TAPE 7 of 16, SIDE A

RAUSA: What about the F7U Cutlass? Wasn't that in the same time period?

SPANGENBERG: The XF7U was a result of the Navy's first real fighter design competition after the war. It was to build a day fighter. It was a big competition. The proposals came in two sizes, powered by Westinghouse J-34 engines or GE J-35s. Small engines and bigger engines. The small engines weren't quite enough to do the job. The bigger ones were. The Navy had a reputation at the time for building only conventional airplanes. Most of industry thought we were well behind the Air Corps and unwilling to take aerodynamic risks. We had no tail-less airplanes. In fact a lot of them thought the Navy was still in the biplane days, and that Walter Diehl our number one aerodynamicist, would never approve a tailless design, but he did. The Vought design had by far the best performance of all the proposals. A lot of things we were worried about, but all the engineers checked off on it. Walter Diehl said "at least we'll solve the subsonic tail buffet problem."

RAUSA: The F7U was not supersonic.

SPANGENBERG: It was not, it was subsonic, somewhere in the .9 Mach bracket, between .9 and one. I thought that the decision to build the original XF7U-1 was a good one and the airplane was a successful flying machine. Unfortunately the thing that happened to it was they made it into an all weather fighter by adding in the first of the Sparrow missile systems and the weight went up by something like fifty percent. When it did that we ran out of all our design margins. You should have had a bigger airplane if you're going to try to do that.

RAUSA: Was the biggest problem the lack of stability?

SPANGENBERG: Not really. It was a good enough airplane. The Blue Angels flew it for solo demonstrations.

RAUSA: Whitey Feightner.

SPANGENBERG: Whitey actually bent one. Did he ever tell you that story?

RAUSA: No.

SPANGENBERG: They were doing an air show and some light airplane wandered across the air field right in the middle of the show. I don't think they ever did find out who it was but all of a sudden it appeared right in front of Whitey. He had to honk it around pretty good and overstressed it.

RAUSA: The problem with the F7U then was it gained weight and it became more difficult for the pilots to handle?

SPANGENBERG: Well, your takeoff speeds went up. You lost your margins on catapulting. The planned higher thrust Westinghouse J46 engines didn't turn out. Eventually the original engines didn't show up and we had to fly the early production airplanes with J35s, one of the early jet engines. It was slightly underpowered with 35 swept wings and with the tailless configuration, you'd get a horribly high angle attack in order to get enough lift to come aboard. And then the increased weight of course it just added to all those problems. We knew we had a problem in the first place but when it went to the all weather version, F7U-3, it just got -- we tried to do too much. We in the Navy. The engineers didn't like it any better than the fleet did. We broke backs of pilots with the nose gear slamming down. The way it ended up it was not a successful airplane but I still think that our choice of the XF7U from the competition was proper.

In more or less that same time frame, '47, we got the results of all the German swept wing and Delta wing research. Douglas had a team over there in Germany, came back, gave us a research proposal for a design that eventually became the F4D. We had that program going for about a year before it became time to do another fighter competition. In those days it was called an interceptor. This was a short legged fighter, high performance. It was supposed to get off the deck, get up, and intercept incoming bombers. A competition was eventually run with Douglas entering the F4D which they already had under Navy contract as a research project. McDonnell entered the design that became the F3H. The official decision probably says that McDonnell won the competition and we just continued the F4D program. In fact the F4D Skyray was by far the better airplane. I didn't think we should have bought the McDonnell airplane myself but we did and then it was touted as a great idea to have competitive programs going anyway. "Douglas will keep McDonnell honest and vice versa." That series of airplanes were all built around the J-40, one of the big powerplant busts that the Navy had. The Westinghouse J-46 and the bigger J-40 engines. They really screwed up a bunch of our airplanes.

Douglas had the great good sense when the J-40 went sour to substitute the J-57 engine for it. The J-57 had been started by the Air Force as a bomber engine and Pratt had tuned it enough and developed it with an afterburner so that it became a very useful fighter engine as well. Incidentally it showed that the Navy was willing to buy somebody else's development product. Air Force and Navy were developing their own engines. We had all of the even number engines, the Air Force had all the odd numbers so a 57 was an Air Force-developed engine, 58 was a Navy-developed engine. We had no hesitancy to use the Air Force-developed engine. It was the best engine around. Anyway, in order to put the 57 into either the F3H or the F4D you had to open up some of the frames in the fuselage. The engine was a little larger in diameter, an inch or two over the original J-40 engine. Douglas bit the bullet and put in the J-57.

McDonnell tried to live with its frames and put in the J-71. The J-71 was not nearly as good an engine as the J-57. It gave us all kinds of problems.

RAUSA: The F3H.

SPANGENBERG: The engine itself gave us problems. One of the early operational squadrons flew through a rainstorm and two in out of the three airplanes, the engines seized. The water going through the engine had cooled off the case enough that the rotor seized. Things like that.

The other thing that happened to the airplane was the same thing that happened to the F7U. It went from an interceptor which our Op Requirement people finally decided we couldn't afford. You could not dedicate deck space to a squadron of high performance airplanes with short legs. They obviously got to altitude a lot faster but they didn't get there fast enough to stop an incoming threat that way. And eventually of course we went to the CAP system where you got the fighters out far enough that you could really intercept somebody. The requirement then was basically an escape for both the F4D and the F3H.

And then when you went to an all purpose fighter again they got into trouble. You lost all your design margins plus the fact that we had to substitute engines. The F3H in particular was not a good fleet airplane. The only thing that was good about it was the guys came back. I still remember Pete Booth telling me it was solid as a rock in a groove. Couldn't move it. (laughter). It was not my favorite airplane. The aviators that I worked with later in my career. John Lacouture and others said "I think you made a horrible mistake with the F3H." I agree that the Navy made a mistake on two counts. The F4D was the real pick from the competition, and then the change from interceptor to general purpose came later. Both the F4D and F3H suffered. Those planes were really the end of the subsonic era.

And that year we did the A2J which was the second step towards a nuclear bomber. It had started with the XAJ as a demonstration project, while the A2J then was supposed to have enough performance really to do the nuclear attack job. It had turbo props in lieu of the R-2800s, and dropped the jet engine as a booster. It had good performance.

RAUSA: Was that a production airplane?

SPANGENBERG: No. It never got that far.

TAPE 7 of 16, SIDE B

SPANGENBERG: The A2J was really overtaken by the A3D to succeed the AJ. Nobody wanted to do composite powerplants if you could do single powerplants. There was great controversy within the Navy's powerplant development organization. I think I mentioned this once before. Seldon Spangler was an advocate of turbo props. He didn't think jets would ever make it on a carrier, and tried his best to steer airplanes in the direction of turbo props. Most airplane people didn't want to go that way. A.B. Metzger was one who pushed very, very hard within the Navy for pure jets. Most of us were kind of in the middle. The pure jets at the time couldn't quite do the job and everybody recognized a composite way to go was poor choice. All of us recognized I think that you couldn't get there from here with a turbo prop if the other guy without carrier constraints was going to be using jets. We would be in trouble.

In fact the historians probably would like to take a look at that jet versus prop thing with one of the early Patuxent tests that was done with an F8F versus a P-80. The Air Force had the P-80 Shooting Star developed and the F8F was our best reciprocating engine fighter. And it turned out in those tests that a P-80 could never shoot down an F8F as long as the F8F never made a mistake. But the F8F in turn could never shoot down a P-80 unless he made a mistake. If he tried to get into a turning dog fight the F8F would win. But the F8F was solely at the mercy of the P-80. You couldn't get away from it. It should have taught a lot of people a lot of lessons. It was good that Patuxent did it, it educated a lot of the people.

We had a P5Y, started as a patrol plane, ended up as the R3Y, as a transport. Patrol planes, seaplane development was obviously winding down. Their great advantage was being able to land on the water and with water everywhere all over the earth that you could operate from. But the logistics of handling the seaplane tenders and whatnot and as the airplanes got bigger that got to be more and more of a logistics problem. And the airplane technology advanced so you could do it from land and then it was tough for the seaplanes to continue.

There has been enough done on the research programs with the D558 programs so I don't think I have to talk about that.

The F2Y was a strange program, and not well done. It proves you can't do long-range planning I think. It started off and ended up too as a seaplane fighter. There were a lot of research programs going on at the time. One of them was the development of a seaplane at Convair called the Skate which was a kind of a combined wing/fuselage arrangement that would also be a reasonably decent hull. There was a development up at the Naval Aircraft Factory along the same lines. We call it a "float wing". We ran a kind of a competition for that, ended up with ^--I think Curtiss was playing around with it too. Eventually the contract went to Convair for the Skate but instead of building the Skate, things changed and they ended up building a Mach 2.0 supersonic, ski equipped airplane. Airplane development was better than I expected. They racked the airplane up in an air show demonstration. The airplane went out of control due to PIO, Pilot Induced Oscillations, and it crashed. It was the last hurrah for the guys that were trying to promote seaplane fighters.

RAUSA: This F2Y. Was that the Sea Dart?

SPANGENBERG: Yeah.

RAUSA: Beautiful airplane.

SPANGENBERG: Oh, yeah. Pretty. We used to have a requirement in our general spec. An airplane had to look good. It met that criteria.

Next on my list seems to be the WV, which frankly I scarcely remember. It must have been the first of the early warning prototypes with radomes on top and bottom of a Lockheed Constellation. Little in the way of airframe development, but a major step in electronics.

Next we reach the start of the Douglas A3D, the Skywarrior, popularly known as the Whale.

RAUSA: Heinemann seemed pleased with his efforts on the beginnings of that program, but his account of it was confusing to say the least. I'd like to hear your version of the events.

SPANGENBERG : Well, I sure agree with the confusion part. Until I read Ed's book, I had always thought he had an advantage over the other competitors since I knew he was on some naval research advisory board, and I assumed he knew more about the state of development of the atomic bomb than I did, or for that matter, than others in the competition. Actually, I now believe he was just smarter than the rest of us.

I had better stick to my remembrances of that time period. Navy carriers were threatened by the advocates of airpower alone being all that was necessary in the atomic age. The Air Force had been made a separate arm, co-equal with the Army and Navy. The large flush deck carrier in the design stage was under attack and was later cancelled. The AJ, although initiated as a demonstration project to show that carriers could operate airplanes large enough to carry the "bomb" had been put into production, but it was not completely credible as the deterrent of the future. Higher performance in both speed and range was obviously necessary. Studies were being done by everyone for both Air Force and Navy. RAND produced a well publicized bomber study for the Air Force. That study concluded that very large, very high aspect ratio designs using turbo- prop engines were the preferred solutions for the Air Force. Similarly, studies done under Ivan Driggs's direction in the bureau indicated turbo- prop designs in the 100,000 pound class were necessary to meet the requirements then being suggested; probably at least a 1000 mile radius with a 10,000 pound bomb.

Eventually, the bureau invited proposals in two competitions, one labeled a "special attack", using "innovative approaches", and the other for near-term, conventional designs. The only "Special Attack" proposal I remember was from Convair for a two stage arrangement with a twin jet, delta wing design launched from a mother aircraft which carried it from the carrier. I can't remember the details, but the high performance stage of the design was quite similar to the Air Force's B-58 delta wing bomber started later. The Navy bought nothing from the competition, not a surprise.

In the conventional competition, Douglas, El Segundo alone submitted a twin jet engine design, while both Lockheed and Douglas, Santa Monica offered four engined jets in the 100,000 pound class. I believe we also had one or more designs using turbo-props. Heinemann's design was admittedly stretching the state of the art in trying to meet the stated requirements, and I believe he was really betting that the 10,000 pound bomb would come down appreciably in weight, and that the carriers would be larger with higher capacity catapults and arresting gear. The bureau, of course, was betting on the same things. I seem to remember a relatively long period of negotiation before we were able to define the airplane well enough to let the experimental contract in the spring of 1949. I wonder now in 1998 as I edit these transcripts whether Jerry Miller unearthed the bureau records on the competition in his research while a Ramsey Fellow at Air and Space. We were either very lucky or very astute in establishing the final design requirements at a fixed gross weight of 68,000 pounds, with a 6000 pound bomb. The J40 engines initially specified had to be replaced by J57s, actually helping the program.

Overall, the A3D has to be listed as one of our most successful development programs with many versions of the design seeing service, including counter-measure, photo, transport, and tanker. The Air Force bought a couple hundred with J-71 engines.

RAUSA: Heinemann talked about having competition at the beginning of the A3D's development. You haven't mentioned it.

SPANGENBERG : Sorry, I had forgotten that, and I really don't remember the details of the Curtiss design, but I do remember the episode. We carried Curtiss along for a few months as competition for Douglas. That action was instigated by Adm. Pride, then Chief, BuAer, as he said, "To keep a poker up Douglas's -----." Frankly, I always opposed such actions as cost and time consuming for both the bureau and the contractors, without any real benefit. However, the practice has persisted and is now standard policy to have a period in which to get "Best and Final Offers" from two companies before announcing a winner. I suppose it sounds good, but I consider it speculative theory, at best. Wonder how many other design proposals I've missed.

RAUSA: The Curtiss plane, was it ever built?

SPANGENBERG: No. We cancelled it after three or four months. The notes only say CWVA so it probably never got to the point where it had been given a designation.

Then we get into the fifties. Did you get around to reading that Gold Book article?

RAUSA: Yes. I went through those. I copied all that stuff.

SPANGENBERG: It really summarizes most of the story of the tactical airplanes from the fifties on. I did not cover the other types of aircraft. On this list of "starts" we have the HSL, the first aircraft in the fifties. It came from an ASW competition and at the time I guess the biggest powerplant in a helicopter was probably the R-1820. Bell proposed a tandem helicopter around a R-2800 engine which gave them a substantial increase in power. It was a good engine. Well liked. We knew enough about the engine. They designed their helicopter around it. It had much better performance than anything else. Bell was proposing a tandem helicopter for the first time and everybody had their fingers crossed on that. Piasecki had been the only one that had built a tandem before. Contract went to Bell and the program as a whole was not overly successful. They had flying quality problems with it.

RAUSA: Do you recall the designation of the tandem?

SPANGENBERG: HSL. It ended up with primary usage as a mine sweeper rather than going into the fleet as an ASW model.

The S2F came from a tough competition. It was the first carrier-based ASW airplane that had a chance of doing the job. Up to then you couldn't do the job in a single airplane. You couldn't do it well enough anyway. You remember we had the AF Guardian, had an S version and a W version. One carried the search radar and the other carried the weapons. That's a poor way to run a carrier. So it was time. And as I said it was a good competition. Grumman won the competition because it had by far the best aerodynamic configuration for getting single engine performance. You could lose an engine with that one and at proposal time fly away with ease either on takeoff and obviously much easier on wave-offs. The ability to do that required lots of span. You remember that we had to go to an overlapping wing fold which is the thing that really kept the other designs from being competitive in the competition because they elected to stick within the folded span requirements but then with a conventional kind of a wing fold they didn't have enough span to solve the single engine problem. I thought that the Navy's requirement was pretty good. The airplane was a good solid design, lasted a long time.

RAUSA: You're talking the S2F.

SPANGENBERG: Yeah. We built later versions of it as the first of the early warning airplanes.

RAUSA: That would be the E-1 Tracker. Successful airplane.

SPANGENBERG: The Tracker and the CODS. In a long successful series.

Had another helicopter competition. Got Kaman into the act with the syncro twin rotor trainer. Then the HRS, the Sikorsky helicopter with the engine mounted in the nose. The other services built that one too. I had little to do with those competitions, Otto Lunde handled them.

Next on the list are three helicopter models, listed as the HRH, HCH, and HR2S. All came essentially from the same competition with only the HR2S reaching service. The Marines issued a requirement for a troop/cargo carrier for the amphibious assault mission with a 300 knot maximum speed and a 50 mile radius. That speed requirement is one that persisted for years and is presumably now to be met after almost 50 years with the V-22. In 1950, it was considered quite unrealistic by most of our technical community, need I say, including me. McDonnell, however, proposed a compound helicopter with two T-56, wing mounted, engines driving propellers for forward flight. The pressure jet rotor was powered by air pumped through the rotor and ignited at the tips. The Air Force had the H-16 at Hughes under development in an even larger size, but without the compound features of wings and propellers. McDonnell had a small tip mounted ramjet powered helicopter flying. All were interesting projects from an R&D standpoint, but with little prospect of service use. The HRH design then gave birth to the HCH, a heavy lift design with the same pressure jet rotor system, but without the wings and propellers. It had such high fuel consumption that even its proponents soon gave up any hope of practical service use and the program was cancelled. The HR2S, on the other hand, powered with two R-2800 engines, was a real success and provided Sikorsky with the experience for later production of their SkyCrane model and eventually of course the CH-53 series. .

RAUSA: That pressure system never succeeded?

SPANGENBERG: Well, it succeeded in driving the rotor.

RAUSA: But it had no lasting value.

SPANGENBERG: No.

And the next set of peculiar things were the tail sitter VTOLs. Up to that point in time the Navy had supported VTOL development in a pure research type of way. We were the first ones to fly jet engines, for example. They put vectoring controls on a centrifugal jet engine, probably a J-33, added a seat above the jet and pilots could maneuver the contraption. Believe it was done at Ryan. If you had been around in those days you could go wherever we had that thing, fly it, and you'd get a certificate you could hang on the wall.

RAUSA: Was this the one they called Pogo?

SPANGENBERG: No. This led to Pogo.

We'd been fooling around with VTOL in a research phase. Everybody wants VTOL. The only problem is we could never pay the price to get it. It's still almost true today in a real general sense but you like the advantages that it gave you. By that time fighter requirements were into at least high subsonic, low supersonic speeds. The power thrust to weight ratios were over one to meet high speed requirements. So the general feeling had been that when you got to the point where there was enough thrust to meet high speed requirements, this was more than the weight of the airplane and you should be able to get VTOL without significant penalty. Well, we never quite got there with reciprocating engines, but with gas turbine power it looked like we could. And the easiest way to get there was tail sitters because they didn't require a heavy landing gear. You also didn't need a high lift system. You do it all with the engine. Kelly Johnson made the remark in some paper that he gave one time, VTOL did all the grunt work. Tail sitters or wire hangers or something of that nature would take off and land first and eventually you could get one that would land that way and then kneel down and crawl away. It was a problem what to do with one of these vertical things if you wanted to work on it. We decided it was time to do that. Congress would no longer fund "research programs". So the services had to develop a requirement that showed some operational end use. The Navy developed a requirement for "a convoy fighter" which then would be deployed on merchant convoy ships to Europe. Every merchant ship would have a couple of these fighters and one of the joys in the competition was to figure out how do you recover them. There was a lot of relatively innovative kind of things to do from the pure tail sitter or grab and then maybe pull them down with a cable or something as they have done now with helicopters on small ships. Or landing into a huge net that you would fly up and stay in the vertical mode and go in and with a probe device on the belly and you'd grab something. There were a lot of those kinds of ideas. Out of that competition came the tail sitters, XFV and XFY, Lockheed and Convair. The Convair design was a pure Delta wing with upper and lower vertical tails so that in a sense it looked almost like four wings. It had small wheels and struts at the end of the two wing tips and the two tail tips. No means of getting it into a horizontal position in the operation. It was supposed to land on a deck. Hopefully, of course, you had enough control to land safely.

RAUSA: Did these two aircraft have a lot of accidents in the development stage?

SPANGENBERG: No. They didn't have any accidents but then they never flew very much. In fact we didn't have any accidents. They were powered with T-40 engines. The Lockheed airplane looked more like an airplane and it had dual upper V and inverted lower V tail surfaces with small aft landing gears on each tip. It landed vertically on the four tail tips.

The Convair was a more stable platform because the wing span was greater than the Lockheed tail spans. The ground contact points were further apart on the Convair.

The Lockheed airplane only flew after taking off and landing in a horizontal attitude with a big jerry built landing gear added to it. The T-40 engine was certainly not the world's most reliable and the pilot's life depended solely on that engine working. You had no possibility of auto rotation as you have with the helicopter so anytime you got into the vertical mode you were really depending on that engine continuing to work. Another factor was that as you got close to the ground the tail sitters lost control effectiveness due to ground proximity. Ground effect in essence helps on landing speed but does not help in the VTOL mode. That led to ideas for landing and take-off from a perforated area.

I went to the mockup on the XFV. Very strange to sit in the cockpit in the vertical attitude. Your view of the ground obviously is awful. I didn't see how they were going to do a landing unless they built a tower of some kind that a pilot could see by looking sideways. At least they had to have better necks than I had.

RAUSA: Was the original concept they had like rear view mirrors. Did they use those.

SPANGENBERG: We had big rear view mirrors. Just like backing up an automobile except you can't open the door, or help with your body turning around. One could imagine landing aids that would help. You'd have some kind of a scaffold arrangement and a landing target that you could line up with something. But as I say Lockheed never got to vertical landings. Convair did on a few flights but the airplane really had no place to go. It finally dawned on everybody that you just can't build an operational fleet vehicle with a tail sitter arrangement. You try to think of how the hell do you handle it. For example, you'd have to put it in a horizontal position to work on the engines. That program died. I really don't count it as one of our failures because everybody really considered it to be a research vehicle, although we sure didn't need two.

The next step after that was to do a jet VTOL. The Navy actually started along that line. The project ended up with the Air Force doing it with a Ryan Wire Hanger. Did you ever see the Wire Hanger? What was it, the X-13?

RAUSA: No.

SPANGENBERG: It had a carrier truck about as long as a fire engine hook and ladder. The plane could be raised from a horizontal to the vertical, held on a big wire mesh arrangement. The pilot used a hook for recovery not unlike the old CAST recovery hooks that we had on seaplanes. He got to the vertical, flew horizontally, translated and finally grabbed a horizontal cable as the plane dropped down. They put on demonstrations of that in the local area. I remember going and watching it at the River Entrance of the Pentagon and at the time they had a bunch of rose bushes growing down there along the road. The recovery vehicle was sitting down there. The airplane took off from the recovery vehicle, translated over the lagoon. You could see the water whipping up in the typical pattern that you get from the down flow and then he came back and landed on the net. Destroyed about $100 worth of roses, just ripped them out of the ground. [laugher]. That was a successful research program but the Air Force couldn't figure out what to do with it.

At that point in our history VTOL and V/STOL enthusiasm was running very high. When turbo-prop engines became available, it became possible to provide more thrust than the take-off weight of fighters, for example. The enthusiasts then sold, or tried to sell, the idea that the advantages of VTOL were now available for all of naval aviation. I remember Capt. Stevens, after being briefed by Mr. Driggs on the results of some tethered model testing at the NACA, coming into the office with Mr. Frisbie and me, and telling us he expected that we should have an all VTOL carrier complement within ten years. That gross over-optimism actually surfaced again in 1977 when "Proceedings" published an article under then CNO Holloway's byline proposing an all V/STOL force, since he had been advised that the state of the art now permitted that goal with no significant penalty over conventional aircraft. That belief is as erroneous now as it was in the 50's and 70's.

TAPE 8 of 16, SIDE A

JULY 25, 1990

RAUSA: Now up to time period of about 1952, talking the P6M. Mr. Spangenberg has his notes neatly laid out here in preparation for this briefing. [laugher]

SPANGENBERG: There are always things that I think about that were interesting items that come with it. That's really all we're doing. The things that were a little unusual at the time.

The P6M was the last cry I guess of the -- maybe the first too -- of the real high speed attempts with a seaplane. It was not popular at the working level with most of the engineers but it was with some. I don't know whether you've heard of Fred Locke. Fred Locke was a very unusual airplane designer, seaplane background type, and he had been laying out things in the old Research Division, preliminary design outfit, and he had one high speed seaplane thing in which the airplane would land upside down. It had a rotating cockpit in the thing and that way he was able to achieve a lower drag, high speed hull design. I can't remember the details but it was a good looking design. Probably impractical.

The P6M was a strange competition. There were only two designs in it. Convair and Martin and it was one of the first where the Navy thought one design was way underweight and the other one was way overweight. We often had them where we thought the contractor was understating what the weight of the airplane would be but in this case we were sure that Martin was way under and we were sure that Convair was way over. There was something like a 20,000 pound difference between the two proposals. We couldn't accept either one so we did a debriefing, sent them back to the drawing boards and they came in with a second proposal and Martin was selected to win in that one although you could have flipped a coin, just about. It was also the first competition in which we had to take the briefing of the competition results up to the Assistant Secretary for Air in those days what would be today the R&D Navy Secretary. Floberg was also an aviator. I suppose that's the real reason we got up to his level. Up to that point in time we had never gone beyond the uniformed Navy in a competition.

The P6M itself of course was not a success. They lost two of the airplanes in accidents. The tail came off one and I forgot what happened to the other.

RAUSA: Were there more than two?

SPANGENBERG: We built more. They had more than two under construction. It was a concurrent program so they probably had five or more of them under construction at the time. In my opinion the requirement was just nonexistent. The basic mission was supposed to be to deliver 30,000 pounds of mines. Had a rotating bomb bay which was part of the hull which obviously would give troubles in service anyway to try to get that thing sealed. Never did get around to that, really working out that part of the airplane as I recall. But in any event, the joke that -- I remember Bob Francis, the A3D Class Desk officer. He and I used to talk frequently about airplanes and whatnot and our favorite story on the P6M was we could buy two A3Ds to do the job and they would cost less than one P6M. Would do the job better and the thing we didn't realize was we could buy the carrier to operate the A3Ds from the money we had left over. That was about it. It was the last of the seaplane, at least the high speed kind of seaplanes.

The next interesting one I guess on here is the F11F and the money for getting that came out of the cancellation of the F10F, the variable sweep design that we talked about before. We had money left over and they called it the XF9F-9. It was a brand new, well designed airplane. It was a little too early to start a new fighter with the next generation of engines, the J-79 and the J-57. But Grumman did a good sales job. It was not a competition. It was a negotiated procurement. Joe Gavin who later became president of Grumman was working on the board at the time. That was an interesting tale too. Joe had been in the fighter desk at the bureau. He was number one in his class at MIT, smart guy and a real nice guy. When the war was over he got offers from virtually every airplane outfit in the country I guess to go with them and they all were going to make him a program manager. I and perhaps others advised him he better get his hands wet first and Grumman was the only one that offered him a job where he would start on the drawing board. Joe took that job. You really learn more quickly, I think, how airplanes are designed and what makes a good one by working on the board. So Joe did the powerplant installation as I recall on that. Later became project engineer on the job. Later became president of Grumman. Good guy.

RAUSA: When you say it was a negotiated procurement how does that differ from the normal bidding process?

SPANGENBERG: Well, you don't bid. The contractor comes in with a good proposal and you just buy it and then attempt to justify why you do it. Later on today we ought to talk about the beginning of the A-4 which was done the same way.

RAUSA: The F-11F you say was a good design?

SPANGENBERG: It was an excellent aerodynamic design. It just didn't have the engine that it should have had right from the beginning. Grumman couldn't really afford to try to achieve the level of performance that the Navy was likely to want for the next fighter so it was really regarded as an interim step between a truly supersonic fighter. It was supersonic but just mach1.1 or 1.2, something like that. It was regarded as an interim fighter but the aerodynamics of the airplane were excellent and it was a well laid out design. Didn't have quite enough fuel in it.

RAUSA: Do you recall how many we bought of those? Did we have several squadrons?

SPANGENBERG: We probably had four or five squadrons I suppose.

RAUSA: Did they have missile capability?

SPANGENBERG: Yeah. Sidewinders. But it was primarily a gun fighter. It was the one that shot itself down, probably one of the stories you should have heard about in the fleet. Testing the guns in a dive, the airplane ran into one of its bullets.

RAUSA: How did it do that?

SPANGENBERG: Well, I suppose it had a high trajectory bullet and the airplane caught up to it.

RAUSA: Did the pilot survive?

SPANGENBERG: Yeah. It was a famous story for awhile. The main reason the airplane didn't go anyplace was the engine was a grand flop basically. There was really no engine in this country --

RAUSA: Which engine was it?

SPANGENBERG: It was an afterburner version of the British Sapphire. Curtiss Wright had the license to build the engine. It existed as a non-afterburning engine but for the F11F they had to develop an afterburner to put on it. That development lagged and they had engine development problems. The first couple of airplanes as I recall flew without the afterburner and then gradually they got the thing running. The designation was J-65. It was not a good engine. At the end of the program J-79s were put into the airplane on an experimental kind of a basis. Grumman had I think two of the airplanes and it was a Mach 2 plus airplane and a very high performance machine.

In the international arena Grumman tried to sell it to Japan in lieu of the F-104s and there were sales efforts in Germany as well. Both of those countries would have been well advised to buy the F11F-2 we called it then, Tiger King.

I remember Gordon Ochenrider who was Grumman's sales guy at the time. It was before he got to Washington. Gordon would come back from his attempts to sell it and he was just completely naive in the international field. The story was that he wasn't paying the bribes that others were, trying to handle it honestly. He didn't sell the airplane and it was a far better airplane than the one against which he was competing. My opinion.

Well, the next one on the list is the A4D and it's probably been well enough covered by everybody. I glanced at Heinemann's recollections on the start of the airplane and as I remembered it there was a lot more effort initially on Ed trying to build a fighter interceptor type, very high performance and again it turned out that the Navy just didn't have a big enough market to interest Douglas really in developing such an airplane or the Navy in buying one. You'd like the performance but the interceptor really couldn't quite do the job. Deck launched intercepts against the high performance threat didn't quite hack it and then you didn't want to invest that kind of a deck space in trying to buy just a small capability.

Anyway at the same time the Navy had been trying for a long time to get a replacement for the AD started. Douglas itself had study contracts for follow on to the AD, all using turbo props. 557 program I think it was and they were ugly airplanes and not at all attractive. I see Heinemann said that they were all in the 30,000 pound bracket and I suppose that's right. I don't remember. But I know that they were not attractive. Finally he turned the thing around and made it really the first jet fighter attack design. It was a nice little airplane. Everybody liked it. The thing I remember most about justifying that procurement was writing a letter from -- I suppose we had to write to CNO or maybe to the Secretary or somebody to justify a sole source procurement rather than having a competition and the thrust of the letter was it would be unfair to industry to have the competition because Douglas was so far ahead, had already spent so much money on it and the chances of it turning out to be a better airplane or a better deal than we could negotiate with Douglas at the time was very remote. Blackie Kennedy was the OPNAV sponsor. He was a project guy on attack planes in what's now OP-506. He was a good guy too. There were such excellent working relationships within the bureau and with the CNO at the time.

RAUSA: It was less bureaucratic, right?

SPANGENBERG: Much less bureaucratic. Whenever there was any kind of a problem the OPNAV guys would be over with BuAer or BuWeps whatever we were then. I guess we were still BuAer and always in close communication and worked together without a lot of paperwork.

RAUSA: Was the A4D -- did you think it would be the great success it was even then at the outset?

SPANGENBERG: Well, I don't think any of us thought any airplane was going to last twenty years or twenty-five years in production. Up to that point in time you were developing engines on maybe a three to five year cycle and the next engine development then went into a new airplane development to take advantage of it. Of course we finally reached a plateau where you couldn't make much of a jump in airplane performance and the engines had kind of flattened out too. That really explains it I suppose. We were not having the kind of step improvements that you had been getting all through the reciprocating engine days. But nobody thought any combat airplane would last twenty-five years.

There were a couple more helicopters that year but we can skip those.

1953 saw the beginning of the F8U program and that was an excellent competition after we got it squared away. A big competition. Called a day fighter and the armament at the beginning was guns, and/or collision course rockets. It carried sixty, two inch, air-to-air rockets. The rocketry stuff never did work out. Within that competition ^__ well, the beginning was very strange. In that article I wrote for the Gold Book I pointed out that they had asked me to write on long-range planning which really never has worked anywhere that I know about. Pete Aurand was the project officer on the fighter desk and Pete was one of those that believed you needed nothing but subsonic performance and simplicity would be the big thing. Do it better, turn better, the air combat arena and whatnot. So the competition actually started as a subsonic airplane. Fortunately -- I suppose fortunately -- Pete got detached and went to his next tour and as soon as he got out of the bureau I think within the next week a simple change went out to all of the bidders saying change Mach .9 or .95, whatever it was, to Mach 1.2. So it became then a true supersonic airplane. The minimum speed requirement was 1.2 and most of the designs came in over that.

Vought won the competition hands down. Their big competitor in a sense was North American. It was strange in that not unlike the P6M competition we knew the Vought design was underweight as proposed. It was in the low 20s, 21,000 or thereabouts for design mission.

But North American came in close to 30,000 pounds for an airplane that was almost the same. They each had variable incidence wings. They were necessary in those days in order to solve the angle of attack problem and get back aboard in the best manner. That was part of the reason too for the A4D's long legs in addition to getting enough ground clearance. You had to get enough angle of attack in order that Delta wing could get up to a decent lift coefficient.

Back to the F8Us. We had variable incidence on the two principal proposals. In our mind Vought was going to be something over 1,000 pounds overweight but even at 1,000 pounds overweight or 1400 or whatever it was we thought it would still be a better airplane and perfectly acceptable in the fleet. North American at 30,000 pounds though would be about where we thought that the airplane might end up as a top of its growth line and there it was starting that way. And obviously if you propose a 30,000 pound airplane you can build it. Eventually we decided that we had to go with Vought. It was a better airplane of all those that were proposed. Later Lee Atwood, then president of North American and a very fine engineer, was convinced that the Navy had given the contract to Vought because they needed the business. He gave a speech before probably the Industrial Preparedness Association, one of those trade organizations, and in his written version of the speech there was nothing in it about that competition but as he actually gave it there was a paragraph added on the Navy's way of doing business or the military's way generally speaking of having design competitions. He said design competitions had to be run honestly and that the evaluators had to put aside any thoughts that they were trying to regulate the economy of the country and so on and just pick the best design. From the manufacturer's standpoint winning the design competition was the key to getting a production contract which was a reason that they were in business. An airplane company could not exist on experimental contracts alone. Everything that he said was right down our alley. We thought we had done exactly what he had asked for and for a number of years I quoted that paragraph of his whenever I gave a source selection briefing to anybody. Atwood didn't know it but he was outlining the rules of the game as we thought they should be played.

RAUSA: But in his own way he was complaining.

SPANGENBERG: He was complaining. Well, as you know that one went on to become a great airplane too and one that should have been bought in large numbers overseas. We sold some to the French. Later on, another country, I believe the Philippines, picked up some refurbished F-8Hs.

RAUSA: Was that a Mach 2 or 2 plus?

SPANGENBERG: No. It started as a 1.4 and I don't think it got up to Mach 2.

RAUSA: This was the first variable incidence wing aircraft that you had dealt with, is that right?

SPANGENBERG: Yes.

RAUSA: Did that present any special problems?

SPANGENBERG: Not really. People were worried about it. Mechanically it's very straightforward. It's no tougher than folding the wings essentially.

RAUSA: I mean the aerodynamic aspects weren't worrisome?

SPANGENBERG: No. One of the reasons, it was a high wing airplane. It would have been tough to do a variable incidence with a low wing airplane. Get sealing problems and so on. The high wing airplane it didn't really bother very much. Of course you also wanted the high wing low tail for getting through Mach 1. Good airplane and successful development and the timing of the program we used for years as the way you ought to develop an airplane.

Unfortunately some of the think tanks around the country and the people who were not close to the actual development, claim that the F8U was a prototype because we had two airplanes labeled XF8U-1. So in one of the big studies done by RAND years later, they came to the remarkable conclusion that it cost neither time nor money to prototype, test and then buy. And the reason that they came to that conclusion was that they did not properly separate prototype programs from concurrent programs and since there was an XF8U-1, they included it in their prototype kind of a program, but it was really concurrent from day one. It had all been planned that we let the first contract for two airplanes but then within the next year we bought five and then twelve and then twenty or something in order to get a smooth production buildup. We bought enough experimental or early production airplanes to get the test flying done. If you have two airplanes it takes forever. And if you do them as pure prototypes you've cut corners all through the thing and you don't have a representative sample. I probably have a hell of a lot more to say, don't have to say it really, but I'll give you some of the prototype papers and articles that were written because it's an important part of the acquisition process. People should know that we stopped prototyping before World War II. The F4U-1 Corsair was the last fighter that we did prototype before ordering it in production.

TAPE 8 of 16, SIDE B

I guess that's the end of this quick prototype thing.

That was the only airplane we started that year according to my chart. Starting in '54 was a very unusual competition of things that were marked helicopters ROE and RON. This was another crazy Marine idea. [laughter] They were going to put every Marine into the air so we had one-man helicopters. You could put them under your arm and carry them around with you. Assemble them in the field.

RAUSA: Observation helios?

SPANGENBERG: You could go to war with them I guess. If a Marine got trapped anywhere you'd drop him one from a airplane, he quickly assembled it, read how to fly in one easy lesson and took off. They thought they'd give Marines flight training in these little helicopters. Every Marine would get one. It was a weird competition. We had about forty-some entries of all sizes, shapes, descriptions and ended up ^__ this was ROE so it must have been Hiller was one of the ones and the other one was Gyrodyne Gyrodynes were little coaxial machines. They were weird. Obviously the thing was a complete fiasco.

RAUSA: Did they fly some of these?

SPANGENBERG: Yeah. They flew. Other people got into the act too. I remember Goodyear built one.

RAUSA: These were open cockpit?

SPANGENBERG: Yeah. You just sat out there in the breeze with a stick in front of you and the rotor kind of strapped on your shoulders [laughter].

RAUSA: You guys must have gone crazy.

SPANGENBERG: We did. That was a busy year too. F4H got started that year also. Lots of things were going on. Eventually the Gyrodyne thing -- or modification of it -- became the DASH drone helicopter. Another program. The DASH was the first radio controlled helicopter program and it probably would have been a success if the Navy had been smart enough to put a total aviation unit aboard the ship and operate the drones as well as doing the job of building and furnishing them. But the concept sort of had the surface fleet personnel doing the operation and they just didn't have enough training.

RAUSA: Well the DASH lasted for a while.

SPANGENBERG: Oh it lasted quite a while. But the Marine one-man helicopter didn't. It was a screwy one. The F4H also finally got underway that year. That's covered to a degree in that Gold Book article. McDonnell was running out of F3H production so they were submitting proposals once a month I guess on another version of the F3H. We were still calling it F3H. F3HA, B, C, D, E, F, G, H -- finally got up to H. Good selling job by McDonnell. The bureau fought against the idea because it was a year too soon to start a new fighter.

RAUSA: What was the fighter outfit?

SPANGENBERG: F3H and F4Ds.

RAUSA: They were the main fighters.

SPANGENBERG: Fighters in the fleet. The F8U was still in development. We ran an informal competition. The final McDonnell proposals were gunned airplanes, 4-20s, still single-place and the F3H-G was a J-65 powered airplane. The F3H-H was a J-79 powered airplane. In those days we did not allow an airplane to start until the engine had reached PFRT which is a preliminary flight rating test, fifty-hour test on that engine. If you did that by the time you got to your full qualified engine test you had a production airplane ready to go. It was a good concept then and would be now. McNamara screwed all that up because he insisted on a total package approach. Couldn't start an engine until you started the airplane and you had to wait for the war to develop before you could do that.

We did an informal competition as it were but without getting formal bids from anybody. We had proposals at the time from a number of manufacturers. Probably the early F4D-2, the design that became the F5D.

RAUSA: Sky Lancer.

SPANGENBERG: Yeah, later. Was in hand. There was a Grumman proposal that had jet engines plus a rocket in it. That was laying around. We hadn't really done anything with it. And all the McDonnell designs. Those are the ones I remember most clearly.

The F3H-H used two J-79s but as I said we weren't ready to specify that engine yet. The performance of the airplane with two J-79s was excellent. Two J-79s would make any airplane pretty good. Their F3H-G was the same airplane but with J-65s, a much lesser engine. And it was a lousy design I thought.

RAUSA: Did it look like the F-4?

SPANGENBERG: Yeah. More or less.

RAUSA: It just looked unorthodox, didn't it?

SPANGENBERG: The F4H as it started didn't look quite as strange. Didn't have the droop tail yet and the wings didn't have the broken wing look that they eventually developed. But it was a single-place airplane and armed only with guns. But a hell of a lot of pressure from the industrial statesmanship side of the Navy organization, as well as from McDonnell saying we have to have something to keep the factory going and so on and so forth. I remember writing the memo, it's back there in Navy files somewhere, that the only way you could possibly justify the F3H-G was to buy it as a stepping stone while you awaited the arrival of the J-79s which as it turned out is exactly what they ended up doing. And manipulations that I wasn't involved in ended up then with them giving a contract to McDonnell for the AH-1. Lo and behold it had become an attack plane. An afterburning twin engine single-place attack plane. A type that didn't exist in any plan that I knew anything about. Short on range. Very strange and I don't know how it all happened. After about I suppose six months there was a big reconfiguration study and the airplane then was changed over to that which we know today. Became a two-place airplane, no guns, except in a pod and armed with four Sparrows as primary armament with a fair amount of emphasis still on the air-to-ground mission.

RAUSA: In other words you were thinking in terms of a fighter/bombers not just a fighter.

SPANGENBERG: All of our fighters have been fighter/bombers. They ended up that way. They started as fighters. If they were good they had enough capability to carry bombs, F6Fs had always done it, F4Us had done it. I think everything had done it. We hadn't had any pure fighters. The only one that stayed pure I guess was the F-8.

RAUSA: I think they did some bombing with the F-8.

SPANGENBERG: Probably shot rockets with it. I guess you could rig up bombs somewhere.

RAUSA: On the in-board wing maybe.

SPANGENBERG: But it stayed purer than most. Anyway, the Class Desk officer, I think Charlie Smith started the thing.

RAUSA: Was Julian Lake in there somewhere?

SPANGENBERG: Julian was probably in electronics at the time or he had been anyway.

In the early development part of the game C.B. Smith or maybe Frank Timmes was the first project officer. Anyway, the big hassle was could we afford to get guns into the thing in addition to the Sparrows and we couldn't afford that extra thousand pounds and still get it on and off the boat. It ended up without guns and was the two-place configuration.

RAUSA: Did that bother you?

SPANGENBERG: Making it two-place?

RAUSA: Not the two-place but not having the guns?

SPANGENBERG: Well, I think all of the operators wanted guns in it but when it came down to the crunch you either had an airplane without guns that you could operate, or it looked like you could operate, with the arresting gear and catapults we had on the ships or you didn't. There was not a hell of a lot of "growth" in the airplane. We didn't have any big margins. In fact that was probably the most critical time then and a little bit later when we had the F4H, the A3D and the A3J ^__ it became the RA5C. Those took up more catapult and arresting capacity than the airplanes since then. I remember writing a paper on that, doing a study of some kind. Answering a query from Ships Installations where do we go from here? How much bigger do we have to keep making these things? Aerodynamically it looked like it would be about at the peak there and I guess we were.

Anyway, the F4H then got changed from the single seat armed, gun armed, lousy, underpowered airplane to a well powered two-place missile carrying airplane and it became the fighter for the fleet. We didn't get the final radar until five or six years later but that was in the works too. Everybody had reached a conclusion then that you had to have some kind of a missile capability, that guns alone just wouldn't hack it for the high performance threat against the fleet. So it marched on.

About a year later the advocates of single-place single engined airplanes rose again and we started the F8U-3 as a competitor to the F4H. Both of the airplanes were laid out as production programs. The F8U-3 was modeled after the F8U-1. That is, you learned to use the aerodynamics of the F8U-1, and put the big engines, the J-75 engine in it. It was a Sparrow-armed airplane too. Again without guns. Vought did a superb job. The cliche after 1958 was that the F8U-3 was the best airplane we ever cancelled.

RAUSA: So the F8U-3 lost out to continued production of the F4H.

SPANGENBERG: Right. Both airplanes were scheduled for production and were designed with superb programs. Vought did a better job in development than McDonnell did. They started perhaps a year afterwards and flew at almost the same time, first flight. And then Vought did a much better job of fixing things up that showed up in flight test. In 1957 Congress was screaming. We had to cancel one. Up to that point in time the Navy had never had less than two fighters in production at the same time. Jim Russell was Chief of the Bureau and he testified that we can't afford to ever get down to having our fleet defense dependent upon any one engine or any one airplane. If you have a bad episode with one and have to ground the airplanes or the engines you didn't want the fleet without some capability to defend themselves.

RAUSA: Vought must have been very bitter about that.

SPANGENBERG: Later they were. They were obviously extremely disappointed. It was just one of many disappointments for Vought at about that time where the Navy was really getting itself into a money crunch. But in 1957 Congress told us to cancel one. We ran a big paper evaluation. Neither airplane had reached flight status, and finally got Congress to delay it a year. By that time we had flight tests by PAX and could make sure that our paper estimates were all right. In the normal sense the F8U-3 won the fly-off. It had by far the best flying qualities. It was the best flying airplane, best flying fighter at least that the Navy had ever developed according to the PAX reports. Good flight control system. It carried only three Sparrows instead of four as a compromise in trying to get the best airplane. It would do everything on internal fuel that the F4D did with a 600 gallon tank. It had better legs. It had higher speed. Climbs were about the same. Ceilings were about the same.

RAUSA: Then why did McDonnell win? Was it a political decision?

SPANGENBERG: No. It was one-place versus two-place. At the time there was a growing conviction in the fleet that you needed two guys to do the all weather fighter job. There was a big all weather fighter conference at Patuxent and they came out with "a unanimous report." I can't believe that of Navy fighter pilots.

RAUSA: The fact that it had two engines, that was important to you.

SPANGENBERG: That was incidental in my opinion but it was an advantage. People would prefer two engines to one engine as long as you didn't pay too big a penalty. But the one-man, two-man decision was primary with the feeling that one man under good conditions could do the job. You had about a twenty percent advantage of cost with the F8U-3. But under the real tough conditions where the studies were done and presented I guess at that fighter conference and I know that were being done in the radar community, the F8U lost out. The kind of radar detection ranges we had, the conversion from when you first saw the enemy to where you could get in a position of launching missiles, it came down to the difference of two radar sweeps that made the difference between success and failure. You sure had a hell of a lot better chance to do that with a radar operator, meaning two-man.

Later the decision for two-man was almost universally accepted. Some of the biggest proponents for single-place, white scarf flying, fighter days came back after they had an F-4 squadron in the fleet. I remember distinctly talking with a bunch of Israelis, I can't remember the fighter pilot's name, but he was known as the king of single seat fighters. Hell of a nice guy. But anyway,I said, "Commander so and so won't agree with me but I thought the right decision had been made." In fact I wrote that in that F8U-3/F4H evaluation memo: "The day of the single seat fighter is over. Let's not make this mistake again. To develop a whole airplane around that concept, have it turn out to be a better airplane and then not buy it. We shouldn't do that again."Anyway, we were talking to the Israelis, and they brought up one-man versus two-man, they were probably getting ready to buy F-4s at the time. When I made the statement the Commander said, "I don't disagree." He said, "having that second guy in back, radar operator, is just like having a wing man who doesn't get lost." Even in the air combat arena that second guy was worth his weight in gold. So as far as I was concerned I thought that the decision had been made in perpetuity that we would go with two-place. And it was of course then for the next twenty years until the F-18 came along.

Those were tough times. It was tough for Vought. I guess I didn't mention when the F8U-1 was selected one of the big "disadvantages" of Vought was that the fact that they had just screwed up the F6U or should never have started the F6U and then the F7U was anything but the world's best airplane. So there were a lot of people that said don't give Vought another one. But it really proves that you have to make a decision on the basis of the design proposals in front of you and not on the record of what they did the last time because every one of the manufacturers has screwed up at one time or another. And in fact if they're about to go out of business they'll do a lot better job for you than the guy that's sitting there with two or three projects on the back burner while the first team works on the one that is further ahead. That's some of my philosophy. I don't think it's worth talking about it any more.

T-34 was an off the shelf type of deal. It was interesting in those days for me, a non-aviator, to listen to pilots talk about their early training and what they wanted to get out of it. They didn't want a very complicated airplane for primary flight training. They really wanted the wind in the face feel, and so you would learn to enjoy flying as opposed to having a complicated procedure that you worried about all the time.

RAUSA: But the T-34 had already -- wait a minute, what year are we talking about?

SPANGENBERG: It's '55.

RAUSA: So they just started coming in.

SPANGENBERG: We talked about the F8U-3 where the actual start was in '56. There was the HU2K Kaman's entry into a major fleet requirement for the first time. And that was a competition which I thought and Pete Brown, the rotary wing desk officer thought that Vertol had won the competition. Tommy Thomas was the aircraft division officer at the time. He had been involved in the AD and the A3D and the A4D. Good friend of mine. But he was also a good friend of Charlie Kaman. The Kaman helicopter as proposed had a very wide blade rotor system. Our aero and structures guys didn't think that it would work. They were going to have a bearing-less rotor, using technology from the oil well drilling experience or something. Tommy won the argument on who won the competition and so they bought the thing from Kaman. It was the highest speed helicopter we had at the time but the rotor system got changed to a more conventional one and that oil well experience was dropped.

RAUSA: Was it a prelude to the Sea Sprite?

SPANGENBERG: It was a Sea Sprite. It started as the HU2K. It had a long successful experience but we thought, Pete Brown and I, that Piasecki won the competition. I still think they did. [laughter]

The TT-1.

RAUSA: The Temco Pinto.

SPANGENBERG: And the T2J. The T2J came out of a big training study done at the time. Getting a new basic trainer. It was a well thought out study in a well laid out procurement plan to buy the T2J. Enough airplane work at the study level had been done.

TAPE 9 of 16, SIDE A

RAUSA: You had just said that North American won the competition.

SPANGENBERG: Won the competition. It was around a J-34 engine, single engine airplane as it started and went on for a while. T2J-1 was redesignated as the T-2A. It was a successful development and it's had a long life. We're still flying T-2s. The twin engined T-2B with J-60 engines followed after a couple of hundred T-2As.

At the same time at the very last minute Temco had been trying to sell that silly little TT-1 thing as a jet primary trainer. OPNAV approved the plan as an adjunct to the T2J and we bought a dozen or so for tests as primary trainers. We hadn't done our homework, studies hadn't been done and the bureau was scarcely involved in the decision.

RAUSA: Where are they located?

SPANGENBERG: At the time they were down almost next to Vought in Dallas. You remember later that they became Ling-Temco Vought (LTV). Ling was a financier type, and the owner of Temco.

RAUSA: Well we actually bought some Pintos, didn't we?

SPANGENBERG: Not many, shouldn't have.

RAUSA: They went into production or we just had some experimental?

SPANGENBERG: It may have been a production program right from the beginning but it was a slow buildup type and we didn't buy very many (14 total).

RAUSA: What was the main problem? Was it underpowered?

SPANGENBERG: Grossly underpowered. You went through a mud puddle and it flamed out the engine. Literally.

RAUSA: Did we hurt some people in that era?

SPANGENBERG: No. Eventually the guy that's now president of Gulf Stream, his name was Paulson, big promoter. He later bought some of those TT-1s and some years later did a demonstration out at a Dulles air show. He was trying to sell an upgraded version to the Navy. He was unsuccessful, and we didn't buy the scheme. He had a few of them flying around. He was trying to sell it commercially and to any military training outfit that was willing. When he flew out here at Dulles he tried to do a high speed dive and pullout, but the canopy came off, hit the tail. I don't know whether the pilot got out or not but the airplane crashed.

RAUSA: Before we go any further, with respect to yourself George has your title changed over the years? Are you still the weight guy now?

SPANGENBERG: The weight thing for me was always incidental. I did the weight estimating but I did not run the weight control program and after World War II we had competent people in the weight group that did weight estimates. I continued to do some of my back of the envelope thing just to satisfy myself that we were always in the right ballpark.

RAUSA: What was your title at this time?

SPANGENBERG: I had lots of titles over the years. I became "Director, Evaluation Division" in 1957; before that I was "Assistant Director." But I was also in Contract Airplane Design all during the period when I was involved with approval of drawings and that kind of stuff. And running the competitions was also Contract Airplane Design responsibility.

RAUSA: So you're dealing an awful lot with --

SPANGENBERG: We were looking at the whole airplane from the time I went to Washington. I would not have come to Washington looking at a piece of the airplane. I would rather have gone to industry or stayed with NAF where you had a better feel. I didn't want to get into details such as only ejection seats, or only powerplants. In fact the powerplants is worse than that, it could be only development of engines or development of intake systems, accessories or fuel tanks. I didn't want that. So I've always been a "generalist." That's a guy who knows less and less about more and more until he knows nothing about everything. But I knew enough about all of the disciplines that I could talk to our performance people, the flying quality people. I could talk their language. I had more trouble talking the electronics language so I really had to depend a lot more there on the people I knew from their reputations and their experiences. I depended upon them. The Puckets and the Plunkerts and Chuck Francis when he was down there. To a far greater degree than I had to in the airframe part. I could argue with a structures guy. To a degree I could argue with some of the aero guys though I really depended upon them for specific performance numbers and flying qualities.

When we ran a competition, for example, or any time during the program I probably had more to do with what the performance guys were working on then did their division director because we would get requests from CNO or from the Secretary of the Navy. We had one from Kissinger, "Kissinger Wants to Know," when he was national security adviser. It took a big study to get a lot of performance data, and of course, he wanted it immediately or sooner. Our Assistant Chief had let me often control the workload of the performance people. If I told them it was more important to do the design competition than it was to get the performance chart out on some airplane they would shift their priorities and all work on the competition.

I believe I also had a very close working relationship with all those working level guys in our technical community. Unlike too many, if I wanted to find out something from the performance group I walked down there and talked to them and they would come up and talk to me. When we'd have a "fire drill" at night often the performance guy working on it would come up to my office, we'd sit down and do twenty or thirty radius problems, for example, to satisfy some congressional request or something. So I was kind of coordinating the airframe part of the game.

You really couldn't differentiate some of what I did from what a class desk officer's job description said. We worked very closely together. Each understood the other. The working level really understood the whole system better than our Assistant Chief did.

Adm. Schoech never did figure out what I did and what Fred Gloeckler did. He would telephone me and I'd run down to his office and he'd give me a job. At first I would tell him this is really Fred Gloeckler's job. He did the same thing to Fred. Finally instead of doing that, going back and telling him, he'd give me a job and I'd give it to Fred if it was Fred's. Fred would give it to me if it was mine.

RAUSA: Was Schoech BuAer or Assistant Chief?

SPANGENBERG: He became Assistant Chief of the Bureau, but at the time I was talking about he was Assistant Chief for R&D.

Schoech went from R&D assistant chief out to the fleet, the 7th Fleet I guess, and then when he came back he became assistant chief.

RAUSA: Eventually he became OP-05. I think his picture is on the wall there.

SPANGENBERG: Could be. Yeah, he was. He was OP-05 for a while. He was also CNM. He was our first Chief of Naval Materiel. Schoech was a wonderful individual. We always said he couldn't spell his own name. We all liked Schoech. Schoech always supported his working level guys. You never had any question but he'd be on your side. If we were going to argue with the Air Force, Schoech could always be depended upon to support you. When Gelantin took over for Schoech you couldn't always depend on him. He didn't back up our numbers. We got into serious trouble during F-111 days. What he did in a big meeting with McNamara's crew was to substitute his judgment for ours. We had Navy numbers for the performance of the F-111B. We also had contractor numbers for the performance and we had Air Force numbers. Air Force numbers were always just a little bit worse than contractor numbers. Our numbers were a lot worse. Gelantin said, "Well since the Navy numbers are under the contractors numbers and the Air Force is in the middle we'll believe the Air Force. And that was wrong. And we knew it was wrong because we knew the Air Force numbers were not those of their own performance analysts. God, I was angry.

RAUSA: Still are.

SPANGENBERG: Yeah. The working relationships between the civilians and the military, it's a two way street. If they were going to respect us or expect us to respect them they've got to respect us and in my experience we never had a problem. I shouldn't say never but 99 1/2% or so. Naval officers and civilians got along very, very well. Far better than in the other services.

Well, back to our models. A3J came along after the T2J. It was a fairly closely held beginning of a program.

RAUSA: Was it originally slated to become a nuclear model?

SPANGENBERG: The thing that started it was a continuing series of studies of North American on a thing they called Nag Paw which was a subsonic low flying airplane, attack airplane. They carried on with that, it must have been for a year and never got to the point that it sold. Suddenly, suddenly to me at least, the supersonic version of Nag Paw arose, directly from North American. Linear bomb bay, God, we had never even heard of a linear bomb bay.

RAUSA: What is a linear bomb bay?

SPANGENBERG: You eject the bomb out of the rear of the airplane. Just have a long tunnel. When you pushed the button the bomb ejected backwards at roughly the speed of the airplane.

RAUSA: Was that for a horizontal delivery?

SPANGENBERG: Right. And it eliminated the problem of opening bomb doors at supersonic speeds which had not been very successful. It hadn't been very good at high subsonic. We had trouble -- most airplanes had trouble -- we had trouble getting bombs out of the A3D initially. Then they finally put a deflector plate or something that cleared it up. The supersonic guys were having trouble, that were trying to solve the same problem. So this was an answer to a single problem. You got kind of screwed up with what to do with drop tanks and the drop tanks finally got stuck on the end there and you ejected those before you ejected the bomb.

The A3J program started with -- as far as I was concerned, it kind of arrived on the scene. The OPNAV officer was Roy Eisner, later head of Patuxent. A very emphatic strong-willed guy. He was convinced that unless we had a supersonic nuclear delivery capability that naval aviation would disappear. It was one of those time spans again. And so the airplane was really justified by others. We evaluated it to make sure that it would go on and off the boat.

RAUSA: It was a beautiful airplane.

SPANGENBERG: Best looking airplane we ever did.

RAUSA: Two engines.

SPANGENBERG: Twin.

RAUSA: Did they have a BN or RIO in the back? All you had was two little windows back there.

SPANGENBERG: The bomber did have a 2-man crew. Eventually it became the reconnaissance airplane, with a reconnaissance capability orders of magnitude better than anything we had been able to do before. We always had photo versions, probably every one of the fighter airplanes.

RAUSA: So it was better than the F-8, better than the Crusaders?

SPANGENBERG: Oh, yeah. It was orders of magnitude better. Bigger cameras and electronic reconnaissance means incorporated as well. And in connection with that development they did that reconnaissance capability aboard ship. It became a separate unit unto itself. From an airplane's standpoint, the airplane had all kinds of troubles. Detailed little problems had been going on in North American for a long time. I was never sure exactly why. They appeared not to have enough designers that had made mistakes before. They were making them all for us. The AJ-1 was a prime example. They put the hydraulics on top, electronics on the bottom so the hydraulic fluid leaked all over the airplane instead of putting it on the bottom where at least you could put a drain hole in and let it run outside.

The linear bomb bay caused no end of problems. A lot of the wiring and stuff had to be wrapped around that bomb bay if you had engines on the two sides so you didn't have good access to places to put things in the fuselage. Eventually it devolved into a reconnaissance airplane. They attempted at the end of the line -- we had a J-58 engine program going which was to be a Mach 3 engine, bigger than the J-75 and the proponents of the RA5C attempted to get that next step and eventually to compete with the SR-71. And they did studies but the Navy just couldn't afford it. However, our J-58 engines did go into the SR-71. In the meantime along the way on the A3J they decided to give it a super performance capability and they played around with putting rockets on the airplane so you got a very high performance capability for a very short length of time.

TAPE 9 of 16, SIDE B

I think John T. Shepherd was the first project officer on the airplane and he has remained a close friend for a long time.

RAUSA: This is the Vigilante now.

SPANGENBERG: Yeah. He was the project officer at the time that they were doing this rocket engine installation and my first experience with him was not very satisfactory. I had written a memo after getting some performance checked and we figured that with the radius of the airplane we were going to be lucky if we got to the outer ring of destroyers [laughter]. The super performance rocket just took up too much fuel. But soon we became close friends.

And we put the radome on top of the WF. The design began on the old S2F. We got our first early warning airplane. We had the AD-5W before that.

RAUSA: Whose idea was it to put the dome on the top of the WF-2? Wasn't it the first aircraft to have a dome on top?

SPANGENBERG: It was I guess.

RAUSA: Did that come from industry or from the Navy? The Super Connie had a dome. Maybe that was first. Did that bother you having a big dome up there for aerodynamics?

SPANGENBERG: Nobody liked it but it was better than putting it on the bottom. Actually, the radome was so large it had to be on top. I think we had tried out the scheme on a TF before doing the real thing. We anticipated problems. I think it actually turned out to be less troublesome than we thought it would.

The next year, '57 now, we started the A2F which became the A-6 and that's covered in that Wings of Gold article. If you believe in long-range planning, boy, that's not the way to do it. The plane came out of a Marine requirement for very short field takeoff with a couple 500 pound bombs and a 300 mile radius. The Congress would not approve the program for the Marines alone so the Navy had to think up a mission. The Navy thought up a long-range mission, lots of drop tanks and 750 or 1,000 mile radius, something on that order. And the combination really worked out very well but it's sure not any justification for spending a lot of time on long-range plans. The original airplane had tilting tail pipes, which could be deflected maybe thirty degrees in order to get the thrust component acting to help offset the weight of the airplane, increase the lift and give it an STO capability.

RAUSA: For the takeoff and landing evolution.

SPANGENBERG: Right. Eventually they disappeared from the production program but the program started with those tilting tail pipes for a long time. The early airplanes also had problems in slowing down. Well, the first problem that came up was the drag turned out to be higher than Grumman had estimated and after we had evaluated the thing at the competition time they had to put more span on the airplane which helped the airplane. And then later they had to put those wing tip speed brakes on to solve the "slowing down" problem and they worked out well. The early speed brakes had been inadequate. The electronics gave us all kinds of trouble in the early days and strangely enough a lot of it was just plain connectors. Nobody had anticipated the degree of service problems that you got trying to put those sixty pin connectors together and that led eventually to all the potting material problems and whatnot that we got later on. The airplane itself obviously was a great success. The Marines dropped their short field requirement and the airplane eliminated tilting the tail pipes. But the basic configuration gave good low speed characteristics, and was easy to fly. Everybody liked to fly it apparently. You could get lots of excess wind over the deck for coming aboard and taking off. The airplane obviously had lots of growth potential. But having started it with that requirement for four drop tanks and a big bomb to do that long-range Navy mission we had enough store stations to handle the growth of the airplane and enough capacity in those stations. Successful airplane. I won't dwell on that. Everybody knows it.

The next one on the list is a VF/VTOL which I did not talk about before and eventually we ought to talk just one session probably on it or I'll give you some of the VTOL papers that had been written over the years (ed: see the "V" Exhibits). The VF/VTOL was a jet powered airplane that played around initially with a jet powered tail sitter similar to that Ryan type in the studies. We ran a competition. It was ridiculous. We should not have run a competition. It was not a firm requirement. It should have been labeled as a research airplane if we wanted to do jet VTOL. It eventually ended up with -- we invited twelve people to bid, only two bid. In those days industry was pretty honest with us. If the Grummans and the Voughts and the Douglases weren't bidding, that was a good signal there was no potential in the procurement. In this case we asked twelve guys to bid. We got bids from Bell and from Ryan. I think Ryan proposed the Wire Hanger kind of a thing but I really don't remember. Bell proposed a lift engine arrangement. It had two J-79 flight engines and nine lift engines arranged vertically in the fuselage in between the two J-79s so the pilot only had to contend with an eleven engine contraption. It was awful. The memo we wrote from the competition was don't buy anything. The VTOL clan however declared Bell to be the winner and we'd negotiate something else. So for about six months they played around with the concept that eventually the Air Force took over. It had engines on the wing tips which rotated. Two engines on each wing tip.

RAUSA: The XVTOL.

SPANGENBERG: Well, we called it the VF/VTOL at the time. It never developed a designation because we never got to the point where we thought we were really going to buy it.

RAUSA: Is this the one that did go on and make some carrier landings?

SPANGENBERG: No. The Air Force took it over and developed it and they've got a number for it, somewhere in the VF series, F series, somewhere there's that contraption. It had tilting nacelles on it. Jet engines on the tips. I want to say J-79s but it seems like that's too much to have four engines. I'm remembering a four engine -- anyway, it didn't go anywhere like most VTOLs have no place to go except for research which is fun to do because you like all the advantages that you might get some day.

SPANGENBERG: Then we did the Mohawk, the OF. This was a joint program with the Army. In those days the Department of the Defense would not let the Army do any development so when the Army wanted to start a new program they had to shop either the Air Force or the Navy. Most of the time they seemed to end up with us, with the Navy that is, because we didn't charge them anything for getting involved. It had to become a joint airplane for budget justification reasons so the Marines and the Army got together on a joint requirement. The main thing that it provided was side-by-side cockpit with enough power. It was a pretty good flying airplane. It had enough capability to do the bird dog job a lot better than other things were capable of doing. We were still flying the Cubs, the OEs and so was the Army. The Air Force really wasn't flying anything in those days for that mission.

I still remember the Marine guys arguing with the Army guys on whether it should be side-by-side or tandem cockpits and some of the same argument had gone on at the early days of the A2F.

RAUSA: Which do you prefer? Depends on the aircraft?

SPANGENBERG: It depends on what you're trying to do. The fighters I thought had to be tandem just for aerodynamic reasons. The subsonic stuff, the advantages of hand motions and communication without having to depend upon the ICS I thought were generally overpowering and during one conference one of the Marines, obviously one of the sharp Marines -- we were working in a working environment where we had partial bulkheads and the guy went over into the next room and then tried to be a part of the conference. He could hear but he couldn't see. It was a very dramatic way to prove that you're better off sitting at a conference table than have guys on opposite sides of a bulkhead without any visual stuff going on.

The airplane was a great success. The Marines dropped out of the thing in order to buy C-130s for tanking.

RAUSA: Are we talking about the Mohawk now?

SPANGENBERG: Yeah. We the Navy had done an excellent job of providing a useful airplane to the Army for close support. The Army could not put bomb racks on an airplane because of the Air Force/Army fight about who does what. The Air Force had not done adquate close support for the Army at any time, according to the Army. They did their version of close support which was anything but what the Marines call close support. In developing the airplane we had some 600 pound resupply containers which we put on wing stations. We got as far as testing the airplane with firing the guns and dropping bombs from those resupply container stations. Patuxent cleared the airplane and at the last minute the Air Force found out about it and prohibited the Army from ever using that capability. We thought we had foxed the Air Force and given the Army a close support capability not as good as they could have had if they had bought some Navy airplanes or had been allowed to by the Air Force but the Air Force seemed very jealous of that. And then we got out of the program and eventually the Army took over. The Army normally took over management after the development because they were allowed to buy "off-the-shelf" airplanes.

We did a P6Y which was the last of the seaplane projects and that was an ill considered requirement to have a huge dunking sonar from an open ocean flying boat. Convair won the competition with a three engine airplane. Had lots of boundary layer control so it could land at maybe thirty-five or forty knots in any kind of sea state. It then did the ASW mission by hopscotching across. You'd land, dunk the sonar, pick the sonar up, take off and whatnot.

RAUSA: This was all jet?

SPANGENBERG: No, props, I think. I think it was turbo props. The old seaplane hands were not happy with this concept. They could only foresee very, very seasick crew members among other things and trying to land in sea state six or seven with an airplane even if it was going slow is a very dangerous kind of operation. We ran the competition, got the airplane and it would have been a very successful low speed short takeoff kind of flying boat, probably with a fair degree of payload capability as you would operate it maybe on a commercial basis but the requirement went away very quickly with the budget crunch and they stopped that. Thank God.

Maybe we can do the E-2 and we'll be through with that year. That started as a W2F. It was the only competition that I was involved in that I thought was dishonest. The winner didn't win. Vought won the competition. It was a replacement of course for the WF-2. Bigger radar, whatnot. Vought came up with the idea of the retarded wave antenna which allowed a thinner radome, much thinner than the WF-2. The Vought arrangement had the radome light enough that they could locate it at the tail of the airplane so it looked strange. But all the wind tunnel tests were excellent. The performance was excellent. The weight, cost, flying qualities, everything. They won the competition. The original Grumman entry was a conventional radome with the dish rotating within it. In those days we wrote a memorandum winding up a competition, signed by our Assistant Chief to the Chief and via all the other Assistant Chiefs. There had been agreement. "Okay, Vought won, we're going to go ahead", and that's what the memo said.

I went on vacation and while I was in Hartford with my family, I picked up the paper and lo and behold the Navy announced Grumman was the winner. I came back after the vacation to find out what had happened? Why? And it turned out that the head of the production division said Grumman is running out of fighters, the F9Fs were through. They were too far away from the A2F to be satisfied with its production. So he said Grumman needs the work and they ought to get it. The total Navy buy at the time was something that was programmed at seventy airplanes. Well, from my standpoint I didn't see that the Grumman production problem was going to be solved by the E-2 by any means, what they were looking for then was hundreds of airplanes.

RAUSA: Are you saying you favored the Vought proposal?

SPANGENBERG: Oh, yes. Everybody did. It was the winner of the competition. Hands down I thought.

RAUSA: So that was a political thing.

SPANGENBERG: That became industrial statesmanship as it were. I was very, very upset because I thought we had a system that worked and it worked because we were honest and this I thought was dishonest. I pointed out to my boss, Mr. Frisbie, who apparently had gone along with this thing because the Chief, or the Assistant Chief or somebody said to. I think Adm. Schoech was the one that backed down. He was our Assistant Chief at the time.

RAUSA: Had you not gone on vacation could you have made a difference?

SPANGENBERG: I think I would. I would have raised hell. When I got back I got told to go pick up my memo. I said, "You've got a signed and approved memo that's in the system and here you're giving the contract to another guy." So I got told to go pick the memo up and I refused. I wouldn't have anything to do with it.

RAUSA: You had already submitted it.

SPANGENBERG: Yeah. Schoech had signed it. So it had gone through the system and had been approved. Finally they got one of the further down the line guys at that time, Charlie Butt, who later became Head of the Proposals Branch. Charlie got told to go pick up the memos and destroy them. So Charlie went and picked them up but he didn't destroy them all.

RAUSA: But the decision was made above Schoech then. He was told to approve that.

SPANGENBERG: Well, the Assistant Chief for Production went to the Chief of the Bureau, whoever that was at the time, and convinced Schoech that industrial statesmanship should win the game.

RAUSA: So it was a Navy decision.

SPANGENBERG: Yeah. It was done within the Navy but I thought it was dishonest because I said the least you can do is to say to Vought you won the competition and we'll pay you for your efforts or something like that. But for other reasons -- this was what we'd done on the PBB years before when again Vought had won the competition and they decided they needed another producer in the seaplane field but they announced that Vought was the winner, paid him for his proposal work, turned the work over to Boeing and then Boeing submitted another proposal that we eventually bought. And I thought they should do the same thing.

RAUSA: But they didn't.

SPANGENBERG: They didn't.

RAUSA: The Vought guys must have been furious.

SPANGENBERG: I wouldn't debrief them. I wouldn't tell them why they lost and the word got around.

RAUSA: But you knew those people well.

SPANGENBERG: Sure. They knew they had won. The retarded wave antennae gave them such an aerodynamic advantage and no one else had it.

RAUSA: And what this translates to was a thinner dome --

SPANGENBERG: Eventually that technology went into the E-2. But that technology was in the Vought proposal, it was not in the Grumman proposal so Grumman redid their proposal eventually and picked up the Vought technology.

RAUSA: In other words Grumman had more friends in the bureau than Vought.

SPANGENBERG: I think that the production chief's decision was wrong because it didn't solve the problem he was trying to solve and it screwed up our 100% record of being honest in my opinion. You'll find that I've written this in some of these presentations I've given. I thought that we had an honesty record that I called 98%. We lost a couple of percentage points because of the overturning of that decision. Other ones got overturned but we couldn't help it. The Bell X-22 got overturned outside the Navy. The PBBl flying boat one was handled honestly. The F-111 I didn't count because it was Air Force management and it was overturned outside the Navy. I've got a letter still from I guess Detwiller, then at Vought, to Jim Russell saying what the hell do we do now? Do we still play the game? Do we get into the next competition? Are you going to tell us whether we have a chance and so on?

RAUSA: That must have been frustrating as hell.

SPANGENBERG: Oh, it was and Vought ended up in deep trouble. The F8U-3 was being cancelled. The Regulus program was being cancelled and one other thing down there. Anyway, they were really in more trouble than Grumman.

RAUSA: Is this a good point to stop for the day?

TAPE 10 of 16, SIDE A

August 1, 1990

SPANGENBERG: Okay, we're now about at the '58-'59 time period and we kind of skipped over but in '57 Mr. Frisbie retired, my old boss, and I became the director of the division. Gil Weiss who was then head of the weight group moved up to assistant director. Keith Dentel took over the weight group. That basic arrangement lasted up until around 1970 or so, when Gil Weiss retired (as soon as he could at age 55) and Keith Dentel then moved into the assistant directorship.

Back to the airplanes. In '58 we started the P-3 and I won't dwell on that with an off-the-shelf airplane basically with a follow on to the P-2 series, P2V series. Then in '59 we started the Eagle/Missileer competition. We did the Eagle and then later the Missileer which was a forerunner of the TFX and of the F-14. The whole development series really started back in '55.

RAUSA: Was the Missileer an actual aircraft?

SPANGENBERG: The whole thing started with the threat projections being such that it was becoming very difficult to protect the fleet against Mach 2 raids coming in. You had to have something better than we had with F4/Sparrow capability aircraft. All the studies said you just couldn't get there in time to shoot down enough and the surface-to-air missiles just couldn't handle the degree of the threat either. It turned out that studies in the mid-fifties indicated that the state of the art in radar was such that we could do a long-range radar search type of thing and get it into an airplane. Took about a five foot dish to do it. This then led to probably the biggest study effort in the Op analysis field that at least the Navy had done up to that point on how best to do the fleet defense mission. That study was known as RAFAD and out of that came the determination that the only real way to do the job was with a CAP airplane and long-range missiles. It was far superior to trying to do the high speed intercept and so on. With the threat then being projected as Mach 2 kind of performance and launching missiles against you it was imperative that they get stopped or at least well thinned out by one hundred miles out or thereabouts.

At the time we started on that the Air Force had gone the other way and started the XF-12 airplane which eventually became the SR-71, with Mach 3 kind of performance but using single shot missiles. That airplane as you know was a very large airplane, 100,000 pound category and very long, impossible to operate from a carrier unless we got much, much larger carriers. That option of going that way really wasn't open to us and also it was a very expensive way to do it. All those Op analysis studies said that we couldn't get there from here. So Navy sold to the Congress a program to do Eagle Missileer. Eagle was about a 100 mile missile with mid-course guidance and terminal homing. The missile itself weighed on the order of as I recall 1300 pounds a piece, something on that order. Then the fire control system was being done by Westinghouse. I just mentioned there was a five-foot dish. The Eagle missile and fire control system part of the program started a couple years before the airplane did and the TF-30 engine got started about that time in order to provide the engine and the missile system in time to match the airplane. Our habit in those days was to get the long lead items under way before you did the air frame because really the air frame has a shorter development time required. At the time of the Eagle competition, Grumman had won a whole batch of competitions. They had the E-2 going on, the Mohawk going on. They had won the A-6 competition.

The Chief of the Bureau then was Adm. Bob Dixon and he told Grumman unofficially that he didn't think that they should win the next competition coming up. They were going to get overloaded. Unfortunately, Grumman was really on a roll there. They had done a reorganization, put good guys in charge of all the forward looking programs and had a good crew. Grumman ended up by foxing the Navy by not bidding as a prime but as a sub-contractor to Bendix. Bendix won the Eagle competition and Grumman was heavily involved in the effort.

The Eagle program went along fairly well, well enough that the airplane part of it got started on schedule in 1959. That was a pretty tough competition. It was a controversial airplane in the sense it was such a low performance airplane. It was to be a subsonic airplane, two turbo fan engines, two place side by side and as I said with this five foot radar dish in the nose. The air frame part of the game was really not too difficult a technical job. It would have been obviously a lot easier than it would have been doing a supersonic type of airplane. That competition then ended with Douglas winning it with a very straightforward design with six missiles mounted on the wings, three on each side, externally. Straightforward airplane.

One of the interesting things out of the competition was a Vought entry which had predicted extremely low missile drag as mounted on their airplane based on wind tunnel tests. What it had amounted to in effect was that they ended up with positive interference drag. Usually you can take the drag of a pylon, the drag of a missile, put the two together and you add another hunk of drag to it for interference. In the case of Vought they were showing that the combination of a pylon and the missiles was less than the total of the two individual drags. Our aero guys didn't believe that and it became a big issue. If they had been right they would have been a more serious contender for getting the award than they were. With our performance estimate they were definitely in second place.

Subsequent to the award to Douglas, Vought turned all their drag data over to Douglas. This was not the first time that this type of thing had happened but it's worth mentioning that in these competitions that the losing contractors if they have something worthwhile in it will normally give it to their competitor in order to get a better plane for the fleet. It's worth mentioning because every once in a while there's a federal program or an OSD directive that we should do "technology transfer" or try to pick the best items out of each airplane and so on. It happens automatically if it's worth doing.

Unfortunately with the Missileer, McNamara's arrival on the scene came along. The outgoing administration did not want to let a full development contract until the incoming administration approved the program. So we kept Douglas on a low level engineering effort probably under $1 million to do some preliminary engineering but then left the decision whether to go ahead in May to the incoming administration. McNamara's crew, as you know, then said the Navy has a new airplane started, the Air Force has a new fighter started called TFX in the Air Force terminology. They're going to fight the same enemy, why don't they do it with one airplane? And the general impression that the working level guys had was the conversation must have been almost that casual, if they're going to fight the same enemy they can do it with one airplane. It later developed into a God awful mess. The whole TFX story has had books written about it.

As a sidelight I guess I read three of the books and in no case did the authors of those books talk to me. Never. And most of them are wrong. All of them are wrong. Parts of the books are correct but the inferences drawn as to why we did things and why we didn't do things are all wrong. The first one was supposed to be McNamara proving to the services that he could wear them down. The military was fighting civilian rule and that wasn't the case at all. The Air Force and Navy were really only doing a technical job that McNamara's crew was screwing up and it was just awful.

RAUSA: And this hadn't happen before where you had the DOD staff intermingling into the development of an aircraft?

SPANGENBERG: No. Up to that time in my understanding, in my experience what happened, the OSD staff might question you on something but they'd accept the reasoning or the technical input from the services. McNamara's crew just didn't believe us and they had a bunch of honest to God incompetents. But the outcome of that mess was the McNamara group cancelled the airplane, the Eagle continued into early 1960 and it finally got cancelled I think in May of 1960. So thus ended the Eagle Missileer concept but it set the stage then for the things that came later, the TFX.

I think we ought to skip that then and go back to these other airplanes that were involved because they were a series and they kind of set the stage of the way we procured airplanes in the future. We got into fixed price contracting at about that time. What had really been happening in the development field is that the Navy had the A3J which became the RA5C, the E-2 and the A-6, all under development at the same time using cost plus contracts. The overruns every year on each of those programs was enough that the Navy kept having to cancel out the little tiny R&D programs that are the seed for the future and it was just raising havoc with the whole R&D development because of the overruns on the major weapon systems. In part we thought we had solved the problem before when we went to the FIRM plan, which stood for Fleet Introduction of Replacement Models some years before. We had said then that we will only fund airplanes with R&D funds through the mockup stage and after that it would be production funds. This is starting to sound contradictory so I'm screwed up somewhere on the things that happened. Actually we did do that and then a whole series of airplanes that we did in that 1950 time period were only funded R&D-wise at very small levels and everything else was done on production funding where the big money was and where then you had more flexibility to operate. As an example, the F-4 got started with perhaps no R&D funding. We did it on the tail end of the F3H contract and so on. The A3J, I think something like $4 million was all the R&D money that was involved. Anyway, that allowed the Navy to start too many airplanes by getting this windfall when they did the switch over. Instead of having to fund a whole program out of R&D we only had to fund the beginning of it. It allowed us to start in one year more airplanes than we could have under the old rules.

Money was becoming more important in reaching decision phases in our competitions. Up to sometime in the fifties we scarcely mentioned money when we did a design competition. The concept had all been approved with paper studies within the Navy and reenforced by airplane studies by the contractors that gave you a second check on what the designers in the bureau were saying could be done. And then when we got an item in the budget we would do a competition, but we wouldn't fund anything until we really had congressional approval to get the program started. McNamara's crew changed all of that and the change is still causing problems today. Now you must get a program well started before you have any approval on the Hill whether you're going to be allowed to continue it.

The Marines then came up with another requirement, this time for a 4,000 pound payload helicopter which eventually became the CH-46. At the time Sikorsky had in production what we called the HSS-2 when it started and it became the SH-3 in a model designation change. Two turbo props powering the helicopter. It was an ideal size for this 4,000 lb. payload helicopter. The Marines were working closely with Sikorsky, put a rear ramp on the airplane and it was a shoo-in really, that's the way we were going to go. We ended up having a competition, however, and at the time Vertol was flying a civil version of a design that really started back with the HUP. Vertol's design commercially was called the V-107. They were demonstrating it, trying to sell it to airlines for mid-city airport to the outlying airport kind of transportation or inner city of Washington to Baltimore. In the civil version it was probably about a twenty place, 16-20 place design. Pretty nice flying machine. They took everybody for rides in it. They entered the competition basically against the Sikorsky design. Sikorsky should have won hands down but Vertol ended up by doing an excellent technical job. They too had gotten the Marines up there to have informal mockups and so on all before the competition was held. They ended up with an excellent technical design and then for the cost they ended up bidding fixed price -- we were going to buy 200 helicopters. They gave us a fixed price bid based on the fact that at the time they sold us 200 they would sell 300 on the outside. So their average price then was down the learning curve and you averaged out 500 helicopter production and the Navy then got the benefit of an average price for 500 and they quoted it for the Navy's 200 which put it well under the Sikorsky price. And with a better technical evaluation all through we ended up buying the CH-46.

Sikorsky got very unhappy and though we didn't know it at the time they went to Deputy Secretary of Defense Gilpatric and told him that unless they won the next one they were going to be out of business. They just didn't have enough business to continue, applying "industrial statesmanship" pressure before the next event. The next event was the CH-53 and that competition was for a payload of 8,000 pounds, twice the 4,000 pound design payload of the 46 and lo and behold we expected Vertol to win that one based on their Chinook experience. They had the Chinook in production by that time, for the Army. It was a little too tall to fit on the carrier and so they had to do something about reducing its height but we thought that they could save the entire rotor system and transmission, engines and so on and win that one. Well, Sikorsky came along, did a lot better job on the proposal than Vertol did and underbid them, again on a fixed price basis but we were only scheduled to buy 100 of those so Sikorsky bid fixed price on the basis of 100 helicopters.

RAUSA: How did you feel about that?

SPANGENBERG: That was fine. It was good for the Navy. The price was not so low but what we thought that Sikorsky might lose money on it but they wouldn't lose a lot and the chances were good that they would sell that design to other people and they ended up doing that. It became the Jolly Green Giant for the Air Force and we ended up buying a good deal more than 100 of the helicopters too. And it became the base for the CH-53D and CH-53E. It was an excellent program.

As I said we finished the competition. We ended up at the end of the road with Sikorsky winning this one and I remember still we were sitting down with -- I think Col. Holloway, program manager for the project, and myself and two of the other people that had been involved in getting the final series of briefings and approvals underway. We were outside of the Secretary of the Navy's office. You usually made an announcement on a Friday afternoon late enough that the stock market had closed. That had been mandated beforehand. We were looking through the papers, the file of folders and lo and behold there was a note in there: "Notify Gilpatric before you make a decision." I didn't know about it at that time. Col. Holloway knew about it. It was his note. And he said, "What have I done?" Here we've notified everybody, an announcement is going out and we haven't told Gilpatric, then as I said the Deputy Secretary of Defense. Holloway called the Chief, the Chief called and received authority to continue.

TAPE 10 of 16, SIDE B

. . .so everything worked out all right. God knows what would have happened if the answer had been wrong from the Gilpatric angle. The technical part of the CH-53, it actually used the same rotor geometry that had been on the HR2S, the old twin R2800 engined design -- previously our biggest helicopter. Added one blade to it, went from five to six blades on the CH-53 and they also had more or less that same rotor system on a development that they were selling to the French at the time. I forget the designation but it all tied in. Sikorsky always seemed to do a good job of taking previous models and using pieces of them to put together the next program, saved on the development effort and they were using things they had a lot of experience with so usually the results were pretty good.

The next thing that came along and again was an awful mess and one that has lots of lessons in it was something called the Tri-Service Transport. It shows up in the Navy starts as the X-22 because that was the outgrowth of it for us. But the important part really was that which came before. The VTOL issue which since the start of the helicopters has had over enthusiastic advocates always claiming "now is the time" that we can do a full production go ahead with something that will replace, in this case it turned out to be large transports. The feeling had been bruited about in the technical press, and is the kind of thing that still happens. A VTOL advocate will write an article on now is the time for the Navy to switch over to VTOL. In this case, it was a "blue ribbon commission." Unfortunately, the whole effort was classified Secret and the overclassification as usual screwed things up quite a bit. The technical committee ended up with about six technical subcommittee reports. All of these were well done and technically sound. The summary report was written by the chairman of the committee who was Prof. Courtland Perkins, then head of the aero department at Princeton. Cort is a real nice guy whom I consider a friend, but he's too often overenthusiastic. His Summary Report largely disregarded the subcommittee reports. It said "now is the time." The state of the art is such that we can build a transport-type VTOL that will meet the requirements of all the military services. The Tri-Service Transport was born. The Tri-Service Transport then was just as impossible as TFX was. We were a little ahead of TFX time-wise I think. But it was the same kind of a mess. The Marines had their requirement which was basically the CH-53D requirement as far as number of troops and so on for the fifty mile radius but they wanted it done at 300 knots, about where we are today with the V-22, over thirty years later.

The Army requirement, I can't remember exactly what it was but it was a medium range distance requirement coupled with a heavy lift requirement, probably well beyond the Marine lift requirement. The Air Force came up with an air-sea rescue mission that they would go 750 miles to pick up a pilot that had ditched.

RAUSA: 750?

SPANGENBERG: Right, radius. Again we had this mishmash of requirements. You knew it couldn't be met by any single airplane. When I was thinking of that -- you remember I showed you the source selection briefing and there was a picture of an admiral throwing a dart at a board. You might want to look at these cartoons. These particular sketches were given to me after the competition. They were done at North American who ended up getting no award in the competition. It should give you a feel for the things that were going on at the time. They actually put it out as a pamphlet and it was widely distributed in black and white form. Why I got these I don't know. I guess they thought I deserved them.[ed: in theory, the complete set will be available in the future. For now, some of the cartoons may be found in the A-2 viewgraphs.] [laughter]

RAUSA: Who drew these?

SPANGENBERG: They were done at North American.

RAUSA: [looking at sketches] I remember that.

SPANGENBERG: [showing cartoons] That was the evaluation and they're looking at the North American entry of the Tri-Service Transport. This next one shows the folding sequence where the tractor pulled it out and it collapses down. The weight problems are solved. The weight guys at North American were all somewhat overweight themselves. I can't remember their names. I told you we would get off with a full load. [laughter] The payload comes out the bottom. [laughter]. I've heard of close support but this is ridiculous. This ain't how it worked out on the simulator. [laughter]

RAUSA: These are funny. Weights and measures. 17 times 30 times 50.

SPANGENBERG: The meaning of that is the requirement was for the VTOL to operate aboard the LPH-2 for the Marines which was an older converted small carrier. It has a seventeen foot height hangar deck-type. You couldn't be more than thirty feet wide and fifty feet long. This really should have been twenty-seven and a half passing in the hangar deck. An impossible requirement to meet.

RAUSA: These are great.

SPANGENBERG: The flight handbook doesn't mention it going down. Ah, that's better going up.

RAUSA: That's the best one, that last one. Those are precious. Were they ever published anywhere to your knowledge?

SPANGENBERG: As far as I know, as I said at the time of the competition they were put out in 8 1/2x11 black and white copies.

RAUSA: Those are great. Don't ever lose those.

SPANGENBERG: But what do I do with them?

RAUSA: If you like I can take them and have them copied on our Xerox machine. We have a zoom thing on it and then I can send it down and make it part of the thing.

SPANGENBERG: Go ahead.

RAUSA: I'll get them back to you.

SPANGENBERG: Maybe you can think of what to do with the originals. They're not going to do me any good.

RAUSA: Let me think on that. There's got to be a place that we can get those published because they're funny.

SPANGENBERG: And it's an indication of the contractors' look at the problem. It's obvious from looking at those things that they knew they were in a mess, that you couldn't meet the requirement. So they're poking fun at themselves, they're poking fun at the military for doing all this. Actually I thought that it was a healthier relationship we had in those days.

RAUSA: You don't poke fun today.

SPANGENBERG: No and you should. We got along and the whole country was better off. If the military put out a requirement that was no good, that industry just either looked bad or they raised a howl. And they stopped doing that.

Now back to the actual competition. The Navy got the job of running it by direction. I can't remember how that happened. From my standpoint we were just told that the Navy has a job to be joint with the Army and Air Force and up to this point in time I really hadn't worried very much about joint programs. I assumed that we would kind of all do our own thing and get together at the end. I got a phone call from either the Air Force or the Army people who said they'd like to send some people in to talk about "criteria." I said fine, come on in. I expected a couple of guys to walk in and they ended up with twenty.

RAUSA: They came to Washington.

SPANGENBERG: They came to Washington and walked into our old W Building, the temporary building we had back of the Munitions Building. I didn't have a conference room set up and my office was about twelve feet square. We all crowded in. It was ridiculous. But I learned then and later really when we got involved in TFX that any place we went with either the Army or Air Force we'd send two guys, they'd send twenty. The program manager of the Air Force TFX was not the world's most experienced, and was not an English major. When he was going to visit he'd say, "We're going to have a visitation." [laughter] I got curious. We looked up "visitation" in the dictionary and it was something like, it had a religious connotation, a miracle, you know. Hordes of people arriving. Back to the TST, we finally wrote a compromise spec, put in the requirements like they told us to put in, but knowing that it was all impossible. The designs came in and we had all kinds of airplanes. That North American thing that I just showed you, the sketches and the charts with the funnies on them was a four engine, four turboprop tilt wing. Vought also had a four engine turboprop tilt wing. We had a tilt rotor design, twin engine tilt rotors, twin tandem ducted fans. Douglas and Bell had the twin tandem ducted fans and that configuration was the only thing that would come close to meeting the Marine requirement from a space standpoint. You could fold the wing conventionally and have ducts. In the case of Bell, the forward ducts were on the fixed part of the wing and they had aft ducts that tilted. The Douglas design had the ducts not on the wings but on the fuselage and they all tilted. The Air Force had underway a couple of research programs, one of which had been started by Curtiss Wright on their own which were tilt props in a twin tandem arrangement of propellers and engines. That must have been eighteen or nineteen foot diameter props, rotated up and became in essence similar to the ducted arrangement that was good for the Marines but using rotors rather than ducted fans. I'm sure we had the V-22 kind of arrangement in there too. Lots of configurations. All of them were better for one service than another. Those twin tandem ducted fans were the best for the Marines. The ones with big wings, the tilt wing device was best for the Air Force and you really couldn't meet the Army requirement with anything that would meet the other two.

At the end of the preliminaries we agreed that the Army would go do their evaluation, the Air Force would do their evaluation, we would do ours and we'd get together at the end. It was the only competition of this nature we ever had where the winning design by one service was ruled unacceptable by the other two. [laughter] Proving the ridiculousness of the whole concept, at least on that aspect of it. If you looked at the results it also proved the ridiculousness of the evaluation methods of some of the other services too because the Air Force had actually selected as their winner that Curtiss Wright arrangement which didn't do their mission nearly as well as the tilt wings did and which they themselves said had unacceptable flying qualities. In our system, an airplane that was predicted to have unacceptable flying qualities was dropped from consideration right then and there. You didn't let it add up points in a logistic system or something else and win the competition.

We ended up by going to the Assistant Secretaries of the Air Force, Navy and Army and saying we can't get there from here with this proposal. We told you before we couldn't do it, now we've got proof that we couldn't do it. The Navy position was we will withdraw. Let's let the three services get their VTOL money and do research that serves a useful purpose. The Air Force and Army secretaries said no, we've been told to do it, we'll go ahead.

Eventually we got DDR&E Brown's permission for the Navy to withdraw. At first he was going to make us pay for one-third of the deal anyway even though we weren't going to participate anymore. I didn't mention earlier that in trying to stop the program from going forward the Navy had suggested that now was not the time for a full-scale effort, but it would be worthwhile to step up to maybe half scale since previous efforts in the field had been even smaller scale than that. The final outcome was that the Navy was allowed to take some research money and do a half-scale effort of a twin tandem ducted fan.

The Air Force was given the job of managing the full-scale development. They elected to have a second competition between the tilt wing designs. They selected the Vought design, which became the C-142. After eliminating the Navy folding requirements it became somewhat more feasible. In the original Vought design the folding sequence as proposed was: install an auxiliary tail wheel, tilt wings to 90, fold propeller blades to plane of the wings, and fold wings aft alongside the fuselage. It was just ridiculous. The North American design was just as bad, as indicated by some of the cartoons. All of the designs tended toward mechanical monstrosities, particularly for Navy or Marine use. I remember I took pictures of the control system in a mixing box of the Grumman proposal which was most complex. There must have been twenty-five bell cranks all within a two foot square area going in all directions. I was trying to convince, not an engineer, but a secretary of the service that this was a pretty complicated kind of device and the chances of it all working were pretty remote.

Five C-142s were built. At least one survived and is in the Air Force Museum at Dayton. It was a great air show airplane (as is the Harrier) but was virtually useless as a military transport. The 1960s was not the time.

We ran a second competition for roughly half-scale models of the two ducted fan designs proposed by Douglas and Bell. Douglas had acquired the rights and/or experience of the Doak Aircraft Company who had been flying a small ducted fan design with the ducts mounted on the wing tips. Douglas was trying to get into the VTOL game for I believe the first time. Douglas then won the competition, I thought, hands down, but didn't receive the contract. It was one of the ones that was on my list of things where the winner didn't win. Douglas had found out that pressures were being applied, I'm not sure how, and they ended up by giving us a fixed price bid to do the whole works. They would have lost their shirt. They underbid Bell by a little bit but on a fixed price basis while Bell bid cost plus. The engineering evaluation was all Douglas. The decision went up to our secretarial chain. I gave it to the secretaries. I can't remember now whether we went beyond that or not in giving briefings but I know that we ended up with getting called to the Executive Office Building. That was semi-humorous too. We were scheduled to be up there at let's say at two o'clock.

TAPE 11 of 16, SIDE A

August 1, 1990 continued

SPANGENBERG: We weren't sure at the time with whom we were going to meet. We were told to go up there to that building next to the White House. We sat at Main Navy waiting for Adm. Stroop in his car, probably a program manager and myself and Stroop, except Stroop wasn't there. It was about ten minutes past the appointed hour when Stroop finally showed up and we were, as you might expect, nervous, jumpy. Stroop in his inimitable way said, "Ah, relax guys. They're always late." And sure enough he was right. We got up there and it was Larry O'Brien and Tommy (the Cork) Corcoran that we were to talk to. So we gave them the briefing, said Douglas was the winner and we wanted to go ahead. They then started asking questions and their questions were on the order can Bell build the -- yes, they can build it but they didn't win the competition. Well, they went along on this vein. Then they said, "Who has the most experience." Well, obviously Bell had a lot more VTOL experience than Douglas who had none except that which they had picked up from Doak, at least none that showed in the way of any flying programs.

Bell of course had been fooling around with these kinds of devices for a long time. They had a group up there that were very inventive but they really could never quite get their ideas to practical applications in my opinion. They didn't belong in the same ballpark with Douglas and the Grummans and the Voughts and McDonnells that we worked with but they were always interesting.

Well, as it turned out we got told to let the contract to Bell and we did. Douglas did not protest, although I thought they should have. In fact I urged them to because I thought it was important for the integrity of the acquisition process.

RAUSA: Why didn't Douglas want to protest?

SPANGENBERG: Well, they were afraid they would make people angry. We were getting into that area where the contractors were stopping any criticism of anybody who might be their customer. We went ahead with Bell. The X-22 turned out to be a good research vehicle. The program cost two or three times what it was supposed to cost. I don't know whether its been scrapped yet. It was turned over to Cornell Labs and became a test bed for checking out flying quality criteria for all kinds of vertical lift machines. So it served a useful purpose. It was more useful than the C-142 was which really contributed nothing to the technology except I suppose it taught us that the way the power controls and the flight controls were tied together just didn't work. A pilot needed to grow another set of hands.

The windup of the X-22 then was after the TFX investigation had started, a staff guy on the Hill got hold of a memo I had written on the TFX decision-making process which mentioned that we had only had two or three reversals in all of our history of the people at the political level changing the decision, the most recent one being the X-22. Well that staff member worked for the Stennis Armed Services Committee in the Senate and he grabbed that and Stennis ended up having an investigation which he conducted rapidly. Got it all over within two or three days of hearings. The X-22 investigation report of course is in the records. They condemned the secretaries for the reversal of the decision unanimously on the committee with the exception of Senator Symington who had been Secretary of the Air Force at one time. And he insisted -- his rationale was that the secretary always had to have the right to reverse decisions and make decisions and so on. In my mind he was wrong then as he was on many other occasions. He caused us trouble later on the F-14 program trying to substitute a carrier based modification of the F-15.

In retrospect we were proven right all the way through. Douglas would have done a better job for less money. They would have lost money on the program. Might have soured relations between them and the government, though. When you talked to Heinemann did he ever mention that?

RAUSA: I'll have to ask him.

SPANGENBERG: I'll skip F-111B again because it's a book in itself. In 1962 the Marines -- it seems like the Marines were always coming up with requirements that we spent our time running competitions to fulfill. They had a requirement for a light helicopter, LHA, Light Helicopter Attack? I've forgotten. Anyway, they expected to buy one that had been a French design that had been flying in this country and to which some American manufacturer had the rights. The Alouette, I believe it was called. Anyway it was a small helicopter. Pretty decent little flying machine but there were too many other designs that were close enough to doing the job that you couldn't do a negotiated procurement on it. So we ran a competition. Bell, Bell South I'll call it, entered the Hughie, HU-1, which had been in production for the Army. It overkilled the requirement by being fifty percent bigger perhaps or something on that order and yet it cost much less. It was already in production so that we ended up by recommending that the Marines buy that and they did. And that then was the start of Hughie production for the Marines. It was another good decision. It was one that gives a lie to the people who think that all the Navy does is do gold plate requirements, run competitions, and do development just for the fun of it. If one can get a better product at a lower price, the services want to do it, at least the Navy did, as much as anybody at DOD, Jack Anderson, the GAO, or anybody else.

Next one that came along was the C-2 and this was done on an ECP. We had long needed more of a COD capability than we had in the C-1. Those kind of requirements however are really at the bottom of the pile when it comes to development money. So the E-2 was coming along and Grumman and the attack class desk working together really came up with a concept of let's do a little bit of a change to the E-2 so we gave Grumman an ECP and they simply put a new fuselage on the airplane. Very simple change we assured everybody. At the time it was a good decision. I was disturbed in later years that it didn't get replaced. It should have been replaced by versions of the S-3 which we had but we couldn't sell over in OSD.

The next mess in 1964 was a COIN program.

RAUSA: Counter insurgency.

SPANGENBERG: Counter insurgency. And on my first note it says a ridiculous OSD-sponsored program. It again started with a Marine requirement. How many of these have started with Marine requirements?

RAUSA: Most of bummers seem to be Marine requirements.

SPANGENBERG: And the requirement for the Marines was virtually identical to the one that started the OV-1 Mohawk in which the Marines had dropped out of in order to use the money to buy C-130s. That requirement was still there. However, there were two ex-Marines then working in OSD and these were very gung-ho energetic -- I don't want to insult them too much. They were not aeronautical engineers, let's say. They knew what they wanted but in the classic case they didn't have enough engineering background to know what was possible and what was impossible. And they had the idea that you could build an airplane -- it seems to me it was to be 5,000 pounds. It was a low weight -- they fixed a low weight and they also fixed a low price. If any historian ever gets this far in looking at it they should research these numbers. It seems to me that they wanted a unit production price of $100,000 and a gross weight of 5,000 pounds or so. Studies were done up at Johnsville in this case, I guess probably through our research division. I really wasn't involved in the studies themselves but the results kept coming out that they could build a $100,000 airplane that wouldn't do anything or they could build a 5,000 pound airplane that would do a little bit but they couldn't meet the OSD and Marine requirement with either one.

The OSD COIN people kept adding requirements to the basic Marine list that tended to be ridiculous. They wanted to be able to operate from dirt roads anywhere so they set a span limit of thirty feet which made an impossible kind of an airplane to do all the things you had to do. It had to be very short takeoff and landing. They actually tried to get in a ski requirement so they could operate off of snow and ice. They even toyed with the idea of putting water skis on it. It had to be designed for rough ground. So eventually we ended up specifying a rough field operating requirement and eventually built a rough runway at Patuxent to test the thing with, humps and bumps. That's a harder job than you think. Everybody talks about rough field capability but nobody ever defined what a rough field was and it's no mean engineering task to define that. Again, we ended up -- DDR&E finally wrote us a letter that said despite two disappointing experiences with the Navy we're still going to dictate that you run the competition for the airplane. The two experiences were as mentioned that they couldn't get it for a $100,000 and they couldn't get it for 5,000 pounds.

So we ran another joint competition. And again we had lots of competitors. Everybody entered the thing. And most of them tried to meet the requirement. The Convair group out of San Diego was enamored enough with their design that they started building a prototype on their own during the time that we were still preparing for the competition. This I think was in part a way to try to influence us to give them the award.

The final straw that broke the camel's back on this was another outfit in OSD got into the act. It was from the Aid to Developing Countries part of the Pentagon. They added a cargo requirement to the airplane that was supposed to be used by some natives in South America, to land on the side of mountains with half a dozen passengers or a few thousand pounds of cargo in the rear end. When started, we were looking at an airplane that could have been something like a repeat of the Mohawk as it had been in its early stages before the Army added all its electronic equipment to it and made it into an all weather battlefield reconnaissance design. It could have been a 7 or 8,000 pound fairly decent spotting airplane. In the competition the only one that came close to that really was a Lockheed design that ignored some of the requirements. Unfortunately you couldn't break the rules to say select that one. But it would have been the best airplane for the primary mission because it ignored the cargo requirements.

North American ended up having the best airplane. Lots and lots of questions about the ability to do any single engine work with a thirty foot span and those two turboprops. They went ahead and built it. Convair built theirs also, but on their own. We got as far as flight testing on the North American and it was obvious that it was not a satisfactory airplane, as predicted. So to get out of the mess -- by this time we had a joint program office. Capt. Joe Coleman was running the program for the Navy but with a staff including Air Force and Army officers. It was a well run program from the administrative standpoint and as far as I can remember there was no real friction between the services once we got started on it. The airplane was obviously unsatisfactory, so to make it useful we ignored the span requirement, put ten feet more span on it, then it became a forty foot span airplane instead of a thirty foot span airplane. You could then meet the single engine requirements and flying qualities got much better. It's a useful little airplane. We never bought the 500 airplanes that DOD said we were going to buy and we never operated in South America as far as I know. It was one that again proved that you can't do the impossible.

RAUSA: The OV-10 has no connection with that COIN project.

SPANGENBERG: That is the COIN.

RAUSA: That plane's been around a long time then.

SPANGENBERG: Yeah. It started in '64.

RAUSA: The Marines are still using it and I don't think they had lot of them.

SPANGENBERG: No, they only had a few.

We had a development contract with fixed price options on that, the same way we had done on all the other designs after the CH-46. The CH-46 was fixed price through 200. The CH-53 was fixed price through 100 and the OV-10 was fixed price through 500. Now going fixed price through 500 I thought was a mistake. You shouldn't do that. The burden on the contractor is just too great, even with clauses providing some protection from inflation. My notes say the OV-10 aircraft ended up as usable, despite the OSD added requirements. Another OSD mandated joint service program. The next real success will be the first one. And North American undoubtedly lost money on the contract.

All these contracts did lose money on the early lots of the fixed price contracts. When we bought the 201st CH-46 the price went up and when we bought the 101st CH-53 the price went up and that caused great consternation in Congress. Might as well tell you the rest of the story while we're here on that too. On the A-7 program, which we'll talk about I guess next, we had a contract through about 200 airplanes. The last lot was for 140 production planes. The airplane was going great. The program manager found some additional money somewhere and wanted to buy another half dozen or so airplanes to add onto that 140. We asked Vought for a quote and they came in. The extra airplanes cost more than the ones already on contract, despite the fact that supposedly you're going down the learning curve so they should be cheaper. Well that caused great problems. You can't sell the idea on the Hill that you want to buy seven more airplanes and they cost more than the ones you've already got under contract. Which then led the programs from that point on to put "variable lot pricing" in all the production options. We made the contractors give us quotes that had what we expected to buy, a normal rate at which they did their basic price setup but then give us quotes on what happens if you buy as few as 50% less or 50% more. As we'll find out later, that got us into real trouble on the F-14 program. We were mandated to buy but half the original lot size, and the F-14 variable lot pricing formula was screwed up. The unit price didn't go up enough if you cut the rate in half , but having it under contract allowed us to cut the rate of production much easier than if say we cut the rate and got told to buy half as many but with the unit price increasing by thirty percent. We had a better chance of holding the original deal and getting what we needed from Congress. We could always negotiate with the contractor, but we ended up really being in trouble with variable lot pricing and it made the writing of the contract very, very difficult. It became very complex.

Now we're back to the A-7 and this is really tied in with TFX as well. At the time TFX was underway we had VAX and the Navy all ran around with lapel buttons that said "VAX I like VAX." The ones that said "We don't like TFX" we didn't dare wear in the Pentagon. [laughter] We obviously needed more capability than we had in the A-4. We had tried earlier to do a swept wing version in lieu of the delta on the A-4 which would have given us the capability, at least it would if we had a fan engine to put in at the same time. But that program, the A4D-3 at the time, had to be cancelled as we ran out of money. We had a batch of studies too, sea-based strike study must have been done about then. Anyway, all the studies showed we needed roughly twice the capability of an A-4. All the contractors did studies. Vought was playing around with versions of the F-8 without changing the engine. Grumman was playing around with all kinds, from brand new airplanes to A-6s, versions of the A-6. And North American was doing the same with their follow on to the FJ-4 or something of that nature. Anyway, Northrop was playing around too. We ended up being forced into an "off-the-shelf" competition. OSD again didn't want us to do a full development, price was too high and we were playing McNamara games again. We did an "off-the-shelf" requirement which said in effect that the airplane had to be a modification of an airplane already developed. It was a good competition I thought and we ended up with four designs basically. I think we had only those four manufacturers, Northrop dropping out.

RAUSA: Who were the four now?

SPANGENBERG: Douglas, Vought, North American and Grumman. Grumman submitted a kind of a stripped A-6. The other three designs were very close to doing about the same kind of a job. Vought had bitten the bullet, given up on holding the fuselage of an F-8 and the engine of the F-8 and did a brand new airplane really. The vertical tail was the same, at least it was the same shape. Eliminated the variable incidence, thickened up the wing, put on a better high lift system, retained experience from the F-8 and some of the systems they managed to save, probably a mistake because putting in ten year old hydraulic components really doesn't make sense. You ought to update as you go along. But they were kind of forced into it you know with the kind of off-the-shelf program. The deal ended up really -- Vought got the contract as you know but the competition was extremely close from the technical standpoint between North American and Vought. Their two airplanes were almost the same on payload range which was the real criteria in the competition.

On the other hand, Vought and Douglas were almost identical in cost but with Vought having a substantial payload radius advantage. Why Douglas wasn't a heck of a lot more competitive on price I think was the thing that bothered me the most at the time because what they had done, as I recall now, you know its been a while, they split the wing and added span to it in order to make it become aerodynamically closer to what it should be. And yet they had to compete from a price standpoint with these other guys. I remember talking to myself into why the difference and looking in detail at cost quotes which you normally would expect other people to do. But it was bothersome, and it turned out that there was a great difference in those days in the labor rates in Texas versus Long Island and Los Angeles. There was no question but what the General Dynamics and the Voughts and whatnot had something like a 30% edge in labor costs. Vought was eager too. They did a good job.

RAUSA: How close was it before Vought won? Was it real close?

SPANGENBERG: As I said it fell into these two categories, very close technically but not with cost with North American, and very close cost but not technically with Douglas. Thus, Vought was a hands down winner. In getting permission to run this the Navy had done a big study, op analysis, and we must have done thirty different missions from six Mark-81s, twelve Mark-82s, from little payloads, every combination you can think of, Rockeyes, Walleyes, everything. All grossly not needed by anyone experienced in the art. You took a look at the payload range curve and you knew what all the answers were going to be but we had to reduce it down and show the bombs per buck or something to get the whole job done. We did more radius work in that competition than we had in all the competitions we ever had before put together. Drove us crazy. And we had to produce all those results when we went over and talked to OSD at the end of the game. We presented it straightforwardly. You want the lowest cost thing to do the job and you want to buy the best product and Vought was a winner, no question about it. I remember briefing DDR&E and Gene Fubini, the irascible Italian, nuclear physicist, was in the room, came in and he came in specifically to ask what he thought would be embarrassing questions. I presume someone had given Dr. Fubini the information.

SPANGENBERG: Anyway, the so-called whiz kids were all listening. Fubini came in and asked me two or three questions. I happened to be giving the presentation so I answered the questions. They were not questions that were particularly embarrassing to me but Fubini thought that they were going to be. He got quite angry, stood up, walked out and said, "Somebody told you my questions." And off he went. Later he headed up some kind of a study and he included me in the group and we became pretty good friends.

RAUSA: He was angry that day though.

SPANGENBERG: He seemed to be. I said he was an irascible Italian. Well, we got through that. Got the contract under way and I told you the story on the price. It turned out well. We went from the day we let the contract to fleet introduction in three years which was the best we had done in a long time. One of the best we've ever done. It just shows what can be done if you've got a good requirement and in this case we had a good requirement; it was not overstated. We weren't stretching for the stars but we were getting basically a two to one improvement in attack capability. Well worthwhile. And along that line right after World War II the studies that were done on how big is the earth, where is the opposition going to be and so on, all said that the Navy really needed a 600 mile operational radius from the carrier and laid out where we wanted to go. From that day on we tried to get there and we haven't gotten there yet. In fact we've backed up a bit. With the combination of the F-14, the A-7 and the A-6 we had hoped to get an honest-to-God 500 mile operational radius where you could do a useful mission. We could come close to that. The F-14 ended up shorter than we wanted but primarily because we didn't get the new engine, got forced into some compromises we didn't have to make and shouldn't have made. But with that combination of airplanes we were getting closer to where we wanted to be.

When we get to the F-18 range performance it's obviously a step back to what the A-4 was. That made the fleet very unhappy. The fleet guys that were operating then and saw what was coming came back to Washington and just raised hell. I got called in, after I was a consultant, with a Navy captain and God he was angry and we talked for about three hours on how we got to where we were. It was I'm sure a great help to him because he was scheduled for a three year tour in Washington and he came in with the idea that the Naval Air Systems Command was nuts.

RAUSA: Do you remember who this guy was?

SPANGENBERG: A Japanese name.

RAUSA: Was he an oriental?

SPANGENBERG: Oriental, yeah. He was an American, born in this country but of oriental descent and a good guy. But he was unhappy with the F-18 requirements. He was having to plan operations and all he did was try to find drop tanks and tankers. He couldn't do with that airplane what they were doing in the fleet with the older airplanes. It really bothered him.

RAUSA: They're still having trouble then.

SPANGENBERG: You can't help but wonder, yet the guy's flying it love it.

RAUSA: It's a safe airplane.

SPANGENBERG: Down there in Pensacola my own reputation of not being in favor of the F-18 was known to a lot of those young guys. They were all asking me why. They said I had to be wrong. I wasn't against the airplane as an airplane but I was against it as a follow on to the A-7.

RAUSA: Is that a good place to quit? Do you want to go a little bit further?

SPANGENBERG: To wind up the A-7 discussion. Somewhere down the line OSD directed the Air Force to become part of the program and the Air Force really wasn't happy to do this but the capability was one that they sure didn't have. They however had enough questions and raised enough points on "their" requirements as opposed to Navy requirements that they were allowed to make some fairly major modifications.

TAPE 11 of 16, SIDE B

The first thing that they did was to say that the airplane was underpowered which it was. Our engine developments had all been cancelled in favor of Air Force engine programs. The Air Force however was allowed to develop the engine that became the TF-41, the Allison engine that ended up in the A-7, started with the Air Force A-7D. The engine was well behind the airplane in development and the early history with the engine was awful for the Air Force. They should have started the engine a year earlier but again probably couldn't because of the McNamara edict that you had to start everything at once. You couldn't justify a new engine until you justified the airplane. Same with fire control system. The Air Force also put in a much more up-to-date weapon control system, attack system.

RAUSA: In the D.

SPANGENBERG: Yeah. We at the beginning were using all off-the-shelf items because we had to and we had a semi-all weather kind of updated system under development but it was not as far along as what the Air Force put into their A-7D. Later of course we picked up much of that same avionics, went to the fleet as the A-7E. It was almost rejected by the fleet as all together too complex. It went through a period of about six months with Op Eval saying that degree of complexity could not be handled and the then program manager Shepherd doing all kinds of studies on "what do we do", "how do we get out of" the troubles. Eventually the system got worked out and the fleet learned to live with it. And you had to have that capability. We would have been extremely shortsighted if we hadn't gone ahead with it so the Air Force introduction into the program helped the Navy capability in the long run. And obviously the Air Force got a capability that they didn't have anywhere else. It was good for the services but these bi-service and tri-service programs really only work when you start with the Navy designed air frame.

RAUSA: As we learned in the T-45, right.

SPANGENBERG: The T-45 was after my time, a modification of the British trainer - Hawk. Well, we've gone through all of these things before. We've done them all. During the TFX days we dug up a list of fifty airplanes that the Navy and Air Force had used of each other's models. Now admittedly most of them were transports and were modifications of civil aircraft and a bunch of trainers. Not very many combat airplanes but there were some. The Air Force bought SBDs during the war, called them A-24s. They bought some SB2Cs and so on. We had bought the T-28. When it made sense to buy them we bought them but you can't start with an Air Force airplane and get a good carrier suitable design for the Navy. It requires major redesign.

The F-86 we got as the FJ series had to be redesigned completely before it became satisfactory as an attack airplane.

RAUSA: I think that's one of the key lessons. We've learned but haven't learned.

SPANGENBERG: Yeah. The working level always knew it. I think most of the operational Navy knew it but none of the OSD people believed it. They just don't believe it, which is one of the big problems.

RAUSA: Okay. Want to stop there.

TAPE 12 of 16, SIDE A

August 9 -14, 1990

SPANGENBERG: I'm going to try to continue this oral history. Zip had conflicts so he's not with me today but if I don't get going we'll never finish. I'd like to start with taking a couple of the programs that are not on the Navy chart of new starts and whatnot because they were done with joint programs for somebody else. Start with the LOH program which to the best of my recollection must have been in the early 1960s (actually 1964). At the time the Army was prohibited from doing their own development. I suppose the rules that were set up when the Department of Defense was prepared and the Air Corps got out on their own. The Air Force took over the old Army Air Corps and the technical capability left for the Army in the aeronautical field was quite limited. So whenever the Army needed a new airplane they shopped either with the Navy or the Air Force in order to do the development.

In the case of the LOH the Navy "won." I'm not sure how the Army ever did these selections, but we normally had a few Army officers in the bureau in the program office assisting the program that they were running. In many cases they became the project officers themselves. The LOH for Light Observation Helicopter, as the name implies, was to be a small helicopter. It was intended for "nap of the earth flying," and was being fairly heavily promoted. I believe Gen. Von Kann was the primary sponsor within the Army. The helicopter was to be powered with a 250 horsepower Allison engine and for some reason the Army had made the decision that "it would never grow." In other words, the manufacturers were encouraged not to provide any growth potential in their designs. This later led into all kinds of trouble. In any event, it was my first real contact with the way the Army would run a source selection but we ran a design competition for them in their normal way. The Army elected to send a batch of people to the bureau who sat in the various technical divisions. For example, we had one Army fellow in the weight group, we had another one or two in the performance group, some in powerplants and so on. There were probably ten or twenty of them assigned to the bureau during the evaluation process and they worked along side the Navy people without any real trouble. And we hope we indoctrinated them in the right way to do business.

The Army had Ft. Rucker, their operational test group, involved in writing the requirements and when we did the evaluation we ended up with the Army at Ft. Rucker taking a look at the airplanes and doing their own evaluation. We did a normal evaluation in BuWeps fashion, and ended up with Fairchild being our first selection. A little unusual because Fairchild was not a name that was familiar in the helicopter business but at the time Hiller was in the process of being bought out by Fairchild or maybe they had been. But anyway all of the Hiller background showed up as a Fairchild submission. An ex-Navy fighter pilot and Class Desk officer Syd Sherby was running the aircraft program by that time at Fairchild and Fairchild submitted an excellent design. We picked them as the winner. We then got together with the Army group at Ft. Rucker who had picked the Bell submission as their winner.

The airplane that created all the controversy later was a Hughes proposal which was really the lightest weight project that had been submitted. We didn't check their weights by a wide margin and when we didn't check their weights the helicopter was not very attractive to us. The people at Ft. Rucker felt the same way. The Army had previously announced that they were going to pick two airplanes and build five prototypes before they decided on which one to put into production so there was no real problem between the Army and the Navy on selecting the airplanes with the exception of the Army's what I guess today would be called the source selection authority or the advisory council.

We went to the Army group that was sitting as a council to make the selection and found out that only two of the seven members of the board had any aeronautical background at all. One was a locomotive specialist and the others had background in the infantry and so on. It made it very difficult to talk with pluses and minuses of a helicopter competition when the people you were talking to really didn't talk the aeronautical language. Adm. Shoech who I believe was the Chief of Naval Material at the time was invited to sit on the council so he helped out in that regard. We ended up by making our presentation, the people from Ft. Rucker made theirs and they then excused the evaluation group and the council itself did the decision making. In essence all they did was to ratify what we had told them and it was announced initially that Bell and Fairchild were the winners and they would go ahead with building five airplanes each.

A short time later we learned that the procurement plan had been put on hold. Reportedly, Gen. Von Kann had insisted on including the Hughes design in the development program despite its lower rankings by both the Army and Navy evaluators. The Army then changed the rules of the competition. Although they had been prohibited from developing any aircraft, they were permitted to procure production quantities "off the shelf." The Army then proceeded to permit Bell, Fairchild, and Hughes to build five aircraft each without mil spec compliance and to submit them for test and evaluation. In that next step, a few years later, the Army conducted a two-step competition, first a technical evaluation at Ft. Rucker in which Bell was eliminated followed by a cost/operational competition. A second round of cost quotations was then requested, after which Hughes was awarded the production contract for something over 700 LOHs. The trade journals reported that Fairchild claimed their cost figures had been leaked to Hughes, allowing the latter to submit a lower bid. Knowledgeable cost analysts later reported that the Hughes fixed price bid was less than the basic material cost of their helicopter, probably making it the largest percentage "buy-in" in history. Following the technical elimination of Bell, that contractor corrected his deficiencies by significant redesign and produced the highly successful Jet Ranger. That helicopter then was awarded the next LOH production contract underbidding Hughes. The time required from project initiation to service use for the LOH was about twice as long as for the A-7.

The next program is not on the Navy charts but one in which we got involved back in the fifties and that was the X-15 program. The X-15 of course was a follow-on to the Air Force's X-1 and X-2 high speed research vehicles as well as the Navy's D-558 Skystreak and Skyrocket. Heavy NASA involvement and I believe that the beginning of the program was primarily that of NASA who really wanted to get some very high Mach number data and particularly to investigate the problems associated with the high heat that you have to have if you get to the Mach numbers 3 ½, 4 and so on. The Navy had been involved in the beginning of the program but I was not. Probably Abe Hyatt and perhaps the people in the high speed aero technical committees of NASA were involved.

My introduction to the program really came when I got a set of the proposals in answer to an Air Force RFP. All the proposals were "Secret" which didn't help any. We had one copy each and we were only given a couple of weeks to do the evaluation and get back to the Air Force. We evaluators then had to really get up to date in a hurry on what had gone on before since we had not really been involved in the project. The Air Force had done the specs, had written the RFP and had received the proposals and eventually got around to sending us, as I said, one copy each. I can't remember the details but I would guess that the Mach number, the requirement was established in terms of a Mach number and an altitude. I believe the altitude was 250,000 feet, the Mach number was probably on the order of 3, 3 ½ or so, perhaps a little higher than that.

The thing NASA really wanted however was to get a red hot structure to see what kind of problems we were going to get into with the expansion and contraction of that structure. They were shooting for a 1200F structure assuming that it was made of steel. The proposals, only three that I remember, were the North American proposal, the eventual winner of the competition, a Bell proposal and one from Douglas, El Segundo. The El Segundo proposal was probably the most amazing of the bunch. Where the requirements had been written in terms of speed and altitude, with the hot structure not specified, Heinemann had come in with an ingenious solution. It was undoubtedly a combination of Heinemann,Gene Root,Van Every, Leo Devlin and the rest of the gang at El Segundo. Instead of submitting a steel structure that would get red hot they submitted a magnesium structure. Everyone was very surprised at that, but it turned out that if one followed the exact rules that had been laid down in the RFP, that the magnesium structure had enough mass that it just acted as a huge heat sink. You could accomplish the performance mission with that magnesium structure. And with the magnesium structure the airplane was lighter and cheaper and all the rest of the good things that went with it. If you really believed that the requirements were those that had been sent out to industry, it looked to me like Douglas won the competition. And the discussions of course with the Air Force and NACA or NASA, whichever it was then, it was determined that what they were really looking for was a high temperature structure and to find the solution of that problem, so Douglas lost out.

The Bell proposal was an aluminum structure protected with a bunch of steel plates kind of like fish fins and no one was very enthusiastic about that approach for fear that you'd lose one of the protective plates due to one cause or another and the whole airplane could well get itself in deep, deep trouble. It was an interesting set of problems that showed up of course in the project. The air conditioning system for the pilot was obviously another very difficult problem to handle with those kind of temperatures. The rocket propulsion was one of the largest that had been tried in the aircraft field up to that date. Eventually we met out at Wright Field with the Air Force and the NACA people and they made the decision to go with North American. We really had no quarrel with that decision. It was a good decision. Overall the whole program was a success. I think everybody will agree looking back on it. It provided a lot of information usable when the space program came along. I think that's all we need to say about the X-15 program. The Navy participated in the flight test program to a limited degree. Forrest Peterson was one of the test pilots

The next program that also is not on the chart is the CH-53E and that's because it didn't get started until after the chart was drawn, and also an HLH which also would not have been on there because it turned out to be an Army program. The whole effort really started when they deployed the CH-53A which you will remember was started in '63, flew in '64 and then deployed in early '67 to Vietnam. When it reached Vietnam the Marines found that they had a problem, they had so few of these helicopters available to them and if one went down in enemy territory they could not retrieve it. The other helicopters, CH-46 for example, could be picked up either by the Army Chinooks or the cranes, CH-54, or by the H-53s and brought back. It apparently became a severe enough problem that the Marines got together and came up with a requirement for a crane-type helicopter with self-retrieval capability. In other words, if one went down a similar helicopter could go in and pick it up. The Marines were really working quite closely with Sikorsky at the time and Sikorsky then came up with a study for a modification of the CH-53 in which they added a seventh blade, increased the rotor diameter from 72 to 81 feet, added a third engine of the same type as the other two and went to a crane-type configuration similar to the CH-54 which was also one of their designs, of course. At the time it was estimated that configuration would give a lift capability of about eighteen tons and that became really the selling point for the program. NAVAIR was willing to buy the design. In other words, if performance and the weights were agreed upon, we wanted to buy it on a directed procurement. However, the ASN (R&D) decided that we should have a competition and let other manufacturers bid. The program then ran into budget problems. The crane configuration of course was a pretty specialized one and eventually when everyone finally got together on the specification requirements, a conventional fuselage on the helicopter was required. We ended up losing a couple tons worth of lift capability when we did that so the helicopters that resulted were more like a sixteen ton lift capacity.

We had proposals from Sikorsky, Vertol and Hughes, that I remember, perhaps there were others too. The Hughes was the least attractive of the three proposals. Vertol submitted a version of the Chinook. The Chinook was always a competitor for the CH-53 but the height of the helicopter was enough so that Vertol never did get around to really working out an arrangement where it fit well on the ships. The tandem arrangement of course always gave a nice compact spot, an advantage for shipboard use. Well, Sikorsky ended up winning the competition and we had only lost a couple of years fooling around with the competition rather than going with them in the first place. But it's also clear that having a conventional fuselage on the design was a good decision.

When the item went into the budget it was unfortunately called the "Marine HLH." At the time the Army also had an item in the budget for an "HLH", and as presented initially, the Marine version was described as an 18 ton lift, the Army design as 22 ½ ton lift capability. The Army wanted the ability to lift any of the containers that went on container ships which explained the 22 ½ ton lift requirement. It was basically a crane-type helicopter, although they could put container pods on the bottom to carry people as well. The Army did not have their program well defined and for several years they refused to define their long-range plans and only talked about technology, an R&D program, or a prototype program.

At the time within OSD there was an active duty Army colonel assigned to DDR&E. Naturally, he pushed very strongly for all Army programs over those of the competing services and did his best to, I'll say, mislead, he probably said, to educate, his bosses into the fact that we could have a joint program, with no need for separate Marine HLH and Air Force HLHs. In his version of the DCP (the Development Concept Paper), part of the acquisition process at the time, he claimed by combining the two programs the country could save a half a billion dollars. This related to the one billion that McNamara had claimed that he could save on the joint TFX program. The Navy's stand on the DCP was actually signed by the assistant secretary of the Navy, the R&D secretary, Mr. Frosch. It seemed to him that we could probably save money by doing separate programs, that the extra costs that the Marines would suffer from the size of the Army HLH was enough to pay for the development of the Navy HLH. Well, it became a big issue for a long time. The general feeling was that among those that just glanced at numbers that you certainly ought to be able to compromise with a single project if you're only talking the difference between 18 tons and 22 tons. Unfortunately, that wasn't the whole story.

The Army requirement also said they should do the lift at what I believe was a 4,000 foot altitude and at 95 at that altitude, a tough requirement. The Marines also had a high temperature requirement but it was 90 at sea level, really our standard hot day requirement for the Navy.

After the big argument on the DCP and with nobody being able to agree, a joint Army-Navy-Industry study was set up in which the participants tried to arrive at a common helicopter to serve the needs or meet the requirements of the two services. It turned out about as expected that the biggest one that the Marines could accept provided too little capability for the Army and the smallest one the Army would accept was too big for the Marines to operate from most of our ships.

About the same time there was a budget hearing in the Congress and Mr. Foster, who was then DDR&E, was asked a question, "Why can't you combine them?" and in widely read testimony he promptly said, "Oh, we can. There's no problem to that." He obviously did not know the background at all. Well a joint program then got directed, despite the studies, by Mr. Packard, then DepSecDef. It was an extremely stupid decision and since Mr. Packard was not a stupid man, all I can conclude is that he had to have had bum dope. Eventually the working level part of the Navy and of course the Marines finally got to see Secretary Chaffee, Secretary of the Navy, and appealed to him. He would not permit us to go directly to Mr. Packard but he said give him the dope and he would go to Packard, which he did. Packard made the decision then, "Well, we'll go ahead with this joint competition with the Army requirements being specified as the most difficult to meet but that it also should have shipboard compatibility requirements." If the industry proposals then confirmed the statements that we were making to Packard, he would reconsider the decision.

So the next step of course was to run the competition. Actually the Army ran it. But we had to work with them on getting the specs out and then of course later we had to evaluate the proposals when they came in. The Navy's main input to the spec of course was just ship compatibility. The Marines wanted full shipboard compatibility with the LPH-2 (a former Essex class CV) and this of course gave them more problems than if they had specified a larger ship. OSD finally directed the Navy, or the Marines really, to require shipboard compatibility only with the larger LHA class, the first ship of which was under construction. Since the total number of these ships wasn't really very large there was a lot of opposition to the fact that the shipboard compatibility requirements had been cut back. The Army set up their typical remote location kind of an evaluation board. Evaluation was held at Ft. Eustis, I believe. We had one representative that we sent down there and then evaluated the helicopters in place at NAVAIR. We had five competitors who submitted proposals -- Boeing Vertol, Sikorsky, Hughes, Kaman and even Gyrodyne. All the designs came in just about as we expected. The Army versions running about 120,000 pounds gross weight, and really impossible to operate in any normal way from ships. Obviously you could put them aboard the big carriers and you could operate from the decks of the LHAs but there wasn't much clearance with the island and getting them down below was impracticable. The Army ended up by recommending the Boeing Vertol design, a tandem helicopter similar to the ones that -- well, it was a big Chinook in a crane version. Had 90 foot rotors, was 150 feet or so long, with a huge operating spot on any ship. We obviously couldn't accept any of the designs.

Eventually Packard reviewed the situation. Some of the Army DDR&E people still wanted the joint program I presume because they thought that we would never get approval for two heavy lift helicopters at once. So we really argued that we (the Marines) didn't have a heavy lift helicopter, we certainly were on the low side of what the Army was trying to do. Packard finally allowed us to get started again with the CH-53E. We finally got a go-ahead for the CH-53E in November of '71, a decision delayed from January of '68, so we had almost a four year delay between the time we wanted to buy the capability and the time we were allowed to get started. The situation then went from bad to worse as the acquisition system was being changed by the proponents of prototyping, "fly-before-buy", and so on. The CH-53E production release got delayed until actually 1976, although Sikorsky had built two prototypes and then two preproduction models before that production release. The first real production delivery didn't come about until late in 1980. I've always used the program as one of our best examples of how not to buy aircraft. It's very, very expensive to stretch things out that long. If a program is going to take ten or fifteen years to go from concept to fleet it's going to have a lot of changes and the costs are going to skyrocket. And when it gets there it may well be obsolete

(Continue to third section of oral history).