Boeing 747 Dreamlifter

[Music] welcome to Peninsula seniors out and about we're at the Western Museum of Flight in Torrance let's go see what cindy has for us today welcome everyone to the Western Museum of Flight I'm Cindy maka the director he has flown down from Washington State to share his insights of what it is like to do the test flying of these magnificent and enormous airplanes that have made the transition between giant surface ships and near giant aerial ships what is it like to fly massive cargo through the Airways of the world ladies and gentlemen the man who has done this Jerry White's [Music] this was a very interesting project the project started back in 2007 and really started before that and it's a very unique airplane as you can see and certainly not the most attractive airplane they've ever seen as well there were a lot of things that happened when people said what's this airplane and really said to people it's really just the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile just with wings maybe not so much but at least it was a thought so the whole concept of this airplane came to pass with respect to how do you build a 787 and more effectively how do you develop the supply train for the 787 you've got vendors all over the world you've got two different build sites for the Assembly of the airplane yet Everett Washington in Charleston South Carolina at that time we had the the 388 and the nine the Street never got built and they built the ten instead so in simplest terms we had a lot of pieces that had to come together in many places the 787 was built because of market need going doesn't build anything unless they think they're gonna make money with it early sell them making money sometimes is a benefit but with respect to the a7 there were a lot of promises made that didn't happen because I don't think people really appreciated these the whole depth of the program new techniques new materials new engines your flight controls new just a whole new airplane so there were lots of different things that happened and we the market was strong to build these airplanes we predicted that there were lots of customers they sold like hotcakes people wanted them they had firm orders were at the beginning for 514 airplanes from 43 Airlines and there were more more and more coming on all the time but the airplane was progressing slowly so at least the build cycle had to be as efficient as we can make it so it was the most successful launch in history of the boarding company the schedule is you can see it change because they predicted they would fly in 2007 didn't really fly 2009 it's supposed to deliver in 2008 delivered in 2011 in the meantime airplanes were stacking up and stacking up and stacking up so again how do you get those pieces together and one thing we'll talk about is the fact that there were several siblings that came from all the world and we had to have the ability to ship those sub assemblies to boring and do it efficiently so as you can see we had to build a very big airplane we're gonna certify this airplane is this gonna be a restricted airplanes this is gonna be a limited u.s. airplane is this is gonna be what's how do we do this they needed volume of 65,000 cubic feet it's three times the capacity of a 747 400 and more 50% more than an Antonov 124 if we shift that material by barge it would take weeks so we flew it we had less inventory that we had to keep on at the facilities we had no corrosion issues to worry about with these picked a hole in the ship and things buy shipped by barge if you would that backup is was always foreseen as a backup and there are Believe It or Not docks at Charleston and at Everett Washington that could handle a barge with parts they were built in distant case so where different parts come from you can see they came from all the world we had created engines came and they were able to crush those the center fuselage came from Millennium which is in Italy near Naples for fuselage Kingdom Speer to talk answers the benighted year came from Kawasaki heavy industry and the Goa leading edge devices also came from spirit Wichita on the wing box from this abhi she had hidden industries Kawasaki the dueling tips and when Winnipeg other parts for Bob and some points were actually blow quite boring I know it's amazing what a concept so how do you move those many parts from that many people building it efficiently it's not easy so believe it or not this is one of those the legendary build or designs that came up more or less around a coffee table with a lot of wine these that's the legend I'm not sure that really happened because nobody drinks avoiding because we built a wood structure and how did we do this how do we get these things apart and you can see that it was somewhat convoluted with the one on the right side that's fine you see the little parts coming out nagoya in the center of the slide the parts coming out of Italy and on the left side you can see the hop skip and jump across the United States between Wichita Everett and Charleston so you can kind of get a grasp of the size of some of these components those are big fuselage pieces so where did we build this thing well point didn't have the capacity to build it we were building 8/7 we're building lots of other airplanes there at the time so guess what where did you got and type in [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] Sabourin flag [Music] [Applause] that's a pressure polecat I'll talk more about that later [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so I'll talk about that video now a little bit in detail the donor air plans for for used passenger 747s two from China air two from your China that's a little confusing I know ones mainland China ones Taiwan interesting itself and they chose them for availability because freighters are really hard were hard at that period of time to really get and they chose to use airplane because what the heck we're gonna take it apart so much anyway with it there's no sense in trying to take a perfectly good brand-new freighter and then cut it up that just doesn't make much sense you'll notice that and maybe we appear in some of the later videos Eden Amex was not a big issue volume and it was the issue you'll see there are hundreds of one inch round head cherry rivets all over that airplane they've just they're in the boundary layer so it doesn't really matter the airplane itself had a max takeoff weight as you can see around eight hundred thousand pounds max landing weight five hundred seventy five thousand pounds they're all fuel weight about five thirty five it's a pretty empty airplane we used obstruct forty fifty six Pratt & Whitney's the radius of that structure that you saw at is one hundred forty eight inch radius there's a new pressure bulkhead the pressure bulkhead we're talking about is actually just aft of the flight that just aft of door one the after the airplane is not pressurized there's no need to there's no live cargo there's nothing there it's weight get Wade out of the airplane is the issue we remove the winglets for an issue we'll talk about later 128 inch stretch the removed Mikael fuel and we added a 747sp tail because it's 60 inches taller and with all of that structure ahead of the tail we wanted to be sure we had a good runner a good effectiveness but the rudder gets delayed lateral directional there's no apu because the airplane is only going to go to boring facilities it's only go to fix number of places and so they ground support equipment is there one less maintenance item diverts we are an issue the airplane does transit Anchorage with one of the loads and nothing's coming off so you don't need any cargo handmade booklet a very unique way of handling cargo and we'll get to that in a bit to the cargo handling power and swing tail power are all on the ground support side it's a very interesting concept there's the four genes for the hinges there's two of these four genes each one is capable of 40,000 pounds it's all done from a solid piece of steel all molded all put on there and that's what holds the swing tail this is the number two airplane rolling out and it's kind of a picture what it actually looked like painted with much nicer painted than it did unpainted but for flight test Berg was unpainted the whole time if you look at the donut airplanes on the line you'll see that the white area there is basically cut on the dotted line that's the part it was cut out of the airplane the bottom picture shows you the airplane with that removed in the factory floor on scaffolds getting ready for installation of the structure it's kind of the flatbed look you know if we could fly it that way I'm sure Boeing would like to have done it for you to probably put anything on the back then so installing the upper deck was really a major major effort as you saw in the videos the factory was really clean that you got had the people they had the equipment and not to say they didn't struggle with the first airplane we had design issues and engineering issues as well as manufacturing issues anybody it's been around this business for a while none just dance that knows it's really hard to do it in your own facility try doing it in somebody else's facility they're not used to our process we're not used to theirs we want to built our process they don't understand our process English is a second language lots and lots and lots of dishes different issues here that came up but the learning curve was steep but the learning curve was was done well airplanes 2 3 & 4 were really clean airplanes out of the factory one of the things they talked about was the screen tail the swing tail itself is problematic in itself because you've got flight controls that run through that swing tail and you have to maintain rig you wouldn't want to have to re-rig every time you landed someplace and loaded or unloaded cargo so they solved that and they solved it well the airplane seems to hold rid the large hyster forklift there on the bottom which is huge by the way is the power hydraulic power for the loader hydraulic power for the swing tail and any electric of the power how can you do with the cargo hand the equipment all comes off of that one rig it's a monster as you can imagine swinging that tl off of a single point Jack point and trying to maintain loads there's really critical because you can bend a lot of metal with that big rig and that much mass so this software fly-by-wire software in that tug Believe It or Not that manages all those loads and dynamics to make sure that but as it swings the arc is true and the loads are are within limits it's pretty cool somebody said you want to drive it I said no I didn't want to buy the airplane so the first flight was done in Taiwan as well technically for flights over there there's those cherry rivets I talked about [Music] so picture i call darth vader [Music] it's really hard to get a picture of the size [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] Joe McDonald who was the chief pilot for 7 at that time and Reggie White was the first [Music] [Music] [Applause] so one of the things that was important on this program was that the airplane needed to fly just like a 747 that one of the goals and objectives was no additional training it's a 747 and from the flight deck it is but but how do you do that and you sort out the issues that are not now that are unique to the airplane and yet allow anybody with a 747-400 type rating to fly the airplane really the only issues that are apparent to the pilot are the issues that occur on the ground handling and for the flight deck you can't see what's behind you anyway it's it's just back there there's no access to that part of the airplane at all it's a totally unpressurized in fact when I talked about the swing tail there's about a half inch of gap all the way around that swing tail when it's you know all the locks are in place birds fly in it it's pretty bizarre it really is I mean there's just big dents in the floor that to basically take the air that we circulate back there and maintain about two tenths of a PSI just slightly positive pressure that just dent that's just based because you you do pump air of it back through there so kind of a new and novel approach this is a service bulletin this is not an STC it's a special USERRA playing limited operation to the boring company by a set number of crews and that's it it's used for the boring company is not for revenue not for hire it's just for transporting material for the boring company originally it was operated by evergreen and has progressed now to Atlas since evergreen went bankrupt and that's how that's operated today is by everything or by Atlas pilots so the flight test program so we had this wonderful plan and as you can see from the Green Line there was the plan and then from the magenta line or Purple Line is what actually happened which isn't too bad if you figure the flight test average is about 20% over what's estimated because you find things fly rate pretty high fly rate about 58 58 flights and bus something like that falls in the middle lobe a lot of the current programs not as high as some programs but certainly more than others you'd see here is that rate and where it falls large cargo freighter the numbers in red and the others are several different models the highest light weight basically was on the five-seven 300 program that was an extraordinary high fire rate and never would I do that would again it's just too hard and get too tired your people get too tired your engineers get way tired and you see here the footprint and you'll see that it's really pretty aggressive we started into July and finished in April that's pretty impressive and with the big slowdown items were I will call it flutter we'll call it a large to that limit cycle oscillation and we've seen LCOS in another four seven programs along the way it had to solve them you find the vibration on the really the first flight and then we fluid enough in Taipei to make it we felt comfortable with the dafair get over to Seattle at a reduced level and then the little clutter investigation straight out of the box in Seattle and then we had to work on that issue worked on other issues other parts of the airplane and then solve the flooding problem so how do we do that 2.2 Hertz was the frequency of the issue we saw it on the first flight of the rudder with a rudder kick and it tended to hang on this is the lateral response at the seat rail the top charges before we did fixes on the thing as you can see input on the left side of the chart on the top you'll see the rudder kick then you'll see the structure start to ring and you'll see that it is not work very well damped at all it wasn't on the order of catastrophic but it was in the order of fatigue and from a certification point of view you can't have any oscillation of vibration in a normal flight envelope so we had to solve it we did how we solved it was moving the load inboard unloading the outboard span of the way so we reduced the outboard takes one in for fuel by 50 percent and we removed the winglets and that unloaded the outboard conception of the wing and we move that load in reward and it seemed to solve the problem it wasn't that simple anybody has dealt with flutter to understand that sometimes you do something and you create something else but it was right at point eight-six Mach well somebody says well maybe you just reduce the amount by a couple of tents in here okay I'm not sure what the agreements were with the FA but I think the FAA was pretty restrictive and they said if you're gonna build these airplanes and you need to do just a limited flight test program and then it's got to be as good as so believe it or not that means the full envelope of the 747 which means for the end pointed of @vd or MD you got to be out of 97 Mach with the airplane getting this airplane to 97 Mach was really hard between 30 and 25 degrees nose-down full throttle and you're coming down further quickly and you're accelerating rather slowly and you're trying to hit the altitude at the point and if I did this with my hands the airplane would stop accelerating so basically it was get there make your input and recovered people that have flown a6 intruders talked about the fact that the a-6 intruder has no limiting Mach because you can't make it go any faster even if you're diving straight down so I think this is probably on that same order it we solved it we made it work could we have just maybe floored the speeds a little bit yeah I think would have been a lot easier but who knows what the agreement was with the FAA I think boy had enough controversy on other parts of the eight seven they wanted no controversy on this program so one of the things we do is we also want to look at the MCG we we didn't know exactly how a lateral directional control was going to be affected in ground effect and we wanted to make sure that the airplane was good for VMC G's that were nominal to the set of the 400 so I've got a an interesting video here of three of the B mcg points building up from we do these tests we start out at a speed that is faster than the MCG that's the be MCG is defined as the the minimums controllable airspeed with the most critical engine failed on an icy slippery runway if you would that's for the simplicity so we disable the Norris wheel steering so Norval Tyrion is just castering so we all you have control of weights or directional stability directional control and then we fail the engine with a fuel cut but we want a real sharp fuel spike a thrust bike and we feel an outboard engine and we typically will just use one engine that we if you don't want to beat up two engines we just beat up one because when they cut the fuel at high power it's gonna compressor stall and it's usually a pretty good bang and a big dynamic load inside the engine so here we go with four engine airplanes we tend to continue the take-off with two engine airplanes we stopped I'll talk about that later if there's any questions this is it Edwards yeah big yeah that's exactly right on a Saturday because you don't want to follow run lay it over it's on the weekdays they get really angry we go to Edwards because it's wide and it's long and there's a big lake net out in front of the airplane it's pretty mundane but you can see anything at all did so labs you could build a point nothing happened it was all good things Thank You wonderful so we go a little slower one of the things that happens on these tests too is that you don't do BMC geez very often and so we typically will do some training and we train people so if they have the least seen them so that when the next program comes on in ten years or five years or whatever it is that somebody we have people around that have seen it so you seal the failure happened there and they are fine so it's a skate and then the rudder bites they get enough garden and control for it to come back [Music] so in the train you have experience or you gain experience and how do you get experience any any takers Dada okay so how do you get Dutch how do you get experience from bad judgment okay so let's talk about how you perform the maneuver and one of the things you do is is you you talk about the fact that they're the data there's a one-second delay between the recognition and input well I mean you do the test you don't wait one second but because if you do it looks like that you got the Indian guys with the sharp pencils do one second factor that in we also have photographers that are out there because we like video everything so I think he thought better about his camera placement that day I for my Douglas friends I'd once did a three engine takeoff at Edwards on another program many years ago when the md80 was in in flight test and they had the wind station out at the side of the runway and they were doing their stuff with the md80 and I was doing myself on a boring airplane and so I do this three engine takeoff and and so it's a little faster than the application of the thrust on the outboard engine and so needless to say I was traveling a little bit more sideways on the runway then I wanted to go further sideways but I could see that it was getting better I could see that it was all get was gonna be fine but I put my wine tech before wingtip vortex right through the wind station and the tent that the people were at we were not popular so the airplane was certified in May of 2007 and then we went into what's called F&R testing which is loads and delivery of items of use you prove to the roote proving you do make sure all the loaders work right you do all those things and that becomes a very big part of the program so this is what it looks like in use [Music] it's nicer with a big job [Music] there's the loaders [Music] it's amazing to me if you stand inside the airplane and watch the load coming on or off how fast it's moving when it comes on I would have slowed it down [Music] these things loaders are amazing these are all like space stuff [Music] [Music] this is actually the let the low but reduce she's like the design Quran was the wane the wing is the most difficult love radius and the wavelength is also a fuselage section that was on that loan and that's the heaviest known [Music] [Music] it's interesting composite is not reflected [Applause] [Music] southern area dated before [Music] so when we talk about the 787 we have to talk about this airplane there are fourteen hundred and sixty-four present orders on the 787 they've delivered eight hundred and eighty two airplanes each airplane takes six loads at a rate of fourteen airplanes a month that's 84 loads a month spread between four airplanes and you figure that one of those airplanes is probably in a C checker or rotating D jet or something all the time so there's talk of a fifth airplane it's so far it's been okay there's talk of reengineer the airplane simply because it Pratt when he's got a work a later version of the 4056 that's better specs so that would all be helpful and because fuel prices in Alaska have gone up Alaska hosts for the first time started charging sales tax on fuel and so for seven full of fuel was the speaking code so they'd like to be able to bypass but Fairbanks Anchorage with it so that's a lot of airplanes I mean what if you could do something else with this airplane I mean maybe we should make it a passenger version I mean what do you think [Music] so with that I'm kind of open for questions and I'm fair game the program has been very successful it's nice to say that having airplanes be successful did we do any wind tunnel question there was very limited when told of some CFD that was done the winter they figure the critical parts were good now the flow around that crown skin I think that's what you're talking about there are doublers trip lers and quinn tipplers up there there are more there's more aluminum up there than you can imagine and and for that very reason because there have been guppy airplanes that have had failures up in that crown skin area because the loads are extremely high is it noisy yeah yeah what is the cruise Mach the cruise Mach is a 2 because it probably should be a little bit lower do you think but but time is more important than fuel how's it doing yes it burns it what's the difference in fuel between the this and a four hundred freighter I would guess around twenty five and twenty to twenty five percent if I recall the question was with respect to how many flight hours did we put on the airplane with the number of test items I think I would agree with heat I would say in that period of time and we were flying at about a rate of thirty eight flights per month and nominally it's four hours per flight so it's probably about 240 hours which is remarkably low because you didn't have to do a lot of things we didn't we didn't many items we didn't change it in touch they're ever gonna be a passenger version of the airplane never gonna happen and to also continue that question was there ever plan to sell it Virgil freighter version the airplane nope okay here we go I was looking for this hey so questions about the question has to do with how did you know experience comes from bad judgment so how did we ever get to the max okay now this is Jerry White's retired blowing for many years did not work in the program not to say that I'm immune from conversations with other people applying but that's to say okay so there are many many many things that have happened and I'm going to address it this way many of you may have seen the New York Times article that came out last week about the maxi okay so when I started doing flight tests in 1978 some of the things you do is what you call failure risk failure analysis okay in 1978 there were many things I would call hazardous that in today's world I would call catastrophic and the reason I would say that is because we have transitioned through before me so scarf flying if you would to hospital post-world War two fourth Korean War yeah Bob burns former pilots military pilots so on and so forth the transition through a time when automation was not so good that auto pilots were not 100% that navigation was an arc to a time now when on my iPad with for flight I have 10 meter accuracy and excellent navigation and very easy to auto flight systems that are so reliable that you use them all the time two pilots whose initial response on takeoff is gear up flaps up autopilot on to at 500 feet on landing or less autopilot off we have transitioned through a time where airline travel had a certain amount of risk in it to a time that was not risky at all so safest form of transportation anywhere even with all the stuff that's going on it's still the safest form of transportation we have made the automation so good that the airlines went through a time where they said we don't want your hand flying the airplane we won't use the automation it's a smoother ride they're not gonna spell the Martini in first-class you're not going to knock some old lady down backed by the F bulkhead going to the laboratory you know all those sorts of things use the automation because it's better than you are it's not that it's better than you are in some cases a baby but it's certainly more consistently reliable the result is consistent until it doesn't work and then you've got the situation where now we were all proud of my of how well we could fly the airplane we want not about no fan threw the airplane everywhere you the airplane was part of you war the airplane that's just who we were are to a time when we've been told not to not not to flat because we're gonna hurt somebody we should know something you go wrong and then the company's gonna be liable oh my gosh that's awful well things started happening Air France 447 was a was a good precursor to that indicated that pilots were not as good as they wanted because if the pilots had done nothing on Air France 447 in two minutes the problem would have got away we have transitioned to them a time where we have military aviators was the bulk of the people who flew airplanes to a time when we've run out of them guys we can't produce them enough there's just not the demand out there anymore well get to that so now we have a Venetian academies worldwide the United States do and we train people say and in some countries it's like you have an aptitude for science or you have an aptitude for math you're gonna be a pilot now what's their background what's their transportation bicycle walking taking the bus they have you ever driven a car probably not and maybe they have a computer and they're probably pretty good on it and so they're there they have a great deal of confidence in me what that computation of what that that those things can do for them how do you teach them to fly by rote there are companies and I've been there in the training simulators where you go visit and you've given a malfunction on simulator flight number four that isn't in the script they will stop the simulator and say no that's not in the in the that's not in the lesson plan they have no capability to problem-solving is it true or is it true of everybody no it's not true of everybody some of them can in order to sit in the right seat of an airliner and a lot of the world including Europe you can have what's called a multi pilot licence which essentially is 200 hours an instrument rating you have to fly with an experienced captain and so when things happen you haven't had that bad judgment that gained you experience to do things now and believe me when things turn to crap and a lot of automated airplanes you've got bells and whistles and lights other things going on and you are suddenly in a train we're suddenly overwhelmed by a whole bunch of data that your brain is trying to process some problem-solving and it's really hard to do the airplane it could have been a poster child was Qantas Qantas 380 incident probably five years ago something like that I think they had an engine failure as I recall and took out a bunch of systems got a bunch of systems and it just so happened that there were five pilots in the cockpit and the the crew management that occurred was incredible because he had ECAM messages that were just pages of ECAM messages they had lights they had all multiple systems going down they had and the stuff was not in the checklist there was no checklist for what was going on so they had to had to individually partition and separate and manage all of those things going on and at the same time fly the airplane and in air buses in gives all automation I mean it is for one of a better word it's like flying a bucket loader you've ever operated a bucket loader on a tractor if that's the feel to it that's what it feels like and because you make an input and it moves at the rate it's gonna move at so you can make a full column in input and it's only gonna move so fast just like your bucket moving on your and your tractor good one in here playing you put somebody in the ceiling so we I was used to when first time I flew an Airbus at Airbus's request I was amazed because I kept basically going bang bang with the flight control I was going to full inputs because I was just not getting the rate that I was asking for based upon my experience so is it that takes us to that of the other side of the argument boring has always built pilot centric airplanes Airbus came in at a later date and they built automated airplanes for our very specific audience very specific customer base Wang started a transition to that they thought with the triple 7 but really didn't till 8 7 the trouble said the triple 7 is really very conventional in the way it flies we have things that help you out but it's really a very conventional airplane so get back to my strain here so how do you solve this issue what's the best wing so one bill sis this airplane that and my extended sigh well save Mike Senecas he was the chief engineer and and it's a direct quote in this Wall Street Journal you can read it and made the comment that the pilot is the ultimate backup that's the boring I can see we all of my generation if things started going weird you didn't understand what the airplane was doing or the automation was doing you that was the mode auto throttles off autopilot off fly the airplane if they had done that in both the lion air and the Ethiopian and said you'd be but they kept trying to solve the problem and kept reverting back to the automation that was flogged and they couldn't handle it they were overwhelmed they were flying they were still trying to fly all the air traffic controllers instructions they never declared an emergency and they were trying to comply with heading changes altitude changes and everything else when they just physically couldn't and and managed the situation and the first officer was unable to really process the information and help his captain out so that's kind of my assessment where is now did we have a design that I that maybe I wouldn't happen on my watch I don't know at least I would have raised my hand should have been a voted system should have been at least a Mis compare that gave the pilots for information every other airplay and oh by the way the 3/7 is not the only airplane with an M cast in it ok it's a very common way to solve a larger - disability issue but if you had the Miss compare up there you would have just at all okay they flew with stick shaker art and the lion air that didn't crash same airplane that did crash with the flight before they had the failure they solved the problem they did the right procedure and they followed through on it only because again the jump seat recognized it but even with that they didn't pull the breakers on the stick shaker and the stick shaker was on the entire duration of the flight now you may ask why they continued to the destination who didn't go back so yes folks there's we're at any a cultural transition in aviation is where we're at and the indicators have been coming on for a number of years with loss of control incidents and that sort of thing and where we're at now is a point where at some point boeing is gonna have to go to a clean sheet airplane now it's the maxi pad or you know no it's not did it have a bad design yes should the people of the crew need to know that I don't think the crew needed to know anything about it because if they just follow the procedures to verify now would have been good to least pass it information on they say hey there are systems on this airplane that caused this and that to happen yeah did it have to be trained well now it does so yeah experience comes from bad judgment knowledge comes from mistakes could you foresee any use of an aircraft like the large cargo freighter fruit with respect to military application oh yeah oh yeah the other company I work for just up the street in Long Beach has a long pointy thing that would be really easy to carry around to the places which you want to launch it from that'd be easier to carry in an airplane like their large cargo freighter oh yeah okay so I work for boots in orbit my other part-time job I'm a typical flunky out of retirement I don't do it well and I need things to keep my brain going so I worked with Virgin orbit we just did a successful drop test of from an inert rocket and rocket that is called r2d2 because people like sci-fi stuff up there which is rocket to design - which is the hot rocket which is with all the all the liquid hypergolic stuff on it which is like having an ember web sitting 30 feet away from you on your wing it's more gonna keep on with the three-sevenths as far as I know yeah I mean the the max is the max okay max is what it's I think gonna be the end of the of that of that 1955 design and it's from the pilots that have flown it and have an FAA pilot quarter to me that he thought it was the best handling 737 is every flaw what was my background okay I was an airport bum like a lot of people in this room I hung around airports my folks had a very limited budget shall we say none for aviation and so I worked for a crop duster and I swamped through high school and Vietnam was going on so that inspired me to stay in college or to go to college and so I came out of college and went in the Air Force from kc-135s and the Air Force did that for about oh about five years I guess since 75 was asked because of my background because there's other situations you go off to Boeing and participate in a new airplane program AWACS so I've spent I did what I call the three year interview at boy flying AWACS through engineering tests and radar tests and flying with the boiling pot and one seed and an Air Force pilot the other had a tremendous mentor Jim Gannett was my mentor Jim Gannett some is along with Jim Jim Chisholm Tim Chisholm Road advisory circular 25 7 which is the Bible and how did you do flight test he taught me as much as he could as much as my feeble brain would allow about flying the 707 and about flying reversible flight controls and flying an airplane that had some really dark corners in its handling qualities I mean you could those vintage airplanes were not like today's airplanes and they would you could get in places that you didn't want to go how do I feel about having had the opportunity to fly essentially every blowing aircraft from the - 80 - the 787 it's pinch me it's this this should not have happened I was a guy that was never going to get to be a pilot I was a guy who went to flight school and felt like all these other people will have their Corvettes and I had my 50 Plymouth you know or whatever and that it was always fine all I wanted to do was be a test pilot that's all I ever wanted to do but thought it was believed it was impossible whole nother subject had the opportunity when born went to rescue the - 80 out of Pima had the opportunity of recovering that aircraft not a pima an airplane with DC generators and AC alternators and that there was no book for because the airplane had been modified so much that those stuff did didn't exist it had been in a high upper blown surface experiment and so it had no leading edges had just these monster flaps on it and just exposed dr jack screws and balsa wood and speed tape and plywood and it was it was a home-built airplane I think it was every bit of home-built and you got to take it to the Smithsonian later but having had that opportunity to see the changes in time and how obese the blowing story happened it's just remarkable and it is like sometimes it it's the like are you me you know not kidding but the other one and because it's just fascinating I always took trips that went to places that nobody wanted to go because he you always found something that was very interesting you know Ethiopia and Africa and Bangladesh and those things because you've learned and you going out into those cultures you learn about how other people see aviation you know I was like I remember being someplace and I wanted to go off to Cottman do and there's had a flight that Bailey went up to Kathmandu and then they put one of their airplanes in a rice paddy someplace between where I was and Kathmandu I said well maybe not today so so yeah I mean having those experiences teach you that all cultures are not the same they're not bad cultures they just don't have the same experiences they don't have those things but we are trying to build we are an industry where we try to solve the problem globally and one size fits all it doesn't doesn't maybe maybe your best is a better solution I don't know it's a good airplane doesn't I don't like it they don't like the way it flies that's just me is about it's forwards in Chevrolet's if you would with the ESPE tail on the alleged cargo freighter did they build it or was it a piece of surplus answers I think I think they built it is it's a more impressive from the cockpit or from the ground when you do something like a VM CG most of the time it's more impressive from the ground the last one I can guarantee you was more impressive from a cockpit also they pulled the number one engine back as well because they did reduce some of the lateral deviation if they had if they if they hadn't pulled the engine back they probably got off the runway yeah but it's the far requires are the data requires that you simulate a slippery runway and you cannot take any credit for nose wheel steering while braking what was the 22.2 Hertz the oscillation coupling problem was that because the tail I it may have been may have been part of a contributor for seven historically has had LCOS and various parts of the envelope and it usually has to do with the wing loading and fuel loading and so the fuel burn and the wing is very very scripted and how you burn in use fuel can I explain the difference between lco and and pure flutter okay so an L Co has limits it's bounded if you hit a tuning fork you'll get a frequency out of that tuning fork of some some frequency and it'll be essentially an L Co it's constant it's a very pure tone if you have flutter generally speaking if you have flutter to be on the onset many times you do not have time to even react to it because it's explosive it's soothing it's the the it's divergent the amplitude is increasing in its divergent and pretty soon you excuse you exceed some structural limit and things break yeah we've been there's been incidents where people have found themselves in a parachute outside the airplane and wondering why did ever wish that I had either afterburners or an ejection seat I'd say that actually no not really I mean I I've had some pretty dramatic incidents and I'm not sure it would have done me any good and what I can tell you is that you're mandated by the FAA to put escape systems into new prototypical models of transport category aircraft the likelihood of you being able to get out of your seat and get back to that wherever that chute is is unlikely the likelihood of getting out of the airplane and not hitting something on the airplane while you're getting out is remote well you try to mitigate the risk absolutely before you could do the flight you do lots and lots of research you build up you you start small and you go bigger and then sometimes you go to places where you've been before and discover that just because of the way you made an input that suddenly it's not the same P is a very famous picture on a wall of an airplane that I flew that was missing large pieces of the vertical stabilizer where I had cleared the airplane for flutter and a six months before and we went back after the fix had gone in for some fatigue things with me almost didn't go fluttered the airplane but we decided well what the heck we got the time in the schedule we'll go do it and my my rudder kick was 20 pounds heavier than the previous kick and we broke the airplane how many hours were on the airplanes before they were converted about twenty thousand hours now you have to also think about where those airplanes were and who was maintaining them and the amount of corrosion that's in the airplane and how good was that maintenance and how good was everything that went along the way and so yeah there was a delta between the FD each one of those airplanes was different wasn't like taking a brand new piece of sheet metal you went in there and you said okay what do we got to fix so they usually went in and did the ad work upfront and then they did the mod which was sometimes you say like well you did the ad work and now you're gonna cut it up as it maybe you should have waited I don't know so it would seem like it was simpler to build the airplane all in one place yes is the answer but we built it chose to build it up in many other places simply because Wayne didn't have the capacity and they didn't and there's a lot of economics involved in it that building a physical plant finding the right people and they were looking for people with composite experience in people companies that had worked with composites before they went that route once they figured out how to make the supply train work I think there were probably some offsets that occurred about some balance of trade offsets occurred in that thing today's world that's a huge part of how you build anything is if we're gonna have international customers we'd like to have the ability to do some training now unfortunately what you find is that when you go to somebody else's house that sometimes we're learning about your design occurs then you would like and maybe you don't have control of your documentation as well as you thought you did because the rules are not the same in their house as they are in your house and so that happens what was my point favorite wanting to fly I'm gonna adjust that two different ways because to the 707 will always hold a soft spot in my heart the triple 7 program was the best flight test program I've ever been involved in we did it right we delivered it on time which was unheard of we did tons and tons and tons of simulation through iron bird and through big electronic simulator or what cell simulation is integration laboratories we integrate the wire runs that all of the optics all of the avionics so we've had flown the airplane in simulation for a couple years before we through the meadow and not to say there were problems because there's always always discoveries first Sol's I did in triple7 ended up on my back and fix that but it that program just was was great now and don't quote me on this but I can also tell you that a very senior person when the 787 program came along said we can't afford to do that again now somebody would say if you had only done that again you might have been closer to on time it also could have said if you to listen to your to your engineers and your designers and not to the marketers that you would have realized that the schedule that you delivered on was pretty close to the schedule they told you what's gonna deliver on what do I plant weekends I have a I like a lot of airport bums I have a friend that has a 180 - I've never owned an airplane because my wife has horses in fact we have a new horse coming that I'm gonna name skylane as a matter of fact because I could have bought at least two of them by now put that - they are so yeah I fly 182 on weekends I live in a little town and called Twisp Washington which is about a hundred mile air miles north-northeast of Seattle in the mountains it's cross-country skiing mecca it is five hours by car to get to Seattle it's an hour by air by 180 - except that you've got to go across some really nasty terrain and in the wintertime really nasty ice machine so Wow yeah it's and it's a great place to live in people have asked you why do you live there and I said because they said 850 850 people why do you live here I said 850 people but I can drive to the airport and count on one hand the number of cars I passed in 90 miles [Laughter] so is this schizophrenic I come down here to work you bet it's schizophrenic I come in here usually able to start laughing someplace in my drive to Long Beach that say wow and they think they're having a good time so anyway that's what I do it you know in the beauty of being retired is you can say no to things and did you mean retired is that you can say yes to things and you can you people come to you because I'm not through that I've done a lot of things and I've been able to transfer that knowledge as much as I can to people I make suggestions I don't give direction how about other people give direction and if I don't like the direction I can choose to play or not play it's not a bad way of a place to be and if it's too much like work then I don't come so yeah so that's me that's who I am that's what I do i I do some other de are work but it's you know I feel like I still still can add 2 plus 2 and get 4 so I'm okay and occasionally I work they work with people like Pete and that's always handy and we've known each other for a great number of years and he's had my back and I've had his from time to time and been able to live up live until about it sometimes sometimes what's the des moines design-build process is what you're basically asking there is the requirement they take the requirements and they say okay what's the airplane look like that would do that many times they have an airplane that'll they'll do a market study usually and say there's this hole in the market where there's demand and the aircraft that are filling there that that part of the market have these specs can we beat those specs given today's technology and so they'll go that way and then they'll still do a Peter it's a paper airplane process for another until there's a customer and then when and the Board of Directors has to agree to spend the money on joint after that part of the market and then the customers come in and they buy it they put money in when there's a business and so they're not going to build anything that somebody's not going to buy so they have to have pretty firm commitments and so that's the getting started part and then this is designed about that integration what do you want that airplane to be what type of systems what's he going to do and you see it's the arrow that drives it arrow and propulsion and then once you've got the arrow model and usually a Windtunnel workup CFD to wind tunnel and to see if somebody has an engine it'll fit sometimes the engine companies have to build an engine and scratch the engine programs are every bit as big as an airplane program for us and in today's engines probably worth every bit as complex and sometimes more no I mean they're squeezing every drop of fuel that they can out of those engines now that make them efficient and it's entered effects operability and maintainability rolls-royce's certainly found that out in spades so no engine on this 87 its adversely affected the h7 program for all the customers that have rolls-royce engines so the the he said there was a comment was the that the this large airplane flew just like the simulator by one of the pilots on the airplane said seeing it just just like the simulator well that may be true but and I think it did I mean really it was pretty transparent to the fact that it was different than a 400 that's the other than the fact that he it was difficult to make it go fast and it burned a lot of gas [Applause] [Music] thank you for watching Peninsula seniors out and about I'm Betty Wheaton see you next time [Music] you

Channel: PeninsulaSrsVideos

Views: 18,731

Keywords: Boeing Dreamlifter, Boeing 747-400, test pilot, cargo plane, documentary, aircraft history, flying, aerospace, crash, Edwards Air Force Base, Airbus Beluga XL, large body freighter, Boeing Dreamliner 787, flight test, first flight video, Betty Wheaton, Western Museum of Flight, Evergreen, A-6, Vietnam, air museum, design, engineering, Peninsula Seniors Videos, Palos Verdes, Virgin Galactic

Id: pPdh1iABqY4

Length: 78min 34sec (4714 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 07 2019