Kelly (10 page)

Johnson’s mentor and organizational genius Courtlandt S. Gross who with brother Robert helped shape Lockheed’s destiny
.

The British hadn’t wanted us to discuss their equipment and plans over the transatlantic phone to the plant, so Hibbard and Gross and the others were quite surprised when we returned with an order for an airplane considerably different from the original design.

We came back on the German ship
Bremen
because its sailing time was much more convenient than the
Queen Mary’s
. We wanted to return as soon as possible and get to work. Within 30 minutes after we had boarded, stowed our gear, and found the ship’s bar, our cabins had been thoroughly searched. They knew who we were. Our plans were in the diplomatic pouch on board the
Queen Mary
.

We had burned all of our preliminary drawings in the fireplace at Mayfair Court, setting a fire in the chimney. So much carbon had collected within it over a great many years that it burned like coal. Chunks of it fell down along with flaming papers. Fortunately, the fireplace drew beautifully. We
really cleaned it out. The fire scared hell out of us, though. We raced outside and saw the flames leaping up, then retreated quickly so we wouldn’t call attention to it and our own involvement. We didn’t want to have to pay for any damage caused. Luckily, there was none. The whole experience lasted only 15 or 20 minutes, but it seemed much longer at the time.

Taking on such a big production order took courage on the part of the Grosses. In 1936, the company had purchased more land in Burbank and the next year had expanded production, administration, and engineering facilities. Total floor space was 250,000 square feet, employment rose to 2,500, net working capital reached $650,000, and the company had about $334,000 in the bank.

After the British order was placed, a young bank vice president, Charles A. Barker, Jr., who had been following the growth of the company joined it as vice president for finance. He and Gross were able to raise $1,250,000 in short-term financing and, in 1939, Lockheed offered its first public stock valued at $3,000,000. That 250th Hudson was produced more than seven weeks ahead of schedule.

When the first three Hudsons were delivered, I returned to England with them for a flight-test and familiarization program, and to prove guaranteed performance. I was able to take Althea with me on the
Queen Mary
, and she loved life aboard ship. We danced every night and had a real vacation. In London, she loved to explore the city while I was working. Althea returned home when I went up to Martlesham Heath northeast of London for the flight-test assignment. The site was the British equivalent of the test center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. I remained there about three months.

Lockheed test pilot Milo Burcham was with me. I particularly remember one event—the diving demonstration. We wanted clear weather for this and waited ten days or so before, finally, some holes appeared in the cloud overcast. We decided to chance it and took off when we had our calibrated barograph aboard and the plane loaded with the equivalent weight of arms. Almost immediately, the weather began to close in again.

Althea Johnson, left, and Kelly, right, aboard the
Queen Mary
with the Lockheed team that sold the Hudson light bomber (left) to the British—the first in the company’s series of successful maritime patrol aircraft
.

“Let’s try it anyway,” Milo suggested.

After we’d climbed to altitude, we roared down with full power to our designed dive speed and leveled out. Low. So low that I remember distinctly flying by a cottage and seeing a woman looking out at us through the flowered curtains of her kitchen window.

“What pretty curtains,” I thought.

We both were shaking slightly after in the eight minutes from takeoff to landing, but we stepped out as if we did that sort of thing every day.

The British drafted me into the Royal Air Force unofficially for the familiarization flights. They wouldn’t take an American pilot, but assigned me—in an RAF blue flight suit—as flight engineer because I had to show them how to operate the engines for maximum range on fuel and demonstrate other operating procedures.

One of my early endeavors must have made the British wonder if I really knew what I was talking about. I wanted to show them what an excellent safety control we had on the landing gear—that it was not possible to retract it accidentally on the ground as you could with retractable gear in most other aircraft at the time. So one of the first things I did in the cockpit on ground inspection was to reach for the handle to show that it could not be raised, that it was held down by a solenoid. Of course, the handle came up. Fortunately, the weight of the gear was enough that the gear itself did not come up. Well, we re-rigged that and went ahead with the flight and familiarization. I had to prove all the performance figures we had guaranteed earlier.

It was in the course of these proving flights that I had my first dramatic encounter with the effectiveness of the English radar system.

The Hudson program was conducted under Commander “Red” Collins with whom I made many flights. He found the “iron mike”—the Sperry autopilot—the greatest of inventions. In the lead ship of a three-plane formation one day—with one Hudson fifty feet off our right wing and another fifty feet off
our left wing—he put his plane on autopilot and proceeded to read the
London Times
. I hoped that the autopilot was good enough to fly us in formation for as long as this flight was going to last, but I went ahead with my work in the copilot’s seat, leaning out the fuel flow to the engines to achieve maximum range.

We were aiming for a 2,200-mile flight to prove that the plane had that range without refueling and we had to fly all over Great Britain, Ireland, and the English Channel to cover that mileage. All was going well, but as we approached Scotland I saw dead ahead some huge black thunderheads we were going to fly right into. Commander Collins was still reading his newspaper.

“Look, Red,” I interrupted, “I don’t think we should tangle with that, do you?”

“Oh, my God, no!” He reacted immediately, reached up to disconnect the autopilot, and wheeled the airplane hard left. One Hudson went over us—I could see flames from its exhaust pipe—and the other passed underneath. Both went into the storm. We didn’t, but had lost our formation.

With the aid of ground radar the three aircraft were rejoined.

We completed our range demonstration—and the
Times
—and flew back to base. But I had seen demonstrated the early English radar that was to serve so well later in the Battle of Britain. The ground crews had been able to locate all three aircraft in that stormy weather, guide us back into formation, and track us for the entire flight.

The RAF made good use of the Hudson, which performed as a fighter in the Battle of Dunkirk. In its primary role on antisubmarine patrol, it became the first airplane ever to capture a submarine. The U-boat had surfaced when spotted, and the Hudson kept its guns trained on the sub until a destroyer arrived.

Before the U.S. produced anti-submarine aircraft of its own, we actually had to borrow back some Hudsons. After this country entered the war, German submarine “Wolf Packs”
began attacking our oil tankers within ten miles of the East Coast. Night after night they could be seen burning, and we had not a single anti-submarine warfare (ASW) airplane in the U.S. at the time. So we borrowed 19 Hudsons from the British and began to build some ASW planes for our own defense. Nearly 3,000 Hudsons were built by war’s end for the British, Australia, and the U.S.

The Hudson, in fact, was the first in a long line of ASW aircraft, produced to this day, by Lockheed. The early ones, the Navy’s PV-1 and PV-2 were derivatives of the Lodestar transport, a “stretched” Electra. New designs emerged later, for anti-submarine warfare is a very specialized, highly-sophisticated science.

On the PV-2, we did some pioneering work on “high-activity” propellers—out of necessity, a frequent reason. The aircraft’s engines in the original design had so much power that we could not swing a propeller of the proper diameter to take advantage of it. We really needed a 17-foot propeller, which would have chopped about a foot into the fuselage! Starting with a new design, we put the engine nacelles far enough out on the wing to provide for the proper-diameter propeller. Ten feet, six inches was the largest diameter we could handle with that configuration.

So, to solve the immediate problem with the PV-2, I asked Hamilton Standard to reduce a 17-foot prop to 10 feet 6 inches to see how it would work. The prop was shorter but wider, grabbed a bigger bite of air while turning more slowly, and thereby avoided problems with air buildup at the tips.

Rapid technological development in propellers had begun in 1936 and ’37. We were getting into variable pitch, full feathering, constant speed, and propeller reversing.

It was and is important for an engineer to keep up with advancing technology. Studying, fortunately, still held for me the same fascination that it had when I discovered the Carnegie library in Ishpeming. On one summer vacation in those early years, I reworked all of the problems in Fred Weick’s classic
book,
Aircraft Propeller Design
. On another vacation years later, I reworked every problem in Dr. Clyde E. Love’s,
Differential and Integral Calculus
, which I had completed in college. I was determined not to lose my capability in mathematics. And I enjoyed both vacations.

For many years after I began my work at Lockheed, I would attend a Wednesday afternoon seminar conducted by the eminent scientists and engineers resident and visiting at Cal Tech. I also attended classes there, especially those taught by Dr. Clark B. Millikan, then head of the aeronautical department. It was my intention to earn a doctorate, and I completed all classroom work in the proper courses only to discover that there was a requirement then in my field for competency in technical German. There simply was not time for me to embark on that course of study.

When it became evident that we were going to need a wind-tunnel test capability of our own on a continuing basis, not dependent on scheduling of a rented facility, I was able to persuade the company to provide $360,000. The top officers always believed strongly in the need for research and backed our efforts.

From what experience I had in working with other tunnels and from work that had been done by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), I undertook the aerodynamic design myself and assigned one of my best engineers, E. O. Richter, to draw plans for the structure. We put it out for bid and had the tunnel itself—the bare walls—built for $186,000 The rest of the money went for very expensive instrumentation, other construction work, and the model shop.

The result was a very good subsonic tunnel capable of testing to a simulated speed of 300 miles an hour. The test section housing the models was a rectangle twelve feet long by eight feet wide. The tunnel had a very useful constant-speed propeller system that was unique—and sometimes troublesome. In the Cal Tech tunnel, speed would change and have to be adjusted with each different angle of attack. With a simple
electrically controlled drive, our tunnel would hold its speed well throughout the range of model position changes. We sold the design to six other companies for a modest $10,000.

That tunnel actually paid for itself on the first real test we put it to, because on our next big airplane design project, the P-38 fighter, we were to encounter a phenomenon about which very little was known—compressibility.

I
N THE LATE
1930
S, THIS COUNTRY WAS AWAKENING
to a sense of its own unpreparedness for war, and for several years Lockheed had been at work secretly developing a new fighter for the Army Air Corps. When I got back to Burbank after introducing the Hudsons to service with the RAF, this became my first priority.

Specifications for the new fighter had been very clear—two liquid-cooled engines and a speed of 367 miles per hour. We advised the Air Corps that our design would fly faster than 400 miles per hour, a speed unequaled then. Lockheed received a contract for such a plane in 1937, with construction of the first beginning in July 1938. First flight of the XP-38—X for experimental, P for pursuit—was scheduled for early 1939.