The Douglas Legacy by Mike Machat

[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 we could not have asked for a more authoritative source for this morning's celebrity lecture subject Mike Mashhad is a longtime official Donald Douglas McDonnell Douglas company artist whose work is known throughout the industry and the world additionally he is a noted historian and published author who has agreed to share some of his insights and memories about this remarkable company and its founder ladies and gentlemen Mike Michaud [Applause] thank you for attending this morning I am honored beyond words to see so many great Douglas mcdonnell-douglas and Boeing employees I see friends familiar faces out there I need to clarify one thing this is being billed as the history of Douglas if I were to properly do the history of Douglas we'd all be here till next Thursday so this is an overview of the great company and we'll talk about a lot of the significant airplanes and so on we're gonna have a question and answer period I know we have a lot of veterans we have some a for pilots if I get some specs wrong or a date wrong we can discuss that at the end I would appreciate it if you would just bear with me on that but there's a lot of facts and figures and we'll go ahead and get started before we talk about the company I thought it would be a good idea to just take a minute to show you how I wound up at this podium this morning there's a little bit of a story to that the year was 1956 I just joined the service and I was taking flying lessons it was a very significant year I just so loaded in helicopters and something I loved doing more than anything else in the world was drawing airplanes this is a Lockheed Constellation we didn't have spellcheck in 1956 so sorry about that but a very pivotal event happened that summer my father took a trip to Miami Florida for business and came home on a brand new Douglas dc-7 B golden Falcon Eastern Airlines and I was very impressed I thought this is really cool and he brought me something from that trip he took photos going up the boarding stair back before jetways if you remember those and he brought me a print it was a lithograph of the airplane flying over Miami Beach drawn by I didn't know the name it just said G . Okimoto I was mesmerised I was like what is this you saw my constellation and I I couldn't believe that a human being had done something so beautiful the lettering it was perfect the lines were straight I said dad what is this my father said well this is a painting of the year of the airplane I flew home on done by an artist who works for the company that builds the airplane it's way out in California and I remember I was nine years old I remember thinking that's his job I have to do that and so the story began I wanted to work in a big Factory in California I only knew two things about California back that I should have mentioned I was born and raised in Long Island New York lost my accent in the service but I only knew two things about California Disneyland and Edwards Air Force Base not necessarily in that order and then all the big companies that were out there Lockheed in North American and Douglas and I thought that's what I have to do when I was 12 I wrote a letter what else what else do you do when you want to be a aviation artist I wrote to mr. Douglas and I said dear dear mr. Douglas someday when I grow up I want to work for your company and I sent him a picture of a dc-8 I got this letter in return from Hugh gay goes head of PA Santa Monica mr. Douglas liked your pictures so much we're going to send you lithographs and we certainly hope you realize your dreams when you grow up it was a long and circuitous route but in 1977 I hired into the presentation's department and worked my way up to staff illustrator that is my real hair I borrowed the glasses from Elton John I was privileged to work in the presentations Department for better part of eight years and then as a freelance illustrator supporting the company for another five years I call it the greatest greatest part of my career it was just a dream come true obviously things changed with the company I chose to leave and start my own business in 1984 but I always supported them and to this day still have very dear friends who were from that era so having told you that story I would like to launch into an overview of the great company it all begins with this man right here Donald wills Douglas born in Brooklyn New York fascinated with mechanics and airplanes mechanical things and aerosol airplanes wound up as a midshipman in Annapolis at the Naval Academy and the story goes that he was really into building model airplanes and flying them off the roof of the dormitory and one Sunday morning he was flying his models and one of them hit the head of an admiral and he was no longer a midshipman and manapua at Annapolis now whether this is true or not I'm going with it because I like the story but I've heard this many many times and he wind up graduating MIT with a degree in aeronautical engineering and working for a company back east called Glen L Martin he had two other cohorts as young designers at that time you may recognize the names Larry Bell and Dutch Kindleberger both of those gentlemen went on to greatness with their own companies Bell and North American Douglas came out west and began his company with the Davis Douglas Company in 1920 and the date that I use personally to launch the beginning of the Douglas Aircraft Company is July of 1921 the Douglas company was formed this is a movie set movie lot on Wilshire Boulevard in Santa Monica the first home of the company that's a dt2 torpedo bomber they're in the foreground and here we have a picture of mr. Douglas in the cockpit with the moustache the cloud ster was the first real airplane of the company it was used by a san diego-la airline shuttling back and forth between those two cities it was a passenger airplane and kind of significant that the first airplane done was built carried passengers because that's really where the name of the company took hold Douglas has had a long association with the United States Navy this is the dt2 torpedo bomber and of course we have the a4 sitting outside this is there's a direct lineage to douglas working with the navy in those early years and all the way up to actually today with the t45 goshawk trainer in 1924 a very significant event took place for airplanes left santa monica in march of 24 to fly around the world it had never been done these were called the world cruisers here we see him on wheels they were also equipped with floats one airplane was lost during the trip it took six months 750 flying hours and lo and behold three airplanes completed the trip and that is why you see on the Douglas logo the three airplanes flying around the world so the slogan became first around the world and Douglas became a household word in 1924 the fact that these men were able to achieve that there were Navy ships stationed along the way that again think about this this is well before GPS or AI NS or anything they use the compass where the demarcation is on the compass were every 10 degrees and they have lines painted on the tail for wind drift and they got around the world navigating by dead reckoning think about that you know Herculean accomplishment Douglas dolphin Douglas always has a fascination with water he had many boats and yachts in his day and the sea planes were always a big part of it I put this photo in here just because it looks cool this is the Catalina steamer in the background and the the dolphin at the pier at San page or just one of the neat photos from that time period 1933 or so that same year the dc2 took a flight very significant airliner during the Depression this young lady here Shirley Temple captivated the country with her acting and singing skills and a movie called bright eyes featuring a douglas dc-2 this is the good ship lollipop is remember that song and suddenly Douglas was becoming well-known in the field here's the great man with his new Buick at Santa Monica that's a dc-3 in the hangar and this is where things really take off no pun intended by World War two Douglas was producing a variety of different airplanes we have here a montage let's start at the bottom the b23 dragon a26 invader going clockwise c-47 skytrain c-54 Skymaster douglas b18 bolo upper right-hand corner the dauntless remember the Battle of Midway the b19 the world bomber largest airplane in the world at that time and in the lower right hand corner the b-17 Flying Fortress now wait a minute this is a talk about Douglas what's a Boeing airplane doing in a Douglas talk well ladies and gentlemen this is the crux of the great man Donald wills Douglas one of his best friends was a guy named Bill Boeing during the world during World War 2 the war effort needed ramping up of American industrial strength and Boeing and Douglas got together and Douglas said I'm gonna build a plant in Long Beach and we are gonna build b-17s under license and that became the beginning of Douglas Long Beach surprises a lot of people when I first hired in a lot of the older hands always called it the bomber Factory never understood that we were building dc-10s bomber factory b-17 Long Beach California plant was built in 1941 the dc-3 first airplane to make a profit carrying passengers a little bit of trivia I don't know a lot of people realize that the wing of the dc-3 was designed by an engineer named Jack Northrop anybody heard him he was working with Douglas in association with the Douglas company working for Douglas up until 1939 when he left the company to start his own operation which went on to greatness in its own way but the point I want to make here is that an airliner became a transport during world war ii the fame c-47 which General Eisenhower considered one of the five great machines that helped America win the war and then we have the c-54 which went the other way a transport used during the Berlin Airlift bringing in nearly half a million tons of coal and food during that situation in 1948 and the c-54 went on to become the dc4 airliner I've always got a question was there ever dc5 why yes there was they built 12 of them it did not go into production because of the war effort but it's very significant and why it was a high wing twin-engine airplane this particular airplane was nicknamed Rover and it was owned by Douglas his good friend Bill Boeing can you imagine today Boeing buying a Douglas Aircraft is for private transportation but this is one of 12 built also significant there was one airline that used them and that was KLM and that gives KLN the distinction of flying every Douglas production airplane from the dc2 to the md-11 all the way to the end one airline flew em all Kom dc-6 we call this the thoroughbred powered by four pratt & whitney r-2800 engines this is the airplane that put long-range air travel on the map pressurized about a 300 mile an hour cruise speed coast-to-coast with one stop across the US first international flights but the dc-6 created passenger travel when I talked to school groups I always asked how many people flew in an airplane today and most all the kids hands go up and I say you realize if I had asked the same question in 1948 when this airplane was brand new out of a hundred people three hands would go up only 3% of the American population had flown and this is the airplane that changed that dc-7 here we see the seven seas which was a play on word for the seven continents the first true intercontinental airliner 355 mile our top speed and this brought air travel up to the jet age this airplane flew in the 55 57 58 time period and this was the queen of the skies at that time now parked outside we have the a4 Skyhawk and I'd like to talk a little about that what you see on the screen is a he used to call him sketches I call it genius this is an RG smith drawing which was created for the rollout of the very last sky Hawk in February 1979 but this is where our G and I came into the picture together I was the new kid assigned to work in the presentations department supporting his office and this was our first project together this is the roll out of the last airplane they made gold foil etchings this was the sketch that our G made showing the a4 M the TA forge a two seater and the prototype XA four D in the background that started a long association our G was a lifelong friend and I was deeply honored to have worked with him and for him this is the same model that's marked outside a four d one and let's talk a little of why the airplane looks the way it does it's basically an engine with wings and a cockpit powered originally by a Wright j65 about 80 200 pounds of thrust you look at the size of the engine relative the airplane and here's the fun fact of the a4 the wingspan is 26 feet six inches that's the wingspan the wing area on an a4 is less than the same area of the tail of an f-14 Tomcat think about that but that wingspan is significant why is it 26 feet six inches and Hyneman was determined to build an airplane to meet a Navy requirement that two of them could be towed past each other on the hangar deck of an essex class carrier without the wings having to be folded and that distance was 26 feet six inches the wingspan of the a4 this is the cutaway of the a4 where we talked about the structure look at the size of the cockpit the engine and the wings and that's where the name scooter came from the man behind it edie Hyneman pictured with his great airplane on the ramp and was originally hired by Northrop and stayed with Douglas in the split in 1939 as did RG Smith and here's a picture of it at the rollout of the last airplane we tried to make three thousand and we built two thousand nine hundred and sixty but the last airplane rolled out in February was painted in the colors of all the countries that used it this airplane eventually went to the Marines as an a4 M let's look at some of the other airplanes that Heineman was responsible for the sky Raider a four D ad two-seat and an single-seat sky Raider was used in Korea and Vietnam technically the first supersonic airplane tug was built although in in a dive but the f4 D sky ray the batwing carrier air defence fighter the a 3 D sky warrior referred to as the whale and just for definitive purposes this is the largest heaviest airplane that operated off aircraft carriers we get a lot of our a five guys and f-14 guys to talk about gross weights and whatever but this a three D was the largest heaviest operational carrier based airplane anybody know what the largest airplane ever to fly off an aircraft carrier was one time in a series of tests c-130 very good I should know what this crowd absolutely the crimson test tube the d558 - one sky streaked another Heineman design that's gene may Douglas test pilot and a Marine pilot Marion Carl on the lakebed at edwards with the sky streaked following on with the d558 - to sky rocket 3 were built one is in antelope valley at the college up there one is a Chino and the third one which is this airplane being air-launched with a rocket is at the Smithsonian in Washington DC why it's the first airplane to fly Mach two NACA test pilot Scott Crossfield on 20 November 1953 took this airplane to its absolute limit and reached twice the speed of sound another significant name and one of my personal favorites I only wish I'd gotten to meet him build Bridgman who put Douglas on the map as one of the few contractor test pilots a civilian test pilot setting world records in a company airplane that's not even possible today but he took the sky rocket and of course the x3 into the history books and was a great great man Douglas x3 through no fault of its own what I call the best-looking worst flying explain of all time it never had the engines it was designed for made 59 flights total the only one was built and it survived it's currently at the Air Force Museum at Dayton Ohio an amazing looking airplane and I always tried to talk about the bright side it did not live up to its design potential but it is the first airplane ever to have an air-conditioned cockpit I always have to go with the positive douglas c-130 3 cargo-master which was an evolution of the Globemaster series turboprop-powered seen here at Long Beach and if you look at the fuselage can you imagine what cargo this might have carried this was designed to carry ICBM missiles coast-to-coast into the different bases the 133 cargo-master at Long Beach now this is where the story changes the dc-8 came about in the mid 50s first flight was 1958 May 30th and Santa Monica where all the prop airliners had been built no longer had a runway sufficient for jets the whole operation was moved to Long Beach in the background you see the 133 the 124 a little bit too small on the screen to see but be 66 and there's even a c-47 park there on the ramp I always get a kick out of showing this to the kids the school groups that I talked to because they think the airplane is on fire and I say true or false jet airliners always took off in full afterburner the answer is no that smoke is a product of water injection where they would inject a distilled water into the burner sections of the j57 engines and it produced smoke but it was extra thrust on takeoff before fan jets came of age that's the United DC taking off out of Long Beach one of my favorite all-time stories and I'm going to share it with you today back in the Sierra Douglas was personal friends was just about every airline president Juan Trippe Pat Patterson and here we have Eddie Rickenbacker the World War 1 ace who was heading up Eastern Airlines the famous story is that Boeing had the - 80 prototype of the 707 already flying and Douglas dc-8 was still on the drawing board and it was very frustrating for the company and Rickenbacker called up Douglas - Santa Monica's Doug Boeing just guaranteed the SFC specific fuel consumption on the j57 on their 707 can you do the same on the dc-8 and Doug said no Eddie I'm not gonna give you any numbers until we flight test the airplane Rickenbacker said good you just sold 25 dc-8 and that just goes to the heart of the integrity of Donald Douglas and the way business was conducted back then it was literally a phone call and multi-million dollar jet order happens right over the phone this is my all-time favorite color scheme I told you about my dad's trip on Eastern dc-7 so I've always had a connection this is the golden Falcon scheme designed by the world-renowned industrial designer Raymond Loewy the reason I'm sharing this with you is that in a period of 18 months this design went through nine different changes so I call that machette slaw no two airplanes are ever painted exactly the same but it was honest to gosh metallic gold paint used in that cheat stripe which was a maintenance nightmare but just goes to the heart of how airplanes were designed and painted back in in the beginning of the jet age very significant airplane out of Long Beach the dc9 this is ship one prototype and the dc9 design evolved over many many years winding up with the I still call it a super 80 I don't use the md80 term too often the mad dog but this is the dc9 super 80 my favorite airplane of all here all the projects I worked on at the company because it's the only machine that I ever got to experience from the announcement by John Brizendine our president at the time launching the program doing the paintings and illustrations for it and then getting to fly on the airplane about three years later so that was a great thrill to see this from literally the first piece of metal cut and then my wife and I made a special trip on a weekend on PSA to go to San Francisco just to fly on my airplane Douglas also built missiles this is the nike hercules and this is an amazing story there are a lot of sites around California if you drive around and you see Army and Navy armories on the corner in the middle of a neighborhood and you wonder why that's there those are former Nike bases lax had a huge complex 24 launchers and an area north Pershing Drive some of the buildings are still there today the operation is called jet pets it's a processing center for resources and circus animals but some of those original buildings from that Nike site are still there on Pershing drive right at the end of the runway and anybody want to take a guess howmany Nike missiles were produced in Huntington Beach 25,000 and they were the first line of defense surface tear during the Cold War from 1955 through 1974 we had one in our neighborhood nobody even knew it 14 nuclear warheads underneath and it was next to a school rec center but the Nike sites were peppered all across the country and God bless them that was run by the army they were literally the first line of defense during the Cold War if anything had happened another very significant machine built in Huntington Beach the four missile flying today much more modern iteration as the Delta think of an airline that I'm sorry an airplane company that built passenger planes jet fighters bombers cargo airplanes missiles all in one operation rare at that time it was Lockheed and contra also built all those different kinds of airplanes just an amazing time in aerospace history April of 1967 the company became McDonnell Douglas here's what Long Beach looked like at that time remember that G period Okimoto on that litho that my dad gave me well that was George Okimoto the chief illustrator I got to meet him and work with him in the presentations Department and he was an amazing talent here's a dc-10 going through cap three in all-weather landing testing he painted in acrylic and was just a marvel I learned so much from him he was a wonderful wonderful artist here's his rendition of my favorite airplane the super 80 and here's my cutaway of the airplane done well before the thing ever flew this was to show customers what it was like now you notice the cabin 165 seats why do I know that because I had to repaint the upholstery 165 seats but you notice that the cabin is divided in blue and gold section and I got that idea for my dad's dc-7 that's the way Eastern painted the airplane they alternated every every three or four rows was gold and blue I said I'm gonna use that so you see how it's all connected this was the first piece of art that I ever won an award this was best of category in the illustration west competition in 1981 and so this is the piece that allowed me to say award-winning aviation artist painting in water-based wash this is I just like to share with you some of the projects that we did there in presentations this is a kc-10 refueling a f15 Strike Eagle looks plausible there was just one little catch neither of these airplanes had flown when this painting was done the purpose of what we did in presentations was to convey to the customer in this case the United States Air Force the products that we make a long beach built kc-10 a st. Louis built strike eagle and RG was my gave me a nice critique on the painting but this is what we did there in presentations another aspect you're seeing finished art this is how it begins these are the comps and I always love this story because at 10:30 in the morning my boss Hank Montez called me down to his office he says I got a project for you they need an illustration comp which is a sketch by one o'clock for a staff meeting so I knew two things number one I was going to eat lunch and number two I wasn't going to use oil paint this believe it or not as colored pencil and the headline was done by the graphics and so this is a brochure mock-up for the dc-10 stretch which became guess what the md-11 but this was done in 1979 that's the finish so you can see the difference from going from the sketch the rough sketch the engineers I was always very very proud of the fact that presentations was part of the engineering department and we worked very closely guys would come down with blueprints to say hold it don't finish that painting we just changed the aileron hinge you know the flap track fairing is 2 inches longer don't hold on and so we would we would work directly with the engineers and we spoke airplane in a very very loving way this is kind of neat anybody familiar with the Russian Wiggy caspian sea monster the wing and ground effect vehicle does this look somewhat similar Strategic Air Command markings launching a tomahawk right but it was a job ticket it was a project and I had to do it and so there we went I always say it it needed more engines but they didn't listen to me so this was done in about 1981-82 timeframe just recently I was dragged and screaming into the world of Instagram by my older daughter so I now have an Instagram site and I decided this is long declassified long since Declassified so I decided to post this on my Instagram page it went viral I had four hundred and sixty likes in the first hour or something it went berserk and guess where most of the comments came from Russia this is a true story I get one comment in Cyrillic I have to go to Google Translate to find out what it's saying and the comment from a Russian guy in saint-petersburg was as follows I translated it from Russian it said you have picture we have real one true story okay back to the a4 one of my favorite all-time projects was this brochure cover for the 1981 team brochure celebrating the 35th anniversary of the team now why is this interesting well I've sitting in my office I just had the job ticket and I'm thinking about how do we show they wanted to show the first airplane in the hellcat and the newest airplane the a forward together flying over the emblem of the Blue Angels and I was sitting there wondering how I could do this get a knock on the door in my office and I turn around it's Harrigan company's story and he says Mike I understand you just got assigned the the Blue Angels cover yes Harry says you can't paint it until you fly in the airplane this is an assignment for my job are you kidding me this is B at El Centro at 3 o'clock on Friday check in with Dale Dale SPECT our tech rep down there and you're gonna be flying with the team right we went out to the practice area this is Randy Clark in the solo airplane sitting there at Centerpoint in the middle of the desert watching the team actually fly the show it was an incredible experience we were so proud to support the team flying the a4f let me talk a little about this airplane this is a much more powerful machine than the original as you see outside pratt and whitney j57 thousand two hundred pounds of thrust with all the tactical systems removed from the airplane the the thrust to weight ratio was approaching one to one so that's what gave this the air show performance that it had and gosh the pilots love flying these airplanes Harry told me an interesting fact that when the team was photographed the only photos ever allowed to be released were when the formation was perfect so if an airplane was just slightly out of alignment or whenever you never saw those photos in the brochures look at the trailing edges of the wing airplanes two and two and three it's perfection separation at the tips about 36 inches and they're doing four to five hundred miles an hour flying aerobatics right I was fortunate to fly in this airplane with Randy Clark who that year actually was narrator this is number seven Blue Angels number seventy a for Jay one of Randy's favorite maneuvers was to hit the gear switch on the roll the gear retracts forward so once the weight comes off the oligos and the squats which senses the airplanes in the air gear snaps up and you're sitting there at 14 feet radar altitude which I watched on the panel all the way to the end of the runway where he goes into a 6g pull and then you wind up at the top looking something like that and the question I always get is do they really fly that close together yeah this is coming down the backside of a loop and I remember looking at that bar and that you see right next to the center post there I said wow Randy this is really cool it goes well yeah but we're normally not up this high when we do these maneuvers you've seen those posters in the gift shops that say success and perseverance and you know you know they have a photo with some term off this is called trust the slot and the wing airplanes the solo airplanes land in reverse order with the lead touching down last in formation crossing the runway at about 120 miles an hour good trick and they make it look easy so this is what the Blue Angels is all about at that same time period the YC 15 had just won a fly off competition against Boeing's twin-engine YC 14 for the a MST the medium-range cargo transport you see the flaps in the extended position this is a shot taken on the ramp at Edwards and we're gonna talk about why that was so significant it was an amazing airplane a quick story about the people at Douglas Marvin marks was the program manager I was working on night shift that was the new kid we were working on this proposal night shift normally Norley doesn't meet program managers right we're punching a time clock we're making tech art when this airplane won that competition Marvin came to our department walked around shook everyone's hand and gave everyone why c15 tie tack that's the spirit of this company we were family he was acknowledging all the people that helped him win his proposal and I will never forget that as long as I live that's what Douglass was all about it was about people the last military airplane from Long Beach is the t45 is the last project that I worked on the goshawk still flying today as the primary jet qualifying airplane for carrier pilots in the US Navy production was moved to st. Louis in the Boeing era but this was the last military airplane from Long Beach and the c-17 is the last military airplane built at Long Beach total of 279 c-17 Globemaster threes were produced ladies and gentlemen bittersweet to share this with you but think about this this airplane was the last manned fixed-wing aircraft produced in the state of California we have Northrop Grumman with their amazing unmanned aircraft and right down the row here we have Robinson helicopter rotary wing but the last fixed wing man production aircraft in the state of California was the c-17 Globemaster 3 I'd like to close with a little bit about the Douglas sign which is currently in Long Beach but how many of you know that it began in El Segundo this is the original iteration of the the fly Douglas sign with oh gosh and a for the around the world three airplanes theme is still there with the dc-7 dc-8 type stylized airplanes and then when it was moved to Long Beach it was modified into the McDonnell Douglas logo with the SST and the rocket and this was the sign from the mid-60s all the way to 1980 in 1980 those same letters were manipulated into fly DC jets and you notice the JL dc-10 the 40 out there is - its tail why is that final building 84 that the top of that tail there cleared the the bottom of the door by a couple of feet and then the vertical stabilizers were added by crane outside on the ramp I was enjoyed watching that this was the plant during the heyday in 1972 dc-10s on the production line just two weeks ago I flew in a helicopter with the LA County Sheriff and launched to the north out of Long Beach and ladies and gentlemen this is the same scene today Douglass Business Park if you notice to the left of the image is a traffic circle and in the middle of that traffic circle is a pylon with a globe and three biplanes it's a replica of the original globe and world cruisers that sat atop the company headquarters on Ocean Park Boulevard in Santa Monica for many many years the streets in the Douglass Business Park are named for the Douglas executives so there's Heineman highway and Wharram way and many other company execs that are memorialized but those final assembly buildings that you see at the top are currently leased by mercedes-benz and that is the West Coast processing center for the automobiles coming in to the ports of Long Beach in LA I hope you've enjoyed it I'll be glad to take some questions ladies general you've been a wonderful audience thank you very much thank you question was where was the Douglass presentations Department we were in building two up in the corner they call it the Attic you'd come in through building 35 the engineering building with all the glorious RG Smith paintings in the lobby and everything and then you'd go all the way to the back go up a few more steps and you were in one of the original factory buildings the department when I hired in was 152 people and let me spend I think it's a great question thank you let me let me spend a minute on that it was like being in Disneyland we had a silkscreen group making displays for the Farnborough air show and and the paris air show and and all these incredible displays with the huge tables with the big photos and all this stuff we had an airbrush group doing the air line markings we had an editorial group doing all the brochures we had graphic design we had staff illustrators we had the tech art group which was incredible the the back in the day before digital illustration they were inking drawings by hand and to me it was fine art watching these these artisans work it was incredible so there was all these different disciplines and the common thread is we all loved airplanes we were all a bunch of airplane geeks and we couldn't couldn't wait to get to work every morning it was just an amazing place how did the culture change when McDonald bought Douglas what time do we close [Music] listen I have to be I have to be objective here aerospace was going through wrenching changes during the Vietnam War the consolidation which now led us to one company building airliners out of five I mean think about that at the end of world war two you had Martin Lockheed Douglas Boeing and convair all building airliners in late 1940s and today you've got one company there was a major shift the st. Louis mentality they built Navy Jets we built airliners I I have just you know there were there were times when it was it was challenging but let me answer that question on an up note anybody here familiar with the Boeing 787 Dreamliner it's Boeing's new airplane its composite it's a magnificent machine it gives me great joy to tell you that many of the lead engineers on that airplane came from Long Beach and that airplane is considered by the people in the airline industry as the first McDonnell Douglas Boeing airliner so god bless him up their dc-10 accidents sometimes in history things pile up in a way that is very very unfortunate there were three dc-10s lost in a five-month period in 1979 it was a turning point for the company the first one was an American Airlines accident in Chicago with a mechanical issue with the airplane I won't go into detail here but it was a design question with the airplane the second and third dc-10s were lost by human error but the fact that the name of the airplane was in the news I remember waking up to both the second and third accident to my clock radio in the morning and another dc-10 had gone down and it tarnished the reputation of the airplane but I have to tell you 500-plus were built the air forces flying 59 kc-10s they've never had a problem with them it was just an unfortunate very very tragic happenstance with three accidents in a very concentrated time what was the impression on the ploy is we were walking around with buttons on our lapels saying we're proud of the dc-10 and I don't mean to make light of the tragedy certainly but we understood the mechanics of what was happening I'm not going to get into how media takes these kinds of stories and runs with it that's not appropriate for right now but we were under attack I remember coming into Monday after the Chicago accident there were news helicopters flying around the kanger doors were closed it was it was like being under siege and again I want to keep this appropriate for the for the group but it was a tough time for the company and we gave it our all I was the last person hired by Doug McGregor who was the first person enacted to start an art department at Santa Monica I thought that was pretty cool and he said Mike we'd love to have your board I have some good news and bad news good news is you got the job bad news you starting a night shift and I went yes this was the greatest training grant thank you so much for the question this is wonderful it was the greatest training ground I could have asked for could you take these blueprints down to litho could you take these drawings down at a print shop could you go up here to the engineering office could you talk I learned the ropes from the bottom we worked from 442 to 112 was our shift and as the new kid I had to go get dinner and it was like they're paying me to do this I can't believe it wonderful wonderful people Howard Drury was our Foreman and what was the purpose of nightshift the purpose of nightshift was to get all the work done for the salesmen that we're leaving on proposal trips around the world and so date shift would take the job to a certain point there were times when nightshift guys would literally get in a car and drive to LAX to hand a box of proposal brochures to a salesman getting on the Pan Am or TWA plane going to Cairo wherever he was going we worked under very very tight deadlines it was the training great was kind of like boot camp it was kind of like basic training and I loved every second of it was fantastic first company to make an aircraft a metal skin we get into aviation trivia here technically the first metal airliner was the Yonkers f13 so you know the Klaussner was was fabric and would you get into a lot of you know what exact date might have happened but the first all-metal low wing twin engine airliner dc1 prototype was a significant machine and that was 1933 the Ford tri-motor was was all-metal in 1929 so a little bit a little bit tricky but question was could I share some thoughts on being an illustrator back in those days compared to the people I know in the industry today is that it yeah there's one key word to explain the difference between what I did and what's happening today the word is digital and and I don't mean to make light of it think about this I was making manual gosh we were making view graphs and flow charts and inking drawings and painting paintings when airplanes were flowing with round gauges with needles that move to a number and that's the way it was in that time period now you've got digitally generated design the airplanes are flown digitally it makes total sense to have digital illustration because guess what when a change is made to the design of the airplane it's one move and the brochures change the procedures change the artwork changes everything changes because it's digital so what I'm alluding to here is I accept the fact that the world has changed but when I went to art school way way back in the 60s I went to Pratt Institute in New York to become an artist that's what we were gonna do I was going to become an artist today I'm a natural media artist we squeezed gooey stuff out of tubes and we spread it on a piece of canvas with a brush is this archaic Stone Age technology but we make our art using traditional methods the digital artists today let's talk about that presentations 165 people digital art group today's about 10 because that's all you need so progress hurts to say you know those days are gone I was just so privileged to be a part of it but it was a definitely a different time I always say that saying you know the term paste-up artists which was a production artist back in those days you might as well be saying Lamplighter you know coal shovel or on a railroad I mean it's that it's that far back so the question was talking about video services and this kind of if I can expand we were one cog in a big wheel we worked with the photo department I remember Jim Kline a lot of great people who job was to do whatever had to be done together as a team I remember one time I got a call from the Goodyear rubber company in Akron Ohio they were gonna make a mural in their Lobby of a kc-10 landing on Goodyear tires and we had to get a shot on runway 3-0 as a kc-10 was coming back from a flight test at the exact second that the tires hit the runway and created all the smoke and they were gonna make a billboard or a mural sized illustration from that so I called Jim and he got his team out there we coordinated with the airport and it took it was a dance of maybe eight or ten people to coordinate it and get a team out there and they shot it and lo and behold we got this beautiful photo of you remember the kc-10 at the center landing gear so you had the two outboards and it was just hitting the runway all of us smoked in action and and it was Juno flaps her down it was just incredible and about a week later I get a call from the rep I was working with he said why oh my god that's so much better than is there anything we can do to say thanks for that great effort that you made and I said yeah I'd never been up in the blimp so I took Shari and we went down there to - off the Harbor Freeway and flew in the blimp as a thank-you but just an example of how all the different departments litho and and photo and all the different members worked as a team I'm gonna turn the mic over to Cindy and let her take the program from here ladies and gentlemen thank you so much for allowing me to share this don't go anywhere because right now if you have some questions for the 2a4 pilots Doug and rich would you like to come up here yes don't how easy is it to bring a board of ship very easy as far as their blades going everybody loves bringing this airplane aboard the ship it was built to land on carriers as might as he said I can further respond to that I didn't I went through Air Force pilot training at the time and in back in the Marine Corps and before I knew it I was assigned to a squadron who's going aboard ship and now in the Navy program they get each one of the the trainers that they work with they actually go out and get some ship time I've never even seen one of these boats and so they don't worry we'll work you up with a squadron he says it's easy I'll say us after you practice so much there is you ready to go at day time it's straightforward and easy night time I don't buy it especially in zero conditions you have no motive place to go you gotta get back on the ship you don't have any other choices so yeah in the fog at night it's a little tricky but the a4 is also known to be a tanker on the couriers know if somebody got down to their last chance fuel wise then you'd have to go up and find the tanker and get some more gas so you have a few more shots at it but anyway I needless to say I love flying the plane I've flown all the models they for a B C D for Douglas e f ta for about 2,000 hours what's maintenance like yeah was that aircraft maintenance officer also as a collateral duty and I'll say this it was a pretty straightforward airplane you only had to split the fuselage if you were going to pull the engine that was ordering the annual inspections if you will the rest of time it was it's a straightforward airplane and I like to compare it when I got out of pilot training everybody wanted to fly the f4 phantom and I and I got orders for the a4 didn t know what it was at that's another story but uh turns out when my sister even got into maintenance our man-hours maintenance man-hours per flight hour was half of what the maintenance of time for with the f4 so it's we got more flight time straightforward airplane not a lot of systems it's a fantastically straightforward simple airplane to maintain these a for alpha is the first model came out about 1954 and so that's what we had Los Alamitos Naval Air Station the A's and the B's and so I guess I did fly this particular airplane back in about 1967 ditch a plane is that what she said okay I was flying the f11 Tiger Grumman supersonic jet advanced quite true in Texas and they were an older model that Blue Angels fluid but it was getting a little old and I had a disabled airplane at about 40,000 feet so I was trying to restart it when the way down didn't work ten thousand feet you've been pulling the curtain so I did that and got out okay had got drugged by the shoot a little bit but I was back flying in about a month the airplane landed nobody got hurt that was my experience joining the caterpillar Club I had none my number of landings equal the number of takeoffs fortunately I think there are some a force effect I think is airplane still flying yeah 64 years later it's still flying I think there's even a couple owned by individual people who have bought it and fixed it up and they're flying air shows I know the Brazilian Air Force I think of this Navy Air Force is still flying it of course in many many countries footed the a4 over the years there actually is a company down in Florida that has a fleet of a I think probably about ten of them still flying they got it from the Israelis and they use them the military hires in one contract to use them as simulated missile attacks or or even dogfighting you take this airplane take all the armament off of it and put the latest engine in it and it will turn just like a well he rode tell you like it's close to it like a MIG it can really turn so they still use them in some of the air combat maneuvering training but there are I think roughly around Ted I'm flying with that company and I think there's about four of them flying that are privately owned how effective as a fighter well the a4 was the primary attack bomber in Morris would probably know about 350 lost on my ship the SS Ranger we said all kinds of records in combat minute you know normally smite uses a fighter some of the other countries evidence their primary fire Israelis used it as a fighter and a bomber I think they they flew it for about 40 years up until just a couple of years ago I flew the a4 in combat in Vietnam it was I read somewhere later that the a4 was considered the most cost-effective weapons delivery system in Vietnam theater well is it typical Bob load for was it a troops in contact will go off a carry I'll take the cocaine weighs about 10,000 pounds and it can carry it's all the way in ordinance which is amazing yeah so now I think the max takeoff weight was around 24,000 pounds in order to make sure that you're still flying at the end of the bow in Vietnam we used our standard load was eight yeah eight 500-pound bombs each airplane we always went out in the flight at two and that was kind of a standard one that we would use and that was what the forward air controller and the grunts liked the best thank you for watching Peninsula seniors out and about I'm Betty Wheaton see you next time [Music]

Channel: PeninsulaSrsVideos

Views: 9,918

Rating: 4.9423075 out of 5

Keywords: Donald Douglas, Douglas Aircraft, aviation, aerospace, history, Betty Wheaton, Western Museum of Flight, Peninsula Seniors, flying, pilots, A-4, skyhawk, F-4, Phantom, fighter, jet, C-17, SST, Long Beach, McDonnell Douglas, DC-10, DC-9, Skyraider, A-1, DC-3, C-47, MD-11, MD-80, SBD Dauntless, Nike Missile, DC-8, Cold War

Id: MPPE37_MkrQ

Length: 52min 11sec (3131 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 01 2018