Roadrunners Internationale Contractor's Forum, October 6, 2005

Nevada Test Site Oral History Project University of Nevada, Las Vegas Roadrunners Internationale Contractors’ Forum October 6, 2005 Las Vegas, Nevada Recorded By Mary Palevsky © 2007 by UNLV Libraries Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews conducted by an interviewer/ researcher with an interviewee/ narrator who possesses firsthand knowledge of historically significant events. The goal is to create an archive which adds relevant material to the existing historical record. Oral history recordings and transcripts are primary source material and do not represent the final, verified, or complete narrative of the events under discussion. Rather, oral history is a spoken remembrance or dialogue, reflecting the interviewee’s memories, points of view and personal opinions about events in response to the interviewer’s specific questions. Oral history interviews document each interviewee’s personal engagement with the history in question. They are unique records, reflecting the particular meaning the interviewee draws from her/ his individual life experience. Produced by: The Nevada Test Site Oral History Project Departments of History and Sociology University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 89154- 5020 Director and Editor Mary Palevsky Principal Investigators Robert Futrell, Dept. of Sociology Andrew Kirk, Dept. of History The material in the Nevada Test Site Oral History Project archive is based upon work supported by the U. S. Dept. of Energy under award number DEFG52- 03NV99203 and the U. S. Dept. of Education under award number P116Z040093. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in these recordings and transcripts are those of project participants— oral history interviewees and/ or oral history interviewers— and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U. S. Department of Energy or the U. S. Department of Education. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 1 Roadrunners Contractors’ Forum October 6, 2005 Table of Contents TD Barnes: Introduction, brief personal background relating to Oxcart program 1 Dennis Norquist: Pratt & Whitney development of the engines for the A- 12 program 2 Robert Murphy: Introduction to Area 51, first test of the U- 2, joins the A- 12 program, builds the D- 21, works on the SR- 71 6 William J. Fox: Honeywell airplane testing, Mele Vojvodich bailout, design work on SR- 71 system, testing work for Lockheed, Senior Prom project 11 Robert Davenport: Pratt & Whitney fuel and oil system development for aircraft engines 19 Ken Swanson: Sylvania Red Dog and Blue Dog ECM systems 26 John Byrnes: Intelligence collection for ECM systems 28 TD Barnes: Military educational background and work with missile electronics, X- 15 project in Beatty and tracking the A- 12, participation in speed run of the YF- 12, joins the A- 12 program at Area 51, security procedures for the project, early days of Have Blue 32 Wayne Pendleton: Work on LO technology for the A- 12, MIG- 21 test program, radar testing on aircraft at Area 51 39 TD Barnes: Conclusion 47 Roadrunners_ Contracts_ 10062005_ TOC_ ARCH. doc UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 1 Roadrunners Contractors’ Forum October 6, 2005 in Las Vegas, NV Panel participants: T. D. Barnes, Dennis Norquist, Robert Murphy, William J. Fox, Robert Davenport, Ken Swanson, John Byrnes, Wayne Pendleton, Frank Molinaro, David Bennet [ 00: 00: 00] Begin Track 1, Disc 1. TD Barnes: I guess everybody got a fast lunch between the events here. We did this forum— this is a new one— for the contractors, and being an Army guy I did it different. I said, you, you, you, and you have just volunteered. So we’ve got some more that will be up here that have not arrived and that’s the reason we’re stalling. But I’ll tell you a little bit about what we are going to try to accomplish today. I’ll tell you a little bit about myself. I was previously on the NASA [ National Aeronautics and Space Administration] high range. I was involved with their X- 15— their X8- 70 projects. My background was radar telemetry, ECM [ electronic counter measure], ECCM and this sort of thing. And I was recruited by the [ Central Intelligence] Agency off the X- 15 sites for a special projects team at Area 51. My involvement was slightly different than some of the other gentleman here. I had formerly worked under top secret clearance, and being as I was working under a secret clearance, it had elapsed, so they had to get me reinstated, so they loaned me out. They recruited me but they loaned me out to the NERVA [ Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application] Project for about three months with Pan Am [ Pan American Airways] paying my payroll and I worked on two or three little nuclear tests until they could get my clearance through, and then I disappeared into the black world and did my thing out there. Where’s Jim Freedman? Is he here? He was one of my co- workers out there. We were cadre at the Area [ 51]. Whereas some of the gentlemen here, some of them worked on various projects out there, but we UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 2 stayed from project to project. I actually got in at the Area [ 51] on the tail end of Oxcart, even though I was working on it, starting in ’ 65 while I was on the NASA high range. These other gentlemen, they were out there, they came out in ’ 62 or maybe even earlier. After the Oxcart program ended, we waited around for the big program to start, which was Project Have Blue— and then we had Have Doughnut, Have Ferry, Have Drill— that was the first one. So some of us will be talking a little bit about some of the other projects other than Oxcart since the theme this year is fifty years at Groom Lake. The Roadrunners started what they have out there now. If we hadn’t been there and got it kicked off, they’d be doing it somewhere else. So that’s a little bit about myself, and what I’m going to do is just have each of these gentlemen get up and tell a little about themselves, what they did as far as the Oxcart or whatever they want to talk about, we’ll have a few others, and then we’re going to reach out into the crowd because there’s many, many contractors that did a lot of work out there. We don’t have any of the camera people up here. There’s supposed to be some up here, and hopefully we will have them before this is over. So we will be reaching out into the audience as we see one, because that’s what we’re wanting to do, is give you a broad spectrum of what all went on behind the scenes to put these planes in the air and to bring them home. So I’ll start with Dennis Norquist. Each of you can come up here and introduce yourself and tell a little bit what you did and who you worked for, and when we get through we’ll have some questions and answers and hopefully you’ll know a little bit more about what we did. Dennis Norquist: Thank you, TD. I was with Pratt & Whitney, not in the early days but I know quite a bit about it. The J- 58 engine program really started in the mid- fifties. Pratt & Whitney was under contract to the [ U. S.] Navy for basically an experimental semi- high- altitude UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 3 engine. Ultimately that turned into the J- 58. And our contract remained with the Navy all the way through the program. They were our funder. The first engines tested— Bob, what was the first year we ran the engine? Bob was— by the way, I joined the program in 1962— Bob joined in East Hartford in 1958, and at that time was the beginning of where the J- 58 engine was originally developed down in Florida. We called it FRDC, Florida Research and Development Center, out in the middle of the swamps. In the mid- [ 00: 05: 00] fifties there was two programs: basically there was a hydrogen- fueled engine that we were running, and what turned out to be JP- 9. JP- 9 didn’t exist in the mid- fifties, and we actually had much better success with the hydrogen engine than we ever did with the JP- 9- fired engine. In fact, I think we were about a year late in delivering the first J- 58 to Kelly [ Clarence L.] Johnson. So it flew with the J- 75 engine first, which many of you know. Another interesting little tidbit, we had 3X engines, we called them, that were for the A- 12, that version, and then the [ U. S.] Air Force version, I think we had about ten more engines, so there was like thirteen or fourteen engines, or let me call them engine teams. There was about anywheres from four to six engineers assigned to each engine model, these ten engines I talked about, and we had – Bob, how many sea- level test cells did we have? Robert Murphy: Six. Dennis Norquist: Six. Those were just strictly sea- level, except for one I’ll tell you about. The other one was an altitude test chamber where we could run two engines up to the mach design points and up to 100,000- foot altitudes. But that was a real operation to fire up these big steam turbines that came out of— they were ejectors that came out of some destroyer, surplus out of World War II. It would take a couple days to fire that thing up and get ready to get an engine tested. And I know one thing, we blew up a lot of engines before we started shipping them, and UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 4 probably the biggest was to get them to operate at that mach- 3.2 design temperature. And so since it took so long in this altitude chamber to test these engines, testing at temperature and altitude, atmosphere, we took a J- 75, fired up, exhausted it into a big chamber, mixed a little air with it, and simulated a climb- out on just sea level. So it wasn’t a performance engine at all. It was just to get the parts to work at that 800- degree inlet temperature. And a lot of things came out of that, like, as an engineer, you didn’t go right up to mach- 3- plus. You’d start out working your way up there and then shut down and go inspect and see if there’s anything failing or ready to fail, because if it failed it was too late. It was catastrophic. So we’d have to crawl into this big chamber, and remember it’s 800 degrees in there, so you’d have to wait forever and ever to shut down. And the biggest problem at that time on the front of the engine was the first- stage compressor blades of titanium were failing right at the root, and it was always started on the back. It wasn’t something you could just look in. You had to really work your way around. So anyway, that was the beginning of the Moro scope. We just went and got some dental mirrors rigged up and put a hole in it. And at that time, if you asked your boss to do something, it was a lot easier for them to say no than do it, so that was the way we did things, and we’d just go out and do it as test engineers. And it was something we all learned and used throughout the whole rest of our life. In one of the areas – is Jim Eastham here? One of the things I got out of it was we took for instance an Learjet engine, and this is not a very well- known fact, and I was at Garrett [ Corporation] at the time and they says, We don’t know anything about afterburners, and I said, What’s that got to do with it? So we put an afterburner on the Learjet engine and for a while it was Taiwan’s twin- engine version of the F- 16 because the country wouldn’t ship them F- 16s. My boss at the time, and Jim’s as well, the reason he understood what we were UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 5 doing, just a few people did, was a guy by the name of Jack Teske was our president then and he grew up on the control system, on the inlet controls. OK, anybody next? Unless you got the questions now or do you want to keep going or what? Any engine questions? Question: I heard in some of your early failures the compressor disc would just get really soft and floppy. Is that true? Dennis Norquist: Well, the rear compressor discs got awful soft because the temperature was way beyond 800 [ degrees] at the last stage of the compressor. I wouldn’t call it soft and floppy, but they ran. I remember there was always seals in there like in that last stage, a knife- edged seal and a seal land, if you ever take an engine apart. And that was a big problem on the [ 00: 10: 00] back end because this knife edge is exactly that, and if it doesn’t expand at the same rate, it’s going to cut that seal right in two and there goes your engine. So somebody got the idea they were going to reverse that around to solve that problem. And the easiest way to solve it is just to make a great big gap so it can go into it. Well, somebody reversed them, and I happened to be running the engine at the time, and we made it to about mach- 2.5 and it didn’t work, and that was the end of that. That was tested behind that J- 75, so it was a real quick test. I have no idea how many engines blew up down there, but it was a lot. Most every test engineer blew at least one. Question: How did you come up with the JP- 9 fuel; the characteristics? Dennis Norquist: Well, I think it was a battle between the airframe, it wanted certain things and we needed certain things in the engine. Shell Oil did it. Audience: They called Jimmy Doolittle. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 6 Dennis Norquist: You know, I can tell a little story about compressors. You brought it up. I don’t know what article it was in, but there was one that wouldn’t go past 1.2 or 1.3 mach number, something like that. Well, it turned out that one of the compressor stages was put in backwards. Bill Brown was our chief engineer and he’s really the second father to this engine. He was in Kelly Johnson’s office and they were discussing this and I can imagine Kelly Johnson had a lot to say to Bill Brown about that. And Bill Brown is an exact opposite; he’s just calm, just tell me the problems, and gives you a calm answer. Well, after they did a little ranting and raving, I guess, he says, Kelly, he says, you ever thought about trying and putting those wings on backwards to solve your problems? [ Applause] TD Barnes: Probably we should’ve started with the gentleman who built the plane to start with before we could put the engines in it. Bob Murphy. [ Applause] Robert Murphy: Well, I’ll have to start a little earlier than the A- 12. I arrived at Area 51 on July 21, 1955. All the way up, Kelly kept saying, We’re on our way to Paradise Ranch. First thing I remember is when I stepped off the Goony Bird was the dust was four inches deep. It had never been trod by man. And all the power was generated by four big diesel engines running twenty- four hours a day right outside your window. They served the food in the mess hall family- style. You sat down, here comes a big platter of New York- cut steaks. In the course of my year- and- a- half there before I deployed with Detachment C, I had lost thirty pounds, and I ate five full meals a day. It was a one- shift operation, flying twenty- four hours a day. But I want to tell you about how it started. I was worked for Dorsey Kammer at Edwards’ [ Air Force Base] north base on the XF- 104. And one day he said, Murph, would you like to go to work for me on another program? And I said sure. I was a bachelor, twenty- four UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 7 years old, and a flight test mechanic. And he said, Well, you’ll have to come down to Burbank [ California] tomorrow morning on your own time, of course, for an interview. So Ernie [ Ernest] Joiner, who was the chief flight test engineer for the U- 2 program, and Dorsey put me in a car and drove me out on the taxiway. They wouldn’t talk to you in a building, the security was so tight. Made me fill out a PSQ right there on the spot, from memory, and turned it in. So a few weeks later, which was probably the end of February or the first week in March, I don’t remember, I walked into Building 82 and was amazed to see how far along this airplane was under construction after the short time that the contract had been assigned. And we put the [ 00: 15: 00] instrumentation in until it was shipped up in a C- 124 in late July. And we put it together that day, completely reassembled the airplane that day, went out for an engine run, Pratt & Whitney’s trusty J- 57. It wouldn’t start on LF1IA, lighter fluid first class we called it, whatever the fuel was. So we hooked a pipe to the bottom of a five- gallon can and hooked it into the fuel system, and we started the engine on that and then switched to— it’d run on the other fuel but it wouldn’t start. Now that was bad for the pilots because if you had a flameout, it wouldn’t start. But anyway, a very, very small group. I was on the first airplane. That’s three people, total. And we had two people who worked in the shop, one jack- of- all- trades ran the stock room, supply, logistics in general, and a guy whose classification was a painter but he was also the time keeper and the aircraft dispatcher. Total people cleared for flight test support: there were nineteen. That included the pilots and everybody, but they all weren’t there at the same time. Made the first official flight the first of August. Had a very interesting flight prior to that where Tony was taxiing and we were following him in a pickup truck. Dorsey Kammer, who weighed about 300 pounds, was driving the truck, Fritz Frye [ sp] the crew chief was in the front UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 8 with him, and I’m standing on the back for dear life. Tony all of a sudden went into the air – he didn’t even realize it at first – and then he shut the engine off and crashed down in a big cloud of dust. Dorsey roared right into that cloud of dust, going as fast as that pickup truck would go, and I’m going [ grips the podium], if he hits the airplane I’m going [ grips the podium again]. We had one of those huge fire bottles in the back with two big black wheels— I guess everybody has seen it at one time, they used to have them out on the flight line— upside down in the back of the truck. So when I see the tires are on fire I start to grab a hold of this thing to get it off the truck. Dorsey leaps out, grabs the wheel, and picks it up— I don’t know what the hell it weighed— and me, because I was between the wheel and the bottle, out of the truck— he and I grabbed a hold of it, upside down, didn’t bother to turn it over, and drug it under the airplane and put the fire out. Anyway, first flight in August. By October we had met the design requirements. We’d been to altitude, and we’d taken some pictures. So Kelly says, Well, the flight test program is over. We’re finished. It’s still going on. But anyway it was a very unique experience on that. I stayed with the U- 2 program until late 1960, then went on the A- 12. I made myself forever with Kelly. I unmade myself with him a couple of times, like when I wrecked a starter on the way out to the first flight and things like that, but I made it. We were sitting in Building 82, a little teeny conference room, and all the manufacturing managers, of which there was six, I believe, including Quality, were there, and Kelly had picked a rollout date, I believe, in early April of ’ 62. And he asked each guy what they thought of that date. Well, let me tell you, because of the sheet metal, or the machining of the parts, we were really in bad shape. Now my responsibilities were the electrical, the electronics, the plumbing, the controls, all the development people. And all these guys had been the original people that formed the Skunk Works for Lulabelle in 1943. So as he asked each one and they all UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 9 told him what their problems were. Anyway, I’m sitting next to the Director of Operations, the head of all manufacturing, purchasing, and everything— which I later got his job— he gets around to me and he says, What do you think about that date, Murph? [ 00: 20: 00] And I said, No sweat on that date, Kelly. God, these other guys looked, and everybody looked. Kelly says, When are you going to have power on? I said, The twenty- sixth of December at nine o’clock. He writes this down. My boss told me later I wrote down, Fire him. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. So I immediately left and ran upstairs to where my electrical supervisor, Roy Setzer was and I said, Roy, we’re going to have power on on the twenty- sixth of December at nine o’clock. He says, God dang, Murph, he says, that’s going to be really tough. They haven’t got the back end of the airplane built yet. And I said, Well, we’ll do it to seven- fifteen, which is where the fuselage hits— mates to the rear end. And I said, I think we’re in pretty good shape up front. I said, I just want to make sure the instrument panel is lit. And he said, Oh, we can probably do that. So on the twenty- sixth of December I was in the electrical, which was on a balcony overlooking the airplane, first airplane, and at nine o’clock here come the door out of Kelly’s office, chunk, chunk, chunk, chunk, up the stand, looked in the cockpit, instrument panel is all lit, one of my electricians is still in there working— he had cut off these wire ties, string ties for the wire, and thrown it right over Kelly’s head— but he didn’t care. He got down. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 10 So anyway, they rolled on that date. So from then on out, for my life’s history in the Skunk Works, I was known as No Sweat Murphy. Anyway, my involvement at Area 51 on the A- 12, I came up to help get the trainer going, shipped four, and I forget, I spent about a month here at that time. And then I went back and built the D- 21. And had the privilege, after I had the first D- 21 in checkout, number ten in the jig and the rest of it in the production line, this is August of 1964, Kelly calls me up and he says, Murph, you want to run the SR- 71 at Palmdale [ California]? And I said, Yes. I want to go back where they fly airplanes. Now this is the total instructions from Kelly, and this was standard for Kelly: OK. You got to move. Move to Palmdale. OK. Get Site 2 away from Rockwell. It’s an Air Force- owned plant. No instruction on how to do this, just go get it away. Hire the people. Train them. The pieces will be up on the first of November, and I want to fly on the twenty- second of December. That’s the last conversation I had with him. Now Bob Gilliland is sitting over there saying, That goddamn airplane had 400 open items on it when I flew it. And he was right. Right, Bob? That’s right. Don’t have the exact number. Anyway, the big deal for me in that day, the SR- 71 made its first flight and the D- 21 made its first flight. One of the deals of being able to do these flight tests with Kelly was very involved on a day- to- day basis with the early flight testing of the airplanes, and on the U- 2 especially, it was my experience, he made the decisions on the spot. You know, the airplane would land and he’d talk to the pilot. He’d make a decision on what to do. He was leaning over my shoulder on day and told me to cut a half- inch off the end of the airplane. I’m this young twenty- four- year- old kid and he’s leaning, watching me while I’ve got this nibbler, and he’s UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 11 [ saying], Take a little more, take a little more, he’s saying, and I’m about to drop it on my foot. But that’s what made these programs go and so successful. Great guy. Any questions? Good. [ Applause] TD Barnes: OK, Bill, it’s your turn up here. This is Bill Fox. He was with Honeywell [ Incorporated]. One of our former presidents of this fine organization. William J. Fox: Good afternoon. I bet that a lot of you didn’t realize that I actually worked [ 00: 25: 00] for Honeywell before I worked for Lockheed [ Aircraft Corporation], on the Blackbird program. I happened to be out at Palmdale working on the F- 104G model, German model, and two guys came to my house one night, Honeywell guys. I knew who they were. Didn’t know what they were doing. They said they wanted to talk to me. I said, Well, come on in. They said, Well, we can’t do it in here. They said, We got to go out and take a ride. So this kind of bothered me a little. They had trench coats on and hats, you know. But I got in the car with them and we drove around Palmdale and Lancaster and they said, We want you to go to work on a special program. I said, Well, what is it? [ They said], We can’t tell you. I said, Where is it? [ They said], We can’t tell you that either. [ I said], Who’s it with? [ They said], We can’t tell you that either. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 12 Well, I’d been working with all these guys from Lockheed, you know, and I’d heard a little bit about the Iron Curtain and all that stuff, but I didn’t really associate it with the program that they were doing. But finally they said, It’d be really a patriotic thing to do and you’ll really enjoy it. So I said, OK, I’ll take it. They said, Good. Don’t go back in to work at Palmdale again. Just stay home and fill out your forms and mail them in and we’ll tell you when to report to work. So nearly three months later— I’m on vacation, you know, I get my paycheck every week in the mail and I’m doing nothing. And I keep seeing these guys going to work and coming home, you know, that I’d been working with, and they all look at me kind of funny. And one day I finally get a call that says, Meet a guy named Fritz at a motel in Van Nuys [ California]. I said, OK, I’ll do that. And they told me what time, where to be. So I got to the motel. There this guy was that I knew him. And he says, Follow me. Well, where do we go? We go right over to Lockheed, right where I had checked in about a year- and- a- half prior to that. And go into the security center, and they used the same security center for the Skunk Works as they did for the main Lockheed gang. And I go in there and the guy says, Fix him up with a badge. He says, What’s your name? I says, William J. Fox. [ He says], Who do you work for? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 13 I’d already been told: Midwest Engineering. And he says, What’s your address? So I give him my Palmdale address where I lived, and he started going through the— he says, You know, we got another guy with the same name, William J. Fox. He said, Damn, he’s got the same address. And about that time the big boss come out of the back of the place and he said, You guys all come in here a minute. So we went back in his office and he said, Damn you, why didn’t you turn in your badge? I said, Nobody told me. And so I was still registered there as a Honeywell guy and now I’m getting registered as a Midwest Engineering guy, and that caused a few problems. But shortly after that, went over and I saw what the Skunk Works engineering facility was. It was a room about half the width of this room and about twice as long, but every engineer was in there, and I met a lot of them that day. But just to tell you about the size of the organization, if that was the B- 1 it would’ve been eight floors, five times this size, with half of them being government people. But not there. There was one government guy that came in there and that was Norm Nelson. So that’s where I started, and then I worked out there on that simulator, trying to get that working, and fed Lou [ Louis] Schalk a lot of unstarts so he could sit there and try to keep the needles in the middle. We spent a lot of time together working on that simulator. But then I went to the Area [ 51]. Well, first we went over to Bob Murphy’s shop and checked out the airplane, and I had the dubious honor of almost shaking it off the jacks because the rate gyros were loose and somebody bumped the airplane when we had hydro power on and I UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 14 had the SAS on and those gyros started jumping and the whole damn airplane [ 00: 30: 00] started jumping and it was on jacks and almost came off of them before I could get the switches shut off. And Murphy gave me heck for that. But we got the bird checked out, and amazing, it was a fairly complicated SAS system, triple redundant. And you all heard yesterday about when [ Mele] Vojvodich bailed out because of the pitch- and- yaw gyro, the wiring was crossed. Well, if they had just crossed one or two of those plugs, it would’ve kicked the SAS off, but by crossing all of them, the two channels both tracked perfectly; they just were putting the wrong signals into the wrong pocket, you know, so when the nose come up the airplane would yaw, when the airplane would yaw the nose would go down, when it would go down it would yaw the other way, and it was just kind of getting worse and worse. That’s why Mele got out of it. But there was a fix on a table to keep that from happening at that time, and it was kind of a shame but it hadn’t gotten put in. Kind of had to do those things in spurts, you know, when there was a bunch of stuff to do, they’d lay the airplane down and do it, but you just didn’t stop flying activities to put some little change like fixing the gyro connectors so they couldn’t get plugged in wrong. It was kind of a screw- up, but Mele got out OK and we learned a big lesson. I stayed with Honeywell through quite a while out there in the early flight test program, and then they decided they wanted me to come back to Minneapolis [ Minnesota] and help in the design work on the SR- 71 system, so I went back to Minneapolis for one winter and I then called Ed [ Edward] Martin and I said, You got to get me out of here. So I was going to California on a business trip anyway and stopped in to see Ed and got my job offer and a month later the moving van was moving me to California. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 15 I have another dubious honor, I guess you might call it that, but the first three years on the program, three babies, though I guess my wife had the honor more than I did, but I think that had the record there for a few years. And you weren’t always able to make contact, getting in touch with your wife or having her get in touch with you. She’d have to call some guy that she didn’t know at some phone number that was not listed and say she wanted to talk to Bill Fox. Well, she didn’t know I was Midwest Engineering. She knew I wasn’t Honeywell. But she just said, I want to talk to Bill Fox. Well, then the guy would go through his list of people that were at the [ Nevada] test site and he’d find somebody and then he’d call up there and you were allowed then to call home, find out what was going on: Yeah, the baby will be here before you are. But working for Honeywell was kind of a neat deal because I ended up working on almost every system on the airplane when I was working for Honeywell. I used to even help load the drag chute. It was kind of fun. I ran the power carts and I ran the hydraulic carts, and didn’t have any trouble with anybody telling you not to do anything. If you were willing to work, you could. And that’s kind of the way the program was. Well, then after I got back out and working for Lockheed, I started working on the inlet control system, and spent a lot of time trying to get the kinks out of some of that stuff because the connectors were going bad because of being cycled hot and cold. Connectors have little tiny pins that go in little tiny sockets, hundreds of them, and the little sockets have a little tiny spring in there. Well, if you heat and cool that spring enough, it isn’t a spring anymore; it’s just a little piece of metal that doesn’t fit very tight. And these things are in the inlet where they get hot and cold all the time. And so we’d have to take those connectors apart, squeeze that little spring down again and make it into a spring again, and put it back together and seal everything up, and UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 16 [ 00: 35: 00] then it would work fine for a while. But the unstarts were a headache more for the pilot than it was for the guys working on the airplane. I got to work on the automatic life vest inflator, which a couple of you pilots probably almost drowned because you thought it was going to work. And I found some problems with it, thought I had it really fixed, so I went to Dick Adair [ sp] who was in charge of our finance and contracts group. He had a house right next to t