a C-131 or a C-118?  Is an F-16 safer than an F-100? Am I less vulnerable?  The answers to these questions are in the air Force Safety Center. There are legal remedies, which have been taken. Today I am the guardian of the truth of what was done and not done.  It is fair to ask a West Point question at this time, “Why did Douglas Aircraft fail?”  The answer to that was in history before I arrived. The cancellations of the “Skybolt” missile and the “Missileer” aircraft both cut short some promising careers.  The migration from bombs and guns to large air launched missiles faltered and faded. This took away direction form the military airplane division of Douglas. It withdrew final assembly from its facilities in El Segundo and Torrance and moved design and production to the plant at Long Beach [later moved to Palmdale] The factory in Charlotte, North Carolina became a maintenance based.  Tulsa did only aircraft IRAN and MOD.  At Maxwell where tomes are written this might begin “Douglas Aircraft Company never built a heavy bomber or a large patrol aircraft.” Because of this they did not have the early swept wing experience of Boeing and later the integration of bombing and navigation necessary for air drop from their primary cargo building experience. They couldn’t leap to Air early Warning (AEW) because of limited large radar integration inexperience. So Douglas hung back with the mechanical engineer and the aerodynamicist and built very good small aircraft the A-4 and the DC-9 and a good large aircraft the DC-8. Their rocket the Thor-delta was a reliability winner and also the smallest of the surviving boosters. It became a basis for the Anti-Ballistic Interceptor missile (ABM), which was cancelled. A key decision put them out of position for the future. That was the decision to sell off bomb racks and sonobuoys and concentrate on what they did best, build aircraft.  Sadly, two things had conspired to spoil that relationship. First was a decision by congress not to buy any more troop carrier aircraft. Instead commercial airliners would be contracted to carry everything except airdrop. [This was before 1965 in relation to the C-124 and C-130] The second was the failure of two turboprop designs, the A-2 and the C-133. In the 50’s Douglas was sitting pretty, the C-94 Globemaster and the C-124 Globemaster II had clamshell doors for cargo loading of even big Army vehicles. The C-124 could be fitted with double decks for troop carrying. Airdrop was still out of the side door. The competing C-130 was smaller but it had a rear door and ramp to drop and load howitzers. The C-130 had four turboprop Allison engines smaller than the Allison’s on the C-133. Eventually these engines the T-56 would be sued on helicopters and the Electra commercial transport. The C-133 used a prototype Allison with an equally unproven propeller. It began to disappear on long Pacific flights with no explanation. Only 50 were ever built and they remained in inventory into the 70’s at Dover AFB. All the questions about pressurized fuselages had not yet been answered. A large water tank with a C-133 fuselage sat outside building 36 conducting a fatigue life test for as long as I was at Douglas [13 years].  The A-2? It had counter rotating propellers and an expensive Allison engine and gearbox. The gearbox blew over the Patuxent River and “Doc” Livingstone had to dead stick it into Chesapeake Bay with no front end on the plane.  The gearbox had disintegrated taking both propellers with it.  Doc couldn’t work long-range problems in the flight manual and he retired on disability from Douglas in 1966 at the beginning of the C-X competition. (Note: C-X is a generic term for a requirement. Likewise the C-XX was a C-20 executive jet when procured.) So things were less than idyllic in 1965.  Douglas had assembled a team of engineers in building 13 the old C-133 production hangar. They hired Russ Murray a USAF colonel with a reputation for trimming the fat. This was to be their first effort using AFM 375-5 method of systems procurement. It entailed Functional Flow Block Diagrams (FFBD), Requirements Action Specifications (RAS), Task Schedules (TS) and a myriad of details borrowed and contrasted with the Navy’s Program Evaluation Review Technique (PERT). Management could really grow big and still have their finger on each developing spec.  They could tell what was over or under budget on a graph. Where Douglas fell short was on airdrop. The C-130 and C-141 gave Lockheed a long line of successful rear ramps. Now a visor nose was being added for drive-through. This left the structure as nothing but a tube. There were stringent requirements on accuracy, which required an integrated Doppler-inertial system tied to the ground mapping radar for precision airdrop.  I saw the mechanical layout of the structure chosen to give a foundation for this configuration. There was a long steel pole like a fire pole with each guidance package mounted rigidly to it.  This fear object associated with the North magnetic pole missed the whole point. Accurate heading wasn’t going to get the nod. Boeing turned their Cargo Experimental Heavy Lift System (CX-HLS) into the 747 commercial by covering the visor nose to be reopened as the 747 CF or convertible freighter.  I learned about stellar-inertial form the B-52 and ground-mapping also. Then I added global flight on great circles as the APN-41 became the APN-61 in the F-4C, D to F-4E/J. eventually Douglas won the C-17. The struggle for airlift funding and the resultant up s and downs didn’t require a bailout like Lockheed got but it did slow down MDC to a halt. Boeing took over in 1998. Thirty-three years of struggle ended in my estimations. The C-17 went on.

The next narration is critical to the success of NATO. NATO names and characteristics of named systems belong to the alliance and are protected by the espionage and secrecy laws of the various member nations. They also seem to lock out standards and specifications in individual countries procurements. Now after 49 years the alliance is acting in concert again. The NATO names are common parlance in the media of the U.S. and photographs and descriptions have been published in the U.K. By names I mean those systems which allied intelligence has adopted as the likely sources of signals intercepted by air, ground, sea and space reconnaissance and electronic intelligence platforms. Now today if I write Fan Song or Grail or Gammon readers of the aviation and even popular press know what is being referred to. Or perhaps only Guideline is well known?  As the memory of Viet Nam and the Israeli conflicts fades or is unfounded in the young these terms associate nothing.  If so I must step up to the contacts made in 1980 with the NATO nations Air Forces themselves and the Israeli contacts, which continued. In this case no mention of threat occurred. The contact was face to face at an Engineering Change Proposal (ECP) conference for the F-100 turbofan augmented engine then being co produced by the Fabrique Nationale (FN) in Belgium and United Technologies Corporation in the United States. The co producer of the F-16 “Fighting Falcon” Fokker Aircraft has since halted all production of aircraft and is no longer a viable source. Today, 6-30-1998 an F-16 flying in the Iraqi no-fly zone fired an anti-radiation missile at Iraqi radar. The firing was in self –defense. At one time the fact that this missile may have been the Texas Instruments High Speed Anti-Radiation missile (HARM) now included with the Hughes assets in the sale to Raytheon would have been news. There will be a report in Aviation Week probably in this week’s edition.  Certainly this event puts in perspective the changing environment for defense contractors. With the Raven and Wild Weasel both decommissioned the path I followed has become indistinct. I have to describe the location of a chance meeting as the link to this quite separated set of partners.  One day in 1977 I drove out to Naval Weapons Center, China Lake, California and after clearing visitor control drove behind Michelson laboratory to two bright silver trailers once located at Jackass flats nuclear test site.  In the trailers a group of navy and civilian analysts were playing a war game with models on a table. They were evaluating the proposed HARM. Other than seeing the static table I was there to see John Moore and his assistant Linda Lincicum who I knew from QUICKTURN. She set up her charts against a wall and began to describe an extensive analysis of the vulnerability of the CH-53E three-engine Sikorskiy Heavy Lift Helicopter. The level of detail and the accounting for every possible vulnerable area and every masking angle with a number of projectile and fragment velocities showed what research had been done in the thirteen years since the Gulf of Tonkin incident. I had seen similar detail applied to armed helicopters, the Ch-47 “Chinook” and the Bell UH-1 “Huey” They included various self-sealing arrangements for fuel. Fuel tanks, fuel lines, fuel system components and hydraulic lines, systems also.  Perhaps this along with the prisoner of war contacts I have made is where I went in the seventeen years since 1981. It was a scolding and I took it as one. The climate since that day from the official women has ben cool. The aggression shown in obtaining the right to present the findings led to my eventual downfall. I just would not agree that helos were a champion. Helicopters are in the sesame position as the Army Air Corps before the Air Force was formed.  They are reduced to spotting, transferring administrative personnel and limited evacuation of casualties. The fire support ands unit insertion missions they are given compromise their independence of action and expose them to low level concentrated small arms fire. Consequently vertical envelopment has been subject to high attrition levels.  In spite of this the Army and Marines continue to purchase large numbers of these aircraft for combat and combat support use.  At this point we are returning and a report on the classified sources is in order. Some of the reasons why the sources were classified include they are irrelevant to a penetrating force, they are in conflict which cannot be resolved by ordering means and they fail to fulfill military objectives. With that in mind a historic note will provide our fulcrum.  First new vertical envelopment tactics using troop carrying helicopters alone for the first time succeeded in getting us into the country and into defensive positions. The tunnels Northeast of Chu Lai show the formidable revolutionary force opposed the insertion force. There were significant helicopter losses and some sources recommended abandonment of the helicopter program.  The second insertion South of the DMZ by a USMC landing force was also successful in taking up defensive positions. In 1967 the Chinese New Year of TET brought a combined North Viet Namese regular and South Viet Namese irregular with Viet Cong National Liberation Front thrust to the old temple city of Hue.  The marines held at Danang with casualties and were backed by carrier air power. Both of these geographic areas were targeted for more air power. A planned thrust into the delta (Mekong Song area) to the South and the need to interdict jumping off points in the panhandle brought the needs to the forefront. It was decided to use Korean War surplus A-26 “Invaders”, B-25 “Marauders”, T-28 and T-37 trainers along with newly configured C-47 “Puff the Magic Dragon” and AC-130 “Spector” gun ships armed with the newly developed GE mini gun Gatling guns in the South.  Check me on the B-25’s they had 75 mm recoilless rifles in the nose like the AC-130s to be built.  In the North a new bold program was needed.  It would require reinforcing the runways at Andersen AFB in Guam and modifying B-52D’s to carry internal and external bomb racks for conventional ordnance. These facts may appear classified to older minds. They were taken from the Congressional hearings of the years 1966-1970. Each officer who testified would have declassified material as required to remain public. The congressional aides would have searched any material, which exceeded the unclassified guideline, and the offending lines deleted from the hearing publication.  Only that Navy testimony has these big gaps for those years.  The Navy deployed two carriers to support the build up. One was stationed south and referred to as Dixie and one was stationed north and referred to as Yankee. The flyers I knew referred to being stationed on the America and JFK which were nuclear hulls converted to oil burning boilers. This does not agree with present air war tallies, which show the Oriskany and Saratoga as being the source of VF-96 and VF-82 the MIG Killers. Perhaps these carriers went south? With this preparation then we can get right to why threat data was provided to contractors and who was sensitive to this data.  These rules began to appear as notes to the classification of Sensitive Sources and Methods (SSM) and No Foreign (NOFORN). These seem to have been a cover for the interrogation of prisoners and communications intercepts, which eventually came out as Daniel Ellsberg “Pentagon papers” published in the New York Times. The data I saw never applied to a ground force except as it might employ weapons against aircraft. What ever was known and reported about the Viet Cong, the NLF, the South and North Viet Namese irregulars and the Viet Namese regulars was held in country in those years. If it leaked out in code that was what later wafted across my nose as Special Access. I never looked inside the covers of any Special Access documents.   This then makes quite exact what I have seen and used form 1965(late) until 1981(late). In 1979 I saw some Army reports labeled Lessons learned. This led to a whole new level of charges levied against contractor personnel and my request to have my evidence withdrawn and sent to Israel.  At that point the matter was ended and I left private life. What may have crossed paths in these two divergent schemes were weapons like the AK-47, the 7.62, 12.7 and the 14.5mm machine guns. This need to know first appeared with a request to reopen the AD or A-1 “Skyraider” production line. They had been made in El Segundo in a former Northrup production plant. It was a casualty of the cold war. The plant remained closed for major programs and built minor parts for the A-3 and A-4 product support. After the Ea-6 years was committed to the Tulsa, Oklahoma plant for EB-66E modification a pair of documents was put on hold at Long Beach. Dick Stammerjohn was an engineer working on sonobuoys and bomb racks until he got reassigned to al Noll’s group to work on AWACS.  He knew Nate Carhardt, the program manager who worked for Ervin Heald. His armament background entitled him to briefings and he was a member of the American Ordnance Association. Dick had a brother who flew A-6’s for the navy and was stationed at Whidbey Island, Washington. His brother eventually became squadron commander. Dick was instrumental in founding Southern California Professional Engineers Association (SCPEA), a labor union for aerospace engineers. Dick worked well in routine assignments and had seniority. No one worked for him. He fit the nomograph methods favored by steam engineers and steamfitters that had been developed before the turn of the century. He was no an expert in marksmanship, trajectory calculus or any other curving or curling object. Dick was linear. In many ways that was where we were trying to arrive with our methods. Dick’s brother gave him a pair of Joint Munitions Effectiveness Methodology (JMEM) books copied from confidential originals. This was an approved method and the books appeared in inventory each month.  They couldn’t be updated however as they were not on the official Ballistic Research laboratory (BRL) list.  These arrived in 1967.  They had targets, generic descriptions including infantry, vehicles, buildings, bridges and the like.  He had originally gotten these books for their vulnerability description of aircraft. This section was very minimal and he did not see them after a cursory review. They came into my possession for the USMC a-4M weapon delivery system improvement.  There was no formal address of need to know, as the books were CONFIDENTIAL. Perhaps they stood out as nothing else on the A-4M update was treated as classified. [This would be the evidence in the A-4N that went to Israel] Now if you ask me what do I know about the Klashnikov AK-47 [Cyrillic characters in original] and the men who used it I could summarize the A-1 hits, the anti-air tactics of lying on their backs in a radial firing upward at 45 degrees out, the JMEM troops in foxholes, troops in open, and troops in foxholes covered with plywood. Then I would have to add the small unit tactics of the U.S. forces the USMC “Leatherneck” magazine articles and finally the Lessons Learned descriptions of punji sticks, ankle spike traps and mines. These would fit the injuries in the 1967 Aeromedical Evacuation card data and my briefing would be complete. Only a small part of this briefing would represent the threat of small arms to aircraft as they began to fly above the overcast and deliver ordnance above 4000 feet where the threat was minimal.  This was also what stressed to the Israeli’s after their initial losses in 1973.  That changed the air war to one involving optically sighted and radar directed AAA. The types of barrage, screening fire characteristic of World Wars I and II became ineffective with the amount of artillery the Viet Namese possessed. A belief that carpet-bombing by B-52’s could swing the balance was attractive to Dick Stammerjohn and he followed them as they deployed to Guam through his brother.  This hope and fear would persist through the war. If we could deploy in mass and smash the resistance the war would be over. The defenders remaining would sue for peace and go home to return to rice cultivation.  On the other hand if the defenders could be resupplied through the Port of Haiphong with sufficient artillery and ordnance they could sustain a casualty creating attrition of our forces, which would force us to withdraw. By 1968 it was obvious neither view was meeting the test.  The Viet were streaming in from Laos and Cambodia from sage sanctuary beyond the border. They had built up routes for convoys and pack trains over the mountains from Hanoi to the Mekong Delta. Their main help was not from China as a small border clash showed. The U.s. view of the war as a structured insurgency with a cultural base in China was flawed.  This began the cultural exchanges, the Ping Pong Diplomacy that led to the formal recognition of Red China and the beginning of détente with Russia. This would be the policy beyond Khrushchev in the Breznhev years.  Ho Chi Minh was seen as a visionary.  He had studied in Paris and drawn from Marx, Lenin and Engels for primary political strategy. He added his own roots and studied the American Revolution and the European Revolution of 1848 that led to Napoleon’s second empire. Now he was forging his own view of a role for Viet Nam in Southeast Asia. Such was the think tank view popular with intellectuals. The Ban the Bomb movement in Britain and South Wales excused mathematics professors like Bertrand Russell to foment student protests also in Stockholm as a peace activist movement and anti-war rhetoric led to a War Crimes Statement. This grew out of the repressive Diem regime where prime minister and Madame Diem encouraged persecution pf Buddhist monks who burned themselves in their orange robes on the sidewalks as “ self-immolation.” This monastic regime also festered a Madame Nhu. I cannot remember her ills or faults. This created a Broadway show called Madame Butterfly. The Diem regime collapsed in a showy atmosphere of useless troops dedicated mostly to the palace guard. He was replaced by Premier Thieu who depended on his Air Force Chief of Staff Cao Ky.  Thieu was a faceless bureaucrat with a temper. Ky fought for and obtained all the U.S. propeller aircraft assets in Viet Nam as well as numerous helicopters and the A-1s on the carriers off the coast. The Army of Viet Nam (ARVN) as their U.S. advisor counterparts called them began to advance to the strongholds in Cambodia and Laos to the West. This was after the death of Johnson in Nixon’s first term.  To connect the North Vietnamese to the local resistance Thieu planted observers in the Viet Cong led assemblies elected in a surprise turnout by the new left the national Liberation Front. Now all meetings in the South had military observers. The ripple of Electronic development passed unheralded as Douglas Aircraft reorganized into commercial and Military Divisions. The previous Astronautics facility at Huntington Beach was joined with McDonnell Aircraft (MCAIR) s Astronautics in a division headquartered in St. Louis headed by Charles Abel the former Douglas Astronautics chief.  A decision was made to close the Santa Monica headquarters and plant where Donald Wills Douglas began his company on Clover Field in 1920. Crash! The deed was done!!  The stink of rotting linen and musty spruce that had risen up from barns after World War I now wafted away.  The thunder of Apollo and the whiz of mercury and Gemini spacecraft sort of took a tier in St. Louis. Not yet ready and losing money space began to shore up for the long run. Overhead became a threat word relating to space assets. The din of Viet Nam was no longer a cry of victory. Commercial air transport in 1968 set records for passenger miles flown then promptly faltered in a sea of red ink.  Low fares were blamed.  Inflation was blamed.  The seeds of recession had been planted.  Real military people began to attack the air war expenses as excessive. As the Army withdrew the returning GI’s were bitter and unappeased.  The draft exodus, which went to Canada and Sweden, had taken large numbers of youth out of the country.  The intellectual base was unwilling to risk its children in a faulted war in Asia. Japan had boomed while supplying aircraft and ship repairs. The Philippines was booming. During the return they would continue. Now you could say in question, “ It seemed you would be electronics snooper, what happened?” I stand 5’ 10” tall. My father stands 5’6” tall. The men who dominated now were 6’3” and above. They had perfect eyesight. Their parents were wealthy. Their wives saw them as handsome and rakish. They lived fashionably in Palos Verde, Rolling Hills and Executive Estates. They had luxury sailboats and went skiing at Mammoth Mountain and Squaw Valley.  Some even played golf. Mostly ex-military officers or commercial airline employees kept this benefit so prolific in America. A blonde surfer type from Huntington Harbor augmented my height, a dark square jawed electronics engineer from DDR&E and the President’s former Science advisor. They were egalitarian and elite beyond my scope.  Also they had contacts, which they never pressured. This reflected on their declining role. I studied Air Force and Navy and marine Air Warfare Tactics as described in the official AFM, NAVAIR regulations and manuals. A segment was about to be displayed which had never ben used before.  Avoiding city bombing and blitzkrieg tactics of World War II the air arm was told to cover the withdrawal of troops in a gradual disengagement from Viet Nam.  As every one else was shifting to a peace time role my contacts and confidantes would be opening offensive and maintaining strike presence to pressure the Viet Namese to the bargaining table to end the fighting. This led to the bombing halts followed by intense air activity as each cease-fire broke down.  I now took an unguarded role as a survivor. No one could come where I was. From my perch I could swoop down on an unsuspecting flock. The A-4s had been chosen to be the primary interceptor asset on the Lexington class carriers. The Chance-Vought (now Ling-Tempco-Vought) LTV F-8 “Crusader” and RF-8 reconnaissance aircraft were to be retired. It was a humble role in my mind requiring considerable thought to avoid meeting superior adversaries. The A-4 had no real air intercept radar and would depend on E-2 and E-1 Air Early Warning and EC-121 land based similar assets to assign and locate hostile air threats.  This led to a training role where Ai-4’s and TA-4’s simulated the day fighter tactics of the Viet Namese MIG-17, 19 and 21. For a while once again these storied attack aircraft would have a place in the sun.  The radar homing and warning (RHAW) passive systems on the A-4 now looked forward to fire Shrike ARMs and later STANDARD-ARMs.  I never received data or briefings on these systems beyond what was cleared for regulations and put in the Flight manual. There never was a request to assess the effectiveness missiles.  Similarly though I went through the first week of weapon systems officer training at Miramar I did not ride in the TA_4 in the following three weeks or attend the briefings or debriefings of the simulated air engagements. That would have taken a significant training budget, a trip to the exposure tank and altitude chamber and the fitting of a flight suit and helmet.  I would have had to be the aggressive and convincing with program management to become an observer of human performance. Instead I chose to clone the tactics I had developed so far and to prepare them to be reviewed by the instructors at Miramar. This gave me a different “see through” for the war.  I was determined to go as far as I could in simulated tactics within the budget I could hold. Hold is an accurate view rather than carve out.  This eventually led to a confrontation with the much bigger and more confident group that had begun on AWACS. In it’s heyday beginning in 1966 the AWACS, was seen as the future of the Douglas Aircraft Military projects.  It was a big aircraft based on the commercial DC-8.  It could bring profitability to a program that held second place to Boeing’s 707 and C-135.  The Tupolev TU-95 “Bear” was aggressive. It flew toward Alaska and in the Aleutians. It traveled to Canada and down the coast of Maine headed for Cuba. Bears flew patrol missions in the Baltic, Mediterranean and Sea of Arkhangelsk. Our F-102 and F-106 interceptor squadrons went out to interrogate and escort these intruders. The F-104 “Starfighter” ended its role except in Europe. After the A/RIA win in 1965 Howell walker, Vice President Military marketing came down to personally congratulate Maurie Platte and I. “Doc” Weatherup, Jim Wright and Al Meltzer felt slighted.  Hal’s words were, “This win paves the way to a successful weapon system integration in the DC-8 based AWACS.” How that would occur was not obvious.  Our partner Bendix was never used on AWACS. Out facility at Tulsa was later Sold. Maurie and I became staff “gophers” for Ted Bullockus and a lethargic cost analysis program.  The important thing was a dry spell of ten years without a contract from the Air Force following the disastrous C-133 was broken.  Now I should point out that in 1965 the view of Aerodynamics that optimum supersonic flight was best done with a delta wing or thin rectangular wing was most prominent. The further view that a “Mach cone” accompanied the supersonic aircraft and an area rule to scale cross-sections to an ideal cone could significantly reduce drag. I should also point out it wasn’t Maurie and I but Jim Wright and I who stood in Al Noll’s office in building 18A on the fifth floor. Jim thought Al was a worrier and a negative influence on analytic people.  He was also a Baptist and drove a Volkswagen from the San Fernando Valley. I had moved from the San Fernando Valley in July and begun to walk to work.  Walker lived just off Carson North of the plant. I walked in quite a ways from Lakewood. At that time a North American XB-70 was under development. It had a large delta wing with drooping wing tips for stability at high speed. It’s 2-D inlets and goose forward fuselage supposedly allowed a wave rider on the bow shock at mach 3.  At the same time in Texas where Walker and RCP Jackson his deputy for plans and analysis were from another aircraft was being developed.  The fighter-bomber the F-111 was the favorite of the Defense Department. It had an inboard pivot and swing-wings based on 2-D aerodynamics and the German swept wing adaptation. It also had a very advanced ground mapping mode radar adaptable to air-to-air or air-to-ground. Finally an all weather ordnance delivery and tactical penetration was available in a fighter-bomber sized aircraft for land based and carrier based roles. The Fleet air Defense F-111B would use the Phoenix air-to-air round developed from the cancelled Missileer Douglas F-6D and the “Eagle” missile on the YF-12 developing from the Lockheed skunk works strategic reconnaissance SR-71.  In 1965 the truly sophomoric science of al Noll was being urged on and cleaned up by the East. It seemed that all the horns were finally going to play. Al’s science might be sophomoric but he was from Brooklyn. He was a whiz with a slide rule and his operational math using probability and statistics was rigorous. Al also could organize a team and write proposal books. So he really was the marketing editor.  The marketing editor began to play his cards. The F-11B was overweight and too heavy for a carrier. Its TF-30 turbofan with augmenter began to have inlet problems, stalls and turbine catastrophic explosions. There was no backup. Another version of the TF-30 was scheduled for the new A-7 derived from the F-8 as a cheap Navy follow-on attack to replace the aging A-4 “Skyhawk.”  Further work revealed the wing pivot was flawed. It would have to be redesigned. Money was short and the F-11B was dropped from the budget. Not to long later and one of the XB-70 prototypes while flying photographic poses collided with the F-104 chase photo plane. This GE advertising photo turned into a cancelled program. Cost and the downing of the U-2 at altitude in 1960 had already put the program in flight test only mode. B-52s were being built with shorter tailfins and rudders to fly at low altitude and began to include terrain avoidance. Gear.  This led to a crash effort at North American Autonetics division to develop a terrain following terrain avoidance integrated avionics suite for a manned bomber.  Using digital filter techniques and sophisticated packaging the micro miniature set all fit in a bomber nose.  It was also lightweight. This was the weapons carrier picture. Over on the CX-HLS where Al was now hiding ready to make his pitch another fiasco was brewing. The CX-HLS was a replacement for the C-133, C-124 and C-97.  It was designed to carry 2 of the largest tanks from Dover to Europe land in an unprepared field and unload without expeditionary gear. As the NATO partners grew prosperous they resented the U.S. presence and tried to take away air and army bases rights. Eventually they were given a role in defense and a bill for services.  This was not quite as onerous but still grating.  The CX-HLS was the largest aircraft ever built. The Barbizon in Britain, the C-132 and the Convair Constitution of the propeller era never reached production or were cancelled or never built. Like Al the Douglas and Boeing CX-HLS’s were losers and Lockheed was to build the C-5A as it came to be known. Now Al went to the AWACS and sheer luxury.  Downstream was also the SST where only Lockheed and Boeing could compete. NASA scotched its delta wing version as too small when the Concorde took wing. NASA chose Boeing and a variable sweep design. Now days when Rockwell has been an aerospace company after taking over North American we can ask? Did they build the wing pivots? How did they ascend? As we follow the survivors the F-102 and F-106 have delta wings and will soldier to the end. The F-111A has a swept swing-wing. Soon the NASA Boeing SST will hit the cost wall and fade away. [The sonic boom test in Oklahoma City and subsequent banning over overland supersonic flight also ended its role a bit] Did it still have a belief in manned aircraft? Are you following me? The F-111 gets a new version with stretched fuselage and huge wing tanks. With the advanced Autonetics radar and its digital brethren this aircraft becomes the strategic bomber for the 70’s and 80’s as the FB-11. An expensive fix to the pivot yields strength for a new version. The quarter round inlets and nozzle check drag and flow spillage areas are cleaned up and oualah! A new aircraft appears. Yes Grumman previous second source builder of the FB-111B now proposes another fighter with swing-wings. This F-14A “Tomcat” uses the phased array radar and Phoenix active radar missiles with advanced track-while-scan for multiple target assignment. Pressures are mounting on the Air Defense command. Its hole-in-the-ground approach in Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado and in a bunker in Pennsylvania near Washington is slipping as the ABM treaty forbids a widespread defense for either side. Limits on interceptor forces are negotiated on both sides but the teams won’t budge. Into this tiny sliver of light The AWACS could have phased array radar and its problem with central command would be solved. It could track and vector multiple interceptors while… did I say it had a missile track capability… I didn’t for good reason. AWACS is reborn as TAC-AWACS to escape the conclusions of ABM censors. If the radar can detect, track or target ICBM’s, IRBM’s or tactical battlefield missiles no one is saying. A cruise missile track and intercept threat rises and falls to become the U.S. launched cruise missile. Various decoy and signature reduction technologies are married from ICBM parlance to this resurrection of the Regulus and SNARK from the 50’s and at this point everything would be stable. The intellectuals are happy, the horse was hollow, the defense analysts are happy, it held Greeks and night happens to fall. In public nothing else is happening. It is as if the war in Viet Nam and the wars in Israel are repeats of the Punic Wars. The ultimate warriors are deployed. There is a surprise the elephants arrive over the mountains but not to worry peace is at hand. Meanwhile in laboratories and on test ranges all over America a view that operational test is mandatory. Although Viet Nam cannot spell requirements for systems it can and does show what fails in service. This then is the tragedy of Viet Nam. When something fails, something specified for Europe is substituted, if that also fails the whole system is withdrawn.  So it was with the F-5A, which should have been an optimum fighter with its thin rectangular wing and twin engines. Instead because it couldn’t be refueled it sat in Saigon as Gen Ky’s personal VIP transport. The F-111 was late and when deployed it vanished as it flew over water on egress. It was withdrawn for rework.  Too late it got no second chance. Today everything flying benefited from the exploitation of systems flown out by defectors, captured from Egyptian stocks or described by immigrants. Satellites and photo and electronic reconnaissance wrote down the enemy exercises. I have mentioned two engineers names and neither knows anything about the EB66, the A-4M Angle Rate bombing System (ARBS) or the A-4 carrier defense aircraft. They returned to building 35 third floor from a big bullpen on the 2^nd floor when the AWACS contract definition ended and the proposal lost to Boeing in late 1971.  I was there half time and returned full time in late 1971 when Hughes defeated the Huntington Beach AGILE proposal.  There was an excess of staff in late 1971 and Al was calling the men into his office one by one. I wasn’t called. An intelligence area had been created during AWACS. We were not going to get along. We needed each other for future work so we tolerated each other. The problem was the work to be done was detailed systems engineering work. It was to use classified data. It had to fit an outline, which was already written. It was going to be done in the open with no safeguards. This was the successful empirical approach, which had evolved from the loss of so many elements of superstructure. Anyone who now advocated “an optimum” or “most cost-effective” approach was now met with silence. Only an operational test and evaluation could wring out the defects and yield a system worthy of production. This approach had worked with ECM pods and FLIR pods. Eglin air Force base was the place this armament development occurred. Al Noll and Fred Solarczyk were out of the loop on these developments. They were in the tail end of the development cycle on Defense Communications Satellite System (DSCS) Defense Support Program (DSP) and the Nike Zeus. They also had heard of MIRV and what was soon called MARV after MDAC lost MX and Northrup won. A decision point was coming up on the Manned Strategic Aircraft (MSA), which would become the B-1. Some of our layoffs Torrey Zimmermann for one went to North American in Seal Beach and El Segundo. What we had left was the CX prototype Advanced Military STOL Transport (AMST) and a vague large aircraft military version of DC-10 currently under development. All tactical systems were cutoff. The a-4 production moved to Palmdale with all its engineering. The test pilots stayed at Long Beach and commuted when required.  When the time came to do the work I was not able to restart the armaments related methods required to set up a range specification for a DC-10 Range Support Aircraft. (RSA) Many modifications like Rivet Joint [this one is active after update again in 2002] and Cobra Judy were being installed in C-135’s to cover the armament development operational test. Other aircraft like Looking Glass ICBM support and flying command post seemed more like more Boeing contracts. Actually these projects were going to dry up. The satellite launches on titan with two strap-on boosters were up to 500 lb. to synchronous orbit and up to 11000 lb to low earth orbit. All the myriad of projects of the past six years was now unavailable. Some would even be piggybacked or leased onto commercial satellite launches and payloads. I finally said I couldn’t offer a method to condense the entire future missile OT&E into the fixed outline. They weren’t surprised. They tried Carroll Simmons. He delayed the news but couldn’t satisfy the Air Force. The Air Force visitors no longer wore blue suits. I met with the one who stayed to listen to his plight. After some very trying days including one when I left the plant to drive errantly to the new unopened Corona Freeway I located an Aerospace Engineer. I went in and told Al Noll I was resigning. Clearly some of the past I had was too shallow or obsolete to satisfy the customer. The more recent was too detailed and violated a prohibition on using a computer. Al and Bob Grower thought that the Douglas computer programs on AWACS just stunk.  The target detection and raid assignment algorithms though programmed over and over just left a manager with no key. As I had found they seemed to be following civil engineering and highway construction Specifically. After that no contractor computer programs could be written and existing operations research programs would be supplied too all contractors at government expense. Al suggested I settle back and try the library.  It was nearly devoid of modern books or reports. Engineers ordered reports strictly for their own desks and never returned them to the library.  I spent a day searching the stocks. Bingo I found one report with a control system approach to inertial navigation error propagation. It used Laplace transforms. Well they said only you would see that as a beginning but go ahead.  I began to work out detailed error analyses for each missile to create the range coverage contours. I had to also make a tentative aerodynamic and structural concept for each vehicle.  Bill Zackowicz took one look at my first values. Where is the rigorous parametric approach I outlined in our first meeting? Why is this stuff I don’t even want being done? I explained that each point in this parametric approach was one pass through what I was showing him. He had just returned from a stint as VP marketing at Bose Speakers. I was essentially telling him each vehicle was a different kind of electron and we had to write and originate the electromagnetic laws for each before we built and tested the circuit.  He threw up his hands. Gorge Heinz had finished his competitive ground based radar tracking system.  A new man Bob Roscoe had come from Western Test Range with Air Force credentials in space booster tracking and detailed range Instrumentation. He had helped George set up the detailed parametric view. I was wasting his money.  I went back to my office and put the work away. Marv Goldner came in and said George Heinz was retiring. This was his last week. Late that afternoon Fred came in and said we blew the assignment. Why didn’t you follow the outline? I waited. He walked out. Al came in the next day and said I could use Dick Stammerjohn’s HP-9810 calculator until a new Monroe arrived for me. The days and nights went quickly and soon the parametrics were done. No one had any confidence in them especially me. Frank Eliel helped me with the detail plots since we have no presentations budget. I handed them over to Fred Solarczyk after Customer Relations secretary typed the captions. He wanted me to change one plot and call him the next day at 9:00AM. The briefing was a t 9:30AM. I changed the plot and dutifully called at 9:00AM. Fred was furious. We couldn’t use your work it’s 10:00AM here. Of course, Albuquerque was Mountain Standard Time. We were Pacific Daylight Time.  I never heard about that briefing again. When Fred got back he asked me to show him how I calculated the radar horizon. I showed him the secant method I had used several times before. He brought in an “empirical approach” we used on AWACS. It was completely quackery. Hidden in a subroutine it was never questioned. I was deeply concerned. How did we expect to win contracts by bluffing on critical parameters? I did not voice my concerns. The actions of the past months seemed like a personal attack. I wasn’t sleeping. I bought a new house with my Douglas stock to get away from the low rent areas. Now I was just gambling. The company was gambling too. The next job was an out growth of a NASA technology study. Another intelligence agency wanted to perform risk assessment on foreign technology transfer. It was a hot topic in Washington. The Daniel Ellsberg and Russo trials had been adjourned due to official misconduct. A Dr. Fielding, Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office was broken into ad his psychological profile and other files stolen. This came out with the Watergate break-ins.  As 1972 summer prated through I worked on Navy large aircraft studies. The work was structurally solid but had no database and thus the parametrics could easily erode. All this was to compensate for lack of a nee-to-know in the entire facility. State-of-the-art was no longer a viable concern. I should jump ahead then to my approval for a job in Florida. I joined Untied Technologies Government Products Division. (GPD) Their need to know covered only the engine subsystem. It was sufficient I thought to utilize my personal interest, which I had shown in high school when I built my own Chevrolet engine. Now I intended to expand that to include gas turbines with advanced electronic instrument packages. The test cells were only seven miles West at the main plant on the Beeline Highway. I just could not pull out of the way I felt exposed. My head hurt and the light was too bright. Any noise distracted me after a sudden start. I could not sleep at night. It was no problem, just some people trying to get rid of me in the most thorough way possible. I was aggressive towards death and a series of murders locally occurred with hours and feet of where I had been. Survival was either a problem or I was paranoid. It took awhile to find what I could do for Pratt and Whitney. They were more use to parts and fuel schedules. I finally went to marketing and read the whole DoD budget for 1977 just as I had done in 1966-70. Then I had the Aerie magazine editor let me in the president’s outer office. I met with the congressional lobbyist. I went to the library. I summarized thinking for NATO in a memo and gave it to Frank Little the Program Engineer I worked for.  He had worked on the RA-5 vigilante 2-D inlet at North American Columbus. It was now a prominent feature on the F-1 and F-15. He liked the work and showed it to Hal Teidemann the Director of Future engines and Advanced Performance. I was let in the Hal Teidemann “feelie” meetings where advanced parts were passed out to touch and look at and weigh. I also was given a new assistant program engineer to work with. He was Joe DeSantis USAF Lt Colonel (retired). We put together a trial balloon of advanced PWA engines applied to a B-52/KC-135A reengine program. We also compared GE and Rolls Royce competitors. United Technologies Research Laboratories came down to brief our management on some sensitive programs.  They glanced side ways the bosses and myself and then withheld most of their work. I got to see the conclusions. PWA had engines on the F-14, A-4, A-7, F-15, F-16, C-135, C-141. This covered Grumman, McDonnell-Douglas, LTV Boeing and Lockheed. Someone from MDC was a little too hot. East Hartford management decided to spend some money on a few of the configurations. They had just taken a big setback when the JT-9D-59A engines were removed from Air Force One and GE-CF-6’s were installed. The new 747 Command Post also got CF-6-50C. Lack of funds had caused the program to go downhill as all updates were stopped. The C-5 also had TF-39’s from its origin. This was the government R&D Advanced Turbine Engine Gas Generator (ATEGG) core which became the basis for the 8:1 bypass TF-39 and the later 41,000 lb. CF-6 at about 6:1 bypass.  I got a tip from on of the math aids that the J-52 was running at night. I slipped out to watch and tried to figure how to do a cycle analysis with only the flame videotape.  Frank showed me J-52/TF-30 ECP money was near nothing and going to zero in the next budget round.  I thought off-the-shelf had more priority and said so.  He said,” I’ll try to get something.”  This is what led later to my getting the F-111E flight manual for a plane with more powerful TF-30-PW100 engines. Was it really a good business decision? The engineers thought so. Most of the money in the bullpen we were in was going to an F-100 trim curve program.  It was thin ice work. You calculated and calculated and if everything went right you got a trim point for a Mach number and altitude and a Fahrenheit day. If anything did not match up for that set of conditions you could throw the work away and start over. On and on it went day after day. All to set 13 clicks of a trim screw on an electronic control. Too hot and turbine vanes burned. Too cold and performance suffered, takeoffs were extended, altitude performance suffered, air starts might fail. Soon a single engine configuration was required. The battle went on. Behind me competitive engines was working on a Foxbat nozzle. They had to prove the engine was stable at low level. These men had no fear. They manned the trenches daily like doughboys and Tommy’s in World War I. Another new man Roger Massey Captain USN (retired) arrived. He was Dr. Massey with a new Phd from Oregon State. His major was operations research. He had been a helicopter rescue pilot and a Carrier Air Group commander (CAG). His recent assignment as director of the Lawrence Livermore conventional weapons laboratory gave him access to Europe. Roger liked attrition studies. He believed in the Lanchester laws. Like Thomas Edison’s view that invention is 90% perspiration and 10% inspiration he saw a routine drive to compete as being the secret of success. In aerospace he also saw a mad dog drive to attrite the other guy out of business whether he be a corporate entity or a national base. Roger was much more attuned to where he was than I was. He did not like me. He was a fair man and obviously aloof from whatever I was doing. That was until December 18, 1981 when I quit. He said, “You had one book and it was a good one.” Alluding to the copy of “Gas Turbine Fundamentals” I had borrowed from Frank Miller before he went to Fokker. It was in my hand. Then He said,” You were the worst engineer I ever hired.” Sloppy, fat, hangdog, I’m sure I earned every slur in those words. He couldn’t sell Volvo-Flygmotor a joint development on the “Grippen.” His sale of the 1120 joint development for the Lavi in Israel was cancelled before first flight when the prototype was nearly complete. [How much of this stuff is in the Chinese F-11?]  My F-100-200 works in product support held up as a joint buy when the F-101 became the F-110 and GE filled out Pratt’s production for the F-16.  The TF-30-P414 remained in the F-14 thanks to our little funding of ecps. The best was yet to come when the F-117 became the C-17 engine and really far down the pike the F-119 became the 2-d nozzle engine for the F-22 [and the F-35 now] super cruiser. Air superiority was not everything. OK so we split up to cover the bases. The F-117 really did grow up from our bomber study to become a “clipped fan” JT-9 for the 757 Boeings narrow body follow-on to the 727, which ended production. Even the JT10D, which had been ruled out, as too big, too late, too much growth became a scaled down V-2500 International Aero engines venture with MTU of Germany and IHI of Japan in Ireland. Thus today I can see my stamp on several programs where much more organized much more disciplined higher placed individuals were either marching in place or headed for a pithy shriveled commercial or military requirement that would never make the production decision. My wife’s’ last words in California were “I’m going to switch you!” That’s what they all sought and thought they had made, a decision to move the Viet Nam war from withdraw to the win column. Frank Miller began to brief me about Pol Pot and the Viet Nam army in Cambodia. The millions of civilians slaughtered led to a movie and a book “The Killing fields” Gary Perkins had been in the Army in Viet Nam he and I talked about Idi Amin in Uganda in Africa. Atrocity was the way in the international arena. Gary went back to Commercial Engines and the Jt-9D. He returned to Connecticut. The Florida Professional Engineers association died on the vine without a vote. He had been interim president. The secretary was Don Podolsky a body builder with massive development. He sat in front of me and Gary sat behind. They watched me like a hawk. Dave Archer sat beside me. He worked for George Zewsky but not competitive engines like Frank Miller behind me. He once asked about the ATEGG I though t he said Maytag. Bud Maytag was the Chairman of National Airlines in Miami. No he was working on an advanced engine core that became the 1130 or F-100 update for the F-15E. One day I left early or stayed late at lunch and went to the bloody Duck Topless bar in Jupiter. I looked up and saw Dave Archer at the bar alone. We had made our decision. Put it in the o club for the fighter. Our part was done. It was like the drive to the unopened Corona Freeway in 1972. This time I took someone with me. We were adapting an airliner cabin using the PWA 727 executive jet, which flew daily from East Hartford to Sikorskiy airport and bask again. My wife had left in 1979. We needed an intimate setting of public domain. In our minds compared to some of sin we were being very conservative. The math aids would never know how cold our blood truly ran.  When you are competing with the corporation with the highest revenue in the world. And that corporation has a joint venture partner in a country alien to NATO, which sells commercial jets in competition with your former employer you have to be serious in your intent. Even then you are run off jobs. Like the soviet Army stay at homes believe GE can’t hurt them. Good housekeeping and practical food, a safe warm bed and colleagues to complain with are all you need.  I have lived in a tactile world. As a boy I built buildings from logs, tinker toys and plastic bricks and blocks.  (First the bricks were wooden.)  I pushed autos and tractors on the floor, the grass and in the garden. Later I built model airplanes, guns, men and ships. I decorated custom cars. My skills were utilitarian. I often built them when I was sick. This was frequent before I was a teenager. The strong solvent of airplane glue and dope kept me awake. Truly I would have to say my work lacked the fire finish and polish which craftsmen can affect. I did some sketching and painting but not enough to be considered artistically inclined. When I had the opportunity to take mechanical drafting in high school I declined. I did not think a skill based on perfect corners ands slave-like precision copying from master forms suited me. It also was a dumping ground for unruly boys where the instructor violently yelled and threw erasers at his doltish imitators. I found that some of the lack of precision was from the women I knew in my family and in my neighborhood. My grandmother and mother cultivated a homespun craft of rag rugs and homemade dresses from patterns. Functional was good enough for them, as they failed the fancier and more ornate designs. Their baking also lacked the design and perfection of professional bakers If the oven was too hot or too cold or the timer was set improperly they would simply scrape off the burnt spot or pop the item back in the oven until it was done. Liquid and solid dry measure was their only proportion, they never weighed, never assessed calories or vitamins and minerals. Because of this they became very obese, sloppy looking women who tried by setting their hair to maintain respect. They wore high-heeled shoes of little fashion and scrimped on jewelry choosing cheap brass brooches and earrings. Fineness in line never interested them. Hoop earrings were gypsy or artist. Thus they kept a small town retail look of dime store and small department clothing and pattern stores.  There was a ballet school in town and Miss Rushton the mistress tried to get me to attend with the lawyers, dentists and dime store owner’s daughters. My parents wouldn’t think of spending money on private instruction. They were public school teachers as my grandmother had been. My father on the other hand risked himself in craft. He had been a student at engineering school at MIT and Princeton as a Naval Officer. When his radio projects became trapped in risqué trial and error he would lapse into a model airplane. They always came out tightly fitted and smooth seamed. Mine always had something a little askew. Though I built on a breadboard so the fuselages wings and empennages were straight and true the formers always split or chipped a bit.  Even after sanding the paper covering was slack and creased. Glue splotches came through where the joints overlapped. Most of all my airplanes never flew well. I balanced them on the CG points by sticking pins in the ends and adding weight to the light end but when I wound the rubber bands with the propeller and launched them they either pitched up and settled ingloriously or they swung and dropped like stones their propellers flapping helplessly. Why this was so I am only just now starting to appreciate. Certainly the Testors and Guillow’s glider versions of F-86 Sabres and F-94 Thunderjets would soar and loop in imitation of Lanchester’s phugoids!! You could move the wings back and forth in the slot and they would power dive and then swoop or cruise effortlessly for a long reach. The larger volumes and double surface wings of the stick models just were clumsy display copies. A dragonfly like long rail with wing and empennage and rubber band motor all on wire landing gear legs would seem cool. Hah! The thing would spiral in a helical tunnel headed straight for the ground about twenty feet away. It was fast but it counter torqued the body as the rubber band unwound. There was no flip up ailerons to keep it in resistance to the motor. A better model was a hollow plastic teardrop vacuum plated with shiny aluminum. At the rear it had a fin and stabilizer empennage. The wings were mounted on a rod that struck through the fuselage. This rod acted as an axle on which the wing surfaces shaped like a corrugated trough were pointed. Looking form the side the trough was a wave or sinusoid shaped. The dip at the front of the axle and mound at the rear were reflected asymmetrical across the body. The mound was forward and the dip was rear. Each half wing could rotate independently. When a kite string was tied to the nose it would rise in the breeze it’s wings spinning and pumping wildly. For its’ weight it soared effortlessly and had very little drag.  My next efforts with powered flight using control lines and a 2 cycle on e cylinder engine were not quite as humbling. The recommendation was to build a big high wing free flight model and get used to launching and landing it. Set the trim and rudder to circle and return then put control lines on a similar model and work your way to circling standing in the center of the circle. I had seen someone fly such a model and the effortless up and down bumps in the circle and then loops and rolls seemed to be achievable.  My biggest problem was finding a place to fly it. Every place was either too rough and choked with 3-4 foot weeds or surrounded by a fence or tall tress that limited the circle size to far too small for easy flying. I finally settled on a Beechcraft Bonanza in solid balsa with only one elevator on the “vee” tail.  I built and painted the mode land added the control horns. By then it was winter. I got a Thimbledrome engine and began to run it in the basement. It screamed and surged as I learned how to start it and set the needle valve.  By spring the glow plug was burned out and it wouldn’t start. Phil McBride had a better Olsen& Rice with a bigger fuel tank. It quit after one run. So engines of .049 sizes are a difficult matter. I never flew that model. Mrs. Henney gave me some planes and engines that her son Carl had used and built. There was a big yellow biplane with no engine. A .049 OK Cub and a 1 cubic inch Champion in a red monoplane with about a 36” wingspan came with the lot. I bought some heavy cable wires to fly the big red monoplane and used the light wires on the biplane.  With the .049 the biplane was underpowered and the fuselage behind shrouded the propeller.  It would not climb unless you pulled in on both wires. As I was flying it this way it wrapped around a wire incinerator in the field I was using. It wasn’t hurt and I tried to decode the power it required to pull tight the wires and climb. I bought a .074 OK Cub for it and a new propeller. That was still too small. I didn’t have any more money so I took the big red one to New York on vacation. It made its first and last flight. I didn’t take the heavier cable wires. Instead I took the light wires by mistake. I had used them and just grabbed them when I left. I had way too much pull. About half way around the circle it broke one wire and headed straight up.  At the top it stalled pitched over and dove screaming in a power dive and hit the ground. Helpless with only one wire I watched it impact. Wump!! The fuselage and wings were destroyed. The engine and fuel tank survived with a broken needle valve. I found a new one in Syracuse along with the McCoy ¼ horsepower and twin cylinder engines then in favor. My budget was one needle valve and we searched in cannibalized parts for one hour. Aha! Just fits. I ran this engine with a new propeller in the basement but never built it a proper airframe. I did learn about some of the balances on the airframe. Years later in California I bought my sons an electric control line airplane with a rechargeable battery. It was light but just didn’t have the power to overcome bumpy asphalt near the forts in the park. That would have to wait for a Cox Mustang with the same Thimbledrome .049 I had first bought.  The .049 started easily and ran as adjusted. Its four bladed prop lifted it off once you got used to how to hold the handle.  It flew around and my son’s were eager to fly it they just… Sharron came and in her bully way insisted on flying it before they did. She jammed the nose into the ground and knocked off the prop spinner. Nobody was going to tell her how to fly the plane. A few more trys of the same and the tips were ground down and lost thrust. Now it was worthless she seemed satisfied and walked away.  I learned that a finer fit and function could be achieved than bullies and arsonists could understand. I found some of the teenage runaways in Los Angeles underground. They were exotic in looks and movement. They were comfortable around me. Their effort was to be cheaper to me. Unlike actresses and models that circulated with money these beauties preferred the austere. The contrast was extreme. When I began to draw and paint and use pastels in 1986 after I dropped my car I could still see their shapes in my mind.  I added to them as bodies to faces I found in the paper. I tried to imagine which face, which expression grew from which body parts, which model limb expression. I also tried to quickly capture and image on TV where it all came together. Various celebrities and the now controversial imitators of the runaways appeared. It was difficult to produce a single still as the perspective and the party on the screen changes. Ten seconds of image, then wait as other faces, bodies, chairs, props, backgrounds then another ten seconds. Try to catch a pose, facial outline a wisp of hair a limb set right. Then wait to add a background a color or a prop in front. Slowly I developed an edge. Now I can sketch people from memory based on short glimpses. I tried in the dim light of the gym to make portraits. They came out very dull. I studied the gym gear they were on and when I got that right the people began to take up a rhythm. I could see their garb, their hair and the thrust of their muscles. I make a lot of sketches and then tried a few color paintings in acrylic. I got so few they now are like jewels. When I bought a computer in 1994 using Christmas gift money, I immediately tried the mouse paint feature.  It was clumsy and jerky at first.  Slowly I mastered the shapes and lines. I copied models and catalogs after the print function failed in Sports illustrated.  The pictures needed custom palettes and developed those.  Soon I could make tints and flesh tones. It took longer to fit sizes in the window and scroll to the blank areas.  After Windows 95 the palettes don’t work. You must make and use color without saving it. Now I have a scanner and have scanned in my years of sketches. They are finer detailed than the mouse paints. Photos from magazines sometimes get wrinkles or skew areas. These can be retouched. The models can be stripped and redressed. Their body parts can be emphasized or blurred. Special effects can be applied. A vector-drawing program with bezier curves came with my computer in 1997. It is COREL Draw 5.0. This program can do crude mechanical drawings. The limit of positioning on a grid and the small size of the overall diagram limits the smoothness of the picture. Tracing outlines of photographs is more accurate. There is a rigid curve option to eliminate wavy and scratchy outlines. Filling the areas with color took a long time to learn. Unless the border is closed the fill fails. Joining curves is very clumsy and repetitive. The artwork would not be passable professionally. This is keeping with a code that frowns on hand development and original forms. Within my limits I press on. As I improve both my analytical forms for the shapes functions and as I improve the pictures the overall smoothness increases. Always there are errors obvious to me and ignored by reviewers. I have passed now through seventeen years of self-criticism.  Just as with the flying model aircraft whenever a configuration is ready and near perfect everyone leaves. I am alone with something either to heavy to launch alone or needing two people to start hold and then control. God is the only witness to my triumphs. If something is really right and I can demonstrate it a bully comes to damage the canvas.  So it is with censorship.  The negative lines I see make me wary and I don’t practice as much as I could, I need to find new techniques, new perspectives with out formal instruction. [My friend Nevelyn Brown, an artist from Shreveport talked me out of this and sent some of her teaching materials] Behind a wall of guilt, Backed by spears of hatred lays a shining forbearance. Once the sacrifice is made the memory keeps it until the next visit. With new skills the next visit takes me into a different room or onto a new plane. This is the world approach of the computer game. Each new temptress, each new performer, each new destroyer must be resisted, defeated, shed like an old skin.  The phases of the Air Force I have seen began with obsolescence of all the reciprocating propeller types. This took until nearly 1970. As the straight wings and the unsteady beat of the engines was shifted to the third world a retro-requirement began to develop. The A-7D and B-1B substituted subsonic type for supersonic type. [I don’t know how the B-1B came to have swing-wings again. The B-2 of course is subsonic as is the F-117] Reliability, cost, and load carrying ability were cited as

 The reasons. The A-10 almost was a turbo prop then it appeared without a radar, with straight wings as a Stuka J-87 or Stormovik reborn!! These were called “Trucks” There was fascination in high places with rejecting performance and buying and using a “truck.”  That fad has passed to stubborn drivers. Sport utilities, suburbans, pickups are now the buying rage. In the air force the subsonics have been allowed to retire and there is a new fad to “get tlucky” with the supesonic survivors. Just as the Soviets seemed to find a niche for the flogger MIG 23 and built a series of supersonic bombers, the blinder, Backfire and Blackjack a new thrust to rearm these aircraft with conventional ordnance proposed for tactical interdiction missiles has occurred. As the missiles drag out the developments and pass tests deemed to simple to convert to operations, the manned aircraft are given the warheads and told to innovate the next phase. This is tragic in scope since it attempts to expand the envelope of combat in an arena considered suicidal for aircraft. The “get lucky” idea then is that the threat assignment is paranoid. The threats will fail to coalesce and the aircraft will pass unhindered. Some of this thinking is coming from the ability to carry out destruction of command and control networks and disrupt communications. The view is that the autonomous role of threats gives an environment compatible with the penetration by manned aircraft. Screening software now eliminates starts or paths that are easily countered. Only revetted, impacted systems operating in a fail-safe mode can survive the initial simple operational plan using missiles. These primitive holdouts then are too sparse and casual in their encounters to pose a threat o total attack. The joint strike fighter now being described in contract definition at Boeing and Lockheed-martin is a reactive vehicle. Surviving threats can be expected to appear randomly in location and numbers. Without coordination their attacks are assessed as worthless by their command authorities. It is the focus of invincibility that breaks the threat counterattack.  To field slow heavy aircraft burdened with major strikes at this time would be to encourage rogue attacks an the kind of blue sky hunting that characterized World War II German defenses. Instead each JSF can knock down each counterpart without fear of loss. The separation existing at the time of firing ensures that our intact air network can target additional fighters. Can the emerging former Communist countries hide their capitalist intentions? Can they develop market economies, banking and internal taxation based on sales and income as well as land without foreign exchange and associated trade?  Three countries operating under sanctions show they cannot. Cuba, North Korea, and Iraq all have rusted and crumbled as the Soviet Union ceased its aid. Without external sources of modern technology their agrarian revolution types of systems linger in a medieval case society without even the handicrafts ands luxury crafts of a trading nation.  Few tourists visit there. China is awakening to become a coastal power using heavy industry and mining developed for armaments to fuel a construction and city building boom.  The wars and corps that jolted Asia seem to have ended as a deep recession spreads. The quick student and consumer reaction in Indonesia has subsided. Prosperity is so rare and recent in this area that except for an elite, which commits suicide in Japan, there is a familiarity to the economy, which has appeared. Old memories of the base of the ascent to wealth abound. Not until the public rejects the reforms and demands a younger untutored approach will the loss of economic muscle be noticed. The noisiest threat today is in Kosovo where the villagers have fled to the forest. Factions here are testing their armed powers against a government, which uses all out force against the skirmishers. Currently 7-3-1998 a cease fire is being explored. There is some difficulty in finding a leadership to explore this course. Just as when Serbia claimed inability to halt shelling of Sarajevo because artillery was not under Serbian command now the KLF cannot be focused. Their demands and goals are unknown. U.N. negotiators are beginning as observers, a term coined when forces were sent to Cyprus years ago. There is a medical and psychiatric element being sought of what in the body can expose firing or liberal thought. How can intransient pain and hardship find supervision from outside? The signal structure of a people living on the edge of a schism between East and West is being damped.  The more complex difference protected by deserts, mountains and oceans to China is a protagonist of America’s isolation. [Lost on September 11, 2001.]  Intellectual property, intelligence, patents, and copyrights need to know; these concepts express the sedentary rules view of government. Now that sedentary people can travel not in sedan chairs or cycles but in limousines with darkened windows there is a practical view that…  so life becomes crazy and you can see that there is a method of error, which men follow. Whenever something breaks or crashes there is a method which has decreed what is done and not done, where things are observed and where they are overlooked, where things are changed or repaired or replaced and where they are ignored or neglected. This method of error is mostly an economic law. Deeply entwined with the method of error is negotiation with nature. Man seeks adventure and risk. He even seems settled just so he can await a surprise or discovery in mostly stable scenery. My major task through the years has been rounding up strays. This includes designs and corporations and it includes runaway girls. There are always some who have been excluded by the major herd and fallen to rustling. Like beeves they get stuck in river bottoms in mud or out on rock promontories. They eat their way through pastures for months and then reach a rock outcrop or box canyon where water is good but food is far behind. My personal feelings and motivations are the only thread that hosts this activity to round up strays. Even a spirit or conscience can’t explain the way I continue when the results are fruitless. Only a “little way” as assigned to Doctor of the Church Saint Therese of Liseux “the little flower” seems similar. On this path at first life’s convictions are enough. For each answer you get two free questions is a way of saying you are on a dangerous run where the risk increases as you stabilize the immediate risk.  The current task falls into place and can be reported. The future shoots ahead like water in rapids. The flume billows and drives down into a standing wave. Thus well planned approaches which have strategic decision points to reassess and change branches finally lead to a flattening of progress as the depth of research necessary to make breakthroughs is cut back and partitioned. Sometimes a new team can find a way where old team is stalemated. Other times the method of error prevails as systems are allowed to age and cycle. The government has done well in researching aircraft crashes, even reconstructing fuselages for bomb investigations and reviewing the flight data recorder “black boxes” to release to the public the facts of the case. As I have worked with the PC I have changed my method from one I used with the TI-82 calculator. With the TI-82 I would erase the method or the program as soon as it solved the problem or as soon as the program ran well. The very next day I would start afresh and solve the problem again. This kept me from building a defense of the existing solution. No matter how good it was. No matter how complex and unlikely to be rediscovered. I erased the rule. This kept me looking for simpler easier to remember ways.  The method of error could not find root in my memory.  Likewise I did not modify old methods or amend them to resolve new conflicts. Thus the negotiation with nature, which demands revelations when I want them, also was allowed to fade away. Business and industry tumbled into the abyss. Philosophy and academic pursuit met no discourse. No students came to lecture. No lyceum set a journey for fellow travelers.  I began to simply to explore memory. What had I memorized and how accurately could I recall it? Another question began to surface, “How much did the methods available in Windows PC’s censor and degrade the verbal, manual and machine methods of the past?”   A good example of this was Microsoft Draw and Microsoft Paint. To make a picture at first I would only use Microsoft Paint.  That was the only application with sufficient colors on the palette and tools in the toolbox to create people, faces, clothes and greeting card type messages. One day I opened Microsoft Draw and began an outline of an F-4 Phantom II. In my mind the nose, tail and afterburner nozzles emerged. It was stubby and the color fills were inappropriate. Without too much effort I could say that it was a phantom caricature. This picture sat for more than a year.  I sued the tail as a cut and paste picture on mail envelopes. Late in 1995 I decided to try to write a program to fly a Phantom as I had run ABS-II in 1969. I surprised myself. Not only did the subroutine names tumble out but also I could remember drag polars and engine thrust tables. By December the program would keep track of a  “flight” of 1000 seconds or so. There was some serious confusion in my mind about CL alpha; the lift curve slope with angle of attack and my real problem was I did not have a standard atmosphere data table in English units. I used one in the handbook of Chemistry and Physics, which was in metric units. The conversion of density, Mach number and viscosity got me down. I put the program, which I had written, in the free Qbasic on the Packard-Bell archive. That was that. It set there another two years until my Turbo Pascal had been replaced by DELPHI 1.0 and after Windows 95 with Delphi 2. I converted the Qbasic code to run as Pascal subroutines behind a Delphi form.  This made a lot more data available and I kept going until I thought I had the metric conversion solved. I built a AH-56 Cheyenne armed Helicopter to go with my Phantom using conversations with Chuck Heathco about his Lift Systems Incorporated coaxial rotor personal helicopter which a Bendix inventor had designed for he and Barry Briggs. Both programs eventually stymied me. They created impressive maps of data but eventually their behavior revealed something was in error in the formulation. They were my first efforts alone. I sent them to the Replica Fighters association.  He couldn’t open them on his Apple Macintosh. I went to the bookstore and got some books on aerodynamic theory. By February of 1998 I could see the problems in my formulation. I still had a lot of propeller theory and wing and empennage interaction to wade through. Now on the 4^th of July I can report I fixed the metric conversion in both programs. The density and pressure is now correct. I made a first cut at a drag buildup using a known NACA profile. My memory is being refreshed. The CDI/CL squared was a function of mach and CL no Mach and Altitude as my first efforts showed.  Thus the non-linearity in the drag polar and not the effect of Reynolds number is what separated the several curves.  I have not yet accounted for all the supersonic drag buildup. Is a square root of 1 minus M squared term required?  Does the body drag include ram drag and base drag for the inlet configuration? Is the thrust and fuel flow corrected for inlet distortion and thus does it include a ramp schedule for the inlet moveable ramps on the F-4?   The tables in ABS were detailed in some ways and simple in others. The data base approach with interpolated data between points differs greatly from an atmosphere based on lapse (temperature) rate where an analytic formula gives values for each parameter for each altitude.  In June I purchased a General Aviation design program from Design Analysis Research Corporation (DARC). It allows me to test my data in a standard research tool, which uses regression on airframe data. As I work on the propeller and engine analysis to include momentum as well as blade element theory I can see a way to recover my Gas Turbine Fundamentals and F-100 engine data. With the Phantom and F-100, I could also squeeze out a DC-9 transport flight manual. This would lead me into a theory of turbine-powered aircraft on the PC. That would still leave the air-to-air tactics and air-to-ground weapon delivery to be programmed. I could take some of the radar search and track formulas I have tested and insert them to give a war game research toll. The rocket in MSWORKS could become a missile. Then the whole thing could be put in a multi-aircraft frame for formation flying and combat tactics. What a dry wind to replicate the years of TAC?  The difficulty of formulating the overall mask has included the use of “STRUCT” in “C” as a way to input and output data blocks global to certain sections of the program. Typical aerodynamic work involves resolving force vector and moment diagrams into dimensionless quantities CL, CD and CM. At greater level of detail derivatives with respect to alpha, beta and phi allow six degrees of body attitude freedom. For resolving 2-D wing airfoil data into 3-D wing body and empennage data gamma and double–u are used.  It would seem that there are only 6 variables required in global form h, CL, CD, CM, GAMMA and w. The other variables are local to specific routines. This is far from correct if a trajectory is to be followed such as takeoff, landing, climb or maneuver. Even cruise adds fuel consumption c. This assumes velocity and angle of attack are only local variables. When radar is added then the geometric scale of the frame (in x, y, z or R, THETA, PHI) is necessary and some idea of the earth’s curvature and terrain masking needs to be included. By this time a batch approach with global database far exceeds any analytic separation of variables into objects with local scope. This then creates a problem in Delphi, visual basic, or Visual C++. The forms are tied to their tables and writing across forms either results in lockup or no transaction occurs. Automation methods, which write in closed or inactive forms, are complicated to maintain registry concurrency. Just as with the report programs forms are limited in how many boxes for data are open not by parameter limits but by appearance. Opening a large table in Delphi as edit boxes on the form (the default) leaves no space for output data or titles and controls. Using an auxiliary form gives null behavior for the controls. Visual Basic allows several tables to be opened with a single form. The form can’t update them however. Forms can’t write in other forms easily.  The best way to work turns out to be to use subroutines in Delphi to set tables as constants. Instantiating them at the bottom of the form only will work well for one large table or so. Remember the program I am remembering was FORTRAN-II and used BLOCKCOMMON data from card decks. Probably real programmers and numeric analysts could easily solve these struggles. Instead it is more likely they would isolate the engineers and force them to accept unusable code. There is a big push nowadays to image processing away from calculations. This finds itself in the processor as RISC. Ordinary Cartesian graphs are now very specialized output. Similarly functions and even powers are reduced to a few usable “business” calculations. Perhaps some new thinking is in order.  For example typically atmosphere is an object. This leads to Medusa headed or Python headed problems. For one altitude there is a myriad of parameters output. Instead perhaps the atmosphere should be combined with some other object to give an object with one-on-one input and output. The wing or fuselage is not a good match.  Its data is typically a function of shape or graphical profile. This then is a place where near infinite numbers of data or groups of analytical functions result in just a few output parameters.  Neither “object”: has the property of a function or set relation necessary to define a mathematical object and result in good processor behavior. The wing/ fuselage would be a good image except the “color’ desired is an invisible palette painting flows to yield a functional picture. This begins to lead to the windows view. The problem then shifts to the atmosphere where gravity is the painter and molecules are the tools. Eventually we wish to merge a picture of molecules arranged by men with other pictures of molecules as tools with a picture of molecules arranged by nature with gravity and sunlight as the tools.  Working at this level of description requires us to describe microscopic processes in laminar and chaotic layers. Somehow we must facilitate the rigid, fluid, and turbid boundaries of our description without exceeding memory and processor limits. Literally trillions of molecules are interacting. They are visible only to an eye aided by electron microscopy or x-ray thermograph. Older views of hard and soft x-rays based on a physiological model are not consistent with modern practice. NMR and PET scanners cleanly divide not only thermal areas but also behavioral or “firing” areas from dormant themes. This view integrates the engine with the structure as more than just electrical and hydraulic power in fly-by-wire modes.  It gives a living interaction like bird flight rather than the box kite view of yester year. These albums of flows and skin contour transmission requirements yield a tougher flying body than the stall break, spin, unstart concept of metal and composite airframes. It is this radial winch network view, which seems to describe the current analysis methods. [Graphic of radial winch with the following captions] on one graphic (winch to tension or release) or the other (‘balsa’ colloid filled membrane foam) One view would wind tunnel test the rig and add hardener to freeze it after a minimum was reached. This is basically how a muscle reacts o an overload to become “stiff.”  It burns off all the solvent maintaining an area as fluid then adds hardener to the resinous residue as a catalyst to form the lump or “charley horse.”  If the muscle is carefully overloaded one result may be a fibrous tree, which can be used near maximum for about a month before it collapses and severe pain results in a need to reduce to minimum load. The logical integrity of this process remains as the programmer’s effort after the program is written and the gym events are past.  Similarly erotic or sexual events, which occur at a distance where visual interaction is possible gives a form, even a child, form if the two imaginations span the space. More formal looks at the code by conversation or touching sets the controls. Without actual direct communication about programming this virtual logic space creates a machine world. My entry then in machine world space is a gymnasium, a food store and a bedroom with tow computers, a calculator and a pen and tablet. The exterior inputs are from television, books and magazines. This whole setup revolves around me without touch or feel of another human being.  I contracted with three women one from Cuba, one from the embassies in Washington, and one from Nicaragua. What I needed was the keys to the Soviet Union entered virtually through the left. Finally in late 1984 I was ready. I got a dictionary from Wayne State University bookstore and began to read my American Bible Society Russian Bible in earnest.  Finally I was finished I tried writing with my left hand using sounds from St. Mary’s Ukrainian Orthodox Church as a guide. This allowed me to avoid the most threatening people in English. I also read Armenian and Turkish to remember the autonomous peoples of the steppes. I distributed the Sermon on the Mount to my neighbors and to the widows and orphans of the DC-8 crash in Newfoundland. I put together a DC-9 description in Russian to test the technology of the dictionary. It was not empty of words. The numbers and metals were there. Words for engine and airplane and pilot were there. Wing, empennage, instruments, hydraulic system remained pictures. Now I would look for airflow, drag, lift, circulation, recognizing that the method itself was international. Other words like moment or inertia I would not expect in general use. Eventually as I needed structures, tensile strength, torsional flexure or stress and strain I could expect to have to approach professors and engineers. Fro the time being I avoided those patterns. I knew from classified sources more about the signature of the technology. It’s image, signals, operating concept, order of battle and even control room panels and texts. These would be of strictly military use. There was no flight manuals, maintenance manuals, unit monthly reports or summaries.  Thus my leftist eventually found pain and had to return through an Egyptian door to be recognized again on the right. Learning to be proper in the discipline of hydrodynamics as Yuri Andropov was requires terms like head, coefficient, discharge, pressure and shear as well as Latin terms like modulus. Some of these terms reflect American, French and British separation of the study into areas of discipline.  There is much more known about metals, fibers, materials of a molecular and atomic nature. The concerns are now biological and not radiation Colder processes of life like germination have replaced fire and strong chemical bond of the industrial revolution Polymers have replaced most decorative uses of base metals. Oil and its refined descendents surpassed coal nearly fifty years ago in residences and businesses. Now even industry has left coal. The world of rolled sheets and ductile beams that formed appliances, automobiles, trucks, ships, even roofs is growing old. It is far form finished. Another world of thin films, substrates, amorphous glass, doping and photolithography has appeared to challenge the monsters. Aided by a culture of encoding using electrical signals and not pen and ink or pencil and paper this new speech draws on a less mobile population. The PCS and TDY and annual leave of three generations of Americans have shrunk back to include mostly remote and dangerous assignments.  Some strange concepts for chips that came found friends and then were caught in a whirlpool of abandonment are surface acoustic wave [just saw some 2.45 Ghz SAW as microwave transmission line filters], fluidics and the germanium and gallium arsenate ‘soft’ chips preceding the silicon versions. Metal oxide semiconductor (MOS), complementary oxide semiconductor (CMOS) each has reduced poser and voltage requirement. Transistor Transistor Logic (TTL) Darlington and Super-Conducting Quantum Induction Device (SQUID) all have made a mark in sensitive instruments with military uses. Charge Coupled Devices (CCD) and micro controllers with linear predictive coding have pre ambled the L1 and L2 logic caches of today’s super-scalar microprocessors. Encoder, decoder and the messaged compression and packaging schemes used for long lines and submarine cables now exist on corporate networks as topological shore structures to enhance multiplexing for sophisticated use. Each of these views today sees a piggyback logic script on each new piece of hardware. The shelf life of code has become less than a week. In some areas the code half-life is less than a day. Yet hardware rumbles when capital decisions must be made. Each move to a new architecture leaves gaps as rules proposed hang without bonds to the future. Impost was the watchword of Vietnam. This struggle found root in space. Surprise the material has taken off but never landed. Now it sees service as a switch and compander on a synchronous orbit “bird.”  The collapse of the Russian production system which built of iron, concrete and rubber but they had had used more oil.  They built more ships and trusted less to local exploitation of hills or ore and valleys of coal seams. China could not collapse this way. It is still agrarian. Drought, pestilence and wasteful methods are its major threats.  Unlike Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia and the African nations it has built a major population insulated against these scourges. Every on knows the hillside terraces for rice. Less well known is the agronomy, veterinary and medical science that keeps China whole. A world of silicon is the outback of Australia, the Sahara of Africa, the Arab Peninsula and the Gobi desert, along with the American southwest, the Sonoran desert of Mexico and the Peruvian-Chilean desert. Each of the vile spots has no arable land. Even with water the stretches lack humus. Vegetable mass has never occurred there. And the bracken swamps and muddy wastelands contain harsh chemicals used now for explosives and fertilizer.  The missionaries and military expeditions led prospectors, explorers and the Peace Corps into this land of the bush.  Dreaded aborigines still keep Stone Age rituals of gathering roots and game. These men’s danger is they woo the civilized to believe they can persist equally. Weeks without food and days without water give visions of bright networks. Whether networks of interior, strokes of Lightning or glass crusts on living things phantoms and ghosts form in the mind masking what I sin the immediate visual acuity. A trained mind captures the poles and then reattaches to civilization.  A good comparison of the approaches is to look at four different conveyances on two different routes out into the Mojave Desert. Eventually all roads lead to California 395 headed past Mammoth Mountain and Mono Lake.  That then takes another conveyance and ends at the Mother Lode to compare with still another one coming up Interstate 5 through the Coachella Valley and Salinas.  All to be finally reversed by a ten thousand mile trip round robin of the Northwest, West Coast and back on Interstate 8 to Florida and then up U.S. 41 to Michigan. There the story ended. So the first two vehicles grew out of the first trip of a 1948 ford with a Chevrolet engine from Saginaw, Michigan to Chatsworth, California. The desert review began in a 1966 Chevelle with air conditioning.  It also traveled to San Felipe, Mexico. It was a strong rare SS-396 with white leather seats. Towing a rail trailer with Safeco Insurance it found the second underwriter. [Two Pintos one rented in Lancaster, California and one driven down from Michigan to Florida are hidden, also a 1953 Ford that went from Michigan to China town and then to the same uncle in the insurance business in Fresno, California before returning to Michigan.] The first carrier has been Auto Owners Insurance with a brief stint with Allstate and a claim in town. As the risk increased I moved to a 67 Chevrolet C-10 pickup. In1973 it got a strong arm 430 Buick engine but never went to Mexico. Instead a Toyota Corolla 1600 5-speed coupe made the second phase as Baja California developed. The Corolla also went up Interstate 5 to San Francisco except for California 1 up the Monterrey Peninsula. Then in 1970 the company wanted to bind its own insurance first in Ford Galaxies and then in American Motors (AMC) Matadors with 304 V-8 engines. With air conditioning the trip over the El Cajon pass at San Bernardino soon leads to a turnoff as the main road goes to Victorville and Barstow. California 395 has no towns or cross roads stores as it crosses high desert Antelope valley headed for Red Mountain where headed up mine tailings and weathered shacks show a modest strike continues. At cross roads a tiny café serves pumpkin pie and coffee to travelers who began at 4:00AM. It is now nearly 10:00AM. The town of Ridgecrest serves as the gateway to Naval Weapons Center China Lake.  There are quite a few residential streets for the civilians who work at the base. The retail is behind dirt aprons off the asphalt main road in the form of one large super market and various cafés, bars and liquor stores. A used car lot and gas stations complete the road to the corner where you either go right to the base or left down a long straight road that intersects the road from Mojave to Lone Pine to the North. This is the East side of the Sierra Nevadas.  There is no pass until farther North. Sonora Pass opens in July or late June from twenty to thirty foot snowfalls. It’s a place of cowards and heroes no one moderate would ever come here. A later trip in a BMW 530 3 liter six cylinder sedan with air conditioning shows the ridiculous contrast of European luxury in desert surroundings.  That pretty well ended the sailor so how did the flyer travel? He chose the route from LAX, the Los Angeles Airport, to Century Boulevard and then to Interstate 405, the San Diego Freeway.  Over the pass in the Santa Monica Mountains where Mulholland Drive and Sunset boulevard meets the road runs past Valencia where orange groves gave way to houses and the Walt Disney endowed art t school.  The road to Palmdale and Lancaster runs through Newbury a retirement community replacing farms. In Lancaster the Antelope Valley Inn has a spa and Swimming pool for guests. Here I picked up a Ford Pinto, which we used to commute to Edwards AFB to the East. Now that trip in 1980 seems so long ago. It began when I visited Tropico Gold Mine and I met the owners, the Halliburtons. They suggested a look at some other properties up North.  I drove the Pinto through Bakersfield by following the railroad grade.  The Salinas Valley was overflowing with grape vineyards in July as I followed I-5.  Near Livermore I turned east to look at Roaring Camp and North to Colima, Grass valley and Placerville. I stayed in Placerville in a motel hanging over the Stanislaus River. Doubling back got me to the original digging and then Sutter’s Mill before reaching Kennedy Mine north. A trip up to Lake Tahoe and Tahoe Summit tested the climbing ability above Placerville. Returning used the brakes and suspension on a huge river of concrete.  Now after the Kennedy Tailing Wheels I began the long switchback climb to Sonora pass.  After clearing the summit in deep overhangs of snow left by rotary plows just a week before I drifted down open switchbacks to the Mono valley and the return on 395. The last time through was in an older Pinto station wagon with an MPG rear end and 2.5 liter Americanized Taunus German 4 in line. This time I came down from Seattle and Oregon. I refueled at a town called Doreen, which featured gas stations, which opened and closed in relays. As the lights went out on the last open pumps in town about 11:00PM I saw another set of lights appear about a mile West. Could the Pinto gas gauge be that far off/ I went and found a station just opening for the night. This got me to Callaway Grocery Store in a little canyon on a road from the freeway to California One where it begins in Eureka. There are two huge wooden jacks in front of the lumberyard just like the tow huge concrete jacks in Hollywood, Florida. What agency put them both there?  This time I had Auto Owners insurance again and avoided the desert. I drove through San Francisco and slept near the lighthouse at Seal Rock. The trip through Monterey And Big Sur was great. I continued on past San Simeon and Hearst’s Castle to refuel in tiny Fort Bragg.  The pumps were on top of a four feet high concrete pier to keep crashers from hitting them according to the young woman who owned the little gas station. Well it was California one through Pismo Beach and Petaluma to Gaviota then a brief stint of freeway to Long Beach. Nothing had changed at McDonnell Douglas. Building 52 and 5 on the East side of the airport had been built before 1971. That had ended the desert underwriter. I still had the trip through Arizona, New Mexico and Texas to add after a phone call from Gaviota found a realtor in Florida. What did I expect to accomplish there? That had been Nationwide and State farm. They had transferred to tiny Cosmopolitan in Washington, DC. I remembered when Tricia wearing her butterfly bikini had brought out the Lloyd’s radio with a broken antenna. That was about the only place we could get coverage for a tan. Finally one night even that slipped away. We were penalty bare just like the skips on malpractice insurance among the anesthesiologists. Creepy, how sports coupes had lost all proportion. Their rates were sky high and the thrill seekers had left.  Now gray men with moustaches not young blonde surfers drove Corvettes and Mustangs.  The dandy could buy them cheaply second hand. The insurance racket on condominiums and rentals led to the farthest Southwest corner of the U.S. up on a ridge favored by coyotes looking down at homes moved and a turkey trailer beyond the border patrol shining spot lights in the darkness. I looked across the wasteland at the Pacific dark. It wasn’t so long before I parked the Pinto for good. No million-dollar settlement, no death and dismemberment benefit had marred the relationship. Now thirteen years later you can buy software insurance. If your computer goes down on a business day or vandals hack your frontend you can be compensated for the damages. The more ominous items like murders by out of control robots o traffic signals that go out and cause accidents have become unmentionable. Trained underwriters see these as motiveless and truly accidental. The current civil infraction approach to traffic violations shows the base is secure. I wrote myself through congressman Micas office to totally deflate my security. I wrote myself back in through Congressman Levin’s office. In between was stealth. Here again is some measure of security. I can cover an airport in my underwriting scheme again. The specific problem that arose was what was the liability footprint from a wide body aircraft crash. The problem involves in technical terms, one, two and three-dimensional errors. What was wanted is a single final summary error. As events were to prove the question was on of manual overcompensation for machine frailty.  The temptation to improvise an immediate compromise of an interlock or to force a seal where the fit is out of tolerance due to springing of suspension hinges was too great one day. What should have been an on-t time departure became a spilling of bodies from the sky. The resultant international safety inquiry showed that there was no fail-safe venting of pressure above the floor when the cargo hold area below lost pressure. [This was Turk-Hava-Yolari in Paris a DC-10] The problem I began with was barometric altimeter +/- 200 feet, radar altimeter +/- 10% of less than 1000 feet, inertial guidance +/-3 N-mi/hour of flight @ 450 kts. Level, straight, TERCOM fix +/-500 meters in rugged terrain, attitude gyros +/-0.5degrees initial and +/- 1 minute per hour, wind 0-110 kts. thrust +/-2%, CL +/- 5%. CD +/- 10%, CM +/-1%, Drop altitude +/- 10 feet, Drop velocity +/- 1 knot, Drop wind +/- 5 knots, Drop pitch +/- 1 minute, Drop azimuth +/- 10 minute, Drop roll +/- 1 minute, Coast start time +/- 0.1 second safe & arm +/- 1 second decoy, weight +/- 50 lb., S (wing area) +/1 ft squared, S0 (frontal area) +/- 3 ft. squared, tail moment arm +/- 1 cm.  Ultimately all these errors are economic. Just as the use of a rugged illiterate man to close the baggage hold was affected by the cost of training, the pay and allowances, and even the availability of employees locally, so the individual craftsmen and engineers also have accuracies which depend not only on their training and service but also on how many tests and what quality and accuracy of instruments they are allowed to use on those tests. It is safe to say that the failure to determine what the actual consequences of an explosive decompression were was the fault of the aerospace industry. All three wide bodies received floor vents, as a retrofit after tests showed the floors would collapse. The later Sioux City demonstration that a turbine failure in the number two engine, mounted in the tail fin, would knock out all three redundant hydraulic systems again showed gun-shy supervisors unwilling to look at the big picture in vulnerability. Earlier CF-6 failures in the banjo area showed that major structural damage would occur. In Sioux City extra pilots supplied extra human beef to land a critically damaged airplane. It was the off the canvas decisions where the boxer had just been knocked down and he was going to win three fights straight because he could see his error that led to risk taking in airline meetings where guilt was revealed and to everyone’s surprise orders were cancelled. It is a feature of the 70’s, 80’s and 9o0’s that manufacturers are increasingly held responsible in law suits while operators are bypassed where treaties and precedent have limited their liability. Now when aircraft are operated at ages of 40 or even soon 50 years the manufacturer still is held responsible.