Editor's Foreword

When my father, George A. Spangenberg, was killed in an automobile accident on November 13^th, 2000, our country lost one who had devoted his entire professional career to Naval Aviation. He received many awards for his service, including "Honorary Naval Aviator", "Golden Eagle", and induction into the Naval Aviation Hall of Honor in Pensacola.

It was that latter group who initially asked Dad to do a oral history, although you will see from his memorandum at the beginning of the history that a good number of other people also became involved. At the time of his death, he was editing the hard copy of the oral history as it then existed. I have taken his edited version and produced a cleaner copy so that it may be more easily read by all. The original will be held at the Naval Archives located in Washington, D.C.

I would like to thank Vadm. Jerry Miller for retrieving the diskettes of the transcription that was being edited. Without that, this task would have been monumental, to say the least. Also, many thanks go to the tireless efforts of Dad's friend and colleague, Hal Andrews. He has proofed all my edits and re-types, and has offered valuable information when the words did not make sense at all.

The approach of Mr. Andrews and myself has been to insert the editorial changes that had been made and correct transcription errors, but to resist the temptation to try to further organize, shorten, or otherwise change what was there. I am sure that Dad would have edited further, but not knowing how that would have been done, we took the approach that the oral history should stay true to how he had left it.

As you will see when you read the oral history, Dad decided it would be more efficient in many cases to simply reference published memos and articles that he had written. These he included in the Exhibits. Many of the Exhibits were quite difficult to read due to poor copy quality, and I decided to retype all of them both so that the entire oral history could be in electronic form and so that it would be more readable visually. There are a few instances where we still could not determine the words, and those are denoted by ???? in the text. The Exhibits are an integral part of the oral history in my opinion, and actually are far longer than the oral history itself.

I hope this effort has been worthwhile, as Dad's concern was that the history of Naval Aviation not be lost. He believed that we should learn from that history as we approached the future.

Judith (Spangenberg) Currier

Memorandum

From: George A. Spangenberg

Subject: "Oral History", Transcription and Attached Documents

Date: 31 August 1997

1. My "Oral History" is about to be circulated to a few professionals by VAdm. Miller for information and perhaps recommendations on what should be done next. In its current form, the project is confusing to say the least, and I believe some explanation of how it got that way may be helpful.

2. In September 1989, I was informed that I had been selected for the Naval Aviation Hall of Honor at Pensacola with "enshrinement" to follow in May 1990. As I said then, and reiterate now, I firmly believe that my selection was really a recognition of the contributions of our entire "Technical Community", and they must share in the honors. I was lucky enough to become a spokesman for the community on occasion, but virtually all of the data on which decisions were based was generated by others. We had the best design and acquisitions group in government.

3. In November `89, I was asked by the museum to participate in an oral history program being initiated. It was proposed that "Capt. Zip Rausa, editor of Wings of Gold conduct the interview ---". With no personal experience with an "oral history", it sounded easy enough; Zip Rausa's office was close by, and since I had been fully retired for years, no scheduling problems were anticipated. I'm sure now that Zip was not nearly as naive since he had co-authored the book Ed Heinemann. Combat Aircraft Designer, with interviewing apparently started in 1977 and published in 1980. Also, Zip now had a full time job, and undoubtedly other commitments.

4. The first interview was done in February 1990. Zip outlined the intended procedure of his taping a one or two hour interview, forwarding it to Pensacola, where the museum would transcribe it and provide copes to each of us. After the first session, I was very unhappy with the way I remembered my performance -- pauses, hesitations, etc. I did a new tape on my own trying to cover the same ground. The current version of the transcript uses the latter tape. A second session was held the next day, with no advance planning on the subject matter to be covered in either case. Sometime, probably in the second session, it became apparent that we needed some kind of a road map on what models of aircraft we were, or would be, discussing. (I had participated in the acquisition and development phases of at least 125 aircraft.) We then started to use a chart labeled "Navy Aircraft Starts" which I had prepared initially about 1960, and had updated through 1970. The transcript refers to the chart, a copy of which is included as "Chart 2" in "Exhibit A-5". [Ed: This chart is referred to often throughout the oral history and so was moved to the beginning of the Exhibits and is called "Chart 1" or "Naval Aircraft Starts".]

5. A couple of months after my "enshrinement" (Ed: in the Naval Hall of Honor in Pensacola) , four interview sessions were completed during the month of July, 1990. During that same period, I was being treated for bladder cancer, and became concerned as whether my "oral history" would ever get finished. I then did five more tapes on my own, and delivered them to Zip Rausa together with a copy of each of what are labeled as "Exhibits". The latter were copies of official memoranda, letters, presentations, published articles, etc. which I believed to be an effective way to keep talking, taping, transcribing, etc., time to a minimum, and yet accomplish what I perceived to be our purpose.

I should probably comment on the subject of my records. On my retirement in 1973, I had no copies of any of my official correspondence, classified or not. Navy files were believed then to be always available for any official purpose, and I saw no reason to duplicate them. I had only my own personnel action sheets, travel orders, efficiency ratings, and the like. If I had it to do over, I would undoubtedly keep more records as I've seen too many papers lost for posterity by "clean out the file" orders. After my retirement, I was asked on occasion to give presentations of one form or another to various organizations, and have gradually built up a disorganized file of items such as those in the "Exhibits".

6. Back to the oral history. By the end of August, 1990, I considered my part of the first phase of the effort to be complete, and I am confident that Zip Rausa completed his part of the exercise. Apparently the museum never made a transcription. A year or two ago, I inquired informally of RAdm. Furlong as to what had happened to the project. He promised to look into the matter. Then VAdm. G.E. Miller was appointed to the Ramsey chair at the Air and Space Museum, and in connection with his research project asked me for information on the start of the XAJ-1 program. From memory, I was able to answer his specific question, but advised him that the records of all Navy design competitions of that era should be available in Navy files. I knew, personally, that the competitions were well documented. The oral history project was mentioned as a matter of possible related interest. Jerry then took over, obtained the tapes and "Exhibits" from the museum, allowed me to duplicate the tapes, found funds for the transcription effort, etc. I did a first pass type of editing, but much remains to be done, eliminating duplication in coverage between the February and July tapes, overall format, possibly tying in the "Exhibits" to the basic dialogue, etc. I recognize at least some of the shortcomings.

7. For the record, I will attach to this memo an "Epilogue" drafted early this month bringing my view of naval aviation developments in the seven years since the oral history was recorded up to date. It is hard for me to be positive about any of those developments. [Ed: That Epilogue, and another found in his papers are included at the end of this Oral History].

8. From my standpoint, what comes next with this "Oral history" will depend on why such programs exist, who will pay any attention to the "lessons learned", or even who will even read them. Everyone nods wisely when one recites Santayana's advice that: "Those who fail to heed history are doomed to repeat it", but in practice my observation is that most individuals will attempt to avoid repeating their own mistakes, but ignore the mistakes made by others, sometimes in ignorance, sometimes with arrogance.

9. Enough for now.

This morning Captain Rausa recorded a couple of hours of oral history as he had been asked to do by the Naval Aviation Museum Foundation. This evening I'm vaguely uncomfortable with the results of that interview, although I've really not heard a playback. I believe my effort was somewhat disorganized and I'm unhappy with it. In this tape I'm going to attempt a solo recording of the period covered this morning and hopefully with a little more organization.

I'll start with the family history. I was born in Duluth, Minnesota in 1912 of a Yankee father and a Confederate mother. Father worked for Armour and Company and was transferred frequently during my early years, but not as much as the Navy might move people around. We ended up in Yonkers, New York until I was about five, then to Jacksonville for a year, then to New Bedford, Massachusetts. We actually lived in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, across the river, and stayed there for most of my elementary school and high school. I'm probably the only person you know that had to repeat the first grade (due to minimum age requirement differences between Yonkers and Jacksonville). After New Bedford, the family moved to Detroit, Cleveland and finally to Hartford. I have a brother that was born when we were in Yonkers and a sister that was born when we were in New Bedford.

I went through high school in Fairhaven, graduated from there in 1930, just a couple of months after my father had been transferred to Detroit. Early on in the high school years I had thought I was going to become a chemist due to having a very good chemistry teacher and then later I was interested in physics, primarily because the principal of the high school was also the physics teacher and assured me he could get me a scholarship at Harvard if I would take either chemistry or physics. However, in the meantime I got interested in model airplanes and aeronautical engineering became the career of choice. I thought about MIT but it cost too much and with my father in Detroit it became logical that I would look around in that area to go to school. I ended up selecting Michigan which had the oldest aeronautical engineering curriculum in the country. You'll recognize that the Depression was on. I got my bachelor's degree in 1934 and then when there were no jobs available -- I think no one in my class got an aeronautical job that year -- with the help of a small scholarship and a student assistantship I went back and got my master's degree in 1935. Aeronautical jobs in 1935 were still awfully scarce. The only one we had really heard about toward the end of that school year was that Pan American Airways were hiring people, presumably to wash seaplanes, in Brownsville, Texas; that didn't sound very interesting to anyone.

Then, lo and behold out of the blue sky, came a recruiter from the Naval Aircraft Factory. None of us had ever heard of the Naval Aircraft Factory. However the recruiter was quite impressive. He was Capt. Zeigler, the manager of the factory. As we found out later, the story went that he needed a new automobile and he could save $100 or so by going to Detroit and taking delivery of a new car there. In order to save the cost of the trip, he set up an official recruiting trip where the government paid him $6 a day and probably three cents a mile to get to Detroit. He also had stopped, we found out later, in Pittsburgh and Carnegie Tech on the way to Ann Arbor. In his interviews with perhaps fifteen or twenty of the graduates of the class of '35 and those of us from '34 that were left over, he told us why NAF was hiring. Congress had passed the Vinson-Trammel Act in 1934 which required the government to build ten percent of their own aircraft and engines. This was because Congress in those days didn't trust the military anymore than they do today. The question of what airplanes should cost was apparently just as great then as it is now. The idea of the government building ten percent of their own airplanes of course probably sounded good to the congressmen but it was really a tough task. The government had no production facilities in the country except at the Naval Aircraft Factory which had been started back in World War I. They built some airplanes then, but by 1930 it had become primarily an overhaul and repair facility.

In any event, they had jobs and no one else did, so perhaps a half dozen of us, or maybe more, received emergency appointments that started us off at the munificent salary of $1440 a year in my case. I was hired as a junior engineering aide. Some of the people who had had some experience during the summer working for an aircraft company got a little higher salaries but most of us started as what were called SP-3s in those days, sub-professional category. We were not in the regular civil service so they didn't deduct the civil service retirement part of the salary from us. We got the full $60 twice a month.

I actually started at NAF then on 12 August 1935 . At that time the major project in the engineering department was the N3N which was in the design stage but approaching flight test. It was being designed both as a land plane and as a seaplane. Across the aisle in the non-airplane part of the engineering department the main project was the H-2 catapult. At the end of the room, design modifications of fleet airplanes were in work. On the engine side of the floor the design of a new, I believe an air-cooled engine, that was to be presumably competitive with the Fairchild V-770.

Now the factory had set up a training program for all of us new recruits whereby we'd spend a little time in the various parts of the engineering department in order I suppose for them to see what we could do and for them to try to educate us a little bit into the real world of airplane design. In my case I started in the Standards group. I think my first project was to make some change in the drawing for the rip pin on a parachute pack. I worked for Mary French, the head of the section, who in turn worked for Henry Hoot, one of the senior civilian men in the engineering department who ran the whole Standards operation.

From the Standards group I went to the weight group for a while and then to the physical test lab or it could have been vice versa. At that point in time, the Navy tested all of its own airplanes for structural strength. They did drop testing and test of component parts as well as static tests of the entire airplane. Contractor testing was probably just starting. My big project in the test lab was running the static test of an O3U-6 wing beam, an aluminum alloy extrusion. It was set up in a jig with whiffle trees, and the loads were applied by hydraulic jacks. I screwed up on that one and didn't provide enough lateral supports on the beam. Somewhere close to ultimate strength the beam failed in lateral bending instead of normal bending as it should have. The big task then was to write a report justifying that it was strong enough despite the fact that we broke it -- a real challenge.

But that was not as bad as one other individual that in his career had designed a walkway for an airplane when he was working "on the board," and then later, in the stress department he analyzed it. One day just before he left the factory for another job he saw the thing sitting in the test lab and decided he would test it to finish the design cycle. He climbed up on a bench and jumped on the walkway and broke it all to pieces. He left the factory within a matter of hours thereafter.

Well, about that time in the history of things, the other parts of the factory started getting in trouble with their program to try to meet that ten percent airplane and engine production requirement. So some of us youngsters were transferred from the engineering department to the inspection department. In my case, I ended up going to the new engine facility which was set up to build not only the V-770 engine, or whatever it was that the factory was designing, but also to build a production run of R-760 Wright Whirlwind engines. The facility was brand new. The inspectors, which we now call quality control people, had all come up from the machine tool ranks, were basically ex-machinists, foremen, lead men and so on. My boss was a real nice individual, probably forty-fifty years old, named Sterret. He was very knowledgeable in the machine tool part of the game but he was not knowledgeable of all with the new inspection tools that had been bought by the Principal Engine Inspector.

The Principal Engine Inspector was Harry Lynn, who in turn worked for the Chief Inspector, a naval officer, Cdr. Del Fahrney. Fahrney later was to have an important role in my career. Lynn was a man who had been around in the inspection business, a BuAer rep at various aircraft plants, and he knew airplanes and the whole system very, very well. He was a man who insisted on getting everything in writing and as it turned out the inspectors then in the engine shop were hard pressed to meet Mr. Lynn's standards on inspection memos for his signature. So that fell upon my shoulders and fortunately I could meet his requirements for writing nasty memos from inspection to engineering. It was a good learning experience. Among other learning experiences for me was that when I checked the dimensions of a lead gear blank I needed to use a "shrink" rule. I had never heard of a "shrink" rule at the time. I was ready to reject several blanks when my older and wiser boss saved me that embarrassment.

The most controversial episode I remember was when we did reject a batch of camshafts for NAF's in-line engine. They had been made by a major manufacturer who specialized in camshafts and that manufacturer was sure that their machines were right and our jury rig checking had to be wrong. We knew that we were right however since not only were the cam profiles wrong but even the total lift was wrong, which could be checked easily with a micrometer. The manufacturer eventually apologized and built new shafts. That seems like enough for my experiences as an engine inspector.

Now I'll go back a bit. I mentioned earlier that when I started at the aircraft factory that I had an emergency type of appointment, not under normal civil service career-type appointment rules. The commission had not held competitive exams for the junior engineering, or any other category, for a number of years, all during the Depression, since they already had more people on the rolls than they could employ. But some time in '36 they decided to have a nationwide competitive exam for Junior Engineers and of course all of us at the NAF took the test as well as others all across the country. The test was a long and hard one consisting of three hours of general engineering testing in the morning and another three hours of your specialty in the afternoon. Most of the people that took the test flunked it. Somehow or another I managed to pass it, although I was never sure why. I tended to think they must have made a mistake somewhere because I got a higher score on the general part than I had on the aeronautical part. I could not believe that to be correct. In any event, they finally established a Junior Engineer, or P-1 as it was called, register and Civil Service started hiring people off that register, and converting temporary appointments such as we had into permanent appointments.

The system that was set up was supposed to work so that those of us working for the Navy would be referred by the Civil Service Commission to the Navy. Those working for the Army, for example, would be referred back to the Army and those holding temporary positions with NACA would get referred to NACA. But I suppose, not unexpectedly, the system broke down and some of us started getting offers of permanent employment with other government agencies. In my case I had letters from NACA at Langley Field. They seemed to be eager to hire me. The NACA answered letters within a day with a telegraphic reply while the Naval Aircraft Factory took several weeks to answer each question that arose. Needless to say, we were in the middle. We wanted to continue working for the Navy but we didn't want to lose the chance for a permanent job. Eventually, of course, it all got squared away and those of us, or most of us, who had started at NAF stayed there.

My next assignment after that engine inspection job turned out to be a real surprise. I had expected to go back to the Engineering Department but I was told instead to report to "Special Project D." That project, about which I was completely unaware, turned out to be probably the most interesting and challenging of any around. Lt. Cdr. Fahrney who had been the Chief Inspector when I started on the engine inspection assignment had been given the task of developing radio controlled, pilotless aircraft, or drones, for use as antiaircraft gunnery targets for the fleet. Fahrney divided his time between the Bureau of Aeronautics where he was a Class Desk officer and at NAF. The project started in 1936 and I joined it early in 1937. Almost simultaneously the civil service paperwork was squared away and I became a P-1 Junior Engineer at $2000 a year.

There are a number of interesting aspects to that Special Project D. No one at that time had developed any remotely controlled, full scale airplanes, though Sperry had flown some gyro stabilized models back in 1924. There was a major controversy in the fleet going on as to the effectiveness of the ships' antiaircraft against attacking aircraft. The ordnance side claimed invincibility against any bombers while the aviation community claimed just the opposite. Special Project D, or Project Dog as it became known, was to provide the means for resolving that controversy. For security reasons the project was operated outside the normal NAF organizations. It was located on the first floor of the building just down the hall from the manager's office. The chief engineer, understandably I suppose, resented the fact that he had been taken out of the loop and had no control over the project. At the time I joined the project, the personnel already assigned were some eight enlisted men headed by a Warrant Officer who was also a pilot. Two NAPs, Wallace and Bohlen, a Chief radio man Hendrickson, a Chief Machinist Mate, Herzog, and first, second and third class Machinist Mates McKean, Foster and Schultz. The only civilian on the job at the time was Bill Wait, an experienced designer, who had been project engineer with some outside companies before he came to the aircraft factory. He was a P-4, I believe, at the time and I became the tenth man in addition to Fahrney in the group.

All of the enlisted people were really top class.

It was my understanding that Fahrney had a free hand in selecting them and he had sure done a wonderful job. You got the impression quite soon that the Navy was really run by the chiefs and the enlisted men. These guys were really good. Bill Bohlen had been to the South Pole with Adm. Byrd. Eddie Herzog had been a wing walker in the same group as Lindbergh during the latter's barnstorming days. All of them could tell all kinds of sea stories and contributed greatly to my education.

Bill Wait, on the other hand, although an excellent designer, unfortunately had a personality that didn't get along very well with people. I ended up half the time being the conciliator between the enlisted group and Wait or between Wait and the people in the shop who were doing work on the project.

When I joined the group, work had been going on perhaps for a year. The basic electronic development of a transmitter and a receiver which would transmit signals between the control plane or the ground station and the aircraft was all being done at the Naval Research Lab. All that equipment had already been designed, built and tested and was being installed in an aircraft when I joined the program. The Navy had ordered two JH-1 Stearman Hammond planes that had recently won some safety competition run by the CAA. The main reason that they were bought was that the airplane had tricycle gear and it was known that we didn't have a chance of getting a successful operational drone unless we did have tricycle gear, or at least that's what we thought. Unfortunately the development of the JH-1 didn't proceed according to schedule. Deliveries were delayed so long that the Navy had decided to seek other solutions. The first program was to take an NT-1, a New Standard training plane, and install the radio control system in it. It was never intended to be flown as a nolo (ed: "no live operator") airplane, but always with a safety pilot. It was used primarily to develop and make sure that the electronics and control system worked. The planes that did the controlling, or had the control operator in the air, were all TG-2 Great Lakes, three place, three cockpit, single engine biplanes. The forward cockpit in its service use had been a bomber station so that it had good visibility for the man who was controlling the drone from the air. In addition to the plane, there was a field control cart developed so that takeoffs and landings were done from the ground.

After the NT-1 flights demonstrated the basic feasibility of the program and with Stearman Hammond JH-1s delivery still far behind schedule, it was decided to modify a Curtiss Fledgling trainer, an N2C-2, and attempt full nolo operation with it. The entire project was being conducted on a financial shoestring. Of course I was not involved in the financial management of the program, but I was sure indoctrinated that money controlled nearly all decisions. In a 1982 magazine article Fahrney, then Rear Adm. (ret.) stated that "A budget of $77,500 was estimated to be sufficient to purchase two Stearman Hammond JH-1 planes on tricycle gear, modify two Curtiss N2C-2 training planes to accept tricycle gear, purchase and install control gear for the target planes, two control planes and two field control carts and pay an engineer and a draftsman. The budget was eventually increased fifteen percent to take care of modifications and delays". This would indicate that the total cost of what we now call the R&D effort was under $90,000. Almost unbelievable. Apparently I cost the project about four percent of the total cost during my two years on the program. Bill Wait cost about twice that.

Actually, though, the small cost was probably possible only because of the different accounting rules which were used in those days which reminds me then of one of Mr. Lynn's educational sea stories. He was fond of telling me that he had been one of eight students who took a graduate accounting course one time. For the final exam each of the students was given the same problem, and after they turned in their test the group obviously compared notes with one another. They found that each one had given a different answer to the problem, so they then assumed that there would probably be an eighty-seven percent failure rate. When they got the grades, they found to their surprise that each one had gotten an A in the course and all the answers, eight different ones, were judged to be correct. So the moral of the story is be sure when you compare costs you know the details of the accounting system being used.

And, in the case of Special Project D, all of the uniformed personnel apparently came with no charge as did all the material that we drew directly from the stock. I'm not sure about direct shop labor, it may have been charged to the program, but there were certainly no overhead charges involved.

Project Dog was classified but none of the drawings or any of the paperwork was marked with any of the usual Restricted, Confidential, or Secret stamps. We had open orders in all the shops and we operated almost entirely by making sketches which we then hand-carried to the appropriate shop. We did all of our own weights and stress analysis and so on. When the first installation had been made in the NT-1, it included a purchased Sperry autopilot and the cost of that unit alone used up most of the budget of that particular area. As I remember, they quoted a figure of something like $10,000 for the Sperry unit alone. When we got to the N2C-2 and the JH-1 we made our own much simplified hydraulic actuators, control valves, solenoids and so on. The actuators were made from two open ended cylinders made from aluminum tubing, fitted with aluminum pistons on the ends of a steel drill rod connecting the two opposing cylinders. The pistons were made of aluminum stock and used Lockheed automotive brake cups (at seven cents each). The airframe part of the N2C-2 conversion involved really stripping the airplane because we had to move the landing gear to go from a conventional gear to a tricycle gear. The tricycle gear arrangement used the lower hinged, V portion of the original gear moved aft. The upper portion of the oleo was cut off and the remainder installed vertically between the wheel and the lower wing. A fixed strut was added to transfer the load to the upper longeron of the fuselage. The nose gear was, of course, all new. It consisted of a V arrangement from the wheel to the fuselage at the bottom of the firewall. The oleo was procured from Pitcairn Autogyro where it was used on a production autogyro main gear. The cost was on the order of $100, I believe. Since that oleo was not quite long enough, an auxiliary structure was built to transfer the load to the upper and lower longerons at the firewall.

Changing the landing gear then changed the stresses in all of the forward part of the fuselage which was made of welded steel tubes. Rather than cutting the old members out, we added reinforcements to those parts of the fuselage that weren't going to be quite strong enough. These were made from steel tubing and bolted over the original fuselage members.

The lateral control of the airplane and directional control was combined so we made coordinated turns. Some theory, and perhaps some flight tests, showed that we would be better off if we had some vertical tail area down below the fuselage in addition to the normal fin and rudder mounted on the top of the fuselage of the original airplane. The solution to that problem was to draw a spare fin and a spare rudder from stock, thereby adding the same fin area on the bottom as we had on the top; we welded the two rudders together giving us a larger vertical tail, about half above and half below the fuselage.

A lot of the details of the control system I no longer remember, but in any event the whole thing went very well overall. My nose landing gear turned out to be extremely flexible. When we turned a corner, the vertical spindle of the nose gear must have turned perhaps ten degrees, very scary to look at it. It actually had plenty of strength but it just wasn't stiff enough and it's very difficult to make that type of a long V gear so that it is stiff enough. Eventually we had to change it after we busted it up on the first landing we tried of the modified airplane. That episode was one I remember well. They had been doing a fair bit of flying without any particular trouble. I suspect Fred Wallace was the best of the control pilots. He did the takeoffs and landings operating from the field cart. When it got time to do a formal demonstration as a drone Lt. Cdr. Fahrney decided that he should be the pilot in the more difficult part of the job which was doing the landing. He did this primarily not because he wanted the glory or anything of that nature, but rather that he didn't want the NAP to take the blame in case things didn't go well. I can remember now the NAP's complaining that Fahrney should never have been allowed to do it for he was the worst of the control pilots. Anyway, the flight went well on the takeoff and controlled well in the air, but when they landed Fahrney put the drone in about a ten degree glide slope and never pulled the thing out. It landed nose wheel first and the gear went in all directions. So the first flight ended really in a failure. Following that we redesigned the nose gear and probably had the strongest nose gear that had ever been built. I still recall looking through the few records that existed at the time on design requirements for nose wheels and eventually we elected to take a design condition of basically 6G or six times the weight of the airplane on the nose wheel of the airplane balanced by rotational inertia. We had a very strong nose gear at the end of the program.

Although all of this happened over fifty years ago now I remember parts of that program still quite vividly and other parts of course I don't remember at all. Maybe some of the other things that I do remember could be of interest. I talked about the fact that money was so important. We probably couldn't have accomplished that whole task if it had not been for the salvage yard at the factory. Fortunately, Curtiss BF2C airplanes, biplane dive bombers, had been stricken after experiencing vibration or flutter problems. A few were sent to the salvage yard and you could take whatever you wanted from any of those planes and they became the source of all of our bell cranks, ball bearings and whatnot, things that we couldn't afford to buy otherwise.

Another highlight I remember is for some reason or another we needed some short stroke actuators and we ended up by getting some Walter Kidde emergency flotation gear items, probably from that same salvage pile. The actuator had been a carbon dioxide system, but in this case we didn't have any means to do it other than by using electrical power.

TAPE 2 of 16, SIDE B

Well, that ingenious bunch of enlisted personnel came up with the idea of using a squib to provide the power to move the actuator. The squib was a little device about a quarter of an inch in diameter and an inch or two long, couple of wires coming out of it and filled with powder. When you put six volts across it, it essentially blew up. We hooked that thing up to the little Kidde actuator in such a way that the gas from the explosion would go into the actuator and move the actuator down to the next port where it would exhaust. I happened to be out in the working spaces of the group on the second floor of a hangar on the flight line when this test came off. They clamped the actuator down to one end of a bench and attached by cable something like a twenty pound weight over a pulley. Everybody crouched down behind some tables, they ran wires maybe fifteen, twenty feet away and touched them to a battery and whoop! the thing worked. We had lots of power. The biggest problem was really trying to harness it all. We actually used those in several applications later on.

Another interesting thing to me was we obviously needed some means of emergency power in case the engine stopped running and we wanted to get the airplane back. So, we decided to take a normal generator and mount a propeller on the end of it which would act as a windmill and drive the generator and produce electric power. I remember them coming to me and telling me to design the propeller to drive the generator and I had no idea how to do that. I ended up by making a drawing of a propeller similar to the ones I had made on model airplanes except this one was sent out to the shop and they carved it out of aluminum. They put it on the shaft of the generator, went up and flight tested it, and the thing worked fine. I don't know to this day why it didn't blow up or go too fast or go too slow but it didn't. I think we were lucky all through that program.

Another interesting thing that happened to me, was in addition to doing the drafting and the shop liaison and the miscellaneous chores, I was also the gofer. When there would be a situation where the enlisted guys needed a new hunk of electronic gear I would often be selected to go to a storeroom and draw out an RU-4 receiver, a GT something, or another transmitter. I'd just sign chits for them, took them out, and they got put in the airplanes. Some years later, probably a couple of years after I was in Washington, two naval investigative service people walked in. They had all my chits and they wanted to know where the RU-4s were and the transmitters and all these other things that I had signed for years before. Most of the electronic stuff was at the bottom of Guantanamo Bay by then. There was a fire extinguisher and a safety belt that had gone into the NT-1, that thing was still hanging up in Building 75 at the factory, so eventually I got out of the mess without going to jail. I often wondered how many other people had the same experience. I never found out.

When I stop and think about all this, I end up by really wondering who did what. Who started the thing? Obviously the concept must have come from Fahrney, perhaps with input initially from the Naval Research Lab (NRL). The development work on the radio control part of it was really done by NRL, and virtually all of the electronics in the airplane were done by all those enlisted guys. I know that there are no drawings of an electrical system, for example. Hendrickson, Herbst, and then later Jack Pearl and a few others did all that work on their own. The early drawings or whatever existed were done by Bill Wait before I got there, and after I got there, I suppose I did ninety-nine percent of the drawings that applied to the program. Sometimes drawing things that the enlisted group of guys wanted done, wanted made, sometimes things that obviously had to be done that I knew something about. Obviously also Fahrney would tell me to do things and Bill Wait would ask me to do things.

Fahrney at that time was thinking guided missiles and I remember one program where they had borrowed an early CBS rotating disc television set, did something to make the power supplies work, and put it in the nose of, I think, an SNB and flew up and down the Delaware River with it. When they came back from that flight they reported that they did a pretty reasonable job of watching the television screen and aiming at buildings that they knew existed up and down the river. Nothing ever was done while I was still on the project in that line. However, the concept of using television as a sensor seemed to have been established and later on television was used in the Gorgon program, as well as others. Fahrney had me make a drawing of a small attack drone for his use in promoting the concept.

One other interesting idea that came about during that period was when they were considering what happens when the engine quits and we put in the emergency power and so on, but then as a last ditch thing a parachute recovery device was desired. That was done like all the other parts of the program with using things you could get your hands on and wound up by taking three standard twenty-eight foot chutes, running the shroud lines through the vent holes in the top of the first chute to get the second chute attached and the third one in line, so we had three twenty-eight foot chutes in tandem. It was actually tested at Lakehurst and the system worked pretty well, frankly much to my surprise. Well, enough for the things we actually did on the program.

One of the things I ran into in those days that later was of interest to me when I became more involved in Washington and the acquisition problems of naval aircraft was that when I would pull a drawing on the Great Lakes TG-2 airplane to find out what the airplane structure looked like, or something of that nature, about half the time the drawings were marked T4M. That was very puzzling at the time, but eventually I found out that the T4M had been the original torpedo plane design. Normally the Navy bought production airplanes from the manufacturer who had developed the experimental model. But pressures developed apparently for a competitive buy and so for a short period of time the Navy tried doing a formal advertising when they had a follow-on production buy. Perhaps in this case Great Lakes won a production contract by underbidding Martin, the original developer. We stopped doing that in the acquisition business really because industry finally refused to bid on such things. There was no way that the second manufacturer should ever be able to produce the airplane for the same cost as the original producer. One of the lessons one learns when you go back and look at history.

Along that same line, before I forget it, was a tale that happened at NAF in that same time period. You remember that I had said that we had the Vinson-Trammel Act and the Navy was supposed to build ten percent of their own airplanes. To do that I mentioned we had built R-760s, using Wright Company drawings and whatnot for a production run. In the airplane field I believe the first buy of NAF building other people's airplanes was the SON program. This was a Navy built version of the SOC that had been in the fleet for some time and produced by the Curtiss Company in Buffalo.

To appreciate this you have to know a few other facts, unfortunately, so this will wind on for a while. When an airplane was priced in those days, one of the items on the final corrected data list that the Navy required was a cost breakdown of the entire airplane. The rules were such that the breakdown of all the parts of an airplane which you used for buying spares and pricing spares had to add up to the unit price of the airplane that was being produced. This, you immediately recognize, could be a very difficult thing to do basically, to price each part and make the total come out to the unit price of the airplane. You did have a break in there that the manufacturer at least had the assembly labor available as a cushion. In any event, the common practice of industry was that you would price things like wing tips pretty high and you would price things like fuselages pretty low. When the factory got the job they were faced with a problem of how to produce the SON within the price of the SOC, to prove perhaps that Curtiss had or had not been cheating us all these years. In any event, either the production superintendent at that time, probably Cdr. Ostrander or his civilian assistant, a man named Stevenson, got the brilliant idea that rather than trying to build a SON welded steel tube fuselage they'd just buy them at the price of a steel tube fuselage from the spares list of the SOC. The price was remarkably cheap. The aircraft factory just sent off a purchase order to Curtiss, "Please send me 44 steel tube fuselages." Curtiss squealed like a stuck pig but eventually they had to produce them, otherwise they were proving that they had mispriced spares for a great number of years. Then the factory was able to produce the SON within the unit price of an SOC. A great sea story.

I ended up staying on Special Project D for roughly two years. Before I left the program the N2C-2 had been flown successfully. We finally got the Stearman Hammonds and had modified them to the extent of putting in the radio control gear. The N2C-2 had been dispatched to Guantanamo and run over part of the Atlantic Fleet on a prescribed course, prescribed altitude, at a prescribed speed. I think they flew at 10,000 feet and somewhere around 85 or 90 knots up and down the deployed fleet which shot at the poor old N2C-2. There were no hits on the first run. Two or three runs later the airplane did pick up a few shrapnel hits but the airplane was recovered and was actually used again in later target tests against the fleet. The higher-ups in the Navy department were really shocked I guess at how poor the performance of the antiaircraft guns of the fleet really were and immediately ordered that we have a production run of N2C-2s. I think the Navy then had perhaps a dozen Curtiss Fledglings still laying around somewhere and that program was carried out.

I had been on the program two years and it was time for me to get a raise. When the program went into a production run it basically had to go back into the normal routine of the aircraft factory so I could stay on the program, but if I wanted to get a raise the Chief Engineer said I was entirely too specialized to get one and I had to prove that I had a great deal more versatility. Well, you can believe that everybody fought the idea including me. I thought that the assignment on Project Dog was just about as versatile as anything I'd ever heard of. You did everything. But to get the raise I got transferred off of Project D back to the Engineering Department in early 1939.

By that time the situation in the country was that aeronautical job opportunities were available virtually everywhere and the companies were looking for people with a bit of experience so we all started getting job offers. Lockheed was trying to hire people and their offers were that they'd match our salaries and depend upon the low living costs and the wonderful weather of California to lure us to the west coast. They didn't get anybody to bid on that one. And then McDonnell was starting his first company in St. Louis and James McDonnell came to Philadelphia and interviewed people. I remember being interviewed by him in a downtown Philadelphia hotel. I concluded that James S. McDonnell was nuts. He had asked me whether I knew anything about hydraulics, landing gears, surface controls or whatnot and he would interrupt his question by pointing to a picture of a Maryland 167 (for which he had been the designer when he was at Martin) and said, "Yes sir, that's my baby." Another remark was with a pat of his hand on an aerial view of West St. Louis saying, "Isn't that God's country?" There were just a few five room bungalows scattered around hither and thither. At the time I think he was operating out of the old Robertson hangar in St. Louis. Anyway I ended up by not going to McDonnell, probably much to my financial detriment. Later, just about the time I left NAF for the BuAer, Glenn L. Martin was making offers and I went down there for a couple of interviews.

Well, I got a little bit ahead of the story at that point. When I went back into the engineering department I first had to train three or four guys to take out all those sketches that I'd been making over the two year period and they had to be converted into normal production drawings . They had three or four draftsmen working on that program. I kind of oversaw them as an added responsibility to the job that I'd been assigned in the stress department. I had to do it because nobody else knew what the drawings were. The Chief Engineer was very unhappy when I'd spend any time on the Special Projects work.

I spent probably six months in the stress department doing stress analysis of the programs that were coming up. I guess the N3N was well along by that time and in production. We were still doing some work on changes that had to be analyzed. The X0SN had been started. That program eventually got stopped I believe just after an early flight test when the then Chief of the Bureau RAdm. A.B. Cook walked through the plant one day and his words were something to the effect that, "Hell, I thought I stopped this program on my last tour in BuAer." So everybody rolled up the drawings and started on a new program the next day.

Well, after about a week or two of working in the stress department I had demonstrated my versatility and so I got a raise from a P-1 to a P-2. That meant $2000 to $2600. I stayed in the stress department for about six months and got transferred back into the design group, back on the board. I was assigned to the SBN where I was supposed to do a few miscellaneous jobs first and then they gave me the task of trying to design a flexible gun mount for the rear seat. The SBN had been built^___the original airplane had been built by Brewster as the XSBA-1, and as part of that Vinson-Trammel Act they were ordering a batch of them to be produced as SBNs. The drawings were in awful shape. Since the Navy had really not intended to buy the airplane in production, the contractor never reached the stage of cleaning up the experimental drawings. The drawings had been made from pencil vellums and the blueprints were difficult to read. In any event my learning process continued. I then got involved in a few other programs where I had some dealings with Bureau of Ordnance drawings and it was obvious by looking at anything done by Ordnance that it was overclassified and overdesigned, altogether too heavy, too big. That was a lesson I suppose that carried on for years thereafter. I never was very much entranced with anything BuOrd did, at least in the aeronautical line.

It just occurred to me that when I was talking much earlier about the enlisted personnel on Special Project D or Project Dog that I had said that we had eight enlisted people when we started plus Lt. Cdr. Fahrney, Bill Wait and myself. During the two years that I was on the program the number of enlisted personnel increased and over that two year period some ten more people were brought into the program. Toward the end of the game they also picked up another officer or two. I remember Lt. Bobby Jones came aboard and he later headed up the project when they started setting up the operational squadrons to go down and run the exercises for the fleet. He continued on the program through the TDN, TDR and attack drone modifications of fleet aircraft started during World War II. I should also say that the ten additional people that came in were perhaps a shade below that original group but not a lot. They were a very sharp bunch of guys. I just hope that the current day Navy is as good as those guys were.

Back to the present of sixty years ago. I was working on the board sometime in the fall of 1939 when the Chief Engineer advised me that I was to be interviewed by someone coming up from BuAer, a Mr. Frisbie. They needed personnel down there. Actually the Naval Aircraft Factory served a very useful purpose as a manpower pool for the Bureau, and did a worthwhile job of training people like myself, that had no experience whatsoever, in getting ready to come down to Washington to help in the management of the naval aviation program. Anyway, when Karl White had talked about a Mr. Frisbie he obviously held him in high regard and let me know that Frisbie was considered one of the prime movers of naval aviation in Washington. So I looked forward to the interview. I guess within a couple of days I was interviewed by Mr. Frisbie. He told me what he and his section did, and it was obvious that it was one of the places in the Bureau that took a look at the whole airplane rather than pieces as you might get if you went to work in a powerplant section or other specialty groups in those days. I was interested in the job. By that time I had a very high regard for the Navy, its people, primarily its people. I didn't know enough about the equipment but the people were sure first rate. To make a long story short, Frisbie then eventually offered me a job and he also offered a job to a Mr. Gil Weiss who had come into the factory in 1938. Gil was a NYU graduate and had worked at Burnelli briefly before NAF.

Gil and I came down to Washington at the same time on 1 December 1939 and we stayed together until he retired a few years before I did. I stuck on a while longer than that -- getting ahead of the story again. My orders to Washington were that I should report on 1 December 1939 and since the move was "in the best interests of the government", the Navy Department would gladly pay my transportation. What that amounted to finally was that they would pay me three cents a mile for the 141 miles involved. So, after I got to Washington, I got a check for my moving expenses and transportation of $4.23. That was my introduction to traveling for the Navy, and the first travel orders I had ever had. Anyway, the next step was Washington.

TAPE 3 of 16, SIDE A

RAUSA: We had covered your four and a half years at NAF, and your transfer to Washington. When did that occur?

SPANGENBERG: 1 December 1939. You'll find out that's the only date I remember. [laughter] I don't even remember the date I retired. I know the year though. But Washington was obviously the best place to go.

RAUSA: By the way, by now you are married. Did you have any children?

SPANGENBERG: I was married six months after I started at NAF. We had our first child in June of 1939.

RAUSA: So you had a baby there before moving to Washington.

SPANGENBERG: We had a six month old girl.

RAUSA: In Washington did you work on the Main Navy Building on Constitution Avenue?

SPANGENBERG: We were in the eighth wing on the second floor, Room 2841.

RAUSA: That's not the building out in the back, this was the main building?

SPANGENBERG: This was the main building. The N and W buildings in back hadn't been built yet. It was the Main Navy Building. All of the Bureau of Aeronautics was located in the 8th and 9th wings of that three story building. My boss had been given the title of "Design Coordination" when he became a P-7, which was then a newly created "supergrade" and he was also head of the "Contract Airplane Design" section of the "Engineering" branch.

RAUSA: What was your first job with Frisbie?

SPANGENBERG: The first thing he gave me to read was the BuAer Manual which could be read in an hour, I suppose. I read that all and said, "now what?"

RAUSA: Were you meeting with the contractors a lot at this point?

SPANGENBERG: Not when I started, but pretty soon I did. Obviously they would rather talk to P-7 Frisbie than they would to P-3 Spangenberg or P-2 Weiss. But eventually it became a melded office. Frisbie was a long-time Navy employee, had started at BuAer in 1923. He had received a Mechanical Engineering degree from Cornell and had worked at Curtiss. He became a Project Engineer before coming to BuAer.

RAUSA: Was he a pretty good guy?

SPANGENBERG: A very fine individual, widely respected, and widely liked. Industry knew him and respected him and he was a wonderful guy to work for. He was a father figure to Gil and me. Later years it was really pitiful because he started what I now know to be Alzheimer's. In his last few years in BuAer, he was really slowing down.

RAUSA: So you eventually became like his right hand man.

SPANGENBERG: Very quickly I became his right hand man and Gil Weiss his left hand. Mr. McCalmont, the second man in the office who was one grade lower than Frisbie, developed cancer of the intestines and in those days they didn't really know what to do about it. I found out about it when he telephoned one morning and told us that he wouldn't be in for the next six months. He went out to the University of Michigan hospital and had one of the first operations where they removed the colon. Well, this necessitated a very quick learning experience for Weiss and myself.

RAUSA: Frisbie would almost be like the technical director, like the number one civilian in BuAer.

SPANGENBERG: Well, he was the number one civilian then. There were two others that had the same grade level as he, one that ran the Drawing Room, Mr. Clark.

Mr. J.E. Sullivan headed the Equipment and Materials. Sullivan was a reserve naval officer, an Annapolis graduate, I believe, but ran his section as a civilian. The functions of the Design Coordination/Contract Airplane Design office at that time were very broad. As you mentioned, Mr. Frisbie could be described as a technical director, or perhaps better as the senior technical advisor to the command structure of the Bureau of Aeronautics. The office duties included coordinating design requirements for all aircraft, running design competitions for new aircraft, preparing test directives for all aircraft, administering the design and operational weight and balance control systems, as well as the requirements and approval of the mechanical design systems of all naval aircraft, including surface controls, landing gear, wing folding, towing, mooring and anchor gear, flotation gear, cockpit arrangements, and so on. We also wrote all the letters for having trials done and this again was a coordination kind of a job. We wrote to a flight test organization then at Anacostia for testing of experimental airplanes, then called Service Acceptance Trials. For production airplanes, we wrote to the Bureau of Inspection and Surveys for Production Inspection Trials. We coordinated getting the letter out, and what was to be tested. It was done in a lot more detail than today where we can just about tell Patuxent "test the airplane" and they now know what the job is. In those days I imagine that there was just not enough of an organization at Anacostia that the bureau trusted to know the entirety of what had to be done. Mr. Eddie Rounds over there was probably the only civilian continuity kind of a guy available. Pilots rotate in and out and you just don't get the breadth of experience, but put them all together and you do of course. The scope of responsibility seems almost impossible to imagine in today's world. The Design Coordination title that Mr. Frisbie had was the best name that section, later division, ever had.

RAUSA: Well, once McCalmont went out there for the operation then you became the man, is that right?

SPANGENBERG: Yes, I became number two guy. McCalmont had been number two to Frisbie and had run almost all of the test directive type of activity -- accepting the reports, doing the weight and balance, writing the directives for flight test and to the Board of Inspection and Survey.

RAUSA: This looks like a good spot to stop because it's a new milestone if that's all right with you.

February 27, 1990

RAUSA: We stopped last time after you left the Naval Aircraft Factory and came to Washington for the first time to work for Bill Frisbie, McCalmont got sick, and had to have an operation and had to leave the area for a while, so in effect and in a very short period of time upon arrival you became Frisbie's number one guy. Have I got that correct?

SPANGENBERG: Partially, that was one part of the job when we got to Washington. I say we because Gil Weiss came down at the same time, you will remember. The two of us went to work on the same day in the same office so Frisbie's office expanded from Frisbie and McCalmont and a stenographer, Gladys Fricker. The Bureau of Aeronautics in those days was very small. We were located on the back end of the eighth wing, second floor, Main Navy Building on Constitution between 17th and 19th. The whole bureau was concentrated pretty much in the eighth and ninth wings. There were some people I guess on the third floor but mostly on the first and second floors.

RAUSA: Who was the admiral in charge?

SPANGENBERG: Towers. The whole operation was small enough so that within a day or two of our arrival Frisbie took Gil Weiss and myself on a tour and introduced us to all of the section heads at the time. The head of the engineering branch was Cdr. Pennoyer, "Horse" was his nickname. He was located about ten yards from where our office was. The Class Desk officers were in the same corridor. There was the fighter desk, Cdr. Hatcher had the job when I got there. Cdr. Eddie Clexton had the dive bombers. Cdr. Mort Fleming the cruiser and battleship based planes, the SOCs, and OS2Us and so on. Cdr. Farnsworth had the patrol planes, VPs and then there was a training desk. Cdr. Farhney had that operation most of the time. He was called Trainers and Special Devices, or some such title. He was still spending part of his time up at NAF. Of course, with tours of duty, people changed. Eventually Cdr. Fleming's job, the VSO Class Desk, which also handled torpedo planes in those days was simplified by establishing a VTB Class Desk.

In addition to those guys, we went on up to the Chief's office and I was introduced to Adm. Towers. A large part of the organization near the Chief's office in the ninth wing was eventually transferred over to OPNAV. There was a training group up there that ran the whole Naval Aviation training program. "Military Requirements" was up there, and "Plans and Policies." Civilian attire was the norm in order to keep "military presence" in Washington to a minimum. That policy ended with Pearl Harbor. I can remember Plans and Policies was then Capt. D.C. Ramsey. There was only one admiral in the bureau then, Adm. Towers. Ramsey wore a pair of slacks and a black cambric jacket all the time. He was easy to find. The point of this is that the whole organization was very small; I can't imagine a new employee coming into NAVAIR today, for example, being taken around and introduced to the heads of all the things that are now called divisions.

My first day after the introduction to all of the divisions, Frisbie threw a "BuAer" manual on my desk. That was a document, perhaps thirty pages in those days, of the rules of how to write letters. Bear in mind I'd come from the Naval Aircraft Factory and we worked on making drawings and doing analyses and reports, but we didn't write letters. I doubt that I'd ever written a single official Navy letter at NAF. Gil Weiss's experience was the same. When we had questions, we asked Miss Fricker who was a CAF-2 and a superb stenographer. She ran the office basically. As an aside, there was only one clerical position in the Engineering Branch Head and Class Desk spaces, a Miss Pelton. Very capable.

RAUSA: Do you recall at that time what aircraft were cooking?

SPANGENBERG: To a degree. Knowing you were going to ask me that I tried to dig through some of the few records that I have. That's probably something I ought to say and I think you already know this. When you remember these things your memory gets awfully selective and the events that you remember one way you'll read years later a completely different way. For example, in reading Ed Heinemann's book, some of those tales I remember but not the way he describes it and some of the stuff is just basically wrong in the way programs started.

RAUSA: That's the way he remembered it and I think that's true.

SPANGENBERG: Probably a historian ought to find everybody from the period; I'm sure he could find conflicts.

When I came down to BuAer I got a raise to a P-3. Gil became a P-2. P-3s were paid $3200. We thought that was a lot of money in those days. But I was a junior in this whole thing and when there would be an important meeting on a new airplane or when the evaluation meetings were held by the Chief of the Bureau or something like that I never went to those things. Frisbie went, and he would tell us some of the things that happened, but not everything that happened. Frisbie was not a guy that did a lot of talking. In fact one of the problems that we always had was getting his knowledge out of him. We had to ask questions to know what was going on. Well, anyway, you asked about the airplanes then under development. The VTB competition had been held and they were building both the TBU at Vought and the TBF at Grumman. At that time the TBF had been selected for production and so we were doing a fully concurrent development program on that one. That led to some innovations in contract guarantee writing. On the fighter side, the F4U was under development and was the subject of one of the early lessons I learned. The airplane of course was roughly twice the weight and size of the previous generation of fighters. There were a lot of people, experienced naval officers as well as the general public and civilians around the place, who thought the F4U was too big to ever be a success. I remember listening to a guy whom I thought knew a lot. I had received a letter from somebody up at NAF who asked me what my opinion of the F4U was. I hadn't been in the business long enough to really know so I just quoted the general impression was that, according to this guy, that it was too big, too heavy, it would never be a fleet fighter. Obviously it didn't turn out that way. It didn't take long to learn that you'd better be careful to whom you listened. I remember John Shepherd, you probably know him.

RAUSA: The name rings a bell.

SPANGENBERG: A fine Naval officer and he always told the story that when he started on a new tour that he had to look around for that little gal in the red tennis shoes to get his information on whom he should believe in the organization, and whom should he avoid for advice.

In addition to the F4U, and what came out of the same competition in 1938 was the twin engine Grumman XF5F, a peculiar looking airplane, two-wing mounted engines, maybe 1820s, but with no fuselage forward of the wing. There was a cartoon that said "first put the engines on, then you put the wing, then you put the fuselage." There were a lot of people that wouldn't even consider the twin engine airplane again for a fighter.

TAPE 3 of 16, SIDE B

In the fleet we still had F3Fs operating, but we were going into the F4F. F4F-3s were in the fleet. F4F-4s started about the time I got there. A famous story about Bill Schwendler at Grumman was that he used a pin through an eraser to find out how out how he could get a folding wing using a slanted hinge pin.

RAUSA: I never heard that before. He put a pin through an eraser?

SPANGENBERG: You know one of those long pink erasers. He stuck a pin through that and screwed around and when he swung the eraser, simulating the wing, it moved from a horizontal plane and put it essentially in a vertical plane of 90. Then that idea was used in the Grumman F4F and TBF type of wing folding.

RAUSA: You touched on the aircraft that were underway at the time. Do you recall about the time you got involved in any particular one or were you kind of working several.

SPANGENBERG: Basically there was plenty of work in that office to do without getting involved in any one airplane, in a new program, that type of thing. The first evaluation job I ever did was a Curtiss Wright 21 airplane that had been submitted to Anacostia by the contractor. They were proposing it as a light weight fighter and Anacostia had written a report. Frisbie threw this on my desk and said write an evaluation report. I didn't know what that was. So I went back and I looked through his pink file of the letters that had been written before. Eventually I sat down and wrote a report based on what Anacostia had said, and compared it with the fighters we had under development. Must have been an all right kind of a job. I remember drafting a letter that finally went out to Curtiss Wright, "no thanks." The government knew they weren't going to buy them. [GAS: As I edit some of this history in 1998, I can't help but think that today someone in OSD would buy the design as the low in a high-low mix.]

There were some other personalities that were important in this area in that time span. Working directly for Cdr. Pennoyer, the head of then "Engineering Branch" was a Cdr. L.C. Stevens, with a title of "Experiments and Development." He was a wonderful gentleman as well as being a very astute technical naval officer. He did the entire R&D budget all by himself and went up on the Hill and defended it. He ran the whole R&D effort. He was an overloaded individual too. Somehow or another he had started handling invention letters from the public thinking that this fell into the category of Experiments and Development, and surely there were going to be some great ideas that everybody was overlooking that would come in. Well, he soon found out that's not what invention letters that you got from the general public were. The letters were a time consuming task. You had to always be nice to the individual. Apparently Stevens had tried to give that job to other people and he had not found anyone that wrote letters that he was willing to sign. Well, with a new boy in the field, Frisbie apparently had told him that maybe I could do it. He wandered down to our office and gave me an assignment. Frisbie had told me he was coming. So he gave me about three letters, samples he had written and signed. It became relatively easy to start writing responses to invention letters. That eventually took a good deal of effort.

RAUSA: He liked what you did so you got --

SPANGENBERG: Well, I satisfied, I could write a letter and there's no doubt in my mind but what I would never have gotten where I was if I hadn't had the ability to sit down and write a fairly decent letter. It did not seem like a very important thing to me at the time. I thought everybody could do it. As you went along you found out that some of those guys working for you, you spent all your time rewriting that which they had written. Technically they just couldn't put it down on paper. I was glad that I had a good series of English teachers back in grade school and high school. I guess that's where you learn it. My friend Gil Weiss could write a letter but it was sometimes twice as long as it might have been.

RAUSA: It's an art I think to be able to do it concisely and get the point across.

SPANGENBERG: Well, that was a continuing job and I did it for years. All through the war I was writing those letters. Probably ought to tell you about some of my favorite inventors.

RAUSA: Are those letters still around?

SPANGENBERG: They're back in files. I didn't keep anything.

RAUSA: I'll bet those files don't exist either.

SPANGENBERG: They may or may not. As far as files existing that again was just an awful story. When I started in the bureau there was a file room/mail room. It was a combined operation. Some of the old hands would go down to the mail room every morning and read through the "yellow" copies of all the correspondence that had gone out the day before. Frisbie never did that. I guess we were always too busy. Apparently some people wanted to do it and I imagine that the naval officers, guys that wanted to get into the policy part of the business probably would find it extremely helpful. They sure would be way ahead of some of the people that hadn't read them. How did I get off on that?

RAUSA: Well, we were talking about how Stevens came down and roped you into writing invention letters. So that took a lot of your time and then you were also working on --

SPANGENBERG: Another thing that happened was that the bureau as a whole was understaffed. They probably needed twice as many people to do the job that they should have been doing. Structures was woefully understaffed and so when they found out that there were a couple of new guys down there at Design Coordination they asked for help. Frisbie finally agreed. So I went down there for a couple of months and worked in what was then the Structures section. This was also invaluable because I learned the personalities of the guys in Structures and later, of course, I was working with them and could understand their philosophy. It varied with each individual.

The long-time head of Structural Requirements was a fellow named Ralph Creel. Creel in that month or two that I was in Structures sat across from me at a double desk. (I had never seen one before.) He sat on one side and I sat on the other and he assigned the work I was supposed to do. I looked at a stress report on a Bell XL (Navy version of a P-39) landing gear. I didn't like their loads analysis. I guess I made Ralph real happy. Ralph was the hardest guy on contractors that ever lived. Contractors complained about him. All the contractors said "That God damn Creel." He wrote them letters almost accusing them of skulduggery, of trying to get around the requirements. Nasty letters. We argued all the time. They, the contractors, weren't really that bad and you had to work with them. Actually, despite the fact that everybody "hated" Creel, when he finally retired he got more job offers from the industry because he knew the specs system, knew how things worked. He was the soul of integrity, probably too much so. He got some kind of a big award, not from a Navy organization or an aeronautical group, but from the SAE. He taught me things of course. I argued with him about the whole art of vibration analysis. I had taken a course under Prof. Timoshenko so I knew the language, but I couldn't do that type of work. That didn't stop Ralph Creel from saying contractors should do it, while I didn't think that we should ask the contractors to do things that we didn't know how to do. We argued about that. He was probably right to a degree but he overdid it. Eventually we'd always compromise. Anyway, I went down there for a couple of months, learned that job, and probably about the time I got back from that assignment was when McCalmont's illness, cancer of the intestines, occurred. Well, we learned quickly. I had not gotten into any of the writing of the letters of acceptance or the letters requesting trials. There was a lot to learn in that area. When McCalmont went out Gil Weiss picked up the weight and balance part of the job and then his career from then on pretty much concentrated on the weight side of our activities. I concentrated on writing letters on the trials and the acceptances and that sort of stuff and doing the drawing approval that came into the shop, looking over the control layout, etc. Basically the contractors would send in a glorified layout of what they were going to do, a wing folding mechanism for example, and we would look that over and see if it was in accordance with the design specifications and whether it made sense, was essentially foolproof, or as near as we thought we could get to foolproof. Did a little criticizing of mechanical details that should have been caught by the inspector at the plant but not as much of that, usually I just took a fairly general look at the arrangement. Eventually all of that work got put into a separate section when we expanded for World War II, and finally it was transferred to "Equipment and Materials."

I guess the first competition that I really got involved in to a limited extent was the PBB, or it became the PBB. It was a twin-engine seaplane which would fly off the water at perhaps 60,000 pounds, but for doing extremely long-range missions it was to be catapulted from a barge-type vessel at a much heavier weight. The competition had been started before we got there and it was in the winding up stage. It was an important part of my learning process overall because they ended up by selecting Vought Sikorsky as the winner. Sikorsky had merged with Vought. You probably remember that Sikorsky had built flying boats. The Navy had a PBS and they built a commercial boat version not long after, the VS-44. Anyway, Vought won the competition but Vought had enough business and the Navy wanted to expand its flying boat industrial capacity (from Sikorsky, Consolidated, and Martin) to get Boeing into the military boat business. They were already in the commercial end of the business. The Boeing design proposal, however, had been below par and finished I suppose number 3 out of 3 or 4. So it was decided that on "industrial statesmanship" grounds they would give the contract to Boeing but it was done honestly, the Navy handled it honestly, by writing to Vought and saying, "You've won the competition. We're going to give the award to Boeing. We want to give your data to Boeing as a starting point in redoing their design." We paid them for the effort. In those days, a proposal probably cost $10,000 or something on that order. Up to that point at that time, that whole era, we did not pay a contractor for proposal work. It came out of his pocket. In this case we paid him for his work and I don't suppose he was happy but he was satisfied. That became an important keystone in my learning, how do we deal with questions of that nature.

RAUSA: Would this be around 1940?

SPANGENBERG: Yes the PBB. I think my chart shows it starting late '39, so it was '39 and '40. Anyway, that is what was done. Boeing was called and told that they had a lousy design. "Here's the data on Vought design. Go back and give us a proposal that does what that does." They weren't going to copy the Vought design. No two designers ever think the same way. They then submitted a new proposal and eventually the Navy went ahead and gave them a contract. The airplane was a success, a pretty good flying boat, but the Navy traded it away later in return for some PB4Ys, a Navy version of the Army Air Corps' B-24s. So the Navy gave up that beautiful Renton plant on Lake Washington at Boeing in Seattle and then Boeing was out of the Navy business for a while. They never did build us any production seaplanes.

RAUSA: One thing I want to ask. At this time was it almost a certainty in your mind that we were going to be involved in the war?

SPANGENBERG: Oh, yeah.

RAUSA: So there must have been concern about getting the right aircraft to do the job.

SPANGENBERG: Right. And one of the tasks that came along at that time, the way you got a different airplane was to write to the contractor and say give us a proposal for doing this, that or the other. Our fleet fighters, the F4Fs certainly were inadequate. We knew they were going to be inadequate. I still remember writing those letters. One to Brewster, do you remember the Brewster Buffalo, the F2A? I wrote a letter to Brewster and I drafted the letter to Grumman and said give us a proposal with putting a 2600 engine into the F2A for Brewster and into the F4F for Grumman, modify the airplane to suit, and include these items: take out the emergency flotation that was a standard part of airplanes in those days, put in wing mounted 50 cal. machine guns instead of the 30 and 50 cal. firing guns through the props. Install armor and self-sealing tanks, the development of which was just starting, and make it a combat airplane. We gave them the performance specs we wanted them to meet. Shipped the letter out, after the usual coordination with the whole engineering branch.

Shortly thereafter another competition was run which resulted in selecting the F7F. That was the first competition I think that I had been involved in to some degree from the beginning. An interesting part of the competition process was that when a competition came in we would hang up each competitor's general arrangement and inboard profile drawings all around our office. They usually filled the room. We would put them up early in the morning and then all the senior officers and civilians in the bureau would get invited to come and inspect the proposals. The chief of the bureau would be invited. Towers must have come down on occasion but I don't remember him specifically. But I remember Adm. Marc Mitscher who was then the assistant chief, coming down. He looked at the F7F proposal and said, "That will never go on an aircraft carrier. It's too big."

RAUSA: He was an early aviator.

SPANGENBERG: Oh, yeah, he was an early aviator. He must have been assistant chief. He was a good guy. In fact, near all the people that I ran into at that time, awfully good guys. Actually Mitscher was right. The thing never did become a fleet aircraft.

RAUSA: What did he see in it?

SPANGENBERG: It was just too big, too heavy. That wasn't the reason that it wasn't a successful carrier plane. At the time the barriers in use on the carriers were not able to handle a twin-engine design.

RAUSA: Did you do much traveling at this time or were you pretty much right there in the office?

SPANGENBERG: Did very little traveling. In my whole career I never did a lot of traveling. The office representative in the early days was always Frisbie. Frisbie went to every mockup and if there were a conference at a contractor's plant because of some technical problem he would go. Eventually I got into the business. It seemed like I waited a long time, but in reality it was only a couple of years before I really started getting involved.

One of the few things that I ended up with when I retired was my personal file and for some reason I kept all my travel orders from the time I got to Washington. So I went back and looked through those and found out how much traveling I did, which wasn't very much. I made 144 total trips throughout my career. That is, official trips. Of those 35 were on TFX and F-111, one quarter of all my travel. That should give you a feel for how screwed up that program was. There were only 7 on the F-14 and on the F-14 you tended to make more trips to Grumman because it was close. You could run up there and back in a day. Three on the S-3 and then six on the HLH, two on the CH-53. Most of the others were single time mockup trips. I guess only 85 of the 144 trips had to deal with Navy aircraft programs specifically. The others had to do with going down to NASA, etc.

RAUSA: Where were you on the day that World War II started?

SPANGENBERG: On December the 7th? I was listening to the broadcast of the football game. Redskins then? It must have been.

RAUSA: What were your reactions?

SPANGENBERG: Shock.

RAUSA: Even though you knew there was going to be a war you still were shocked? Do you recall what your feelings about the aircraft that you had available at the time and how that was going to affect your job?

SPANGENBERG: I'm afraid I didn't have any great philosophical thoughts.

RAUSA: Did you think that the bureau now was going to get big, going to get some more people?

SPANGENBERG: I suppose. And the bureau had been growing. In retrospect a hell of a lot of very intelligent planning was going on in the late thirties. Actually later in my career whenever there would be a spare time I would collect data on what we had done. How many airplanes we had bought, and so on.

TAPE 4 of 16, SIDE A

The thing that everybody tried to do on that Sunday, December 7, 1941, was to try to find out what they wanted us to do. The announcement that came out at the football game was, "All military personnel report to their offices." All the captains, admirals, ensigns all got up, left the football game and went to the Munitions and Navy Buildings. All of us civilians didn't know what we were supposed to do. We tried to call and we were told to relax and I suppose eventually there must have been a radio announcement telling us to report on Monday.

RAUSA: This was Sunday, right?

SPANGENBERG: Yeah.

RAUSA: So you were going to go to work the next day anyway.

SPANGENBERG: Sure. When I first came to Washington -- there were probably a few things we should have said. The things that surprised the hell out of me was that at Philadelphia there was a fairly high degree of security. You didn't fool around with any confidential material. It got locked up before you threw the cover over your drafting board or before you went away. We even locked up "restricted" data which was another category that existed then. You had to show your badge to get in and out of the Navy Yard.

When we arrived in Washington, there was no security to speak of. Here were all the secrets of the nation and we didn't even lock file cabinets. It was strange.

RAUSA: After Pearl Harbor now did all of a sudden your work intensify or were you already working pretty hard to begin with?

SPANGENBERG: We were working hard then. When I came down to Washington we were on a five-and-a-half-day week. We worked seven hours a day and four hours on Saturday. The seven-hour day started around 8:30 on paper but in order to park you had to get there at 7:30. So most people were in there at 7:30, 7:45, around that time. Some of the characters would sit down and have coffee and read the newspaper. Others, like myself, would go to work. We were already there, why not? We normally went home more or less on time. Once the war came along we went on a forty-eight hour week. We worked eight hours a day supposedly, six days a week and we civilians got paid overtime, but at a rate only the government could calculate. It was a dollar and forty cents an hour, the overtime rate of pay.

RAUSA: Now we're in 1942 and we're building up.

SPANGENBERG: We were building up before that.

RAUSA: So you didn't really notice any big change?

SPANGENBERG: It was just more of the same at the beginning, a lot more of the same. Another thought, out of context, but before I forget it -- our office got monthly production reports so that we could keep up with the writing of specifications for weight reports and for other things. It gave us a source of data that I found invaluable, and then in later years we kept those kind of things and kept records, I did anyway, of production quantities and rates. When I could get my hands on any cost data I kept records on that. I sure wish I had kept all that data, but I didn't. I left it in the files when I left. I think it really bothered me that more people didn't do what I was doing, trying to get a full grasp of all the variables in this business.

So, I had all this data on how many airplanes we bought every year. I finally started putting it down, probably in the late sixties when I had gotten to a point in our organization where I became a spokesman for how we bought our aircraft. I was asked to give presentations. I went back and tabulated all this stuff and lo and behold in those early days starting in '39, '40 and '41 we had started buying trainers. We bought trainers and transports. We didn't buy very many combat airplanes, but we didn't have anybody to fly them anyway. I was really surprised when I saw how logical the buildup was. Lots of trainers and the auxiliary kind of support airplanes and transports. All those DC-3s we bought and the R5Os.

The same thing was going on in the ship side. The Essex class carriers had all been started. They were almost ready to go by the time of Pearl Harbor. We must have commissioned Essex in '42 maybe. Another thought on the planning -- I remember participating in a study on putting twin floats on an SB2C for a 2600 mile one-way flight mission. It was for providing close air support in an attack on the Gilberts. That scenario never happened.

RAUSA: But somebody was thinking about it which is interesting.

SPANGENBERG: It was the only time I ever was involved in something that was going to be a one way mission. It was necessary since there was no way you could build a 5200 mile range airplane.

RAUSA: Was there a time at the beginning of the war where you were alarmed by our loss rates of aircraft or didn't you worry about that?

SPANGENBERG: We probably didn't know about it. One of the important things that happened for the education of people like myself was that all that gunnery film, gun camera stuff. When any action film got back into the bureau, the chief would set up -- we had a projection room at the time, tiered seats, whatnot -- and a great many people would get invited to see showings of that stuff so you got an immediate feel for what the situation was out there. Fortunately, we also had this Navy rotation policy that often gets bad mouthed, "it's stupid to rotate an officer from the fleet, etc." To us civilians, the feedback was invaluable.

RAUSA: You mean having a combat veteran come in and take --

SPANGENBERG: Right. All naval officers, ninety-nine percent of the naval officers that I've ever dealt with have just been very fine guys. People you wanted to work with. I remember Emmit Riera when he came back. He probably had never been in Washington before. He got put on the dive bomber desk. He and his buddy, they would tell sea stories, anti-aircraft fire, so solid that they had to break out the rafts and paddle through it. That type of thing. [laughter] Well, you knew that was an obvious exaggeration but it sure gave you a good picture of what was going on. We knew that we had a lot of problems with the F4F fighting against a Zero in any kind of a dogfight. We also knew that we were always going to be in difficulty trying to build an airplane that would compete with the Zero. Actually compete with a land-based airplane which was really what we tried to do. We always tried to get the carrier plane to be competing on an equal basis aerodynamically with a land-based and if we could do that we were doing a better job than they were. We had a built-in weight requirement that went with folding wings and so on. There were a lot of requirements we had to build into our carrier plane that the land-based guy didn't have to do. The Zero was a land-based sort of an airplane. It had less strength than we were designing so that they had that kind of advantage. We also probably tried to have a little more legs in our airplanes than the Japanese were doing. We didn't know that at the time. In fact we knew little about what the Zero was. The thing that really hurt when you were working back there was the guy that you'd been working with last week or last month and then you'd get a combat report that he'd been lost.

RAUSA: Did that happen a lot?

SPANGENBERG: It happened too often. Once is more than enough. Lil and I had met a naval officer, Ed Allen, when we were up in Philadelphia and had become social friends. He was working in a different part of the organization at NAF than I was so I didn't really know him too well professionally. Probably in flight test or something like that. An awfully nice guy. He was lost at Guadalcanal on a dive bombing mission. He was flying SBDs. Bob Dixon was his squadron commander. I remember much later, when Adm. Dixon was chief, BuAer, my wife and Mrs. Dixon discovered their mutual friendship with the Allens.

RAUSA: During those war years, George, do you have a sense of which aircraft you thought were the best and which ones you thought were a mistake or didn't measure up?

SPANGENBERG: Well, we probably bought too many types of airplanes during the war. Once we were into World War II most of the procurement rules got suspended. We didn't run a full design competition until the war was over, but rather tried to keep all the competent contractors busy.

We probably ought to cover some of those early airplanes and see what happened to them. One of the early competitions after the PBB, the catapultable seaplane and the F7F, was a big competition for an airplane we were going to call the PBJ, a relatively small, amphibian flying boat, smaller than a PBM, to be used for coastal patrol anti-submarine work. It was a big competition. We got as far as determining the winner, though I can't remember who it was, but then the whole project got cancelled. It was decided they would have spent altogether too much time trying to find a submarine visually from an aircraft. That was undoubtedly a wise decision. It would have been too little, too late.

I have a chart (ed: see Exhibits - Chart1, Naval Aircraft Starts) listing the aircraft "starts" by year from 1935 through 1970 that we can use for reference.

RAUSA: A "start" means you gave a contract or that just means you were looking at it? Essentially you just bought a couple, is that what you're saying?

SPANGENBERG: The "start" refers to a program initiation, usually with a model designation assigned but some of them didn't go all the way through to completion. I think that all had some kind of a contractual start, but my "start" may be earlier than the contract date. You can look through some of these previous listings. The F5F and then F4U came out of the same competition in '38. F4U was a single engine and the F5F was a twin engine. The FL got into it. Do you remember the FL?

RAUSA: No. Was it a fighter?

SPANGENBERG: It was a carrier version of the Bell P-39. There were advocates in those days of the sleek kind of an airplane look you could get with a water-cooled engine. The Airacobra was being touted by the Air Corps as the best of all possible worlds, and somebody got us involved in that. I later got involved in it as they tried to build the thing. It had a conventional landing gear instead of the P-39s tricycle because at the time we really didn't have any tricycle gear experience on carriers. Didn't know what would happen and some of the early results weren't very good.

The SB2A and SB2C dive bombers were from Brewster and Curtiss. The PB2M contract was for about a million bucks to build the biggest airplane in the world at the time. J3F, that funny looking airplane, SO2U and the SO3C. Anyway, this chart was really done to show that we weren't buying enough airplanes when we got down to the decade of the 60's.

RAUSA: But up there you said you were buying too many.

SPANGENBERG: Well, undoubtedly we were during WWII.

RAUSA: I'd like to get a copy of that to include when they transcribe this. That would be very helpful for researchers to have that. I've never see a compilation like that. That's interesting.

SPANGENBERG: This is the kind of stuff I ended up doing in my "spare " time. Some of it was to try to get people's attention. In order to make sensible decisions anyplace you have to know what's gone on before. I was always a great believer in the saying that if you fail to heed history you're going to repeat it. But unfortunately most people don't really believe that. They won't repeat their own mistakes but they're real happy to repeat other people's mistakes.

RAUSA: Of those planes during the war were there any particular ones that you were especially proud of or thought that you had a particularly important influence on their success?

SPANGENBERG: I can claim all the successes with the good airplanes and the ones that didn't work out I didn't have anything to do with. [chuckles] As a matter of fact the F6F obviously was a wonderful airplane and I can claim that I wrote the letter telling Grumman to put a 2600 into the F4F.

RAUSA: Into the F6F or the F4F?

SPANGENBERG: No, the idea was to get a new Grumman fighter based on the experience with the F4F and obviously we were going to have to build a bigger airplane. We probably had some informal studies with Grumman along that line. That's the way we normally worked. We'd say unofficially -- either my office or probably more likely the Class Desk guy on a visit would tell them -- they would get together and talk a little bit and put a study together and then we'd formalize it by asking them to do something and then they could start charging money to the government. The early one undoubtedly was charged against the F4F, some F4F production contract.

The F7F was a good airplane but we weren't really ready for it as a carrier airplane. We didn't know enough about emergency arresting procedures for twin engine, tricycle gear airplanes.

The F14C was a dog.

RAUSA: Was that Grumman?

SPANGENBERG: No, that was Curtiss. It was next to the last of the Curtiss fighters. It started again with a liquid-cooled engine. The air-cooled vs. liquid-cooled argument raged all the time. There were some people that just thought a fighter had to be liquid-cooled. Better streamlining. Our powerplant people were obviously really very strongly air-cooled, thank God. Then eventually the engine that was being built for the F14C petered out or didn't work for the F14C and they re-engined it with a 3350. It became the F14C-2, but it didn't go anywhere.

The F5U was the "Zimmer Skimmer." Are you familiar with that one?

RAUSA: I've heard of it, yes.

SPANGENBERG: It had an interesting background. Charlie Zimmerman had been at NACA. He was always interested in short takeoff and landing airplanes and he got this concept of building a low aspect ratio airplane. He put propellers on the wing tips and rotated the propellers opposite to the vortex that naturally exists at the wing tip, going from the high pressure to the lower pressure side of the wing. By running the propeller in the other way you'd unwind the vortex and get the equivalent of a high aspect ratio. With the huge props you would get extremely good landing and takeoff performances.

RAUSA: How many engines?

SPANGENBERG: Two. The design we built had two R-2000 engines and a cross shafting system with the propellers at the wing tips, low aspect ratio. It started with no tail surfaces but it accrued some horizontal surfaces. I have forgotten now whether it had vertical surfaces. It must have had some vertical surfaces.

The problem was how to do the weight and performance analysis. You know with all this talking I haven't talked about performance. I have to get into it right now to a degree. The performance work was really done under Walter Diehl who was an aero and hydrodynamacist naval officer; he started at the Navy Building when they first opened the doors in1917 before it was quite completed. They built that building in six months. You couldn't get the drawings done in six months today. It was all on filled ground. Diehl was the only naval officer I knew that stayed in one job his whole career after he got to the Navy Building. The story was that he kept a resignation in his desk drawer and every time they tried to move him, he "quit." He was really the father of naval aviation in my day.

RAUSA: Was he well liked?

SPANGENBERG: He was a wonderful individual and very, very sharp, but basically an engineer. Most of the aero people at the time were, my school for example, you got a lot of theoretical aerodynamics, sources and sinks, circulation and Kutta-Joukowsky transformations but you didn't really learn how to run the performance on an airplane. Diehl wrote a book called Engineering Aerodynamics. He developed a performance estimating method that worked. Some contractors didn't think it worked, but for us it gave the right answers. And working for Diehl at the time was Buck Louden, a long-time civilian, and Jerry Desmond, another not as long-time civilian. Jerry was maybe five years older than I was and he was doing most of the performance work himself, occasionally Louden still did some, but Jerry was the performance man. He'd come from Navy Yard wind tunnel work, and did the work well. Nobody really knew how to estimate performance any better.

Zimmerman tried to sell his concept as an individual. He tried to sell the airplane to the Navy. The Navy would have nothing to do with an individual so they told him to go get associated with a normal manufacturer. He finally got a job, or rather got his concept accepted, at Chance Vought. Chance Vought submitted a proposal to the Navy. When the Navy looked at it -- it had to be a fighter of course. In those days we could not fund research programs which was what this should have been. But as a fighter it was supposed to do 500 mph.

RAUSA: That would have to be in a dive. You can't do that --

SPANGENBERG: As I said it depended on who you listened to. I still remember drawing those V-max versus altitude curves. We had one way out here at the front that finally went 500 mph. Contractors "best estimate" and the next, perhaps over 15, 20 knots slower was contractors "worst estimate." Another 10 knots worse than that was bureau's "best estimate" and finally, the bureau's lowest estimate. So we gave the decision maker these choices and we obviously thought we were going to be between our estimates and Vought Zimmerman thought they were going to be between theirs. It was a very interesting proposal. They tried to build the airplane and the thing that really killed it was we couldn't build the mechanical drive system to get power to the props.

RAUSA: To drive the props up.

SPANGENBERG: To drive the props.

RAUSA: What was the span, do you remember?

SPANGENBERG: About twenty feet or so. I wonder if that's in that book of all Navy airplanes.

RAUSA: I doubt it. Was one built?

SPANGENBERG: Yes. The airplane was built. They had considerable trouble during wind tunnel tests and getting low speed characteristics.

RAUSA: You sound like you were pretty interested in that concept.

SPANGENBERG: Well, it was different and if it worked we really had a world beater at the time.

RAUSA: You mean because of the potential performance.

SPANGENBERG: Right. I think that we predicted that it was going to be a heck of a lot faster than the F4U and that was a 400 mph airplane.

RAUSA: Would there be problems with the props out there and G forces out there unloading and stuff?

SPANGENBERG: Obviously there were, and surprisingly what it turned out to be was it developed blade stresses and at these kind of speeds and with any kind of maneuvers they were just out of this world. You couldn't build the propeller and so Zimmerman and Connie Lau, a Chinese aerodynamist who worked for Vought, used to tell the tale they were walking across the bridge near MIT and they suddenly got the idea that they'd eliminate -- well, in addition to blade stresses they also had moments being exerted on the airplane that made it unstable -- so to eliminate the problem they decided they'd put a helicopter-type hinge in the propellers so the moments could not be transmitted to the rest of the aircraft.

RAUSA: So that one kind of died its own death.

SPANGENBERG: It died its own death because we could never get the powerplant transmission system to pass the test.

RAUSA: The plane did fly though?

SPANGENBERG: No. It never flew. They finally destroyed it. It should at least have gone to a museum. I understand the low powered, low speed research V-173 that did fly is in storage at the Garber facility..

RAUSA: It should be a big attraction.

SPANGENBERG: In fact some of the lessons from that you know you can still see happening in the later VTOs and the STOs. You couldn't sit the airplane on the ground in a level attitude. It fouled up all our specs for how to make a drawing. It had to be at perhaps a 30 angle of attack in order for the props to clear the ground. And it failed basically because you couldn't build a transmission system transmitting power from R-2000 engines. There must have been around 1500 horsepower a piece I suppose. R-2800 was around 2000 so it was less than that.

Helicopters of course weren't existent at the time.

RAUSA: What ever happened to Zimmerman?

SPANGENBERG: He stayed with Vought for a while but then went with Army aviation and I lost track of him.

RAUSA: Which one do you want to talk about next, the SB3C?

SPANGENBERG: The SB3C and the SB2D were dive bombers intended to replace the Hell Diver started in 1938. As you can see there's not much overlap. This was in '41.

RAUSA: The SBD is already in the system.

SPANGENBERG: SBD but not the SB2D.

RAUSA: Okay. How come the SBD is not on here.

SPANGENBERG: It was already there.

RAUSA: Yeah, BT-2.

SPANGENBERG: Yes, you remember the SB2C Helldriver was already underway and scheduled as the SBD replacement. The next step on the VSB series then was to start the development of the SB2C replacement in 1941. A competition was held with Curtiss and Douglas selected as winners. I had virtually nothing to do with that competition as Mr. Ivan Driggs had been hired by Cdr. Stevens and was assigned to Design Coordination as a P-6, thus taking over as the number two man in the office to Mr. Frisbie. Ivan had been the first Chief Engineer at McDonnell Aircraft and, in fact, had pressured me to accept a job there rather than going to the Bureau of Aeronautics in 1939.

RAUSA: Tell me about the airplanes.

SPANGENBERG: The requirements specified for the airplanes were overdone, especially in retrospect. Upper and lower remotely controlled turrets, bomb bay, tricycle gear, two place, powered with the new R3350 engine. Curtiss and Douglas were each to build two prototypes initially, but Douglas was authorized to start production prior to flight tests. The Curtiss SB3C was never completed as Curtiss concentrated on the BTC started the following year. The SB2D was built, although it was far from successful. The airplane was overweight, performance goals not met, and so on. The best thing about the program was that it appeared to teach Ed Heinemann and all the Douglas, El Segundo crowd a great lesson in the merits of simpler design approaches. The Navy also learned that lesson. Before continuing with the SB2D story, though, I'd better bring in another fact.

RAUSA: And that was?

SPANGENBERG: It must have been in 1942 that there was a major change in the direction of carrier based attack airplane development. To increase airplane performance, and hopefully to reduce combat vulnerability, decisions were made to make the dive bombers single place, eliminating the scouting mission from its requirements, and including that mission in the torpedo/horizontal bombers. That decision then led to contracts for the single seat BTC at Curtiss and the two crew TB2D at Douglas in 1942. I personally was not involved in the conferences leading up to those decisions but all the major officers and senior civilians involved in the design process participated. You may know that in those days BuAer had full responsibility for naval aircraft development, requirements, procurement, training, etc., so it made getting everyone involved easier than when some of the functions moved to the Pentagon.

RAUSA: What's that PBO on the list?

SPANGENBERG: That was a land based patrol bomber, a modification of the Lockheed Lodestar transport. The British, I believe, bought it first as the Hudson. But back to the SB2D. It was our first project with the newly NACA developed laminar flow airfoil sections, the 6500 and 6600 series, which really worked better in the wind tunnel than in actual service where dir and surface imperfections on the rings kept the predicted lower drag from being achieved. I remember Capt. Diehl taking me into a room at Langley when we were down there for some kind of conference. They were preparing a wind tunnel model using a pretty good size model, probably a ten, fifteen foot span model. Eastman Jacobs was the aerodynamist that was the father of the so-called low drag wing which had a so-called bucket in its drag curve. If you could achieve that of course it gave you a big advantage in drag. But to get the bucket even in the tunnel the model had to be glass smooth. Diehl said, "I want you to remember this." We peeked in the door and there were about six guys with wet/dry sandpaper, pumice and felt pads polishing the wing. Diehl closed the door and we crept out of there again.

RAUSA: Because he knew that you weren't going to be able to do that with a real airplane. The SB2D didn't even look good, the airplane.

SPANGENBERG: No. It looked awful. It violated Diehl's rule that if it doesn't look good it won't fly good. [laughter] .

RAUSA: Did you know Heinemann at the time?

SPANGENBERG: Sure.

RAUSA: Did you get along with him pretty well.

SPANGENBERG: Oh, yeah. Loved Heinemann.

RAUSA: He always spoke highly of you.

SPANGENBERG: And Heinemann's real strength was a good understanding of the entire airplane. He did a superb job of trying to find out what the Navy needed and trying to give them what they needed and he also had a superb engineering organization.

TAPE 4 of 16, SIDE B (continuing)

Leo Devlin, Heinemann's number one guy, in particular, seemed to be the really practical engineer behind Ed. For a number of years there was another fellow named Leonhart who was an administrative type of individual. He died early. Then the rest of the organization was awfully good. Good group of project officers and very strong aero. There was Gene Root and later Van Every. I guess when we got down to detail kind of work I probably worked more with Devlin because Heinemann was "working" the higher-ups.

RAUSA: Were other companies set up as well as Douglas at the time? Like Grumman always had a good reputation.

SPANGENBERG: They all did. I shouldn't say they all did. Some didn't. Few of the Air Corps contractors seemed to understand the Navy's needs. They were set up wrong or something was wrong. At Grumman at the time they had Schwendler as the engineering brains. Jake Swirbel production brains. Dick Hutton and Bob Hall. Bob Hall was the older guy. He was the idea man and the salesman. Dick Hutton was a brilliant preliminary design guy. And Vought had some great characters. Paul Baker. Paul is still around somewhere.

RAUSA: I think Leo Devlin is still around.

SPANGENBERG: Yeah. I haven't seen Leo for years now. Since I retired I don't get to places and Leo never did come to the east coast very much.

RAUSA: But the point is regardless of the technical nature of the business you were in, the individuals were key to the success. How well they did their jobs and how dedicated they were and that sort of thing.

SPANGENBERG: Agreed. Now getting back to the SB2D. As I think I've mentioned, the design was put into production early in its development. When it reached flight test status it seemed obvious to most observers that it would not be successful. The contractor proposed all kinds of "fixes" trying to keep the program going including making it into a single seater, and then proposing adding an auxiliary jet engine. None of the changes could save the program, and eventually it served only as the means by which the extremely successful BT2D/AD series emerged.

RAUSA: Back to the chart, the year 1942 shows 8 starts, can we begin there?

SPANGENBERG : Well, the first two we can cover quickly. The BTC and TB2D projects resulted from the decision to make the dive bombers single place and for the horizontal bombers to pickup the scouting missions. Although I can't remember much of the details, both programs failed. The BTC probably grew out of the SB3C program as a single place design around the R3350 engine when it started, but before its demise I remember a R4360 powered design labeled as COE for "Cab Over Engine". This came about due to the length of the four bank R4360 engine. As the designers raised the cockpit to get adequate down vision over the nose, it became apparent that the pilot was almost higher than the top of the engine, and visibility could really be improved by moving the pilot over the engine. As I recall, the project was cancelled soon thereafter. The TB2D survived somewhat longer, was ordered into production, but only the early prototypes were built. It was a two cockpit, single engine design using the 4360 engine, Pratt & Whitney's largest. The airplane was large and it must be said, unloved. The Navy's attack tactics had changed and negated the need for the type. Horizontal bombing was inferior in results to dive bombing, and the dive bombers were fully capable of handling the torpedo mission.

RAUSA: Where are we timewise now in reference to your chart?

SPANGENBERG : Talking like this, I obviously get all out of sync with the chart for the obvious reason that by the time I finish talking about a model, a few years had elapsed since its start. I really don't have any idea how to make this a really coherent story. Maybe since we have been talking about attack airplanes and Douglas we should just finish up with the BT2D/AD story and its competition.

RAUSA: OK.

SPANGENBERG : Back in time then to 1943, Douglas was producing SBDs and developing the SB2D and TB2D. Curtiss was producing SB2C Helldivers and working on a replacement with the SB3C and/or BTC. The general scheme of things seemed to me to be to keep every manufacturer busy hoping that one of the many projects would pay off. The attack or dive bomber field then was fleshed out with the BK at Fleet wings and the BTM/AM at Martin, both single seat designs, the former around a R-2800 engine and the latter around a R-4360. Neither of these manufacturers had any, or at least, recent carrier aircraft design experience. Fleetwings had a new exhaust system design which it was hoped would overcome its handicap of a slightly smaller though more proven engine, while Martin relied on a hope that the R-4360 would show the growth in power that its R2800 brother had already exhibited. Both developments could be considered successful as flying machines; Martin produced a hundred or so, I think, while Fleetwings stopped with the prototypes. In one sense their major contribution may have been to inspire Douglas, El Segundo to become a far better competitor for the Navy's carrier types.

RAUSA: Maybe its time to talk about the AD which was a bit late for WWII but did yeoman service in Korea and later in Vietnam. Why was it so successful when its predecessors were not?

SPANGENBERG : Well, Zip, I know you know much of the history from your collaboration with Ed Heinemann on his life's story. Incidentally, I had not known of your part in that until I looked up something in the book recently. I enjoyed Ed's history.

As you know, Douglas was in deep trouble in 1944 with its Navy programs, and had been trying to salvage the SB2D/BTD production line with minor fixes. The bureau was not pleased with their efforts to say the least. Finally, as Ed Heinemann describes the situation, it came down to an overnight design session in a Washington hotel for a proposal presented the next day. I was not a participant in that session, nor in the ones which preceded it, though Mr. Frisbie was. My contribution started as soon as the design proposal reached us. My job at the time included checking the contractor's weight estimates, probably the most important single variable in the design process. An optimistic one can lead to structural failures and catastrophe while pessimistic ones lead to a non-competitive design in the warfare arena. As an aside, during my entire career in Washington, Mr. Frisbie, and later I, insisted on keeping the weight control function in our division. It is essential to the job of monitoring any aircraft development. Periodically, we had to fight off those so-called management experts who believed the function belonged elsewhere.

Back to the BT2D. In this case, I found the Douglas proposal weights to be substantially higher than what I believed they should be, assuming an average design capability. We in the bureau, of course had a substantial advantage over any single contractor in making weight estimates, since we had the records of all the aircraft already built. Each manufacturer was lucky if he had any records other than those of his own designs. Weight data was but one part of proprietary design information closely held by all the manufacturers. I was able to show Leo Devlin, Heinemann's very capable assistant, that many of Douglas' design items were much heavier than those being produced by other Navy contractors. An example, I remember, was that the SB2D rudder pedals were nearly twice as heavy as those on Grumman and Vought designs. Douglas took the message to heart and started what became probably the most effective design weight control effort in the industry. My original estimate was that the airplane's weight empty was at least 1000 lb. (or roughly 10%) heavier than it should have been. Douglas, at the working level agreed, but contractually they were unwilling to guarantee that figure. Eventually, a compromise was reached that they would set a design goal 750 lb. under their estimate, while holding the higher guaranteed value. At first actual weighing, the weight was under by 1200 or so lb. Eventually, the Society of Weight Engineers (SAWE) made Heinemann an Honorary Fellow of their organization, and his organization did excellent jobs on the subsequent A3D, A4D, F3D and F4D designs.

RAUSA: I knew part of that story, but not all of it.

SPANGENBERG : Of course, the design simplification message was everywhere evident in the BT2D as opposed to the SB2D. No bomb bay, simplifying the structure. Use of the F4U main landing gear, one of the lightest to that date considering the job to be done, simple slotted flaps, and so on.

TAPE 5 of 16, SIDE A

RAUSA: Back to airplanes, were you starting to get into jet-powered technology at this time?

SPANGENBERG: Well, yes, of course. We have to back up a bit again. As the chart shows we started the FR Ryan "Fireball" in 1942 along with the McDonnell FD/FH Phantom, the first a composite power plant with an R-1820 in the nose and a centrifugal turbo jet in the rear. The FH was our first all jet fighter, a twin engine arrangement with Westinghouse 19" axial flow jets. The Navy had a very real problem in attempting to get into the jet age. By their nature, pure jet engines have low static thrust as compared to an engine propeller combination, giving us a very severe problem for carrier take off and landings. Policy considerations also dictated that our major manufacturers concentrate all their efforts on producing aircraft to win the war in which we were then engaged. The jets were not really ready for that one. To give you an idea of the thrust available problem, the original engines in the XFD were rated at less than 1200 lb. each of take off thrust. An R-2800 engine with a 13 ft. propeller produced on the order of 7000 lb. of takeoff thrust. It took years before the advent of turbofan engines and larger catapults eliminated that design problem, a very real one, not always appreciated.

RAUSA: What was the next big project after the Skyraider, do you remember? We're talking now '56, '46.

SPANGENBERG: We probably ought to consider a couple of the other interesting programs that people may not know the beginning of. One of them is the HK-1, better known as the Spruce Goose, the Kaiser-Hughes program. It arrived in the bureau as a great unknown. We never heard of the thing. Suddenly then Capt. Stevens who ran the R&D programs called Frisbie and myself in and said they had a new program and we were to evaluate it. Well, we didn't have any data and it's hard to evaluate without data. Eventually we found out that the contract had already been let with the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to build these two huge wooden airplanes to defeat the submarine threat by getting cargo to Europe. Apparently there had been previous negotiations and the Navy must have said "no thanks, we're not interested in the program " and I guess the Air Corps must have done the same thing. So the program got directed probably from the White House. That was the rumor at the time. Later some Hughes guys told me that it was Grover Loening, a name you must remember.

RAUSA: Loening amphibians.

SPANGENBERG: He was well known in aeronautical circles. He was always inventing something or another. He convinced somebody that was the way to go. He got involved with Kaiser and the first contract that was let said that they were to build this 400,000 pound flying boat, roughly twice the size of the Mars which we had under contract with Martin. That was the biggest flying boat that anybody had ever done up to that time. As I recall the new proposal was