TAPE 18

The top of our motel was trimmed with red fluorescent lights and

Dorothy was sam~what embarrassed by our being located in the red

light district. The next morning we rented a car for a three day

trip through the park. We spent the first night in a little rough

cabi~ in ~he area of the main hotel, across from the famous geyser,

Old Faithful, which spouts of.f a high column of water about every hour.

During the night while we were asleep, • '· ' .• I ;; •· Dorothy was

awakened. by a rattling and pounding sound just outside the

cabin at the head c f C• u r bed . She woke me and we both looked

out of the little ~indo~ at the head of the bed and we saw a

good-sized bear raidin~ our garbage can. We didn't disturb

him, but kept ~etching, and after he had his fill, he wandered ~~

away. -~~ring the three days we made a loop around the Park

and covered a good bit of it. It was our first visit there

and we enjoyed it thoroughly. When we were ready to leave, I

wanted to get to Missoula, Montana on the first hop and I

wanted to be full up with fuel so that we wouldn't have any

trouble getting all the way there through this rough

mountainous terrain. With no aviation fuel available, I

decided to fill up with high-test automobile gas. I figured

that the automobile gas which was suitable for cars at high

altitudes should not be too bad for our airplane at fairly

high altitudes. Also, we hadn't used a large amount of our

gasoline coming from Pocatello and the Ercoupe fuel system was

particularly well suited to this occasion. It had a 6-gallon

1 ·.• ' .. ·::.

.. : ·~.,

Tapf~ l"E

header tank ~ith gravity feed to the carburetor, and two wing

tanks holding 9 gallons each, which were connected together

and the fuel was fed to the upper header tank by an engine-

driven

fuel,

fuel pump. By putting the ne~ fuel, .the automobile

in the wing tanks, the first operation would all be

essen!ially with airplane fuel from the header tank and the

take-off and climb could be made in that manner. Actually, it

worked very satisfactorily. At that time, there were hardly

any Omnirange stations in that mountain area and we followed

little roads to the small towns of Ellis~~~Whitehall and then

went through the Butte and the Anaconda copper miDing area.

Beyond that, w e h a d b o t h r o a d a n d r a i 1 r o a d t o f o 11 c> w a n d we

landed at Missoula a little after noon. It ~as only a littl~

over 400 miles to Seattle, and we probably could have pushed

through that same day, but Dorothy's brother Phil and his

family were expecting us the following afternoon and so we

took a short hop to Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, arriving there about

the middle of the afternoon. We got a taxi and asked the

driver to take us to a motel or hotel, but he told us that

there were two conventions in the town and that there were no

hotel or motel rooms available whatever. However, he knew

some private homes that took in transients occasionally and he

would see what he could do over the telephone. We heard him

ask for a room "for a couple" and then he said "I

they're married."

satisfactory time.

At any rate, we got the room and

think

had a

2

Coeur d'Alene is a beautiful town on a large lake.

There were reguJar passenger boat excursions on the lake, but

we missed the last one by an hour or so. By exploring a

little farther, however~ we found a man who took us for a good

motorboat ride .. The next morning we left Coeur d'Alene about

10 o'clock and landed at Ellensburg at about .12. Ellensburg

and Yakima nearby are in the agricultural area made possible

by the Columbia River which is not too far away. From

Ellensburg to·Seattle, a distance of about 100 miles, we could

see the great white-capped peak of Mount RaiQier on our left

almost all the way. It is 14,410' high, about the same as the

highest of. the Colorado mountains, but it is much, much more

impressive, because it rises up from near sea level, instead

of from a plateau of 5-7,000', as the Colorado mountains do.

We followed the road and railroad to Seattle, going through ~~&/.

famous Snoqualmie Pass and we landed at a little field ~ v the

the northeastern portion of Seattle,

right on Lake Washington. That area is all built up now and

unfortunately the little airport is no longer in existence.

Phil and Laurie and a couple of their four girls met us at the ~-

airport and we stayed with them for about a week. AI flew

around the Seattle area for a couple of hours, giving rides to

lTSUJ..• ~ Laurie and/\ th'e four girls, .J:i:.r-an-n-1.-e, Jean, Kathy and Barbara~

Barbara was an infant and Laurie held her in her lap. As I

recall it, this was the first airplane ride for any of them.

I wonder how many people I have given their first ride up in

3

Tnpe ~8

. ,; ·.·•

the air. While I was giving some of these rides, we noticed a

fair amount o1 smoke rising from an area just east of Lake

Washington, which was only a mile or two wide at that point.

While we were on the ground between flights, a fire chief of

~ some sort came out~ the airport and practically commandeered

the airplane so that he could make a flight over the fire area

and see where best to place his equipment. I took him up and

flew around the fire area. It was a brush fire and was

approaching some houses, so it needed immediate attention.

When we got down, he offered to pay for the.ride but it was a

short one, and I enjoyed the experience.

Phil, Dr. Phil E. Church, Head of the Mete~rology

Department at the University of WashingtoD, and a couple of

his friends had rented a cottage on Camano Island for a good

portion of the summer and we spent several days there. The

island was in Puget Sound north of Seattle and attached to the

mainland by a bridge. It was about 26 miles long and varied

in width. The cottage was in a beautiful spot on the shore of

Puget Sound and in a wooded area. We had a pleasant and

restful stay there. There was quite a b~t of driftwood up and

down the shoreline and I found a nice tapered root of an aspen

tree which I sawed off and sent horneby Parcel Post. Sometime

back I believe I referred to a piece of petrified wood that

had been found near College Station, Texas, and that I had

used as a base for a lamp which we had placed on a table at

one end of a sofa and that Dorothy's mother had said "looked

4

Tape 18

lonesome and needed a companion'' at the other end of the sofa·

to balance it. I later made the companion lamp from this

aspen root, but I had to send it home Parcel Post because we

did not

Ercoupe.

have room or weight allowance to carry it in the

After an enjoyable week with the Church family in

Seattle we took off and went south about 100 miles to

Longview, ~ashington on the Columbia River and about 40 miles

north of Portland.

In December 1949 Molton B. Taylor Df Longview had

written me requesting information regarding some details in

connection with the Ercoupe which he could use in the develop­

ment of a flying automobile called the Aerocar. I had sent

him a batch of information and we corresponded a bit,

course of which he invited me to visit him if I could.

in the

This

trip in the Ercoupe made it convenient. His operation was

right on the airport and as I remember it there was only one

other small fixed base operator. He showed us his first

Aerocar which had been completed and partially tested but at

the time was under modification. It amounted to a very small

2-place automobile powered with a 100 hp aircraft engine and

designed to be light as possible. To this was attached a high

wing of 30' span and a rear portion of sheet metal fuselage

c~rrying an unusual tail and the propeller back of the tail.

The vertical surface of the tail projected below the fuselage

and protected the propeller from the ground. The horizontal

5

Ta_pe 18

portion of the tail had a rather large dihedral angle. The.

wings, the rear portion of the fuselage and the tail came off

from the automobile portion as a unit, the wings were folded

back along t·he fuselage and tail surfaces in a vertical

position and the whole rear combination could be detached from

the automobile portion completely. Small caster wheels could

then be attached to the tips of the wings at the rear and the

whole arrangement attached to the automobile and pulled as a

trailer. You could then move the whole arrangement on the

ground as from your house to the airport or along the road if

you had had to land because of bad weather and were driving to

a region where the weather was better. Or you could stow the

wings and rear portion of the fuselage and use the car by

itself. One of the most noteworthy mechanical advances that 1?~ Wtt-±-4: Ta y 1 or had made was in connection with the propeller

drive. The propeller was mounted on a very long shaft in the

rear portion of the fuselage and this ordinarily entails great

difficulty ~· conditions of resonance and very severe

torsional vibrations. He avoided this difficulty by making

use of a fluid clutch or drive, .. · tin;y.;

the fluid. consisting of ~

ball bearings. Thus there was no direct mechanical connection

between the engine and the propeller shaft.

M~lt had done a lot of good work on this project, but it

was a very difficult nut to crack. He continued working for

several years, ending up with about a 150 hp engine instead of

6

the 100 hp and developing many refinements.

the weight and power of a 4-place airplane,

extra complication, and the airplane

ordinary

difficult

light 2-place airplane. And

to have either the airplane

He ended up with

substantial

performance of an

it is extremely

or the automobile

portion have performance equivalent to the airplane's alone or

the automobile's alone. I should have pointed out that in his

first venture, he tried to use a number of the features of the

Ercoupe,

operation

including making it spin-proof, having two-control

and using the tricycle gear principle. but with 4

wheels on his small car. All in all, it was a worthy effort,

but in the end it did not succeed commercially.

We had stopped off at Longview, expecting to stay for an

hour or two and then fly on. MDlt and his wife insisted that

we stay overnight, however, and we were sort of happy to allow

them to persuade us. We not only enjoyed visiting with them

in their home on a farm on the edge of town, but they showed

us two outstanding things also. One was an area of mint

far.ms, where mint was grown commercially, and a mint proces-

sing plant, where the essence was distilled

commercial market. The essence, incidentally,

out for the

is so strong

that it appears to burn your tongue if you touch it to it.

The other was a large Weyerhaeuser lumber mill where large

sections of pine logs up to 5' in diameter were sawed up into

lumber and the waste made into paper. All of the handling of

7

Tape 18

the logs, the lumber and the scrap materjal for pulp was done

mechanically, mostly by remote control. It was remarkable to

see these large logs of varjous sizes being moved in and sawed

into lumber of various sizes and dimensions, all controlled by

a man sitting at a control center with a few handles and

switches. It was a far cry from the old country sawmill. And "Jr. ;-:-'.d...

the waste scraps and bark were all ~ into a large boiler and

made into pulp and then came out through a paper-making

machine in the form of large rolls of excellent grade paper.

This process was con:inuous, going on night and day, shutting

down only a couple times a year, for maintenance and repairs.

The next day we took an easy trip with three stops down

to the little Palo Alto airport on the southwestern rim of the

San Francisco Bay. We stopped for fuel at Eugene, Oregon and

then again at Red Bluff, California. That appeared to be the

hottest place we've ever been. It was so hot that we were

completely debilitated. We had a bite of lunch in a little

shack on the edge of the airport which was cooled by an

evaporative water cooling system. It was not much, but we

appreciated it greatly. We had difficulty getting back into

the airplane without burning ourselves. This is in the north

desert area of California. We

minutes' visit with Norm

then stopped at Davis to have a Atk;l.nson ~wilt'~ and Wes Yates who were

work on agricultural aviation and the

distribution of sprays.

8

Tape l·':<

In Palo Alto, we stayed with Buddy ~nd Betty Jacobs, wh6

went all out fc·r us. Buddy was still ~attending Stanford

University but between them they were also running a picture

framing store and doing very well with it financially. They

lived in the hack of the store and put us up there also.

Buddy, I believe I mentioned before, was the son of East and

Ivy Jacobs, our old friends from Hampton, Virginia. We stayed

with Buddy and Eetty two nights and then flew directly about

230 miles or so to Bakersfield to visit Dorothy's brother,

Victor, and his wife, G1nny. Vic had a PhD ~n geology and was

doing geological work in connection with the possible location

of oil wells in the vicinity of Bakersfield. He has been (also '84)

quite successful and they are still there in 1978. Vic and

Ginny took us to the Sequoia National Park where we saw a

number of very large sequoia trees and large sugar pines and

others. One of the sequoias is cut so that a road runs

through it and you can drive your car through it. We were

looking at the President Grant, one of the largest sequoia

trees, and I was trying to get a picture of it. A small boy

was ~tanding right close to it and his mother called to him,

"Come away, Jimmy, can't you see the man wants to use that

tree?"

We spent four enjoyable days with Vic and Ginny and then

flew the 150 miles or so down to Monrovia, just east of Los

Angeles and not too far from Arcadia where my brother Herb and

9

Ta.pe 1 E.

his wife Virginia and their familv lrved. Their older·

daughter, Beverly, was to be married shortly aDd my mother and

father were already visiting there, so we stayed with a

neighbo~r next door.

While we were there we visited Ivy Jacobs and her

younger daughter, Dorothy, who w~re living a few miles west of

the airport at Monrovia. East and Ivy were separated for the

second time at that point, and East was living with his mother

in a beautjful area close to the Pacific shoreline near

Oxnard. His contributio~ to the science of aerodynamics had

unfortunately ended. Their daughter Dorothy, then about 8

years old, had been named Dorothy Jane after my Dor0thy Jane.

She was interested in the airplane and I offered to take her

for a ride. She hadn't been up before and was uncertain about

the situation, so I didn't force her. The next time we

happened to see them, however, she greeted me with the

statement, "I have decided to take a ride with you." We later

flew around the area, I,among other things,showed her her

home, and she thoroughly enjoyed her flight and was ready to

go for more.

The next days were dominated by the preparations for

Beverly's wedding to a fine young man by the name of Bob

Wells. The wedding was to be on a Sunday and I needed to be

in Fort Worth, Texas on the following Tuesday in order to

10

! .J I'~ l b

attend an important meeting with the CAA and other parties

interested 'lo:ith regard to the futuie program of the Ag-1

airplane. This meant that we had to get as far as we could

after the \o:edding on Sunday, which was scheduled for 4 o'clock

in the afternoon. Immediately after the service and before ~ Ut\.u.-0:-

the reception, we left~and Ivy Jacobs took us to the Monrovia

air po'r t in her car. By 5:20 we were in the air heading east

and hoJ>ing to get to Blytheon the Colorado River that evening.

The weather was clear in the Los Angeles area, but we

had not taken time to get a last-minute report on the "'eather

at Blythe. It was easy sailing as far as Desert Center, an

abandoned airport about 40 mileE from Blythe. Twilight was

approaching, b u t w h e n w e 1 o o k e d a h e a d .i:- e '~:::::B l r t n e , the sky

was black, and it looked very stormy. Our Omni was

satisfactorily tuned in on Blythe. however, and we were within

4:. sight of a good, well-traveled road leading to ~tfi€. We

wondered whether we should land at Desert Center, even though

it was out in the sticks and unattended, while we still had

enough daylight, but then we saw the airport beacon light

flashing from Blythe almost 40 miles away and we decided to go 1\-,t..,~w'

:t: or B i y tire , thinking that the storm must be beyond itx if we

could see the light so clearly. It was a critical decision

because once we got to Blythe or near it, we did not have

enough fuel to turn around and go back to a lighied airport

with any reasonable degree of safety. In a pinch, however, we

11

T :1 p e 1.8

.. ~ .

figured we could turn back and land on ~fie road because it was

pointed out by the car lights and the traffic did not seem to

be so great as to be dangerous. As we got within a few miles

of the Blythe airport,· it started to rain, and the closer we

got, the harder it rained, although we could still see the

airport light

factorily, too.

and the runway lights were operating satis­

We landed on the lighted runway and taxied up

in the heavy rain to a hangar which appeared to be at a very

slight elevation and which had the doors open and people

beckoning us to come in, which we were happy to do. By that

time it was pitch black there. While we were taking the

baggage out of the plane, the lights went out, not only in the

hangar but in the entire airport and the Omnirange went out at

the same time. There was no airport beacon and no runway

lights. The current that went off was from the Blythe power

plant and afterward they tried to get lights from an auxiliary

plant on the field. They had had a flash flood before we

arrived, however, and all in all the water had risen high

enough so that the emergency auxiliary plant

an obviously wonderfully well thought-out

was inoperative,

arrangement. We

were very fortunate, because had we come just a few minutes

later the Omni would have been off, the field would have been

completely dark and we couldn't have found it in the blackness

of the rainstorm.

The fixed base operator was good enough to take us into

12

T .: pe 1.8

•'

town and

the dips.

in several places had to for~ fairly deep water in

He put us up in an attractive little hotel of

Spanish architecture and atmosphere. After eating supper in a

nearby restaurant, Dorothy took off her shoe~ and stockings to

wade across the streets. The cause of all this was a

hurricane that was driving its way up through Mexico and we

were getting the northern fringe benefits. The next morning

the weather was clear at Blyt~ but the flight service station

gave us a report for Phoenix that was VFR, but not with a

great margin. We took off at 6:45, hopiQg to get well on

toward Fort Worth during the day, so that I could make the

meeting, but as we approached Phoenix, the ceiling there got

down to about 500'. Fortunately the regulations were not

enforced quite as rigidly in those days ~y the controllers as

they are now, and the tower operator allowed us to come in and

land on the main airport at Phoenix. We stayed at the airport

hoping for the weather to improve, but in the meantime we

called up Bill Stout and he came out to visit with us while we

were waiting. After a time it was apparent that the weather

was not going to be good enough to leave Phoenix that day and

that I would miss the meeting. At any rate, there were others

from Texas A & M who would attend the meeting and could plead

my case for me, and it turned out all right in the end,

because I got what I wanted. We then put up at the Westward

Ho, which was the hotel in Phoenix at the time and we stayed

there for 3 days until the weather over the mountains cleared

13

up. Once the meeting had been missed, there was no use

forcing things and during thos~ 3 days ~e were royally

entertained by Bill and Alma Stout. Bill, who as I had

mentioned previously, had designed the experimental Stout

Sky car with many features 1 the Stout single engine preliminary

transport plane with a Liberty engine,and the ~ Ford tri-

motor. He had a 1 so designed and b u i 1 t the ex~~ e rime n t a 1 Scarab

automobile with many features ahead of the tim~. At that time

he was retired in Phoenix, but was busily engaged in his

laboratory working on possible ornithopter flight, following

the ideas of the dragonfly.

The storm in Phoenix had been severe enough so that many

of the streets were flooded and in

crossing the street by means of a

one place we watched people

this in a desert town. rowboat,A Atter the f1rst

day the weather in Phoenix was fine but we still couldn't get

through the mountains easily. Bill and Alma drove us all

around the area, showing us Scottsdale and Camelback Mountain

and other attractive parts. On one occasion we stopped for

some fresh orange juice at a little stand across from an

orange grove. Alma remarked how delicious the orange juice

was and Bill asked the boy serving it whether it came from the

orange grove across the road. The boy reluctantly said, "No,

these oranges are out of season and the juice came from.

California oranges." Both of their faces showed their

chagrin.

14

e 18 .

(Now Side 2)

By Thursday, August 30, the weather over the mountains

had cleared up and we took off toward home. ·We refueled at

Tucson and at El Paso and finally stopped for the night at

Ca.~ r.~rrrCI,I ' Mckml, Texas. McA~~seemed to be a scraggly desert town whose

only reason for being was probably a few oil wells nearby.

The motel accommodatjons were minimal. The next morning we

made the 360 miles from Mc~~to our home at College Station

in a single hop of 3 hours and 51 minutes, completing one of

the most interesting vacations that we have had.

In September 1951 Tom Salter, vice-president and chief

engineer of Cessna called me up and asked me to do a

consulting job on their Cessna 170 airplane, trying to find

ways of reducing the cost of manufacture. They would let me

have a 170 airplane to fly as I desired for the next few

months and to study the details as I had time. I accepted the

job, took commercial airlines up to Wichita and flew the 170

m~ back to College Station. In the course of the work I

had the Cessna plant dig up and send me detailed information

on the weight of each individual part, the material cost arid

the man-hours required to make it. I also had a set of

assembly drawings. With this information I computed the

weight/square foot and the cost/square foot for the wings and

15 i-'·

Tcipe 13

the tail surfaces. I also got the cost/pound for all of the

parts of the airplane, including the wings and tail surfaces.

It was interesting, incidentally. that the cost/pound was

greater for the fuselage doors with their windows, locks and

hinges, than for any other part of the airplane, even

including the instrument panel with all of the instruments.

Of course, no gyroscopic instruments or radios were included

in the standard airplane of that time. When I finished, I had

suggested a number of detailed changes which I computed would

reduce the cost of manufacture by possibly $200. The main

suggestion was to use straight edges for the tail surfaces.

The tail surfaces were the same as those used for the

Cessna 195 and like many airplanes of that time, the contours

were all curved. This wasted material and required extra

cutting time. When Cessna came out with their 180 airplane,

they did use straight edges on the tail surfaces and

ultimately they have used them on all of their airplanes. I

believe the Ercoupe was the first light plane to come out with

all sheet metal covering for the entire tail surfaces and the

ailerons. When it first came out, even the large military

airplanes had fabric-covered ailerons, elevators and rudders.

The Cessna 170 followed the practice established by the

Ercoupe in using thin sheet metal covering for these surfaces. ERCOUPES AGAIN

Pspeaking of Ercoupes (which of course I seldom do), a friend

of mine, Bill Renshaw from Indianapolis, cut the following

news item under the heading "Flying Farmers USA.":

16

T ;1 p e 1.8

"Ever wish you had some way of recording all those fine

ideas you get while on cross-country flights,

so hard to recapture once you are back at home?

ideas you find

Frank Andrew,

Flying Farmer and agricultural extension engineer,

of Illinois, has worked out a way to do just that.

University

Thinking

primarily of the time he could save,

fitted a dictaphone into his Ercoupe.

engineer Andrew recently

It worked so well that

he now uses it not only to record ideas but to dictate most of

his correspondence. He reports letters written while aloft

while relaxed just naturally read better."

CHARLIE ZIMMEmiAN'S PROJRCT

About that same time in 1951 a magazine article

appeared, telling about the trials and tribulations of Charlie

Zimmerman in his attempt to develop a special, novel type of

aircraft. Charlie was one of the fellows who had helped me in

the design and construction of the W-1 airplane and later put

out excellent reports on longitudinal stability and lateral

stability for the NACA. He also did excellent work in the

free-spinning tunnel and later initiated and developed the

flown freely free-flight tunnel in which models could be

instead of supported rigidly on balances.

an original thinker and a hard worker.

He was and still is

At the time we were

working on the W-1 we made some tests in the 7 x 10' wind

tunnel on wings of varying aspect ratio, from the usual values

clear down to 1 and with varying plan forms, including

17

T<:~pe 18

circular. The circular plan for~ gave very high lift·

coefficients and the maximum lift ~as not reached until an

angle in the neighbo)lrhood of 45° had been attained. While he

was willing to help us.a bit with the W-1, which was in effect

a short t~ke-off and landing airplane, he wanted to go very

much farther and make an airplane that would take off and land

verti'cally. He was soon spending his time on his own project

and starting with the low aspect ratio concept, evolved a

design that looked very promising. He evolved a design that

was more or less semicircular in plan form and that would have

two large propellers, one at each wing tip, just ahead of the

leading edge. By having the propellers rotate in opposite

directions, in each case the outer blade going down~&r~. he

could get in effect an increase of the span, which would help

the landing gear the climb performance. When on the ground,

would support the craft fn such a manner that the wing and the

propeller shafts were in vertical positions and the craft was

in effect resting upon its tail. With the large propellers,

the craft would then take off vertically like a helicopter.

In flight the craft would be nosed down to a horizontal

position, just like any other airplane. The propellers were

controllable so they could be used satisfactorily, both to

lift the plane off as a helicopter and to fly horizontally in

airplane-type flight. With a small amount of wetted area, the

craft should have an exceptionally high maximum speed. To

take care of the 900 change in attitude, the pilot would be

18

standing up vertically when the airplane was on the ground and

then would be lying prone face down when it was flying

normally.

Charlie spent a lot of effort wo~king out a comfortable

position for the prone situation. Ch~~~ first worked on

models and eventually deaigned and built one that was powered

·b y e 1 e c t r i c i t y an d t h a t r o s e an d h o v e r e d sat i s fa c t or i 1 y • ~ 'UiCt..<... . • I

T.h e n ex t s t e p /-,a f 1 y i n g s i n g 1 e- p 1 a c e a i r c r a f t ~.,__ y.;"1( ~v1" .. ,c:J he

interested the Vought Co., then in New Haven, Connecticut, and

the Navy Department. The idea was that it was to be used

eventually as a fighter airplane that could land not only on

carriers, but in restricted areas on battleships, cruisers'and

so forth. The design was to be sleek, essentially a fairly

thick low aspect ratio wing with the people and the power

plants entirely within the wing itself. Charlie and his

family moved to New Haven where he was a consultant for Vought

and the first flying plane, the V-173, was designed,

constructed and test-flown there. As the first step, the

plane was built as an airplane only, leaving the helicopter

performance to be added later. ~had an ordinary tail-wheel-

type landing gear. This work was started, I believe, about

1939. Charlie went through many trials and tribulations with

the Navy desiring changes every now and then, some of which

cut down·the overall aims. The plane was first flown at the

end of 1942 and for the next 5 years went through several

19

Tc:pe 18

hundred hours of exhaustive flight tests and modifications and

more flight tests. In the meantime, starting in 1942, actual

design work was begun. on a single-seater shipboard fighter,

designated the XFSUl. It was completed and ready to taxi in

March 1947, 15 years after Charlie had started on the project.

At that moment the Navy put a "Stop order" on the project, and

the airplane has never been flown. Toward the end, the Navy's

interest was apparently limited to the high speed

possibilities of the project and when the jets came into the

·picture, they appeared more promising than Charlie's flying

wing. Charlie went back to the NACA, has since retired and is

now living in. Hampton. It must have been a great

disappointment to him, but now it can be put down along with

most research as adding to our knowledge.

BACK TO THE Ag-1

In the first part of 1951, the testing and minor

improving of the Ag-1 continued. At that time it had the

characteristics previously mentioned plus the following

features: Because many of the agricultural planes in use had

had contact with electric wires (in fact, many of the

Stearmans showed creases in their landing gear farings because

of contact with electric wires which they had broken), the

spring steel landing gear legs of the Ag-1 were sharpened to a break~·

point in front, so that they would help to~ through any

wires that might be contacted. In addition, two fairly large

'")()

. ·~i

. ~. '·

Tape 18

. ~

sloping tubes over the cockpit which provided part of the

turnover structure, would also guide any wires over the

cockpit, in case they slid back along the upper cowling.

Also, many airplanes had had their vertical tail surfaces~jf~~

damaged by the wires and in the Ag-1 we mounted a cable from

the top of the cockpit to the top of the vertical fin, so that

the wires would be guided over the fin and not harm it. Thus,

·some bad crashes could be avoided. ~Another feature of the Ag-

1 was that it had the instrument panel mounted so far ahead

that the pilot's head would not come in contact with it in a

crash, even if he did not wear a shoulder harness and an

allowance of 1 ft was made for the stretch of the pilot and

the seat belt. With my long arms I could reach the instrument

panel to make adjustments, but it turned out later that most

short pilots could not reach it at all with the seat belt

fastened. Thus this solution to a problem was not

satisfactory and a shoulder harness became mandatory to keep

the pilot's head from striking the ·instrument panel in a

crash~ The Ag-1 had been proyided with a standard Navy

seatbelt and shoulder harness wh]ch were strong enough to

support a 200 lb man with an acceleration of 40 A• or a

momentary load 40 times the man's weight, or 8,000 lbs. It

had been demonstrated that a man can withstand momentary

·accelerations of this order when properly supported. Since

the ·indications from safety belt failures are that

accelerations of 15-25 A are likely to be obtained in crashes

?1

Tape 1 2

of the kind under consideration, a harness capable of

withstanding a 40 R acceleration appeared well warranted and

adequate support for the harness was of course also necessary.

A novel arrangement combining the shoulder harness with the

seatbelt was used in the Ag-1 airplane. The harness, as

originally installed, had the usual loop at the lower end of

each shoulder strap, which the pilot had to slip over a

portion of the belt clasp before fastening the belt. Thus

there were 4 loose ends: 2 for the shoulder straps and 2 for

the belt, that had to be located and assembled before the

harness could be fastened. This is a time-consuming operation

and probably explains why many pilots, particularly duster

pilots, who may get in and out of their airplanes every few

minutes, often did not bother to use a shoulder harness, even

when it was available. The only final change made in the Ag-1

installation after considerable experimentation was the

permanent attachment of each shoulder strap to its respective

side of the seatbelt. Thus there were no loose ends to hunt

for. Now, nearly 30 years later, the arrangement is still

used in some of the new agricultural airplanes. The ·shoulder

straps of the Ag-1 were supported on an inertia~ reel, which

gave the pilot freedom and allowed him to move forward as far

as he desired. If the airplane were given a deceleration of

3 R or more, such as would occur even in a mild ~. the

inertia\ gear would lock the harness in the position it had at

the start and the pilot's shoulders would be restrained from

22

•·-v ' ., ... ;!;· ·.

Tl:lpe l8

going forward while the airplane came to a stop. At that time

the inertia~ reel had just come out but at the present time it

is in fairly general use.

During the entire design and construction period of the

Ag-1 I had been working closely with Hugh DeHaven and Howard

Hasbrook of the Crash Injury Research Unit of Cornell Medical

College and as the plane was being completed, they came out.

with the following 10 recommendations for making an

agricultural airplane crashworthy.

l. Design forward fuselage and cabin structure to

resist nominal crash loads as well a~ f light and

landing loads. 4

2. Design aircraft structures to absorb energy by

progressive collapse.

3. Design tubular structu~e to bend and fa~l outwardly

away from the occupants.

4. Locate the passengers and pilot seats as far aft in

the fuselage as possible, behind the wing.

5. Locate fuel tanks in or on the wings, not between

the fire wall and instrument panel.

23

Tape· 16

6. Provide space between the instruruent panel and fire

wall or nose section to permit forward displacement

of the panel and the instrument casings.

7. Design the instrument panel to be free of sharp

rigid edges in range of pilot's head.

8. Fabricate the instrument panel of ductile material

and/o:r

face.

use an energy-absorbing shield on the panel

9. Mount instrument cases on sheerpins and/or as low on

the panel as possible.

10.

The

Provide shoulder harness, safety belts, seats and

seat anchorages of sufficient strength to resist

failure up to the point of cabin collapse.

Ag-i was made to conform to all of. these

recommendations except #5, to locate the fuel tanks in ur on

the wings and not between the fire wall and the instrument

panel. My study of crashes had shown that many occur because

of mishandling of the fuel system or failure of the fuel

system. Putting the fuel tanks in the wings requires extra

complication in the form of fuel pumps, valves and fittings.

24

~-

I thought that the overall safety picture would be better with

the simplest possible gra\ity feed fuel system draining

directly to the carburetor and this required a position in the

fuselage up back of the engine.

During the months of July, August, September and October

of 1951, th~ Ag-1 airplane was taken on a demonstration tour

by CAA personnel. The tour covered most of the agricultural

areas of the United States. At each stop the airplane was

demonstrated by a CAA pilot and then it was flown and

evaluated by other pilots, largely duster and sprayer

operators. In all, over 650 pilots have flown the airplane

and approximately 500 have filled out forms indicating their

evaluation of its various characteristics. Considering that

it was a single-place airplane and that there was no

opportunity for the pilots t0 receive dual control instruction

in it or to be checked out ty a pilot familiar with it, the

mere fact that it survived this treatment and returned tu

College Station appears to be a cert&~n amount of vindicatior.

of both its handling characteristics and its ruggednes~.

Before

the controls

each pilot flew the airplane he was briefed on

and informed regardin8 its special character-

istics by means of a typed sheet. Afterwards he was requested

to record his opinions on 37 individual items listed under the

main headings of Performance, flight Characteristics,

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T :1 pe 1 8

Controls, Ground Handling of Materials, Protection, and

Maintenance and Repair. In obtaining a pilot's opinion of an

airplane, it is of course desirable tu have his considered

judgment after he has become used to it and has had consider­

able experience with it. His first impression, such as was

obtained in the one or two flights possible for each pilot

during this tour, is often different from his judgment after

he. is familiar with the airplane. The first impressions of

several hundred pilots are of substantial value, however, and

averaging all of the ratings 98% of them were satisfactory or

better, 67% having been excellent. Overall, 2% of the ratings

were unsatisfactory. Of the 37 characteristics evaluated, the

worst two were considered unsatisfactory by about 1/7 of the

pilots who checked them. In general the approval was greater

than expected, especially considering the unusual features,

such as the high position of the pilot in the airplane for

vision forward and down, and the unusually powerful high lift

flaps. It is likely that some of the pilots thought that they

were receiving a favo')(_r in the opportunity to fly the airplane

and were therefore less severe in their ratings than they

might have been otherwise. I thought that on the whole it is

probable that more weight should have been given to the

unfavo~rable comments than to the favo~rable ones.

Before starting on the demonstration tour, the Ag-1 was

fitted with its first installation of spraying equipment.

26

Tape 18

After the tour, the plane was returned to us for an extended

period of investigation and experiment with dispersal

equipment. Use was made of the measuring station on the Texas

A & M Plantation on which special instrumentation was

available for measuring the pattern of distribution. ~During TEXAS AGRICULTURAL AVIATION CONFERENCES

that general period I was a member of an advisory committee to

the Texas Aeronautics Commission. One day in January, 1952,

Asa Burroughs, who worked for the Aeronautics Commission,

called on me at our Texas A & M Aircraft Research Center to

see if the commission could help sponsor a joint project of

some kind. They needed to get some additional public

awareness. I told Asa that I was planning to set up an annual

conference on the use of airplanes in agriculture, starting

about a year later, after we had some worthwhile results from

the measuring station. Asa was enthusiastic about the idea,

but couldn't wait until the following year, and so, two months

later with the generous help of the agricultural departments

and with a booklet of 89 pages of prepared papers, we held the

first conference.

The year before I had been invited to give a paper on

the Ag-1 airplane at the Agricultural College of the

University of California in Davis, 'california. This was a

short course including information on ent~mology, weed control

and so forth, and the whole thing was repeated a couple of

days later at Riverside~ California in the south, in order to

27

Tape 18

give the aerial applicators and farmers th~re ~n opportunity ...P ;~ t-n:>w. b..u.it.. ~., ... .

.:,~ . . ... , '.

to get .it without going all the way to Davis. WOur meetingVwas at Texas A & M

to be held on March 31 and April 1 of 1952. It happened that

an agricultural aviation meeting was to be held in Columbus at

Ohio State University about 2 months before our meeting and I

wanted to attend that one to get as many ideas as possible.

Fred Triplett, a farmer from north of Waco, Texas and then

Pre$ident of the Texas Flying Farmers Association and also

owner of a Cessna 170, flew me and Asa Burroughs to Columbus,

Ohio to attend the Ohio State meeting where we learned what we

could. Our meeting, which we optimistically called the "First

Annual Texas Agricultural Aviation Conference and Short Course

on Pest Control" was sponsored not only by Texas A & M, but

also by the Texas Aeronautics Commission and the Texas Flying

~ · Farmers Association. It included a morning of papers on

insect control, an afternoon demonstration of the Ag-1

airplane and the operation of the measuring station, following

my explanation of the Texas A & M Agricultural Aviation

program as a whole. In the evening we had a dinner meeting

chaired by E. M. Tex Anderson, President of the National

Flying Farmers Association and with talks by Dr. R. B. Lewis,

Director of the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station and by

Ralph E. Young, President of the Ohio Flying Farmers and

agricultural aviation coordinator for the Ohio Aviation Board.

The next morning had papers on weed and brush control,

?R

J ,·. -· .l ~

defoliation, and state laws and regulations. Finally in the

afternoon we had papers on agricultural aviation and the Civil

Aeronautics Administration by von Rosenberg, our pilot for the

Ag-1, and fundamentals of plant disease control and essentials

of seeding and fertilizing by airplane. The first year an

attempt was made to include the fundamentals of the various

subjects. In succeeding years, if the demand existed, the

subjects would be brought up to date with the latest

developments. The whole would form a possible nucleus for a

comprehensive text on agricultural aviation. The paper~ "''ere

all collected in a single volume which were made availah~e to

all of those who attended. The attendance was good, a

couple of months later sent e postcard to each of thcs~ who

attended, asking for their suggestions for improvin~ the

conferences and also asking whether it would be worthwh~le to

have another one next year and to make it an annual

The vote for continuance was just about unanimous and the

conferences were continued as long as I remained at Texas A &

M and for a few years afterward.

Chronologically, this next section really belongs just

ahead of the previous one on the Ag aviation conference.

Our first project sponsored by and financed by the NACA

was.

End of Side 2 END Of TAPE 18

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