A Century of Aerospace History
by
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General Doolittle earned his decorate degree in 1925 from MIT in aeronautical engineering after earning his regular commission if the Signal Corps in 1920. His early flying skills enabled a series of aviation records and the most famous raid he led after Pearl Harbor on Tokyo. The decade-by-decade account of stories and pictures is a unique collection spanning early supersonic flight, hypersonic flight, and spaceflight, starting with Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and the early Space Shuttle flights. The author’s connections and participation throughout the chapters designated as “Decades” are told with many pictures. However, the priceless pictures are primarily contained in three of the five appendices, about half of the over 160 photos.
The author’s integration of his professional career and essential family history gives the reader appreciation of the stressful environment of the race to the moon starting in 1960, the economic downturns requiring adaptations to new opportunities and technologies. This story accounts for the author’s ability to make those adaptations successfully.
His mid-1990s education nonprofit worked with General Jimmy Doolittle III (Ret Col. USAF), President of the Society of Experimental Test Pilots (SETP), to solicit $50 million for a new museum, SETP headquarters, and aerospace education classes.
Many events and people advanced flight in the 1920s. I was fortunate throughout my career to encounter many of those people.
The first story, with pictures of Jimmy Doolittle covering six pages, born in 1898, gives the reader a perspective of the genius of Doolittle as he ably deserved his medals of honor and status as a national hero.
My boss, General Schweitzer (1906 - 1996), flew in 1929 and helped Chiang Kai Shek in 1932 to 1935 started his Air Force in China. He worked as a pilot for American Airlines in 1936.
Hanna Reitsch was flying gliders as a teenager in the early 1920s. She pioneered as a woman German test pilot in the 1930s and 1940s for helicopters, rocket airplanes, and the V-1 Buzz. Bomb.
M. G. Bekker, (1905- 1989), a Polish Engineer. An expert in tracked vehicles (tanks), after the invasion of Poland in 1939, he had to move many times until he joined General Motors in Santa Barbara and was responsible for designing the Apollo Lunar Rover wheel.
Richard E. Day (1917 -2004) He provided the flight control solution to the roll coupling solution to the early supersonic flight fatal accidents.
Betty Love (1922) just turned 100 on July 2022. Betty and I started our careers in 1955. Her first job title was “computer.” She was using a Frieden calculator. We still chat on the phone frequently.
Whitey Whiteside, born in the late 1920s, died late 1990s. Joined the Army Air Corp at 16 years old with a fake ID and rose to Col. in charge of aircraft maintenance at Edwards AFB.
A Brief Introduction for Jimmy Doolittle and Robert (Bob) A. Hoover
Jimmy Doolittle
https://www.defense.gov/News/Feature
James Harold Doolittle was born near San Francisco on Dec. 14, 1896. When he was still an infant, his father, Frank, moved to Nome, Alaska, to try to capitalize on the gold rush there. Two years later, he and his mother, Rosa, moved to the frontier to join him. Doolittle likely honed his sense of competitiveness and adventure in the wilderness. He was a small boy, so he grew up scrappy and got into fights often to defend himself from bullies. The agility he learned from those fights made him a good gymnast, too.
Most people know the name Jimmy Doolittle for his famous World War II raid on Tokyo that earned him the Medal of Honor, but the Army Air Corps General was a memorable figure long before that. Doolittle set air racing world records in the 1920s and was a revered aeronautical innovator throughout his life. His work and leadership led to many of the air and space technologies the world still uses today.
Bob Hoover (Photos in Appendix A)
The following research excerpts from Forever Flying R. A. “Bob” Hoover
Robert A. Hoover was born in Nashville, Tennessee, on Jan. 24, 1922. In his book, he remembered his excitement as a 5 - year old as he learned about Charles Lindberg’s 1927 solo flight across the Atlantic. At 13, during his early experience as a paper boy finding a Model A chassis, he paid $7 for it and got it running so he could drive it. At 15, his early heroes, Roscoe Turner, Jimmy Doolittle, and Eddie Rickenbacker, motivated him to work 16-hour days sacking groceries to earn only $2, enough for 15 minutes of flying lessons. It took most of the year for him to overcome chronic motion sickness. Finally, at 16 years old, he soloed, as I later did in 1949. Soon after, he performed for his family, flying a 40 HP Piper Cub between two trees and under overlapping branches.
Bob Hoover’s book tells his WWII combat flying, POW experience, and Post War test pilot accomplishments culminating in his last air show performing acrobatics at 86 years old.
The 1960s Decade tells the stories of the author working with Neil Armstrong as he flew the X-15 hypersonic airplane. He was promoted to NASA Lunar Landing Research Vehicle project engineer and helped design and run the flight research program continuing to work on updating it with new Apollo hardware to the Lunar Landing Training Vehicle. These eight years of working with the senior NASA Apollo executives covered the challenges and high stress of the events leading to the first lunar landing on 21 July 1969.
The author’s continued work in aerospace and related industries as a senior NASA consultant on the Constellation program with access to rare pictures make this book a truly unique history of the last century of aerospace.
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About the Book
The post-flight reports from each of the six Apollo missions regarding the success of a one-time attempt to land on the Moon confirmed in the opinion of each of the Commanders (pilots) that the LLRV was absolutely mandatory to train a human pilot to land a vehicle (the LM) of the Apollo era successfully on the lunar surface.
Wayne Ottinger and his colleagues at FRC had created a marvelous flying machine called the Lunar Landing Training Vehicle, a unique machine that gave us the confidence and capabilities to ensure the Apollo Lunar Module never failed in landing at six different and unknown locations on the Moon. This remarkable book tells the full story of how they did it—Apollo will be ever thankful for their inspiration and innovation, a true milestone in the history of human flight.
David R. Scott
Commander, Apollo 15
March 3, 2023
About the Author
Clyde Wayne Ottinger, born October 22, 1933, in Phoenix, AZ, has lived through phenomenal advances in aviation and space travel starting in 1903 and only five decades later, achieving human exploration beyond earth. His early interest in flying in his high school flying club just after WWII and training as a mechanical engineer prepared him well to begin his career as a flight test engineer on the first lightweight supersonic jet engine for many Century Series supersonic fighters and a Mach 2 bomber. In early 1960, he joined NASA as a rocket flight test engineer on the hypersonic X-15 rocket plane, and in 1963, he was promoted to the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle project engineer. In mid-1966, he joined Bell Aerosytems as the Technical Director for the Lunar Landing Training Vehicle. He worked with test pilots, Apollo astronauts (Neil Armstrong and six others, two Airforce Generals, two Navy Admirals, and Bell Aerosystems’s Vice President General Walter Dornberger (former Commander of the Army portion Nazi Germany’s missile installation at Peenemunde). He witnessed President Eisenhower’s attempt in his second week at NASA’s Flight Research Center to claim the U-2 Francis Gary Powers was piloting on a NASA civilian atmospheric research mission when it was shot down on May 1, 1960. NASA’s Chief Test Pilot, Joe Walker, had to taxi a U-2 with NASA painted overnight on its tail for the press soon after he arrived for work. Khrushchev confronted Ike with spy camera from the crash, had Powers in prison who he met after his prisoner exchange.
His key roles in Apollo, credited for developing the critical research and training for 12 astronauts safely landing and returning from the moon, led to senior consulting and activities throughout the post-Apollo decades into the first two decades of the 21st Century.