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Marietta, GA (Lockheed Georgia 1962-1964)

Jobs were tough to get. I was lucky to get hired by Lockheed Georgia to work on the C-141. The plant in Marietta, just north of Atlanta, was there during the war to build B-29s and was huge. They were making the C-130 (still in production there). The C-141 was to be a jet version but became much more. I am proud to have contributed to its success and the C-5 that followed. Here is a good video about the development and use of the C-141.

I joined the structures department analysis methods unit. A small outfit of 10 engineers was tasked to take the design methods and analysis tools of Lockheed Burbank, where the plane was designed, and assure that the thousands of draftsmen and engineers proving the design were following proper procedures. It was exceedingly important work. Big airplanes are hard to build. The strength and loading of everything go up by the square of measures (cross-section of a beam, for example), but the weight goes up by the cube. A plane doubled in size would weigh 8 times as much and could not fly.

The engineering section was an enormous mezzanine over the factory floor's entire length (about 1/4 mile). It was covered with desks and drafting tables crowded together. In some parts, the desks butted together, and you had to climb over them to get to the back rows. Boss's offices and conference rooms were partitioned off with curtains. Many people smoked, and the whole place was in a fog of smoke and smell. You could not see from one stairway to the next. Our little section had one secretary at the back with the only phone. Every transaction in the whole plant took place person-to-person face-to-face and involved a form: Accept No Verbal Order ANVO. An ANVO was a multipart form with one color copy for the originator, another color for the recipient, and another for file with the originator's group secretary.

The factory floor was a maze of machines, work centers, and planes. The flooring is made of wood blocks, 4" or so cutoff ends of treated lumber. Easy to replace and move around to suit different needs, but hard to walk on. Huge, full-span overhead cranes were constantly moving material and plane parts from place to place. The basement was a maze of tunnels, workshops, and parts depots. The plant's ends were gigantic doors leading to the flight line where finished planes went out one end, and plane parts and material entered the other.

There were washrooms, drinking fountains, and cafeterias clearly marked: "colored" and "white", but none of the "colored" ones were used. Everyone used the facilities marked "white," and I never saw any racial discrimination anywhere in the plant or in Marietta. My impression was that there was a lot more racial discrimination in Evanston and Boston than in Marietta, and none at Lockheed.

I took some courses downtown at Georgia Tech, and race relations there were terrible. I was ashamed. None of the students or professors were black (not much different from MIT). A popular eating place across the street featured decorations of ax handles called "Dixie Drumsticks." The proprietor later became Georgia Governor.

There was a huge parking lot in front of the factory with guarded entrance houses with pedestrian tunnels down through the basement. Engineers parked in a much smaller lot in the back with a small building with offices and a direct pathway to the engineering mezzanine. The guard sat behind a counter, and the atmosphere was more casual and civilized. Factory workers queued up on timeclocks in the tunnels; engineers had a timesheet kept by the department secretary. Factory workers dressed like factory workers; supervisors had color-coded hard hats, engineers wore white shirts and ties, and managers had suits. Everyone had a picture badge with a color-coded background. Mine was yellow, engineer. I could go anywhere in the plant and escort visitors. I was not allowed outside on the flight line without an escort.

There were two computer centers in the basement. One for business, planning, material handling, scheduling, and such. The other smaller one for engineering uses. Each had a warren of offices among the pipes and wires for the factory above. Mathematicians, Programmers, and computer operations people were in the offices. The mostly punched card equipment and computers were in bigger rooms. The whole plant was serviced by one huge WWII vintage air conditioning unit—an engineering marvel. The computers were vacuum tube, not transistor, so did not need extra cooling.

We were using the new IBM 709 computer (a later model of the 701) for finite element simulations of the tricky parts of the structure. We had simulations of the wing, which had a hard-to-model double angle of sweep, the wing root/fuselage junction, engine pylon junction, fuselage barrel, and T-tail. Each was broken down into small interlocking pieces (finite elements) represented by a few numbers from their geometry and materials. The numbers were encoded on thousands of punched cards in the order required by the computer program FAMAS (predecessor to Nastran). We were limited to the capability of the 709 to solve the simultaneous equations (about 900). The runs took hours of precious computer time, so we could only schedule them at night. The computer was unreliable, and input mistakes had to be handled during the runs. As the only single youngster in the group, I did most of the troubleshooting and corrections for the nighttime runs.

Computer operations in the aircraft business at the time were very compartmentalized. An engineer developing an idea had to present it to a mathematician to document the method. The project was then passed on to a programmer to code the method in computer language onto worksheets. The worksheets went to a keypunch operator to punch the cards for the computer. A dispatcher stacked the cards with the cards of other projects to make up a run. It often took days to get a printout of a run back, and the complete process of a new idea took months. Before a computer program could go into production (running real data for application to an actual airplane), it had to go through a rigorous Air Force review.

We couldn't afford the time of this cumbersome process, so I spent many hours down in the computer room working with the operators and bootlegging a keypunch machine to correct glitches and get useful results. I became very proficient in all aspects of the technology. The whole shop was heavily unionized, so everything had to be handled with great care to not step on anyone's turf.

My major engineering project (my daytime job) was to develop a program to transfer the wing and tail loading curve information to discrete loads on individual finite element points. Lockheed hired a Georgia Tech professor and a mathematician to guide me in designing the Panel Point Loads Program. Jim Kennedy, one of the programmers, and I worked very closely to get the program through the process and useful for the C-141 project and later for the C-5A. Jim and I became good friends. I was best man at his wedding and was present at the birth of his sons.

Jim and I worked together on a program I invented called the Tab Form Simulator to break the log jam on getting engineering work onto the computer. Most aircraft analysis work involved big sheets of blueprinted paper forms called Tab Forms that armies of women filled out using manual calculating machines. Our group maintained a library of hundreds of these forms for every aspect of structural analysis. The idea of the Tab Form Simulator was to have just one program that read in data cards in a FORTRAN-like language to simulate the calculations of a tab form with a deck of input data cards and printed the resulting columns of numbers. Thus, any engineer could directly run any new idea or need without going through the mathematician/programmer bottleneck. Jim did all the programming, and I shepherded the program through the approval process and publicized its use.

The Tab Form Simulator is the same idea as VisiCalc and Excel but predated those by 15 years. Jim and I won a Lockheed Buck Hunter of the Month award for it. When I returned to Lockheed after graduate school, the computer center had expanded from 1 709 to 3 7090s. One of these was running the Tab Form Simulator exclusively.

When I arrived in Atlanta, I had almost no money and no idea how far away Marietta was from the Y where I was staying. I couldn't keep mooching rides off others staying at the Y, so I used my last $125 as the down payment on a high-mile Ford Angela (as in the Harry Potter movie) and moved into a rented room over a garage. A few paychecks later, I moved into a rental house and bought a new red and white Corvair. On one vacation, I drove the Corvair to Kansas City to an aircraft mechanic school to get my FAA A&P Mechanics License. I never used that, but it was an accomplishment.

The nearby little airport had a Civil Air Patrol unit with a military version of the Aeronca 7, a two-place observation plane with 90 HP, and a climbing prop. It was a ball to fly — greater visibility and power than the J-3. I flew cadet orientation flights and several search missions in it. I was the maintenance officer for the unit. I could take off with the stick all the way back, and in a stiff wind, the L-16 will go straight up. I was the only one in the unit to fly the plane.

The Civil Air Patrol had a mission to introduce young people to aviation and civil society. Very much like Boy Scouts but with an Air Force flavor. I flew many cadet orientation flights for kids on their first time in the air. I remembered my first flight in Dixon years before and enjoyed seeing the universal joy and wonder. I am proud that none of the kids got airsick on my flights. When I was in the Civil Air Patrol in NJ, I was appalled by the attitude of some pilots that it was OK to get the orientation kids sick. Part of it was the L-16 was open, noisy, and airy with very good visibility. The NJ Cessna 172s were closed in, quiet, and had small windows. Cessna 172s are not much fun to fly or ride in.

Another mission of the Civil Air Patrol is search and rescue. We mobilized every few months to fly search patterns over the rough terrain of North Georgia and Alabama, looking for a missing plane that had not closed a flight plan. We would fly or drive to the assigned mission headquarters and be given a sectional chart marked with our specific search area and assigned to a plane, not usually our own, and an observer. Most flights were about an hour or two. Sometimes if the observer was also a pilot, we traded off and covered two areas. It was essential and tedious work, but it was fun to fly a variety of planes and be part of a congenial group of enthusiasts. Low and slow in the mountains was dangerous and very bumpy. We had some anxious missions in planes with hard-to-understand fuel systems (I'm talking to you, Luscombe owners).

Later, I bought a quarter share of a 1948 rag-wing Cessna 170 four-place 145 HP plane like the two-place 140. I flew the 170 for several trips to Fayetteville, NC, to visit Harry and Gwynne and Jim and Elizabeth, and to Columbia, SC, a couple of times to visit her folks. I built a transistor power supply for the Lear tube radio to replace the heavy vibrator supply. I took out the obsolete CRT Omni screen. I was still a finger-on-the-map pilot, and our radio only had 3 working transmitter channels. The rag-wing was a fun-to-fly plane with excellent controls and a reliable 120 MPH cruise speed. Later models with metal wings are clunky and slow in comparison.

On a business trip to Boston, Jack fixed me up with a blind date to the Boston Pops with a friend from his church group. Betsy had graduated in History from Boston University and was working in the MIT admissions office.

I enjoyed my work at Lockheed and made some good friends there, but it was a dead-end job with no prospect for advancement. I lived alone in a rented house and had no social life or girlfriend. It was lonely and depressing. I had saved enough to return to grad school, so I sold my share of the plane and moved on to the University of Illinois.

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