North American Aviation Research Articles

The Dallas Story: The North American Aviation Plant and Industrial Mobilization during World War II by Terrance Furgerson (review)

The Dallas Story: The North American Aviation Plant and Industrial Mobilization during World War II by Terrance Furgerson (review)

The Dallas Story: The North American Aviation Plant and Industrial Mobilization During World War II by Terrance Furgerson (review)

The Dallas Story: The North American Aviation Plant and Industrial Mobilization During World War II by Terrance Furgerson (review)

North American Aviation’s dramatic transformation and the influence of Moral Re-Armament in 1941-1945

ABSTRACT The controversial wildcat strike by Local 683 of the United Auto Workers (UAW) in North American Aviation, Inc. in Inglewood, California, USA in 1941 was contentious in a number of ways – it hindered the U.S. defense effort, it allowed the International Association of Machinists to gain strength against the UAW in the aircraft industry, and it showed many union employees that combativeness with management might not be the best strategy. The strike ended when President Roosevelt sent in the United States Army. Although this event represented one of the most rancorous moments in U.S. labor history, only a few years later this same plant went on to have incredibly amicable labor/management relationships that allowed it to break records for aircraft production and serve as a model for employee-employer partnership. Labor and management worked together, largely guided by the practices of MRA. These principles included making decisions based not on who is right (power and opinion) but what is right (principle and common goals). MRA's focus on family life and receiving guidance are two other dimensions that are highlighted here. Personal correspondence and reports provide a behind-the-scenes explanation of how public events ensued. This case showed workers that they could oppose communism while also bargaining effectively with management using collaboration.

The Face-off between Communism and Moral Re-Armament in North American Aviation 1941-1945

The Face-off between Communism and Moral Re-Armament in North American Aviation 1941-1945

In Memoriam

In Memoriam

Recent Developments in Macro-Econometric Modeling: Theory and Applications

Developments in macro-econometrics have been evolving since the aftermath of the Second World War.[...]

An Interview with William A. Barnett

An Interview with William A. Barnett

Arthur H. Muir Jr.

The physicist and Egyptology enthusiast spent more than three decades at the North American Aviation Science Center.

Risky business: Using enterprise risk management at an airport

Operating an airport is fraught with risks. Identifying, assessing and managing these risks should therefore be an important part of strategic planning. This paper outlines the key elements of enterprise risk management (ERM) and how it can be used by an airport. It describes both well-known, and less well known, exposures experienced by a major North American aviation facility and ranks these based on their likelihood and potential impact. The risks identified requiring immediate attention included problems with commercial airlines, terminal tenants, property taxes, government intervention, viral epidemics, inter-modal transportation and vehicle parking. The majority of the risks noted were financial or operating in nature. The most commonly identified concern related to major capital projects, while the activities of the airlines were also frequently mentioned. Of the 220 risks noted, 74 were considered to be above the risk tolerance threshold. The information in this paper can be used by airport operators to help identify, assess and mitigate the potentially negative effects of threats in their internal and external environment.

Aerospaces: Southern California architecture in a cold war world

Architect Albert C. Martin, Jr.’s aerospace laboratories and manufacturing complexes, along with the residential developments surrounding them, visually and symbolically defined a new industry and a new lifestyle. For about a decade, roughly 1956–66, Martin’s designs for Thompson Ramo Wooldridge, the Aerospace Corporation, North American Aviation and other firms gave Los Angeles a unique industrial landscape. Aerospace modernism offers a way of reframing southern California’s Cold War by viewing it through a lens of architecture and design. Martin’s architecture gave material form to a regional economy, a collective imagination and an emerging political economy increasingly central to southern California. It also gave form to the conviction of his corporate clients and their Air Force patron that only the right kind of buildings – scientific, industrial and residential – could attract the kind of creative talent and inspire the kind of thinking required for state-of-the-art aerospace engineering. Paradoxically, an architecture of openness and transparency hid a world of secrecy and classification, spaces that normalized secrecy not just in the workplace but also in entire communities.

The UAW and the struggle to organize aircraft, 1937–1942

This article examines the United Automobile Workers’ Union (UAW) efforts to organize the aircraft industry, 1937–1942. It argues that the North American Aviation Strike in Inglewood, California in 1941 played a pivotal role in determining the union's fate in the industry. Following the controversial strike national UAW leaders seized control over the Aviation Organizing Campaign, placing the drive clearly in the hands of the union's auto interests. The move removed local leaders, and alienated a workforce that long cast a suspicious eye on the UAW. Ultimately, as events at Curtiss-Wright in Buffalo, New York show, the decision greatly hindered the UAW efforts in aircraft and opened the door to fierce competition from the International Association of Machinists.

Testing the Celentano Curve: An Empirical Survey of Predictions for Human Spacecraft Pressurized Volume

This paper presents an analysis of the “Celentano Curve” that depicts a relationship between spacecraft pressurized volume and the duration of a space mission. In 1963, Celentano, Amorelli, and Freeman of North American Aviation described a set of curves that can predict the amount of pressurized volume necessary per crewmember to conduct a mission at “tolerable, performance, or optimal” levels. Since Yuri Gagarin flew in Vostok 1 in 1961, the US, Russia, and China have launched more than 250 human spaceflights. This paper collects this empirical data and tests the Celentano curves against it. In assessing the data this analysis takes a traditional statistical approach, stating the null hypothesis as no effect between mission duration and volume. It treats the Celentano plot of a quasi-logarithmic curve as the alternate hypothesis stating a causal relationship between mission duration and volume. Many researchers have published variations of the Celentano curve, and this paper considers nine of them as additional interpretations of the alternate hypothesis, plus three versions of the crew size alternate hypothesis and one functional operations hypothesis. . This analysis shows that pressurized volume increases as a function of mission duration, both as a power curve and a logarithmic curve with a coefficient of determination (R 2 value) of 72 percent and 60 percent respectively. Within the historic envelope of spaceflight experience of over a year in space, the volume trend does not level off but continues to rise.

Sidney Siegel

Sidney Siegel, a solid-state physicist who became a respected pioneer in nuclear reactor development, died of cancer on 15 March 2001 at his home in Pacific Palisades, California. He also was one of the first scientists to study the effect of radiation on solids.Born in New York City on 10 January 1912, Siegel began his career as a physicist in the 1930s at Columbia University. At that time, solid-state physics was just emerging as a specific branch of physics. He earned his bachelor’s degree in physics at Columbia in 1932. As a graduate student under S. L. Quimby, Siegel was one of the first to experimentally investigate the relationship between magnetic and mechanical properties of nickel. This investigation was aimed at testing some consequences of Werner Heisenberg’s 1932 theory of ferromagnetism. Siegel received his PhD in physics in 1936; his thesis was on the relationship between the magnetic and mechanical properties of nickel. During World War II, working as a research engineer with the Westing-house Electric Corp in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Siegel helped develop an influence exploder for electric torpedoes and an airborne radar system. After the war, in 1946, Westinghouse sent Siegel to participate at what is now Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the design of a pilot-scale, gas-cooled reactor for civilian power—the Daniels power pile. The reactor was designed with graphite as a moderator. Eugene Wigner, then director of ORNL, had predicted that graphite in a reactor would swell and otherwise deteriorate under the intense bombardment of fast neutrons. Siegel, with his background in solid-state physics, was one of the earliest pioneers in the study of this so-called Wigner effect.While at ORNL, Siegel attended the Oak Ridge School of Reactor Technology. Many of the alumni of this school became prominent figures in the unfolding American development of power reactors. Among the students was (then) Captain H. G. Rickover.In 1949, Siegel returned to the newly organized Bettis Field reactor laboratory, which was operated by Westinghouse for Rickover’s Naval Reactor Branch of the Atomic Energy Commission. At the time, two naval reactors were being worked on: a sodium-cooled intermediate neutron reactor (SIR) at General Electric and a pressurized water thermal neutron reactor—originally called submarine thermal reactor (STR) and, later, pressurized water reactor (PWR)—at Westinghouse. Although prototypes of both reactors were built, the US Navy adopted the Westinghouse STR rather than the GE SIR.Siegel played an important role in these earliest days of naval reactors, when many combinations of coolant and moderator were proposed and some were actually built. He assembled and then headed a group of capable young physicists and engineers to conduct the critical experiments on the core of the STR and to analyze the reactor’s solid-state aspects. But of the perhaps 10 different combinations of coolant and moderator, only the PWR (and its relative, the boiling water reactor) survived, mainly because it was based on the extensive and expensive effort of Rickover’s Nuclear Navy.Siegel, like several other leaders of reactor development, chafed at Rickover’s imperious scrutiny. In 1950, he left Westinghouse to become the associate director of the newly founded nuclear program of Atomics International, a division of North American Aviation Inc.The main job of Atomics International at the time was to design and build a 500-kilowatt (electrical) graphite-moderated, molten-sodium-cooled reactor. Siegel was project engineer for this very successful reactor experiment. This experiment was followed by a much larger sodium-cooled reactor sponsored by the Consumer Public Power District of Nebraska. However, that reactor developed serious leaks in the stainless steel cans that enclosed each graphite module.Because Atomics International had so much experience with sodium as a coolant, the company became heavily involved in the sodium-cooled fast breeder project, which was the main line of advanced reactor developments in the US. The primary focus of the breeder programs was the so-called Clinch River Fast Breeder, which was to be built in Oak Ridge but was abandoned. Siegel, at the time, served as the main technical spokesman for the Atomics International version of fast breeders.In 1973, Siegel returned to ORNL as associate lab director and coordinator for the NSF-sponsored program on energy and the environment. He retained this post until 1975, when he retired to California.Siegel served as both vice president (1965) and president (1966) of the American Nuclear Society. He also practiced his extraordinary talents as an art photographer and creator of exquisite large wood sculptures.I knew Siegel well and was one of his great admirers. Beyond his capabilities as a solid-state physicist and a technical administrator, he was widely learned and able to convey his thoughts in unusually lucid prose. He represented the best of the nuclear pioneers: He was thoughtful, knowledgeable, and articulate. Many of his colleagues shall miss him, as shall I.Sidney SiegelPPT|High resolution© 2002 American Institute of Physics.

International Interdependencies between the Deregulation of Domestic Service Industries: A Case Study of Aviation in North America

This article is concerned with the interdependence of national markets for service industries. It focuses in particular on the North American aviation industry. It looks at the effects that deregulation and other developments in the US market had on Canadian aviation and air transport policy after 1978. What emerges is that, in the aviation sector at least, national markets for services can no longer be treated in isolation from changes in other, and especially larger, national markets. This is not only a topic of academic interest but has implications for the development of EC policies.

Angle of attack: Harrison Storms and the race to the moon

Apollo was the most ambitious engineering project ever undertaken by man: to take a rocket 50 storeys high, load it with the explosive power of a nuclear device, put men on top of it, and shoot it at the moon. Harrison Storms, head of North American Aviation's Space Division, is the man charged by the federal government with getting the astronauts to the moon and back. Just to find metals pure enough means creating a whole new technology, and new machine tools must be invented to build parts of the rocket and spacecraft. Storms commands a technical empire of 30,000 people, some of the greatest minds in industrial America, not to mention Werner von Braun and the German rocket scientists from Peenemunde. Chasing the triple nines (tolerances of .999), they give their careers, sometimes their lives, to this colossal machine.

Wild Blue Yonder: Money, Politics, and theB-1 Bomber by Nick Kotz

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 187 Nahant began to lose trim as the ship accumulated water in the bow. The designer expected the water to flow aft in water channels and to be pumped out near the stern; consequently, there were no pumps near the bow. The captain wisely decided to return to Port Royal, where the water passages were found to be clogged by debris left in the ship by the builders. About four weeks later, on December 6, in a similarly heavy swell, the monitor Weehawken sank while at anchor off Charleston, with the loss of twenty-four men. Hunter had just finished writing a letter home, saying he intended to enlist for another year, when an outcry on deck hurried him outside in time to see the Weehawken settling to the bottom with only the top of its stack above water. As he contemplated Weehawken’s stack, the old sailor’s doleful censure of the monitors came again to Hunter’s mind. He returned below decks and destroyed the letter he had just written. On December 8, when his year was up, he found passage on a ship going north to Boston. And I gained a new appreciation of the sinking of the original Monitor off Cape Hatteras. Eugene S. Ferguson Mr. Ferguson edited a series of reminiscences by a man in his seventies of his boyhood and young manhood in Early Engineering Reminiscences (1815—40) of George Escol Sellers (Washington, D.C., 1965). WildBlue Yonder: Money, Politics, and theB-1 Bomber. By Nick Kotz. New York: Pantheon, 1988. Pp. ix + 313; illustrations, notes, bibliogra­ phy, index. $19.95. Although this volume is seriously flawed, it raises an issue that merits the most careful consideration by the people of the United States: how can the character and quality of decision making on national defense be conducted, rationally and objectively, for opti­ mum effect by the existing institutions of our political democracy? With the sweeping exaggerations that characterize so much contem­ poraryjournalism, Nick Kotz charges that national defense has been caught up in “forces that have run amok.” As a consequence, he contends, we “manufacture weapons that are not needed, that cost too much, and that don’t work” (p. viii). Such hyperbole in the preface may turn off thoughtful readers, but for all the author’s undisciplined verbiage, he does have an important thesis: political considerations have unduly influenced the decision-making process with regard to the acquisition of weapons to the detriment of national defense. While the title leads one to expect a study of the B-l, the scope of this volume is much larger. It is what the author calls the perennial centerpiece of the debate on defense over the past thirty years: whether or not to build a new strategic bomber for the air force. The 188 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CUL TURE strategic bomber offers an intriguing focus for the history of technol­ ogy. Like the ship of the line in the 18th century, it involves not only a multitude of technologies, each for military reasons pushing toward the hither edge of the art, but also relates to national strategy, the state of the economy, enemy innovations, and the like. Kotz’s account of how the B-70 contract was let back in 1957 illustrates the thrust of this book. The North American Aviation Corporation (the miserably bad index fails to mention this firm, along with other significant subjects) had just had to release some 25,000 employees when the government canceled the F-108 fighter and Navaho missile contracts. For the corporation to survive, winning the B-70, a $6-billion-dollar contract, was essential. To build a broad base ofpolitical support as well as technological expertise, North American recruited subcontractors such as Lockheed (Georgia), Chance-Vought (Texas), and Boeing (Washington), each with its coterie of subcontrac­ tors and suppliers scattered across the nation, upward of 60,000 employees. The object, of course, was to secure the widest possible constituency to pressure senators and representatives to “vote right” on the B-70. When the Soviets subsequently shot down the U-2 spy plane at 70,000 feet, the ceiling altitude of...

War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination by H. Bruce Franklin

188 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CUL TURE strategic bomber offers an intriguing focus for the history of technol­ ogy. Like the ship of the line in the 18th century, it involves not only a multitude of technologies, each for military reasons pushing toward the hither edge of the art, but also relates to national strategy, the state of the economy, enemy innovations, and the like. Kotz’s account of how the B-70 contract was let back in 1957 illustrates the thrust of this book. The North American Aviation Corporation (the miserably bad index fails to mention this firm, along with other significant subjects) had just had to release some 25,000 employees when the government canceled the F-108 fighter and Navaho missile contracts. For the corporation to survive, winning the B-70, a $6-billion-dollar contract, was essential. To build a broad base ofpolitical support as well as technological expertise, North American recruited subcontractors such as Lockheed (Georgia), Chance-Vought (Texas), and Boeing (Washington), each with its coterie of subcontrac­ tors and suppliers scattered across the nation, upward of 60,000 employees. The object, of course, was to secure the widest possible constituency to pressure senators and representatives to “vote right” on the B-70. When the Soviets subsequently shot down the U-2 spy plane at 70,000 feet, the ceiling altitude of the B-70 previously presumed safe from antiaircraft weapons, production of the bomber abruptly became problematical. But once again politics shaped de­ fense policy. President Eisenhower, accused by Democratic candidate John F. Kennedy of being soft on defense and anxious to help Republican candidate Richard M. Nixon, released $100 million to revive the B-70 bomber. The rest of the book consists of reiterations of the B-70 pattern of political intrusions into the defense decision­ making process. For Kotz, the decision to build the B-l was based on the desire to savejobs and thus ensure supportive votes and to extract big campaign contributions from those grateful that California with all its electoral votes would be “kept green.” Now, it is undoubtedly true that political concerns do distort defense decision making excessively. But Kotz is lamentably silent when it comes to offering constructive suggestions on ways and means to minimize this practice. He raises many important issues, such as the tendency of the services to emphasize acquisition of major weapon systems to the relative neglect of supporting infrastructure, but again he offers little or nothing by way of cure. I. B. Holley Prof. Holley, emeritus professor of history, Duke University, is the author of Buying Aircraft, the volume on matériel procurement in the U.S. Army official history of World War II. War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination. By H. Bruce Franklin. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Pp. 256; illustrations, notes, index. $22.95. TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 189 This is a book about the cultural roots of Armageddon by a professor of English and American studies at Rutgers University, the author or editor of fifteen books on culture and history. Analyzing such products of popular culture as science fiction and war films, H. Bruce Franklin tells us why he thinks the United States now teeters on the brink of nuclear catastrophe. Weapons of mass destruction must be imagined before they can be devised, he argues, their uses conceived in human minds before their shapes can be molded by human hands. But not just any minds. Noting that American inven­ tiveness has propelled the arms race since World War II, Franklin wonders if something unique to this country’s experience might be faulted. He finds it where two aspects of American culture merge: the people’s long-standing infatuation with technical prowess and their even older self-image as builders of the city on a hill. If American know-how could create the ultimate weapon, then so exceptional a nation might pacify the world—conquest for the most benign of motives: ending war forever. American power would serve all man­ kind, not one country’s own narrow self-interest. How history molded that underlying structure of values and sentiments to threaten the present and jeopardize the future...

10. The 701 at North American Aviation

Presents recollections of users' experiences in the computer industry involving technology, products, services, and/or computer applications.

A program manager's history book

I've always been lucky enough to be where the action is, starting when I was a small boy and got to shake hands with Charles Lindbergh. Luck led me to aeronautical engineering, an urgent interest in learning how to learn, and a drive to be involved where the action is. Aeronautical engineering-and the complex system approach needed to package all the elements of weapons systems-led me to project management and macroprogram direction. The idea of this Program Manager's History Book is to illustrate how I believe that project managers grew to be able to manage the major programs that we take for granted in American industry and why our ability to do these things has made the US the worldwide technological leader that it is today. Since I was fortunate enough to have been a part of those growth years, a lot of my comments are based on personal exerience. Moreover, they reinforce a basic belief. that the best way to learn is by doing. For me, following the learning-by-doing path began in 1948. I was a supervisor with the Aerophysics Division of North American Aviation. Those were exciting and challenging times. Our team was working on something new in the guided missile business-the Mach 3 cruise missile. What's more, we were using the latest technology. We were incorporating titanium in the missile's skin. In addition, the cruise missile was designed with a new, inertial navigation system. The design also featured parallel boosters, and a delta wing. In fact, that early booster system resembled the more advanced configuration that was recently used on the United States Space Shuttle project. What was exciting to me about those years was that I was on a steep learning curve. As I think back now, I find I learned things that went beyond the obvious technical advancements that we were working on. For example, that was the first time that I began to realize that engineers didn't always see the big picture. Systems engineering began to develop, and the concept of overall program managers developed. But, as time and techniques moved on, new programs developed.

Communist Conspiracy or Wage Dispute?: The 1941 Strike at North American Aviation

FOR SEVERAL DAYS in the summer of 1941, the 11,000 production workers at the North American Aviation plant in Inglewood, California, conducted a strike despite strong opposition from the President of the United States, the national leadership of their union, the Los Angeles Police Department, and the Fifteenth Infantry Division of the United States Army. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's decision to send federal troops into Inglewood marked the first use of the U.S. Army to break up picket lines of striking workers since the Pullman strike of 1894.