Stewart, Donald (Part 1)

Stewart, Donald (Part 1)

Discussion about Jack Conroy and his Pregnant and Super Guppies

University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives and Special Collections, Huntsville, Alabama

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Bilstein, Roger E.

Stewart, Donald

Part 1

[00:00:07] Roger Bilstein: Let me begin…I'd like to verify a couple stories before we start. One of them is the story that Conroy was getting a little bit low on money and didn't have a NASA contract yet. He shored the inside of the pregnant guppy up with wooden timbers and flew it out here to Huntsville and landed out here at the Redstone Arsenal airstrip, and Von Braun got in and flew around with it.

[00:00:35] Donald Stewart: I thought I might have some pictures of that. Well, it all goes back quite a bit further than that. There was a guy by the name of Lee Mansdorf that had bought all of Pan Am and I believe TWA's C-97 Stratocruisers. C-97 is the military designation of them, and Stratocruisers is the commercial designation. He stored all these in the Mojave Desert because he didn't have any real big problems with corrosion. He had a young guy that was working for him or with him or a friend who also worked with Hughes. I don't remember his name. But Jack Conroy came in and wanted to start a commercial airline with his Stratocruisers. So this young guy—this is in 1960—this young guy just off the top of his head says, “Well, a way to start something to get to the commercial airline end of it would be make a missile carrying stage out of these Stratocruisers.

[00:02:13] RB: This is not Mansdorf, this is the other guy you’re thinking of...

[00:02:16] Bill….I’ll think of his name…I want to say [Schuman?], but I don’t believe that’s right. Then Conroy thought about it and still hot to make this commercial airline, non-scheduled commercial airline arrangement. This kid, there was a guy name of Walters—a retired Boeing employee who worked with Mansdorf—that took this idea and said, “That’s a pretty good damned idea,” and made up some sketches and drawings, and I think I have most of those here…He and Mansdorf came to Marshall to talk with Marshall because we were responsible for all the stages.

[00:03:20] RB: What year was this? Do you remember?

[00:03:22] DS: 1960.

[00:03:25] RB: That was really early on then that they were doing that.

[00:03:28] DS: I said there's some history on this. A lot of people don't really know, and if you want to tell the whole story, you have to get this in. I was working at Boeing in 1960—this is interesting—this is beside the point—interesting [inaudible]—I had talked to some people, put in some applications. My application got to Chrysler here. At that time, I came down to interview Julian Hamiltion who was in charge of transportation before the Cape split out and became a center of its own. Julian was working with the special transportation group who developed the transportation scheme for the land, sea and air and all this. He needed an aeronautical engineer that knew something about airplanes, so he offered me a job as a [cycling?] man to work for Chrysler and work for Jim. This was in November of 1961.

[00:04:41] DS: So about December 13th or 14th of ‘61, I was sent out to Los Angeles and UCLA’s very rudimentary open wind tunnel to observe wind tunnel tests of Pregnant Guppy. These people had a model that I think they had built in Japan that mounted in the tunnel. Really, they didn't know how to run a tunnel test. Instead of observing, I wound up being responsible for running it. We ran—when we had a lunch break that day, they actually showed me what they were going to do—we went out and got about five dollars worth of modeling clay and a roll of thread, so we could make a configuration so it looked like its aerodynamic state. After we got it pretty much concocted so we had fairly good flow with all the controllable air surfaces, we ran the test, and everything looked real good for a tough study, just a preliminary study. I left then and said, “Well, you guys, what you need to do now is go into a surface flow, use chalk or whatever you want to, to get some surface flow so you can tell what kind of surface flow you got and how efficient your laminar flow streams are for your surfaces. They said, “Yeah, we'll do this.”

[00:06:54] DS: Conroy had donated I think $200 or $300 to UCLA's aeronautical department, so that we could get the wind tunnel study run while the school was out. In that time Jack Conroy, Mike [Healy?], and Ben [Aziz?] and Kaplan—he was a structural engineer, design engineer—they said, “fine.” I left and came back to Huntsville and made my report. I guess I had [trip reports?]. The next thing I knew, they were calling in after Christmas holiday saying, “Come see what we've done.” Well, they had started the structural modification in January, and the Super Guppy was taking shape.

[00:08:03] RB: The Pregnant Guppy?

[00:08:05] DS: I mean the Pregnant Guppy was taking shape. Here's a picture of the way it looked around February or March.

[00:08:21] RB: This is the original cabin [inaudible]

[00:08:25] DS: What happened is they cut at this point here [inaudible] and here’s the original frames. When they brought it in, Conroy liked it so much, he said he was running out of money. He had begged, borrowed, stealed [sic], stoled [sic], done everything he could, just running out of money, so what he needed now is hopes of getting the contract for this thing. He ran—on the original body, on top of the original fuselage—he ran wood and steel frames or aluminum frames to stabilize this thing, so he got an experimental FAA clearance to fly the Pregnant Guppy into Huntsville.

[00:09:27] RB: This was when, early ‘62 when he was doing this?

[00:09:31] DS: This was...I would say in mid-’62. On the way in, it was a real fiasco headed into Huntsville, he had to fly a certain FAA designated route over an unpopulated area. This was sometime I guess June or July of ‘62. They came through Tulsa. They were so low on money,
one of their friends knew a friend that was with [Phillip Oil?] called him, made some personal contacts, filled the airplane up with gas and left. Oklahoma people were hot after him to get their money back for gasoline because he didn't buy it. He didn't give them a credit card or nothing. So he then arrived in Huntsville. I met him at the airport.

[00:11:28] RB: This is out here at the Redstone field?

[00:11:29] DS: Redstone Airport. This was sometime September…say…sometime around October 1st. Last week of September, first week of October.

[00:11:50] RB: How long was he down in Tulsa? A couple of months then?

[00:11:50] DS: No, he was just in Tulsa...just over night.

[00:11:57] RB: Oh, okay. This is when he flew out. He flew out then in the fall of 1962, okay.

[00:12:06] DS: The next Saturday after arriving—he spent some time here during that week—I guess it was the next Saturday, Friday or Saturday, that Dr. Von Braun came back into town. He decided to do a demonstration unbeknowning [sic] to the Marshall NASA people. He had only a very limited amount of gas. He performed his demonstration in front of Kroeger, Kramer, Dr. Von Braun, Rees, Karl Heimberg, Julian Hamilton, and myself. The crew at that time was…Jack Conroy…

[00:13:17] RB: He was a certified four engines?

[00:13:20] DS: He was a pilot. Co-pilot was…[inaudible] the flight engineer was [D’agostino?]; the mechanic with him was Bill Cuff; and...I can’t think of [inaudible] I might have some cards in here…

[00:14:25] RB: Was Goodrum out there that day?

[00:14:26] DS: No.

[00:14:29] RB: [laughs] In talking to him, I got the impression he was.

[00:14:33] DS: Well, the story's been told a number of times.

[00:14:39] RB: Were any of the people out there that day very skeptical about it going off? Marshall people?

[00:14:43] DS: Oh, yeah, Marshall...I forget the co-pilot's name, but anyway...There’s one other member that was stuck [inaudible] gas in Oklahoma. There was a boy, there was seven man crew. Jack Podesky was the co-pilot. They were very skeptical—Dr. Von Braun, Dr. Rees—were all very skeptical of the airplane, so Conroy told them, "Well, I'll give you a demonstration.” Well, he took the airplane up, flew it around, came back and landed, and then he took Julian Hamilton and Hermann Kroeger aboard the airplane for the next ride.
[00:15:42] DS: One way to demonstrate the capabilities of the airplane was if you could put— since the volume of the body was so great—one of his tricks to really demonstrate the people the controllability and stability of the airplane was to cut the number one and two engines on the port side and fly by in a straight line. He was out and Julian Hamilton was in the plane with Mr. Kroeger, so Julian Hamilton said, “Well, I'm going to show you, Mr. Kroeger, how stable this airplane is,” because Mr. Kroeger was an old test pilot from Germany, World War II. He chopped number one and number two engine. Hamilton was standing right behind Kroeger, so Conroy told Kroeger, “See, number one and number two is out.” It was still a straight flight. He showed Mr. Kroeger that he only took a thumb and a toe to hold the thing on a straight flight, which is contrary to most two engine airplanes as well as Boeing’s. Mr. Kroeger kind of wants to see the engines out there. Mr. Kroeger looked out and says, “Good God.” Then at that time, they were flying across the field according to Hamilton's account of the story.

[00:17:31] DS: Dr. Von Braun's comment was, “That reminds me of the story of the bee that doesn't fly.” [Roger Bilstein laughs] Then his next comment was, “Aww, it should do that because the airplane is nothing but a [fly and rudder?]”. Conroy came in and landed, so this really stimulated Dr. Von Braun's interest in the airplane then. When Kroeger got off the airplane, he was so excited he reverted back to his native tongue. The only thing you could understand from his conversation was “The thumb and the toe,” “The thumb and the toe.” Dr. Von Braun shook his head and got in the airplane and took off, so then he flew around.

[00:18:32] DS: Then Conroy landed and tied the airplane down and went out to get something to eat later that evening. He got together at Conroy’s motel and talked to him, possibility of NASA contracting Boeing. The next day Conroy was talking to Mr. Heimberg, and Conroy had told me and Julian Hamilton that he needed some gas, and we mentioned it to Mr. Heimberg. Heimberg asked him, says, “I understand you need gas.” Conroy said, “Yes, I could use a little bit.” He told myself to take care of it, so I talked to Ken Hill. Ken Hill had the commercial airport send a truck out. Conroy filled the airplane up—24,000 gallons. The last time GAO was here that I remember was still trying to explain how we used 24,000 gallons of aviation fuel in the test stands [Roger Bilstein laughs]. There never was a contract about…

[00:20:06] DS: Brainerd Holmes, Dr. Siemens—Bob Siemens is now Secretary of the Air Force. All NASA headquarters was totally against air transportation. They figured out business was missiles and space exploration. Jack Conroy kept telling everybody, Dr. Von Braun and everybody concerned, “The second word in the N-A-S-A is National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and aeronautics comes before space.” So Holmes or Siemens—I believe Siemens—finally wrote a letter—that I've got a copy of—said if Conroy ever developed this airplane and got FAA certification, Holmes or Siemens…the biggest fallacy there was the fact that he didn’t spell out what kind of certification—it said certification so it could safely operate—that he would, that NASA would consider the use of the airplane.

[00:21:38] DS: Conroy's idea then was, “Oh you know tell you what,” to develop the airplane and to get a “Part 8” certificate, which was a special certificate that crop dusters and general junk airplanes have. The certificate says that you cannot carry any cargo for hire. We went through quite a battle of six or eight months—maybe three or four months—of working all this out, fighting with Conroy. I was the project engineer on the thing, and I was fighting with Conroy and his people constantly to keep them from cutting corners and making sure that FAA considered the price of twenty-four or twenty-five million dollars, whatever the S-IV lease cost was, was the main consideration in their safety, [because?] we considered to be more valuable than men at this time. One thing that put the push on the Guppy was the fact that the S-IV test stand [blew?], and we had some problems which put the S-IV behind schedule for the Saturn I program. This added a lot of impetus to developing this special carrier. It would take eighteen hours to fly the stage to the Cape instead of eighteen days around through the canal—or twenty-one days.

[00:23:28] RB: A couple stages could save you a month.

[00:23:30] DS: We never could get the people at headquarters or KSC or any place to agree on what it costs one day of delay at the Cape. But once they started having S-IV problems, they never would say how much it cost but they sure got behind this at headquarters then. They went to FAA and requested that they allow an [inaudible] for this “Part 8” certification to allow Conroy to fly for hire because of national interest, and Conroy was allowed to charge us. I've got a copy here that you can use for his first proposal. In November, he made his first proposal in October of ‘69, Dr. Von Braun, and made his addendum to that proposal November 6th. Conroy was one thing: he was opportunist. He was the kind of guy that if you keep around he's going to keep you real honest because he wasn't an engineer, but he had a lot of common horse sense to some degree that most fighter pilots had. Conroy did hold the F-86 record from flying Los Angeles to New York; having breakfast in Los Angeles; flying to New York having lunch; and then flying back to Los Angeles and having dinner that evening at the [Skyeville?] Festival. He was quite an ego maniac to some degree.

[00:25:39] DS: In those days, the Saturn program was not “How you can't do it” but “How can you do it and get it done fast?” We went through quite an uphill thing in Pregnant Guppy. Normally, an aircraft company takes an airplane to the desert to go through flight tests carries at least four spare engines. They take a hundred percent spares. When we went to Edwards Air, we took the airplane. Oh, at that time, Dr. Von Braun thought it would be wise since we were going to the Missile Center, to get Edwards Air Force Base involved.

[00:26:38] DS: You've got to mention in this thing, there was a guy named Jackson M. Balch, down at MTF, who we had met with all kinds of difficulties selling headquarters and everybody on this program. Then Jackson Balch came to work for Karl Heimburg,Mr. [sic] Rees’ technical assistant, administrative assistant, who was assigned to test lab to learn the ropes of Marshall.
One of the first things Karl Heimburg did was say, “Hey, we've got a real good problem here,” and gave him the Guppy problem. People resented his entering the program, but Balch had a lot of [learning?] and could convince people that—there's a lot of convincing you can’t mention in this thing because we’d all probably be behind bars—but anyway, we finally convinced the people from NASA activities…

[00:27:53] RB: Did Balch go to headquarters then?

[00:27:56] DS: Yeah, Balch went to headquarters, he had bought…Jack and I went to headquarters two or three times to give presentations.

[00:28:04] RB: Who were you talking to? Low? Or Holmes?

[00:28:07] DS: Talked to Holmes, once he was with Siemens…I guess…I believe Low at that time. But the thing was, Balch came on the same [inaudible] Conroy first went into this. Conroy started his construction at On Mark Engineering. He had no people of his own, so he let On Mark Engineering in Van Nuys do the structural modification. Then he let this guy he subcontracted with—Kaplan, the Strato engineer—do the engineering and the FAA coordination because he was an FAA designator. He was more or less at the mercy of these people as well as trying to get a contract with NASA. He—as some managers have been known to do in the Saturn program as well as any other program, the C-5A, the F-111—he was too optimistic in his selling and wound up in…Christmas of ’62, I was out helping in Conroy's office, and he got a call from—at this time he had lost all his help and doing work for free. He had his wife working as a secretary, so he got a call. The call was they were going to foreclose on his house. Things got real bad sometime around just prior to Christmas, I guess.

[tape cuts out]

[00:30:28] DS: This time Jack Balch, Julian Hamilton, William Morrow, and myself, we went to California to see how things were going on. I came back and reported, and we went out there to see how things were going on. I think I made a mistake in that date…It was ‘62… more like… June instead of Christmas. We went out there and talked with some of Conroy’s investors. There was a Jay [Humison?]...no…Jay [Overholtz?] and a guy by the name of Mr. [Humison?], who was a design engineer for the project system on the S-IV stage who…one of the few millionaire engineers you run into. Jay [Overholtz?], who had investments in one of the casinos, and Las Vegas was there. There was one other gentleman that I can’t remember, he was sort of the silent partner…well, I guess it’s Lee Mansdorf. One thing’s got to be said about Lee Mansdorf: he had everything so that if the airplane went, he'd make amends; if it folded, he'd still make amends. He believed in really hedging his bets. But those three more or less went on a [note?], and then Conroy could finish this endeavor. One of the first things to know of Mr. [Humison?] was really a gentleman. One of the first things he said he wanted to do was get Conroy’s debt…house out of hock, so he could stop having all these family problems and things going on.

[00:33:09] RB: How do you spell this guy’s name now?

[00:33:11] DS: [Humison?]…I don't know who was it. It was [Humison?], Howe, and [Overholtz?]. I may or may not [inaudible]. Howe is the Howe that has [Navajo Truckliners?]…I may can find the spellings of his name, write it down, look it up later.

[00:33:47] RB: Okay.

[00:33:48] DS: Like I said, this was sometime around, sometime between June and Christmas. Sometime around between Christmas of sixty…one...and June ‘62...because in September of ‘62...the Pregnant Guppy...Boeing 377 Stratocruiser took off from Van Nuys Airport and moved up to Mojave Desert…where we…But then the flight test came after the maiden flight. This is where we really had problems.

[00:34:51] RB: Before we get to that, I heard one story that when Conroy had flown to Huntsville, Heimburg or somebody wanted to do some load tests, and so they really filled the airplane up with gas when Von Braun was on it.

[00:35:09] DS: FAA requested a load test, test out the structures. That was load test may be referring to, but it wasn't. Nothing was put in the airplane by Dr. Von Braun.

[00:35:32] RB: It still had the wooden timbers in it though. [laughs]

[00:35:33] DS: Yeah. Well, the wooden timbers was just to load up the [support?] structures. This was prior to going to Edwards for the flight test. I started mentioning before that we went to Edwards and got Edwards involved, so I went in, and I was sent up as a measly NASA peon, and I talked to Jack Balch, Paul Bickle, the director of Edwards NASA flight research center.
I went in and explained our problem at the [missle?] center. Dr. Von Braun, I guess, had already written him a letter and explained some of the problems we were running into. He called all of his people together and called in one guy by the name of Bill Gray, who had been a FAA chief of FAA flight tests prior to going to work for Douglas and doing little flight test work, freelance flight test work on his own. He did the Purdue flight test at the flying TV station, the relay station. He had since come back to work for NASA, and he was assigned to the project as knowing the ins and the outs of FAA, things of this nature.

[00:37:16] DS: One of the things, to show you the way people felt about Dr. Von Braun, he's in the missile business, he gets all the money from the NASA budget, Mr. Bickle gets whatever crumbs is left over, but he...Bickle was quite an avid airplane fan and gave me a couple examples of him modifying his glider. He held the national record for time aloft and flying it for a long time. Anyway, he says, “Whatever Wernher wants, we'll give it to him, even if we have to certify the airplane, say to hell with FAA.” [Bilstein laughs] So that was a little interesting…

[00:38:07] DS: Then Bill Gray came on the scene and started advising me. Let me know where Conroy was trying to undercut, take shortcuts, which I was going to the FAA and say, “Watch that [inaudible] Irishman,” “I don't believe this is right,” “Are you looking at this?” “Are you looking at that?” FAA was rather reluctant at that time because they're one agency that’s liable that I know of by law for any engineering decisions. The man that approves something—structures, systems, anything in FAA—if that's not right, and they have a crash and accident, he pays himself with time in prison. If he can't be proven that some change was made or something he didn't approve himself. He's held liable by law, and CAB and Congress gives CAB the power to put that guy on the spot, and I guess that's the reason FAA, they were reluctant to comment as of this time. They says, “Okay, anything has got to come through Conroy because Conroy is the applicant for the 'Part 8’ certificate.” I just kept saying, “Look…” and the people from headquarters kept telling FAA headquarters, “Stay on this, because this is a momentous thing, something that's never been done.”

[00:39:51] DS: So we went through quite a hairy, I guess you'd call it, flight test program. The plane actually performed, it's kind of like the [inaudible] performed better than the original Stratocruiser…be more responsive by adding the seventy inches after the wing at the field splice, after the trailing edge of the wing, which it did. But there was still some concern of the wash off the bubble [inaudible] section. It was always contingent, it would wash out in certain angles of attack, certain roll angles, one of your horizontal stabilizers, which would get in trouble, but we went through all this testing. Conroy—was smarter than I guess a lot of people give him credit for—sold FAA, only checking those things that were critical, which at that time, Bill Gray and I, I guess, still had our doubts that the damn thing would fly and figured that if it does, great, if it don't, great. We really had no control over flight testing. Whatever he sold FAA would do, we had to buy it because that was [inaudible] at that time. I guess it was Siemen’s directive if he had it certified, we’d buy it, we’d use it, consider the use of it.

[00:41:45] DS: But anyway, it was a rather hectic thing, trying for Bill Gray's advice, trying to force Conroy to do more than what he had contracted to do with FAA to get a certificate. Through a little coercion here, a little coercion there, we were able to achieve this. One of the big things that I guess that we had, is Conroy had a guy by the name of Sandy Friezner, who was…and I do know how to spell his name…Sandy was an instrumentation man, and he’d done a considerable amount of submarine instrumentation work, oil rigs…you name it, he's done it if it's been needed to be instrumented. Sandy was one of Conroy's close friends, and sort of, thought it was great to be a citizen and try to do some of the [stupid?] things that he was doing. He was the only one that would consider the instrumentation job on this thing, so...Friezner is Sandy F-R-I-E-Z-N-E-R…

[00:43:10] RB: Yeah, excuse me, I just know it…I've got another, unfortunately, interview coming up on the hour, which is really unfortunate because I'm enjoying this, I…

[00:43:22] DS: …We fed all…[McNamara?] started the C5-A, we fed him information on the guppy. He did his cost-effect analysis on the side, came up with an airplane that was less than the guppy because of some of the structure loads, and some of the other things. We actually fed him information on this airplane. We had two airplanes [inaudible] ‘61…‘69…seven years, seven and a half years, and I still get involved [inaudible] on occasion people call…

[00:44:15] RB: Turned out to be pretty successful didn’t they?

[00:44:18] DS: Oh, it has its limitations just like the Piper's assessment, 707 and anything else. I think that's where the people in the space business don't understand, don't know is the fact that they try and strive too much for perfection because they’re in an unforgiving environment. In the airplane business, you’re in a pretty forgiving environment.

[tape cuts out and restarts]

[00:44:54] DS: He could've been out there, and I didn't know him at that time. He could have been out there—I got to thinking about that yesterday—he could have been out there, and I didn't know him at that time. I was observing. What I was giving you was the people were working on it at that time, but he could have been out observing the flight or something. I don’t know. Just knew the people personally involved in it at that time.

[00:45:37] RB: Did Karl Heimberg's test lab have a lot to do with the Guppy?

[00:45:44] DS: Karl Heimberg? I would say Karl Heimberg probably was the man here at Marshall that pushed it through and more so Von Braun and upper management because everybody that worked on the Guppy from the beginning worked for Carl Heimberg, more or less. All of the development of the Guppies was handled out of Heimberg's shop because he had, what you call, the lab responsibility for special transportation. Heimberg's outfit handled all the barges and did all the design work modifying the barges to haul Saturn stages did all the design work, and design review of the contract for modifying the Guppies.

[00:46:54] RB: This was up to ‘63 anyway?

[00:46:56] DS: This was up to the Super Guppy. P.M.—John Goodrum’s outfit—P.M. was, more or less, we turned the Pregnant Guppy over to PM, which was formed in ‘63, ‘64—which was called Industrial Operations at that time—to John Goodrum’s outfit. Well, it wasn’t John Goodrum’s outfit then, I guess, it was…nobody had been designated at that time to turn it over, more or less, I.O. to handle operations of it. Heimberg’s outfit handled all the technical design, special equipment requirements for Marshall [inaudible]

[00:48:03] RB: There's something I want to ask you a little bit more about too, that was that McNamara used Guppy information for C-5 work analysis.

[00:48:12] DS: Yeah, what we did, there was a guy at NASA headquarters who was transportation. There was two of them—there was Earl Barr and….

[00:48:24] RB: Stan Smolensky? Is that who you’re thinking of?

[00:48:28] DS: No, not Smolensky. I'm talking about the transportation people that we interfaced with at headquarters—Earl Barr and Jim McCullough—that we interfaced directly with. According to Earl Barr, D.o.D. directly contacted him, and as we developed information and everything, we more or less fed it into headquarters who, in turn, gave it to D.o.D.

[00:49:05] RB: What kind of information were they using?

[00:49:09] DS: We fed him wind tunnel data, copies of all the reports, design reports and everything, and requirements for volumetric type airplanes to carry volume loads…a bit of wind tunnel data, flight test data, and quite a…just anything they wanted or were interested in, you know, some copies of this data to Earl Barr at headquarters who in turn gave it to D.O.D.

[00:49:47] RB: You mentioned the Pregnant Guppy, there was some concern about the air flow and empennage, would that have been…Oh, C-5, has a fairly good...

[00:49:57] DS: Well, C-5 has a very high tail, it was just…At that time, the C-5A, the information we got, they were trying to determine the actual diameter that the C-5A could sit in, the optimal diameter for C-5A. It fluctuated anywhere from the diameter of this Pregnant Guppy to the present diameter, which is about twelve…twelve…or thirteen foot high, and some ten, eleven foot…it's more or less figure-eight shape type thing. The Guppy, the C-5A, it's not a real drastic, upside down figure-eight shape like the Pregnant Guppy or the Stratocruisers. But anyway, all this information we were able to get. Everything was given back to headquarters who in turn passed it on to Department of Defense to assist them in running their cost-effect analysis, to determine the actual diameter of the C-5A—which in turn, they wound up with an airplanes just like the 141—is good for carrying steel rails, tanks, concrete blocks, and sacks of cement. If you want to really carry a volume such as the S-IVB or the S-IV stage or the Titan, it can get— because of their upper structure, the bubble comes up, and the crew compartment in C-5A—you begin to run into height problems.

[00:52:06] RB: Do you remember any particular difficulties or any incidents that occurred during the operation of the first Pregnant Guppy? I'm thinking of that picture you showed me in a day, was it Ellsberg [sic] Air Force Base, you said that was? Where the tail took off or something like that?

[00:52:21] DS: No, it was Ellington. Yeah, we had…the Pregnant Guppy has always had…very limited due to the 4360 engine. Engines were the limiting factors. Any time you lost an engine on takeoff, you had to start looking for a damn place to land real quick because the glide of it…opposed to something like jets [inaudible]. One thing I was going to talk about with flight tests, I brought up this guy Sandy Friezner. It's a kind of [inaudible] to make this damn airplane work, you had to go in and clip about six, eight inches off the end of the props. He predicted that—from his non-engineering, swinging a mass like you do a propeller from his knowledge of his basic fundamental flying airplanes, propellers, and helicopters—he'd swing in this mass of the propeller on some wing on the arm at some CG location, and if you started chopping it off, it reduces stresses in its blade, propeller blades. Some of the original history behind the C-97 was a hollowed [derow?] blade the Air Force had used for this thing.

[00:54:22] RB: What kind of blade?

[00:54:23] They called it [derow?]. It’s an aluminum, hollow-casted…Some of the big problems they had on the C-97 was that the blades would separate, caused considerable problems in the loss of airplanes like they had on the C-133. Conroy's idea was that he had to have eight inches to clear the fuselage, so he said, “We gonna cut the damn blades off and go because if any nut, I'm not even an engineer, I can figure it out, it's going to reduce the stresses of this blade.” The commercial version was a steel blade, which was much better than the Air Force blade that was prepared for him. They cut the tips off this blade and had this guy Sandy Friezner to instrument it. Sure enough, Sandy Friezner’s instrumentation says the stress is reduced by a certain level, a certain percentage.

[00:55:30] DS: Well, FAA has a real funny way of operating, and I guess they have to operate this way, but they says, “This is fine and good, but before we’ll accept it and certify it, we have to have the original hand-standard people do the stress survey.” I think this cost Conroy some forty…thirty…forty thousand dollars and upset him to no end because you can set out on the end of a runway and what you do is set out and run that plane through numerous sequences of flying conditions on the ground to determine the stresses and the built up stresses in the blade. You leave them off and pull them up again. Commercial outfits built the airplane burnout three and four engines sitting out there to get all this data that you need, for the prop manufacturer needs, to justify the FAA making these changes because it was certified in a certain way. When you start making changes like Conroy's making to the airplane to the props, you got to justify all this to the FAA. It's up to the applicant to prove to them beyond a shadow of a doubt that it in no way endangers the crew, the cargo, the people on the ground.

[00:57:00] DS: Like I was telling you, we took hardly…we took the airplane and very limited spare parts. [Nose?] we didn't carry oil up there because Conroy had checked in with some of his Air Force cronies at Edwards that the particular oil that is needed for the Guppy was a bunch of surplus up at Edwards, so we just used the Air Force oil as a giveaway type thing. We used Air Force gas about eight…seven…three cents a gallon or something like that. When we got up, and the FAA finally made their thing that “Okay, you gotta run this stress survey on this prop,” Conroy went through the [old bay head?], and he and I had some very rough altercations there. Finally, I told him, “Okay, fine, I'm going to pack up and go home, and I'll just tell Marshall that you're not going to do what is required by FAA.” Finally Conroy blew his stacks and said, “Okay, go ahead and do it! Burn up the damn airplane!” We ran the survey and sure enough Sandy Freizner’s previous instrumentation predicted [the strain gauges?], we did—they did—reduce the stresses in this blade.

[00:58:28] DS: [Hamstander?] thought this was so great they suggested to Conroy, “Hey, go and cut off the tips of the outboard propellers,” because they cut it off from the rounded tips which squared it off. Conroy says, “Hell, I can't afford another prop survey. I ain't even got a NASA contract yet. To hell with you!”

[00:58:50] DS: Then we had some different flight tests..I think where you were mentioning about water for [ballasting?] and I said, where you’re going through flight tests, you gotta do various CG locations. The way you do this is by ballasting water tanks. You go up and you go up, you ready to fly all morning, and at Edwards, we would take off at about five…four-thirty…five o'clock. You get up [tape cuts out, inaudible] high. What Aerospace did—kind of what people did—they came up with a water ballast system. It was the day, was going out and was checking for flutter, and so we had Sandy Freizner and [Bill Covers?] on the system worked out…I don't believe it was Jack Podesky…Bobby [D’agostino?], flight engineer [tape cuts out] below the main deck. They went up and did their various CG locations by [ballasting?] out the tanks and so finally they was ready to do zero. You have to do all these cal…You’re probably familiar, you have to do all this calibration room…

[tape ends]

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