By Neil Chance
First the disclaimers. One, I want all of you English Majors who read this to cut me some slack, because I am not a professional writer. Two, I am not going to use any names to protect the innocent.
There is nothing romantic about my getting a job at The Boeing Co. I simply needed a job and they were hiring. I hired in on 15 April 1957 and retired on 1 August 1999.
They hired me as an Engineering Draftsman. Then they put me through four weeks of learning the Boeing way of doing things.
This all started on 15 April 1957 and I still remember that day as if it was yesterday. The person that I was going to be working for took me for a tour of the Plant II factory where I would be making drawing changes to the B52-G.
For a kid that grew up on the Oregon coast, and never having any close up experience with an airplane of that size, I was overwhelmed. How could anything that big get off of the ground.
OK, here is the quick run down of the major programs that I have worked on. B52-G, 707-80 (first commercial airplane built in the USA), Bomarc Missile, Minuteman Missile, KC-135 Tanker, Air Force One, The Doomsday Airplane, NASA 515, YC-14, AWACS, 727, 737, 747, 757, 767, 777, and many smaller programs. What you just read in this paragraph represents a segment of aviation history that can only be understood by the people like myself who lived and worked in the midst of those programs. The general public only sees the end result of the blood, sweat and tears that the people put into those programs and systems to make the end product safe and reliable.
Now let’s forget the dull stuff and get into the stuff that is more interesting. I will tell stories as they come to mind. What I am trying to say, is, that they will not be in any sort of chronological order.
Let’s start with NASA 515. It’s a Boeing 737 that NASA bought to see if they could change the design of commercial airplanes to make them more efficient. The idea was to put the cockpit in the middle of the airplane over the wing, where the center of gravity is on all airplanes. I won’t get into the engineering dynamics of the idea. Need I say, that it took a lot of engineering to come up with a cockpit in the middle of the airplane. Because you have never heard of this, you can probably guess what the outcome was. We put the cockpit in the middle of the airplane and we flew it. It was such a bazaar concept that I felt this air of anxiety over the whole program and everyone around me. It was the only program that I ever felt that. Don’t get me wrong, the people that came up with this idea didn’t want to get anybody killed. The normal cockpit was still in the nose of the airplane. They just added a second cockpit back in the fuselage. They had cameras mounted in the nose of the airplane with TV screens back in the second cockpit so the pilots flying the airplane from back there could see where they were going. If you stop and think about it for a minute you will figure out why this idea didn’t work. The human mind works in a three-dimension world. Landing an airplane on a sunny day in two-dimension world is one thing but trying to land in a two-dimension world in bad weather is next to impossible. Of course there was the other choice. If all conditions were right you could do an autopilot landing. As a footnote, after the program was over NASA took the airplane back east. I have a picture of that airplane and over the years when I look at that picture I wondered what happened to 515, then a couple of months ago my wife and I went to see the Museum of Flight at the South end of Boeing Field. As we went out side to see some of the airplanes on display, guess what, there sat NASA 515. Man did that bring back a lot memories.
In the next article I will tell you a little bit about what has to happen to get an airplane to the point where the flying public can get on an airplane. And I will tell a couple of stories, one of which will be about “The Doomsday Airplane”