'

Roy Harris

June 7, 2000

Erik Conway, interviewer

Conway: ... Virginia, about supersonic transpmt stuff in the fifties and sixties. Let's see. We 're

talking about what I'm doing, and I'm working on a history of supersonic transport research for

NASA. What I' d like to talk about today really is mostly work in the fifties and sixties on military

bomber programs that so1t of segue into the SST stuff in around '58 or '59. How involved were

you with those programs?

Harris: I came to work at Langley in July of 1958. I was assigned to a branch that was located in

-W-.e tJ,J,,:.(f;.~tt.,l\lt ~c)I.J .. [TF JJ TF the old four-foot supersonic tunnel, which is no longer there. It was torn down to buil~MF; ~

is on that site now. That group was basically developing the technology for supersonic airplanes,

both military and civil, although when I first got there, the focus was mostly on military.

-+h~ '>lo4{>fw•vn't c.. One of my first assignments when I got there was to try to ca lculat~ wave drag of an

+-~e airplane. Dick Whitcomb had published fl Sl:lf.)ersoniG area m14~ transonic area rule as well as the

. I Tl . I h . .d d 1/eri I . supersomc area ru e. 1e supersomc area ru e was at t at time was cons1 ere ..!teA comp ex, tt

involved passing cutting planes through the aircraft at really ~b:;r angles, and many, many of them

to get to r c~lplieated mathemati~gli~ef-fhose etttting pia~ i; what they call an eq~ivalent

~kiv~fe..,~ koJJe~ area distribution, then you ca lculate the drag. And you get many of these" ~s depending on what

'1~LA the mach number is.~e ~tlW Then t:Wj~ would use standard known theories to calculate the drags of

those bodies of revolution and you could relate that to the drag of the airplane.

But when I first came there, that was considered to be kind of like an academic exercise.

~ do t\. com pJ.d~ ocltp/PJ~ You could on ly do simple shapes, and it was just too complicated and took too Ion!¥] But my

+1~+ e>.c.~~~.-.INif"..J- #.e wAve Jm.s cf-\- ~e ~"was to try to calculateA\_we Jllil t=e ~" s ht.~ ~ a military airplane, it was called ~ .. CAP2,

Combat Air Patrol No. 2.

Conway: It was Navy aircraft?

Harris: It was a Navy study, right. The CAP2 and another equivalent Air Force program that we

were working on at the time call ed TAC, for tactical aircraft, eventually those two programs joined

rr~~~~~ to become first the TFX and then the F-111. Those~ came together. That was the big activity

~k~...J...!1 o....W.tr ~ that was going on ~I came in the summer of '58.

We had done wind tunnel tests and I participated in those tests of the CAP2, so my boss

decided it would be a good idea for me to try to calculate the drag of the CAP2, the wave drag, and

estimate the skin friction and the other components and see bow well we could match the

calculation to the experiments. r~.w-.~ rl~ytes,

So I set out to do that. 1 set up a graphical scheme for passing these4 It was just mind-

boggling. It was honib1e, a miserable thing. It took me three months to do all of this, to get the

drag of one configuration at one mach number. And I got about 90 percent through that and found

a basic en·or, bad to start ~11 over again. So it took me six months to calcu late the drag, and it was a

c.o...l c \.\ ( ex, ..h~ "' very cmde ~ because we had to make all kinds of approximations to get a solution. But the

~

answer came out amazingly close, and everybody was kind of impressed with that. I certainly was

mt~~+ -h1...-.-. o~-tf fo hotTified that this is geiBg ~ be my job forever. [Laughter]

T hat was at about the time when the first large computers were coming into the Center. I

believe that the Center had just gotten an IBM 704, if I remember correctly.

Conway: Punch card machine.

Ha!Tis: Punch card machine, but it was considered a big computer in those days. So I went over

1:\. and talked to tilt lady by the name of Sarah Bullock, who was head of the computing secti on, to ld

-1. o.>ked : \- ~ere uJCi.S her what my problem was, andll~ ~ any way we could try to computerize this process. She

assigned a person to work w ith me who was a computer programmer, her name was Charlotte

(!ret; J 0 V\ ckp,..- ) 0 J-{..e -Greigbtoo-[phoneti.c ], and we set to work to do this and we did computerize the process.

While Charl otte and I were working on this, about the time we had the process

computerized, we had a visit by some guys from Boeing, just talking technology. They mentioned

they had a mathematician who was working the same problem, and so we got together and looked

at his work. Basically his geometry routine of passing all these cutting planes ~Hs iifteiH~ thn/. was

~ essentially the same as what we had done, but he had stumbled on~~r better way to calculate

the drag of these equi valent bodies of revo lution than we had. He had found a paper that was pretty

obscure, that had been published in the Journal of the Royal Aeronautical Society in England. Two

1:: mJ :,.:Jon guys by the name of--1 don' t remember their first name. The last names were e~FHiB~on and

E""~,~J..u V"l ,

Lord. We refetTed to it as the EmmiRgteR-Lord technique, which really was vastly superior to what '

I!\. 'I. L ~

we were~.

So we talked to the Boeing people. They agreed to g1ve us their code, under the

understanding that we would do experiments on wind tunnel models and ~cal ibrate the code,

-)-he ~otli tr-A..J.I()•Y'i because we had the wind tu1mels and we could do that. They agreed that if we would doA!Gtt' they

would give us the code and allow us to publish the results. 1 1

•

~e 04(C'~),.,·ho,.,.. "~'~ .;.J,~ So we set out to do that. ~wsni-:saelc, I th iM~ I went back to the CAP2 and redi~ tat, and to crJcl e

or~ I '1 my amazement, it took

11 ab'out two weeks to generate the input and about a half hour on the

-%,. ~}- ~}-computer. I had the answe1~ the drag t;e.t~ several configurationsA. half a dozen mach numbers. It was

something that would have taken me years to do. What's more, it was much more accurate because

rib( 1'\ 6'$ I l}e,J-'1 we could pass a lot more cuttin&, When you're doing it graphically, you can't afford to do

11M> many.

dt1 ~iAe COvY~pvJ,Y • But we could do lots of them11 The answer we got from that code sta1tled eve1ybody because it was

right on the money. We kept doing other configurations, and everything we did was ti ght on the

money, predicting the drag. J +-ke w~ve d~Lo e, Ue a"'d(}UtY~J,..s.

So after we did tilt.q we set about ~ coupling the other codes, ~skin friction cod] that

w~iJ~ .,..,e I1J ertJ d" ~~~ rersc "1 we had. I bad generated a skin friction estimation code~~ the wave drag code. Anothe'A~ who

~u.V had worked in --,group by the name of Harry Carlson, you've probab ly talked to him.

Conway: I've heard the name, but he wasn' t been mentioned to me as somebody to talk to.

Harris: You should talk to Harry. I haven' t beard from Harry in a long time. I assume he's still

alive. Harry's about ten years older than I am, and I'm getting a little bit long in the tooth.

Conway: Well, you ' re not as old as Larry Lofton is.

~.s

HatTis: That 's right. Lany ' s still around, and his mind is stil~ sharp as a tack.

Conway: Yes, I talked w ith him last week and I've set up another interview w ith him for next

week.

. lo11 "" w/lo'tc. ~..J-Ham s: Harry had developed a code for calculating the drag that results from generating lift ~ I

ahd eV'&\bl ed Hlii1l! cj,p. ,.J, t-k ~angle of tack. That was the third piece that I ~ needed.-1 to put his code with my wave drag co de

and my skin friction code together, and we generated the first system of cod~to calculate the ~

-e lift and drag of ael'etl)h&mic petfommhce::::vf a supersonic vehicle. I got some notoriety from

~ that( I was given some awards and Jftl ff for .u.t:. /J- r

KJe w"vkecl This is leading into ho'4 the SST ~, because by the time we had gone through all of

;f' ..J.v +LtW" t.).Y\d +-o this, I mean -~took several years to develop these codes and" ca librateA a.@ rea lize we had a

powerfu l tool. In fact, it was so powerful, I think if Boeing bad had any idea it was going to work 1 1 ,

~el,. lltJY'''iJ n ,f- -}-l..e &/wf..o,.-Lord r~0"'~~' 1}""" as well as it did, they never would have allowed us to publish~• so the whole world~ it. It is still

"' "'I rM /d hA-ll "

used today. T hirty years later, it is still the standard. People have made improvements to it and

adapted it to better and faster computers1 and~:phics is a lot bettet; and the input is a lot simpler

than when we used to do it on punch cards.

I did extend it to put optimization routines in so that you could work a problem backwards.

If you knew, for example, the length of the airplane and the maximum cross-sectional area, you

.\.or could work the problem backwards to what is the optimum area of distribution sf minimum drag.

"

Then you could go back and automatically Coke-bottle-shape the fuselage to give you what that

Y\eeJs -h, be , ~ shape1 It 's all done~ the computer.

Conway: Give you a basic configuration to work with.

~WOYk Harris: Right. We did a l o~ on that. Actually, we also produced, I think, the first computer

drawings of an airplane, what they ca ll a wire-frame drawing. There 's one of the SCAT 15 on the

wall.

There 's kind of an interesting story there, too, as to how that came about. Like so many

things we did, it came about by accident. Nobody had the wisdom to sit down and figure out what

the end product should ever be. You have some notion and you take a lot of twists and turns.

~e U/11 v e J n.~ But basically to generate the inputs for a fairly simple SST configuration to- code, you 're

~y-talking about 4,000 data points, and you basically had to input the XYZcoordinate}t all 4,000.

Conway: Ouch. That took a while.

OL p~...eC.. card ' Harris: It took a while and every one of those had to be punched into )!. We had some simplifying

-i.-he cod. .P

algorithms put in~ so that you didn't have to necessarily put the XYZ value at every point. For Cliv-loil <At;...~pj/

example, we hadA.lY Fuee sectioqs.1

You could specify certain11-A'a forESe sections and the ~ ~0~~~~~~, .

computer could spit-* out-1 We'd try to be as smart as we could so it would eliminate work, but still

the problem was that all 4,000 points had to be con·ect, and you wind up w ith this humongous tab le

with all these data points. c;.L..D! p -e ..J..~+

It would give you the aerodynamics performance of the ~ you put in IJ

there, and you just had to assume you didn 't make any mistakes.

Well, you know people do make mistakes. The way we discovered it, one of the guys that I

was working with, who was originally my first boss and first mentor, a guy by the name of Wamer

Robins. In fact, you may want to talk to hi 11_>~ he's around. Warner was my first boss. He's

the one that gave me the job of figuring out a way to calculate wave drag. He was using this code.

He was, I think, actually doing the SCAT 15 ,w.Mk.

Conway: The 15 or the l5F?

hA-d Harris: This was the 15, that came first. The 15 was a disaster Gri0 ina ll)·. This thing -tim: tllil

" butterfly wings, you know.

Conway: Yes, the integrated swing wing that locked in.

Hanis: If we bad any sense, we would have known that}:,~ going to be a disaster, because the way

it was designed, when the wing is swept back in the supersonic condition, the forward wing kind of

folds into the main wing. So the main wing has to be designed to cany the entire weight of the

airplane. At low speeds when the fmward wing sweeps out, the forward wing has ~ 1:§114: to carry

the entire weight of the airplane. So you've got two sets of wings, each one bas to be designed to

carry the entire load of the airplane. It 's going to be heavy, heavy, heavy. We should have known.

That's what killed that idea. It was a neat idea. Aerodynamically it was a good idea, but

stmcturally it was a disaster, because you basically had a redundant set of wings. You're carrying

kJ.L (1+ hr~f-the weight o~ them l3 u ruu;e11 you're only using one set to generate the lift at any point in time. So

~ t;.t+-you switch/ rom one to the other, but you carry the weight of both of them all the time. They both

have to be designed to cany the entire weight of the airplane, so it was a disastrous structure. ~I c,. 1!.-u VI. tr-,~ x vad-m1 ,

Anyway, we were working on ~- We knew that the drag was very sensitive to posj tion of Md -prDdKu C<, fO'oJ')J ~ e

the engine nacelles, because the engine nacell~s create a shockwaves,.eliii6ti!"a pressure field. If that e>..ch, 0 VI ~ t-rJI'IIUJ.\rJ fa v+ ~ +- .l).. t C¥Jr.l-D ~ j ~6'J ID ~

pressure field11~~1e, if )'QW ha-¥e a win!) en A ir Foree ,.ecti.QRt~ the front pati o~1f. i s increasing

area and the aft pati is decreasing area, OR thi! Air force seetien, if the pressure fi eld from M:-J.-(e

nacelle is impacting on the front side, the forward side where the area is increasing, the interference

0\nd pro dl-itt" drag will be ~ positive "high drag, because you've got positive pressures acting on a forward-

reS 'i 1-k I•L-> e( 1-'1 l; C.YMS 6' / "1 .J-/..t> d m_~ facing area. So it !..- force.

Conway: So it creates drag that way.

d.<! c .. tas '"' f c.. t- i'A Han·is: Right. If you locate the nacelles on the back side of the wing, where you've got slllf@ ~ei A-g

fJ't.'tfJ-t~..f C"M~Pnenf d~io :: ~-, you've got positive pressure acting on a slope tHis we,·, it has a small thrust wmp~1uent

A ~

to counteract the drag.

Conway: To counteract the drag in the nacel les.

Bvtf .,- ~., Harris: You don ' t ever get less than zero drag. -ie you

11minimize the drag by doing that. You can

~ A c.o...,r ~...e~-, DliV""~ I have an interference drag/ hat reduces thelldrag, have a total drag that's less than the sum of the

C~l-t•"}0,.,ronflf.J-' individu;~prags/\But if you put it in fi·ont, you'll have a tota l drag that's more than the sum of the

individual drags.

Conway: Which was the flaw in the B-70 bomber, essentially.

Conway: Yes. That's what I'm working on in this chapter right now. I'm trying to understand that

flaw, but you 've just explained it to me. That makes sense.

O.J:Cro..4- .J.- # Harris: The B-70 was one of the first~ that 1 app lied this to. I took one look at the 8-70, and

1\

two things told me it was going to be a disaster from the drag standpoint. One was, you've got this

big wedge in the front creating pos itive pressure fields all impacting the front s ide~+ U" at:Jo,J

Conway: On the front edge of the wing.

Harris: Front edge of the wing. The second thing is, in the back where nacelles are, they had a

base. They had a blunt base. It, -in efjt@st, k&8 8 !!t'J .aftrlil, a rectangular-shaped area in the back with

d . . h S h d . . 'd f 1--ecJ.un;B/t' ,. II h . roun engmes m t ere. o you've got t ese roun engmes ms1 e o ~? q c. as1ca y, t ose Jets ..u...e p rt:t;t; u t e

are going to be pumping down11

that area between the engines ;~>'here ) a a=• c got TOutld and=st'Je:llfe.

You've got a f01ward area there and you're going to have a negative pressure on that fo1ward area

that's going to create drag.

Conway: Well, that' s interesting. I wouldn' t have thought about the engine.

Harris: The engine atTangement on that was a disaster for two reasons. Up front, you had a

positive pressure field acting on a forward slope. In the back, you had a negative pressure field

acting on an aft-facing slope. Both of those mean big-time drag. It's why they missed the B-70

predicted L-over-Ds.

Conway: I know they were way off.

Harris: They were predicting big numbers. I don' t remember the numbers now, like eight or better,

eight and a half?

Conway: I've got eight and a half from a l959 document.

+}-Harris: Is what they were predicting I think When I came in and did my first analysis, I predicted

ll

seven.

Conway: They didn' t reach that even.

Conway: Okay. Well, that's good.

Ha1Tis: I'm jumping around to a bunch of different things. But let me get back to the story about e~O]I~f ~J,is '-'Vl ~t-.e sc~-r J5"'

these engice.s, because11a~ ~ittle bi~ w· Se .w:e::~ucle~ leeat~·el ~eod inta iliWely. r I !:> "'"" ,,., rPSI-~ V'~S~//-,

~ W'e programmed the code to move thew engines, moveJ#~o feet this way and mov~~

feet that way, W@Ve it two feet tbat Y'ay,. and get the sensitivity and try to seek out the spot where

the drag is the lowest. Wamer Robins was going through, doing this process, and he programmed Cti'IJI1·w.:?~ ( Tb Ls OIM::AZ'~mF>t-1-, +h.. wft,/-j

to run all thes~~- .H4r'ca::: blll:k~drag did not vary at all. o matte~ two feet this way, two

feet that way~iag was constant. I don't know how much computer time he wasted hying to figure

that out, wh~ in the world was going on~tna lly discoverefh~ had a decima l point en·or in the ll A

position of the nacelles. The nacelles were I 00 feet behind the airplane. [Laughter] So moving it

two feet this way and two feet that way wasn ' t going to make any difference.

Conway: Wouldn't make any difference because they weren't attached to the airplane.

Harris: They weren' t attached to the airplane. They were I 00 feet behind. He had just slipped a

decimal point.

Conway: Oh, heavens.

j..- .J I I,} ef'VIY, # J to~JJhe kl;. HarTis: So we realized, y~S• hoew, this ~ a common~. If you've got 4,000 numbers, it's easy

; .. ev.t' oJ.UeWJ. II ro,.,-k w to slip a decimal poin~ In looking over those 4,ooo

11w.tl, you' re never going to discove~you've got

d . I . e r voY. a ecrma pomt~ .

So we got the notion, because we had plotting routines in those days, "Let's see if we can ' t

get the computer to draw a picture of what it sees as a way of checking." If you did that, you' re

obviously going to see the nacelles 100 feet behind the airplane and you can go quickly and easily -#e ,..;pvt+" • ~ e

changeA*-tt. So we did that, developed -*tl~technique as a method of preventing erTors and a way

'!Jk/ecf ~ to check to be sure that the ~the computer sees is what you intended for it to

11ieelc m, that you

didn't make some stupid en·or in putting the inputs in. That's real ly how we started the wire-frame

o/1\e.s drawings. I think we produced the first ever. ,

Conway: Larry showed me one of those. In this case, the engine, the nacelles he had plotted ahead

of the plane. So I guess that's what he was trying to show me, but I didn ' t understand the

importance. Great. That's excellent.

C.Oh1-t~IAIIPI.j._l 11~ fo .. :rr .... ~ HarTis: The first ~s that we did were the CAP; and the TAC.. We did the 8-70. I think by this

!J

time, res~ m:mbe.-, the B-70 was actually flying.

Conway: Yes. I11 '64 they finally got the thing in the air.

/'Yit J.o J 1)

Han·is: But it was built in the early sixties. A lot of things they wanted1

when I developed this (ft\.t WPtc,.fo /l +kt g -7{)

code, go back and let's look at the B-70 kind of thing. Even before I ran the calculation, 1 said _. r;ta,.,'+ Ach1( 11,

~ ~E L-over-0 W~e 't ~ 8esi g;Red. ~~ WtJ. s. f' v t> d It J. e d ,

Conway: There 's a big contest between Langley and Ames over it, as I understand it.

Harris: Well, this erupted primarily in the SST when we first started doing SST designs. Ames did

an SST design that was sort of based on B-70 approach. And there was a heavy competition. There

were several designs from Langley. In fact, one of the pictures lJ ulled out to show you was, if you 011\e o.J-..1.-lwc;e tar/'? SCIJ.-r tpV\.+I~t-fs-A /VH~ "

haven ' t seen it, I think we finally focused on four of those SCAT designs. {I

Conway: Right. I' ve got pa intings of those.

Harris: Okay. I've got a photograph, pictures of wind turu1els models that 1 can show you. ~n

I think the first SST -related thing I did, we knew that the French were working on SST , A 1!.

design. The first thing that I remember seeing, 91 the original French design iilly called it the Super ~

Caravelle. There was a little three-view drawing, like two inches by two inches, in a magazine.

can't remember the name of the magazine.

Conway: Jnteravia in '61.

HarTis: o.. dnuvt~, .~ '1.,-Jtr~ tJ~~'

Yes, it was~ little bitty thin~ My boss came in with that one day and gave me that little

two-inch by two-inch drawing, said, "Can you calculate the performance of this thing?" I said,

J /1 ~rAVt." .f-o "Well, 1 @8+1 make a lot of assumptions, but I can make a cut at it." I actually made -a ettt ~tHe! I~

1\ Cti/M~j,~~"~~ b,.s.t'J ,,.. ~i-.e z.,;..,t. Jnaw;"'J 1

"ttt that tl:rrug:-aR€1-t~ some drag,.,esiirM8tss, but before long we got tee f'ijJOt[;}er il4 tba~ws ~t better

and better information on what we were looking at. m14de Cit hHIAlt;vt~ .toy 1

I think that's probably the first SST configuration that I actually J tu~lteel 8t. But about this

time the SST was getting big. At that time, there were two--Dick Whitcomb was one of the first, 1

think, to start working SST designs. He worked on several. At the time I came there, he was

working on something which eventually came to be called SCAT 4. In fact, one of my first

.J...he sr:HT f assignments when I first came to work there, because he was testing .tl~ese th i"~s 111 the four-foot

'1 supersonic tunnel, I was working the night shift in the four-foot tunnel, running Whitcomb's model

Whitcomb was already a legend. ,I mean, when 1 was in co llege I had read NACA reports w/..\~c(YN!~

about the~ area rule, the ~~ isiRsl a t@ a nils.

Conway: Transonic area rule.

~ .... le rwl..l.s.~r), Harris: The transonic area~that he had~n. Actually, before I came, I had read about supersonic

area rule, because one of the reasons I had gotten the assignment, in just discussing with my new

-4hf bosses, I had read about the supersonic area rule, at least knew abou}t concept. When they found out

about that, that l already knew something about it, they sent me over to the libraty to read up on

c;~ pe.-~ "'".£ d ...-~~~5 . evetything. Then they got the notion about trying to calculate eeHIMI:illg.

One of my first jobs whi le I was just starting to work calculations in the theoretical side, at

the same time I was working night shift in the four-foot tunnel as the test engineer. It was

Whitcomb's test, but I was the test engineer who was in charge of running the w ind tunnel and

getting the data for Dick.

Dick in those days was quite the ladies' man. He was unmarried, single, eligible bachelor,

which he stayed, he never man·ied. But I can remember when I would be mnning night shift, Dick

wou ld have a date. I don ' t know whether they'd go to a movie or whatever they did, and after the

date he wou ld come by, leave his date sitting out in the car, come in and check how the test was

we-rP -rk+ gomg. There 'IIIJIIItl several times he got so engrossed in what we were doing, he forgot his date was

1)

sitting out in the car. I had to tell him, "Hey, Dick, there's a young lady out here." [Laughter] But

that was Dick. I've known Dick ever since those days. We've been good friends, and I sti ll see

him on occas ion. We worked together. I never worked for Dick, but we worked together, because I

was developing theoretical tools.

Dick was interesting, because Dick was a consummate experimentalist. Somebody asked

him one time, what did he have against theoretical tools. He said he didn ' t have anything against

theory, he said he just objected to theory that didn't work. [Laughter] , I e

Sl 1'\C >~ 110" V But we got the notion, because Dick was working the SCAT 4, that '« got these computer ,

C(li\

tools, let's use the computer tools to design tile SST, because by this time we had ideas on how to

I l I " • ~~"C v.ol ~t~fKt"lt' ~t"'.C., • optimization. Harry Carlson had developed a technique, given a

6 plan f01m that you cou ld

~ n /

optimize the shape of the warp, a combination of twist and camber. It was what people called a

"potato chip" wing.

Conway: It' s a good description I hadn't thought of.

h;~, eo~~ 1

Han·is: He had an optimization routine built into11

timt. I had by this time put an optimization

routine into the calculation of wave drag so that we could, given certain constraints on length, wing

plan form, maximum cross-section area of the fuselage, we'd calculate the optimum fuselage shape

to minimize the wave drag. So we had the notion, well, we 've got these two. Let's use them to see

Ql" ow ~""~ if we can design file SST. Because we weren't going to beat Whitcomb at his game. Everybody

1 .j... ,. A ~ £:?p·hw,r~,~ ,

knew he was the best in the world, intuitively, ~0i fi Eting t@o>@e tH&t. But maybe we had

it~+/,..t 11ew codP~ ~"" 01 Jv,.YIJP4Jf ~...,.J sometliing_ that would give us ae t~e~. And that Jed us down the road to first the SCAT 15, then 1-o

..., " I}

the SCAT I SF.

Conway: So the computer was in a substantial sense responsible for that design.

Han·is: It is responsible for that design. In fact, we published a paper that explains it step by step.

Don Baa ls, who was my branch head, was the senior author. Baals, Warner Robins and myself.

-Baa l~ Is, a lid Han is. I've got a copy of that paper.

Conway: Is it a NASA pub or is it AIAA?

; ... J~ f Harris: It was first published as an AlAA conference paper and later as a journal articlel! Journal of

A ircrafl. Basica lly it used the SCAT I SF as an example case. It showed and explained how the

computer codes worked and showed how we used the computer codes to des ign the SCAT !SF. It

"hot1.J- _ gave a rationale for everything 1lt thatclkt~,.... •

II

But when we did the first SCAT l fdesign, we tackled the cmise case first. r • t • A

Co v\.'11" tee, 111 ~ ;-,0 "''

original SCAT17-. the first shape we tested,Jif was just a cruise shape. We came up w ith the

VYl eJ--+ ~ f' butterfly wing later in trying to figure out a way tol\~ot 1~1 ;;1U! od takeoff and landing requirements in

a shape that's good for supersonic cruising.

If you just design for 1ile supersonic cmise, ~ s :ve!e-laRg st, I can' t remember whether

we were looking at mach 2.5 or 2.7, somewhere in that range at the time. lfyou just designed for -H ... -e

~e r cruise condition, l\leading edge wants to be about seventy degrees of sweep. In those days, we

" ~ l.. ,..,, WI -f; Wd·.J,o?

hadn 't worked out how to get good takeoff and landing characteristics ~ wings a t that much h~J $-h.L;),·t'] ~~J CO VI.J..nl rrulfe,.,~ ~ /)

sweep.,.8'l. We 0 Ct all hi dG fiJ.f problems 111iiflt'pitch-up a-Ad aJJnok.iud~ @f ~ree leMs with those ~ ~V\~ n

des igns .~.l- +... !:e-oU Q. """d Ia .,d ·~s c f7""' J ,·:J-.1 b n ~, m~k~ -;) J

Our first approach was to design a cruise shape and see how good we can}- I .,

r ~e1 tills IIUhllbsts, I'm a little fuzzy on the numbers, but I think the first version of SCAT ISF

that we came up with, we had ~t a theoretica l cru ise L-over-0 of somewhere around ten.

Conway: Heavens.

Harris: ~bon+ dr~,.o,

The best that Whitcomb was getting wa? 7.5A those kind of numbers. We recognized that\. ~4,c.. wur,

a theoretical number. In practice, we probably wouldn 't get all of that, but, .-, the theoretical

numbers before were all looking li ke 8.

Conway: Sure. If you can figure out a way to tum that 10 into a subsonic plane and get your off-

cruise performance decent.

led l-o beri·~~~~ J.oUJPvk fJY?s-j;;~S"F Harris: Right. So tha~ feft thG w[;}s le thing no len l:eel a lot of other people,4 ~. a lot of the c~ ncepf

subsonic fo lks and a lot of the stabili~~;ntrol people trying to work the p itch-~ problem and

d-. ~~~ WQrk /P~-S..j..rr) · ways to solve

11 *tt. T.N~fUt ?" 811lH~d for a number of years before the SCAT l5F ~ took its

final shape. I think the leading edge was still pretty close to 70 degrees, except we put that

t-outboard crank on it. We found that there was some benefits ..:~'franked arrow wings in trying to to,; .,1tec! ptl--c L,_ vt p e v-1 ~I,*""

work thef and somewhere along the way we got involved in the SCAT 16, which was a variable

I · J -et!d pVD6}y'*6 w,,. ... t( .... ,s towS!' Eddie Polhamus [f3 1:81i6t*cLo' '?r there was in the seven-by-ten-foot tunne~ (He's another

one you ought to talk to~ I sen"' lmerw if he's still around) Eddie, prior to the SST days--well, wait

a minute now. I'm getting time frames mixed up a little bit.

There was an activity. I remember John Stack made a trip to England somewhere in this

early--

Conway: Yes, he went in '56 and then again in '58 or '59.

Harris: Right. There was a fellow I think by the name of Barnes Wall is in England, who was

working variable sweep wings.

Conway: Yes. Called the Swallow.

Harris: The Swallow, right. And Stack came back all invigorated about variable sweep wings.

Basically, we had done variable sweep work in the United States prior to that, but it had gotten

extremely complicated. The problem with the variable sweep wing tt..e is that if you put the pivot

where you'd like to put it, right on the fuselagel\~~~~ou've got some thickness, yett ' Y"l! get to ftUt

-se.n=!o@tl: ing big b IL:at to handle the load, and you pivot the wing, the problem is that as the wing

sweeps back, the aerodynamic center moves back, and you wind up with a balance problem. The

only way you can fix that balance problem is to translate the pivot point.

Conway: Move the pivot point forward.

~ ..W~ .,.d nAS .f.li Ut ~'Yl-J HaiTis: As you sweep back, move the pivot poin~ Well, as you can imagine, because this pivo!,.t the

entire weight of the airplane htts to bs e8'1 t ied thHtagh tb i ~ F i, ot stt w tm c, it gets to be big, heavy,

and now you're go ing to try to move it? [Laughter]

Conway: Which is what the X-5 did, but it was a small airplane.

J.-W Harris: It was a small airplane, right. The U.S. bad just gotten l&ael:z:s{ wrapped around ~axle

ttying to find a practical solution to variable sweep and hadn't found it. But Barnes Wallace had

come up with the idea of an outboard pivot. Stack got all excited about that because now you could

have something that looked like a cranked wing, so you'd have a fixed portion. The way those

areas played, because at least you've got a new idea, a new game to play in trying to solve the

balance problem.

Stack came back al l excited, and Eddie Polhamus jumped on that problem and sta1ied doing

a lot of experiments in the old seven-by-ten-foot tmmel at Langley. He discovered that there is an

optimal pivot location, that with that optimal pivot location you can have a combination of fixed

sweep and variable sweep so that the aerodynamicf center location is the same in the most forward

swept position as it is in the most aft. A:nd it doesfo}lt stay tl ~C l e. It starts there and theA kind of eh~il:i

~ i les that and coU{t!!J!b~

But the way those two, the fixed area and the variable area play together, if you balance

those areas right and locate the pivot right, and Eddie was the one who worked all that out wid ' l~ e

para mea i :;; ftH1~1t#a, here's where to put the pivot, you can solve this balance problem without

hav ing to translate the pivot. It took Barnes Wallis 's idea of how to do the pivot mechanism, and

the NASA structures people statted working on Mmt as t8 how to use that idea to fit a pivot in the

thin wing. So ~hat 61::1t, anf that led to the SCAT 16. We worked both the 15 and the

j .,._ /~ Pl.)_ .,J.._£,-. o( ~ J e.P'

16"-the group that I was involved with. !(Variable sweep ~ for the SST application never was

really accepted.

Conway: Except that Boeing ran with it until '68 when they dropped it for a delta wing.

Harris: That's right, Boeing did.

Conway: Boeing won the competition with the variable sweep in '66 and then had to drop it in '68.

Hanis: Right. There's one other li ttle story that's interesting, I think, along the way. Prior to us

doing the SCAT 15, and this really came out of the work that Harry Carlson bad done. The first

wings that Harry started using his code to optimize were pure anow wings{ The de lta is a specific

hA6~eyg <;W~~p , ) wierf' case of the an·ow, where the trailing edge~- The most optimum arrow would be .it you keep

~ ~

sweeping the trai ling edge so that you get it up to the point where you've almost got the trailing

edge and the leading edge on the same line. Structurally you can't build such a thing, but you'd like +o ~ve ()Is WI.V.(; L. () \- ~~ 1 p,., ~ If ., !:J -e+ , 1\ what we ca ll the notch ratio,

11 wh i c~ is, jf you 'oa!c at nov,· t:Re:trailiAg edge corn i~Ht«i to a dd ttt,--it.

on ~ dellA w/Vls , 1 • ~ved thfli::poiR: iR: you csme M~ vo"ith a d-elta~ notch rati~ is zero. Ifthe trailing edge were p Vt.rT!onrl

~evi' i} '~ "VI 0\ halfway between Mo€ delta and the leading edge, it would be a 50 percent notch ratio.

" Conway: So essentially you' re sweeping the aft edge forward.

Han·is: Sweepi-11g the aft edge forward. The more notch ratio you have, aerodynamically, the better

you get, but structurally the more difficult to build. So there has to be an optimum tradeoff between

what you can physically build and how heavy does it get to be with what you would like to do

aerodynamically. 3o~~m-g•at~e3e a r~Ags~ Ed McLean and Clint

Brown and Bemie Clunker [~a ticl4i d ,~J ~ ~ir-s). Q t"rOW W11·11 0. /~? ku" e 'i::Jf-vt J t'es +koo.f 'I v-~Vtl ember-j

Conway: Don' t know that name.

Harris: 1 don't know what happened Bernie. Tltat;g;;:S: Ris a Me: ~sb aoo then be kinei of msetppeo~r~

f~1 1 1 tlilQI, . But Clint Brown and Ed McLean are both still around. They took that concept and

tried to come up with a configuration of what we called the Brown Bomber. 1mdt J~ wt:r~ bu~/)

But in the process t'!lf El8illl!) tlflttt, , .... El a H:rpee a parametri c set of arrow win~ that looked II

a~emes, and it turns out that one of the models thst l:ael eeen--1 think it was a disp.lay model, not

~J ~eeVl an actual test model, thttt set'l tebo~cl=builr, they painted it red, and it was out at Ames. When

SdWlf NASA hired "'-e P.R. people who came up with the meatball, the NASA meatball , the symbol for

'l

NASA, he was touring the NASA Centers and he was out at Ames and he saw that painte.d-red Ocrrt?u.JW,..._~

arrow wing, and he t£ id 5f used some a11istic license, and that's the upswept on the NASA If

meatball. That's where it came from. It was one of those arrow wings.

l-laP~-was us iRg h-i~EI&=t.o warp-Ates~~mgs4€Fget OfJtim~e-it 'WQ&..a

""'' pllllakope. You yan seftd artist exaggerated both the notch ratio and the degree of warp when ...\-i-. e m ecA-l:.c, f

he put it on 1Be, but that's where that came from, the NASA meatball. It was Gil t oi:Baa:y .V...e C( ,_J-i.,..J

€Ht lse~ ~~srimiMts The model happened to be out at Ames an~ta was out at Ames and saw it-

Conway: Thought it was neat.

--::r.-1- (J ..,.._

Harris: ~came the symbol for aeronautics"\ the meatball.

Conway: The Brown Bomber. Tell me about that versus the Canard Bomber.

Harris: I don't rea lly remember anything about the Brown Bomber, other than that there was such a

thing.

Conway: lt was an arrow-wing bomber? .

Harris: It was an arrow-wing, yes. I had been involved, through Harry Carlson, on the arrow

wings, and actually Clint Brown and Ed McLean worked in a different or?an~ati on at Langley. I ~ ~~ ~ , . e,;e~r;t 7 ,

didn ' t really work with them en thatf) l d1d work later w1th both of them1 Later on, Ed McLean and

I collaborated on some things and worked very closely together, on SSTs, as a matter of fact.

Conway: In the seventies?

Harris: ln the seventies, right. Clint Brown left NASA and went up to Princeton and worked with--

l forget the name of the company up there. My mem01y is bad; 1 can't pu ll the name or the guy.

They had a company up there. It 's the same company that John Hoboult went and worked with

. • I w"~. l-fS.[>()n~Jj;-4r ~~--loif when he left Langley. Jolm was b1g mto space. He s the guy who IR]•h tl the lunar -ot;8itet=-

Ot. ~ pvo~cL, -\-o ~0~;.,\ ~ j_(~ I'YIODIJ' C)j.,}- ~ rendezvous4 Ill thmk of the name 111 a mmute. But anyway, ~left and went up there. But Cl int,

later, in the seventies came back to NASA and worked in NASA Headquarters for a wh ile. We

worked again with him in that era. But it was that association with the arrow . wmg and how it later

appeared on the ASA meatball ~)... T wa hJt J -1 v d es-c-,: he ,

wl~·+c:IJ.,b We worked the SCAT 16 and the I 5 and the !SF. ~ continued to work the SCAT 4. But

'1 su-r /6"~ill'J 8 s l J' ~ ,4"'~ de<.k)n eventually it became clear that the competition was really betweer}f-and I think the Ames design

was called a SCAT 17.

Conway: I can' t remember whether it was 16 or 17. I have the summary publication on all the

SCATs, so it's easy for me to look up which one was theirs.

-rt.,e\~ t~re (TZ-t5rtw/r-~ .).~ q JAolosrt:ip). J Harris: ~some display models of them. This was the 16, that was the 15, that was the 17, that

~ A

was with the SCAT 4. There 's the wind tutmel. Me, when I had hair. This was the old four- foot

.}\,..e. supersonic tunnel. It was,.SCA T 16 wind tunnel model.

Conway: Yes, I think I have a copy of this picture.

Harris: So the competition sort of boiled down, within NASA, .t between SCAT 15 and 17.

The real question, the theoretica l potential of the 15 was much greater than the 17. The SCAT 17

was a li ttle better than the B-70, because they did get rid of that wedge and put strut-mounted

engines on it.

The advantage of the 17 was, it was a simpler design to get better weights. Worse

aerodynamics, better weights. The 15 had the best aerodynamics. Weights in the end were not bad,

but aerodynamics got very complicated in trying to solve the low-speed problem with a high sweep

on that wing. We went around lots and lots of ax les h-ying to solve that. In the end, Boeing finally

put a horizontal tai l on it.

Conway: That fixed the problem.

Harris: In fact, this is a model of the SCAT 15 that we first--

Conway: This is the 15F.

Harris: This was the first version of the 15F that we did. This was, I think the final version. This is

from the second SST program.

Conway: The later program in the seventies.

Harris: The later program in the seventies.

Conway: This is more similar to the version they were just working on in HSR, essentially ..

Harris: Yes, this was an HSR configuration, I think. So this grew out of this. You can see how

they put the crank.

Conway: Right. They moved the crank up.

Harris: They got rid of a lot of the notch. I mean, it's a combination between the de lta, but they put

the sweep out here. They got the engine nacelles in the right place.

Conway: Yes. They got rid of the outboard tai ls because that's a lot of weight. It may be good

aerodynamica lly, but it's a lot of weight.

We already talked about how the 15 and I SF were really dependent on the computer. l ' m

going to have to figure out where your computer-related stuff was published and how it was

disseminated.

Harris: I can show you some stuff here.

Conway: I can wri te some citations down.

cA-- C!Ot'"\ p u ~,, co J /S, I> Harris: This is probably the first publication of the whole system [:wultutr]. T his was th~s, 1

a\A~ ~per' 11 4-t.d-ruLJ;s~,.J o.t "'- ,~per "'""cl Robins, Han·is. This is the AIAA paper. This was the joumal art icle. It was later published as a

/1 ~

journal article.

Conway: Yes, it's easy to get AIAA papers out at the Langley Technical Lab.

HarTis: Yes, they' ll have both of these out there. They' ll have both there. It was first published c.. a T>Qt-lr C4\ ~ -J.o•n·nA I u,.J,clf'" ~and probably nine months or a year later published~. T his is October '68.

Conway: This is published in '68, but you obviously had it running well before that.

Harris: Yes.

Conway: You were running the basic code in the late fifties.

Harris: Well, no.

Conway: Well, you started, you said, in '58.

Harris: I started in '58, July '58.

[Begin Tape 1, Side 2]

Conway: So it's got to be more like '61 or '62.

Harris: Yes.

Conway: So, well after the B-70, but right about the time when Boeing is trying to figure out what

to do with its own--

~b)l~t.tJ-,;Y') Han·is: I was given an AlAA award for that in '68. Let me see if I can find the first piaes ef tRi6,

toJe ' ~~f c;l0,. , which was the wave drag~ It 's in '64, was the first · .

Conway: So this was originally classified. [ sott of figured that.

Jt"«-~ du.,e Harris: About that same time or maybe a little earlier, Harry Carlson published the eillllt to *: lift

{.tr ;.~~ o.l- C'oJ,~ ~ on~ piece of tat, which is the other piece you might look for. I don't know whether I've got that or not.

IJ

6~ Conway: So that was drag to ;.e lift?

i\

Harris: Yes.

Conway: The Boeing WS-1 I 0 entry then was based on the right idea by putting engine pods aft

and putting the shockwave there then, which is interesting. But without the programs, the wave

drag program was '57, they would have been a very hard time figuring out where to put the nacelles

exactly on the wing .

.vavJ-lv Harris: YouA find the optimum. Intuitively, a good aerodynamicist would know that's where they

belong. You're playing with a positive pressure field and you want that to ayt on a forward-fac ing -J..,J..e lof¥1f-to".,.... 1

slope. You don ' t need a computer code to know that. To optimize :it, you do. I mean, to find the .1

best placement.

Conway: Yes, because Boeing's entty was interesting because it was a diamond-shaped wing with

the engines and aft-placed nacelles. So they foresaw that the Ames guys were wrong.

HatTis: Right.

Conway: As did the Langley guys.

Harris: Here's the Carlson rep01t . I believe this was in '64. You know, the interesting thing about

the wave drag code and Whitcomb's area rule, Whitcomb generated the area rule from intuition . .ar

~ rea l!)~om iatll iti8R. After he did it, people went back and found that the theoretical basis for

it was already there. It had been developed in an obscure Ph.D. thesis by a guy by the name of ')+,J -h 1'11, J

Wally Hayes, proposed in 1947. But evetybody looke~1a~ and said that's an abstract theory, -} hot? ~-e al'$,_,.}e J-~p, JJ;t: J ~

that'& no practical application. It wasn't until after Whitcomb published it that they went ls@:d<...aM! I! L J / II " Wet/I~ He-~~~ 1s. woyr;;, wc.s"''-£.o"ififJse e,;:eu v~,/.9

~i9 ere s s. theoretical basis for th ~-B, an-d .tt.'e in Wall) Hayes 's sraff. So the mathematics for how A ~

you calculate the wave drag really came out of Wally Hayes' work, not out of Whitcomb's work.

Conway: That's good to know. There's some discussion of this in Jim Hansen's book on the

theoretical basis, but Whitcomb probab ly had never read it, and even if be bad, it's not the same. It

wouldn't have meant anything to him.

, + +k-t "re~ .,.~Jt .C.vom '7~ , 0. ~6 o:J (!

HatTis: ln fact, I would defy anybody to read Wally Hayes' report/\Q've got copies of the report

somewhere. I don't know if I can put my hands on it, but it's in my fi les) It's not so difficu l t ~

the *t•cmce you lldlu .. o-...W.e~" '1o,)ve ~ee~ ~e ~r-cu ruf~ ~ J~~t)- +~ t' +zoo -h)t)i~;

Conway: It 's never hard after the fact.

HarTis: But even Wally Hayes himself, I think, had no idea. [Laughter]

Conway: I've gotten the impression from my own research that estimating the performance of

supersonic aircraft in the fifties was an a11 that nobody had really mastered.

Harris: Right. "'J...kW~p ~..s of-

My first estitn!H:e8 Bf estimating drag were based on theories that were linear in ~

nature, they were grossly simplified, and people had only obtained solutions for simple shapes. For

example, you could go in to textbooks and get equations for the drag of a delta wing.

Conway: The triangular low aspect ratio wing, yes.

Harris: Right. Or even the arrow wing, all by itself. And you could get the drag of a body of ~vo...,....

revolution M the textbooks, equations for how to calculate the drag of a body of revolution. So '1

what people were doing is that if you had an airplane you wanted to ca lculate, estimate the drag for,

lift and drag for, you'd go out and pick out an arrow wing that was close to the shape. Yow· wing

may not even be an arrow wing, but whatever. You pick out an an·ow that was close and assume

that it had the same drag, you can ca lculate that. You pick out a body of revolution that sort of

looked like the fuselage, calculate the drag on that. Engine nacelles, there wasn' t a way to do that.

Basically, I guess, if it were a B-70-type thing, you could go into the equations and get the

drag of two-dimensional wedge. It looks li ke a wedge, so estimate the drag based on that. For

things like the SST podded engines, basicall y you could consider each pod like a body of revolution

and estimate that and just add them all up, and you just neglect any interference effects.

So that was sort of the state of the art before these computer codes came into being, and if

you got close to the right answer, it was luck. It mean~you had compensating enors. You knew

you had en·ors in there big time. If you got the right answer, it was because you had compensating

en ors.

Conway: You had compensating en ors that you didn ' t know about.

Hanis: That you didn't know about. Right. But it was all you could do. And that's what people

did.

The Concorde was designed w ith those methods. It was designed originally with those kind

of ideas, and then they went into the wind twmel and tried it. To their credit, they did an amazingly

good job, I think, because they got as good as anybody else had gotten in that era with those

techniques. It was just that they~ estimated L-over-D about eight and were getting less than 7.

The Concorde engine is an interesting story. That Concorde engine is a very good engine,

even by today's standards for a supersonic engine.

Conway: Really? But it didn't start out as a supersonic engine.

Harris: No.

Conway: It started out as an engine for, 1 guess, a transonic bomber, as I understand it.

Harris: Yes. I think it's the Olympus 593~ ttltin=l:c *it' s eulled. I don' t mean to say it's as good as we

~-- 'd·~ +.~ e rert~d can do today; it's not. But it is amazingly goodA even if you compare it by today's standards.

Conway: For a 1964 engine.

Han·is: Yes. Three things ki lled the Concorde.

Conway: It's too small.

Harris: Too small. 1n no eta, for-that.s i~e ai1 rslaRe, and range was too short. The other thing was, it

was designed when jet fuel was ten cents a gallon. A lot of things make sense at ten cents a gallon

that don't make sense at a dollar and a haifa ga llon. [Laughter] Really, the U.S. lucked out. They

canceled the SST program ~tf' M~e vn M g t iMLle for the wrong reasons, the first SST program. But in

+e..-~ the long ~, we were lucky they did, because shortly after, had they gone ahead into production,

jJ,../' ~tuld l...ve s~~ ~~bout the time they,.~t into production that the oil crisis occulTed and jet fuel went from ten

cents to a dollar and a half. It would have been a disaster.

The other thing that would have made it a disaster, too, is that in those days we were not

J,l.J-o .J-t..e enV(Ytlt~w.t!d sensitive to environmental concerns. We just assumed that whatever it -.-;, everybody wou ld live

ow,<1 rolllllt 10"" with it. The noi se, sonic boom, ooelt1'9~~ that that airplane would have produced wou ld have been

unacceptable, too.

Conway: Yes, certainly the engine noise. Just before it was canceled, Boeing had come to the

conclusion that they had to put a new engine on it to meet the noise standards that went from--the

original engine was a 633 pound-a-second engine, and they decided that they needed to raise it to

830. So the weight of the plane went up 125,000 pounds for the bigger engine and the fue l to carry

it around and all that. It' s just a mess.

But you 're right, and in fact, it 's because of that that I've built the book largely around that

sort of transformation that occurs both in the aircraft industry and in NASA supporting the aircraft

industry, of environmental concerns just not existing before really 1965 or so, when there' s this

brutal transition around the SST and then after that, it becomes the first issue you have to address in

new aircraft design, wi ll you be able to meet these rules. It makes the book interesting.

p VCJ~ (/I H1 I

Harris: Yes, the rules keep changing. That's one of the things in the whole SS~ the ground rules ~~ ~~e. A ... J P.!- b e,'nc; "'"' e congfTIIt 'i04elf~~

continually changed. Timing just killed the Concorde and just saved the"ssT, although we were A I

t{~,~I"'Dir1 f'rlrl~ACt;,.~ AV\

bui lding a bigger one. v. ..... etortuHtic.-

Conway: It would have been better economically than the Concorde.

J:,~tt"'" Hanis: Right, than the Concorde, but not good.

A

Conway: But not good enough to beat the 747, even the original flawed 747.

''-svtes Han·is: Right. There are all kinds of interesting side1~ that detetmine how things really work

out. What really should have happened on the SST program, they should have continued the

program through the building of the prototype and use it as a research vehicle. We'd really have

learned a lot. And, you know, 95 percent of the cost was already paid. To cut it off right when we Wt' lo!:>..J-- 01"' orfol-..fu~<t,' J..~ J-~t W"~ Mlf"/'1 /-,;,J .CoY

did was a big mistake. In the end, 1t 88&t: as a lot that MPH will have to be paidVwhen the country J .-9-c r ~Set,".......,

decides to build an SST, and I think the SST is going to happen. NAS~fl~ade an absolutely stupid

Ct1*1p]J,l1 el,i.,-..£, ~ moJ- vc ce"'+-11

decision t~~l .- program. I hztve t€Js:quali~ tl~t. I'm talking about the recent cancellation of

a ttll S U]>t'I-SQiljl. +rtt"'!.f>O,_-f- 'r-~S.t'~YC ~ ,

Conway: The HSR.

~ I rytJc.t" Harris: The HSR, The HSR program as it was structured was the wrong program.

~ I (

Conway: Why do you say that?

Harris: Because it had a fundamental fl aw that bad probably been a flaw that some wise people

have known forever, but I discovered it during the NASP, National Aerospace Plane program. I

...J..o ~e. ca ll it the NASP syndrome, simply because it became abundantly clear through the NASP program

/I

~~ R w, .. JJ Jt~ what was happening andA that program was going to fa il. Early on, I could predict that program If> a

II ,( j\

monumental fa ilure for one simple reason, the program, to succeed, had to develop new technology.

-l- ec~~Jrll?l ~ When you started that program, you did not have the oa~se i l ity to finish it. So the focus of the

1 program had to be to develop the technology that allows you to do this mission. /

~+ ~.J-111ed~~ Well , th€ fl aw ie ~ j:3regt'MlT4ik5 t+Ntt, you have to understan~ there's '}difference between

a technology program, a fundamental difference that has to be recognized from day one, ~ tlr whoev~r-­

~ and a development program. In a development program, Boeing decides they 1\

are going to build a 7-umpty-ump, .My, and when they make that decision, all the technology s hAe. -h Jot! ,:._ p/0\CP ll.tltwlte to build it.

Conway: It has to already exist or they won' t make the decision.

~ Harris: So you have a development program. '*t: development program is a very disciplined

" program based on schedules and budgets, and says we're going to roll out an airplane on this day,

and evetyth ing you do is focused on that day, on delivering pieces along the way that allow you to

deliver on that day. That's a development program . . But we zkiddt:d emseloccrt into= mm we managed the NASP program as if it was a

c:t Q. (JY 4 j""' development program. Had a date, date certain. Going to fly this thing on _, date. When you

A

manage a technology program like a development program, the first thing that happens is, the date

wl..en drives evetything. It r ou look at what .. I need to do to develop the technology, and you lay that

b~i} program out. Oh, can't be ready by the date.

{\

Conway: So you drop it.

Han·is: Can' t do it. So you start dropping everything that can't be done by the date. But it tums

~o-h out, everything you need to~ make it a success can' t be done by the date. So your logic built into

tnc.YlC(se .... ,,-1 ~rrt-olllft. ..._., the development program . , causes you not to do the things you need to do for success. So

II.

you can 't run a technology program the way you run a development program. And that's what

/ethsf happened. The SST program, that HSR program, was run like a development program, not like a

t1 ltittve

teclmology program, which is iR: a Catch 22. You 111.t an absolutely guaranteed failure. I{

Conway: You know you need a laminar flow control system in order to give some perfom1ance

margin for the system, but we dropped it because it wasn 't going to be done in 2003, no way.

Han·is: Right. We had the wrong program. What we should have done is canceled the program as · frl'~ ~W'I ,

it existed and rep lace it w ith a p118:gt'81~ : ef techno l o~ The way aeronautics teclmology has to be

done, people who are in the technology business shouldn 't be driven by dates.

Conway: In the research business ..

~~ OM Harris: In the research business, :ight. There~ to be a pressure, certainly, to do things.., some

o. c e.-h ,-..., +ech~tJPc,;1 kind of schedule, but you don' t decide whether you work on bM6 or not work on it based on the date

I}

you can deliver. You figure out what is the problem that has to be solved, and then you work with a

sense of urgency to solve that problem as quickly as you can. But you don't stop working on a

problem that has to be solved because it can't be solved in the time frame. So it' s a different mind-

It t-et;ft;tY(~ pr6'h~ ,._. ~ a ~ad idtP~ set about how you managed ~~~' because you have to recognize from the start

71it's ~ to

! A

start talking about when you're going to produce an airplane until you have the technology in hand.

Conway: But NASA is a development agency. It ceased to be a research agency a long time ago.

Harris: Big mistake. See, the proble~ there, it is what space has done to NASA. NASA's ~ol_e in

;.l!. f'(}!f I....... (}.; ~, -g,r-,1-j Spt.t t' space is vastly different than aeronautics. NASA is ti technology developer in space; lt does the

/J /1/ II

tu1J ope11a .J-~S research, develops the technology, and bui lds the vefi icles. Aeronautics; we have a more limited

" r~er;o'cL... q.., d role in aeronautics. We are strictly a,. technology organization. For the first couple of decades of

h-.t~f NASA's ex istence~ Ml!rl

11great pride that I had three months with the NACA) [Laughter]

Conway: It was a completely different place.

Harris: Completely differently place. But for the first couple of decades of NASA, the people who

were running NASA were people who had grown up in NACA. They understood that space is

different from aeronautics, and they allowed aeronautics to continue to function as a research

organization. But somewhere along the ':.c{t' 1n the top mana! ement at NASA--and it's an age 4 N ~p

~~+';act' £15!1 "1 ~~e"'-C1 thing, .,, Phet } I 1 S 4 , lUi tbe !!page ttg Jll ¥, in the early days the people who ran the space MRtien

I I ' " /1. wrr~ree~ 1"""

were people who had previously ~ aeronautics. But as those people retired, died off, left, il

\\W Fr, they were replaced with people who had grown up on the space side and only understood rr,,~slo~-"' 1??1$.s ,;; n

the space/\siWe, didn't understand the aeronautics,~. And they're the people who forced

aeronautics into this development role. l-acmalhg l1a&wn,. tb~alci I ~l dii \'«iiiil co"l~ne

~QD I!lYbltcly, bt' nuA~tc I' m an advocate for f nngl~ for aeronautics and I'm very

5U pp~r.J- fJ(JS/!J-involved right now with this community team that's trying to keep the aeronautics program healthy.

~ A

Well, it isn't healthy.

Conway: Or restore it to health is more like it, because it basically doesn 't exist anymore.

01'\e. Harris: Right. Butl could make the argument that what NASA has largely become in aeronautics

(/

today isn' t a govetnment role.

Conway: lt just services companies.

II"\

Han·is: Yes. But what aeronautics ~NASA used to be, what NACA did, is clearly a government

role. There are some people, in fact, Dick Culpepper, who currently is AIAA vice president for

"' techn ical activities, a job I used to have, has drafted an !!Mterial EM. commentary for Aerospace A •

I II"' America. I wrote one some time back about what' s happened to aeronautic~- NASA and what

needs to be done about it. He's writing one to kind of follow up on the one 1 wrote, where he's

going to recommend that aeronautics be taken out ofNASA.

Conway: And put where?

h,',!r reco..,,.,fYlJaJ:o,.. , Harris: Well , that is the issue that I have with ._t. He talked to me about it when he said he was , going to do the article. I said, "You know, I've been around this issue about four times in my career

where that question has come up. The answer always comes back, keep it in NASA, that there is a h J-w~c?~"-- A 11 Vo he. ~ h, c."" J S p,.c'i :'

lot of synergy~" Dan Goldin doesn' t understand this, but the NASA space program needs the

aeronautics program, not the other way around. Aeronautics doesn't need the space program. The

space program desperately needs the aeronautics program.

We bailed out the Shuttle. That thing would have been a disaster. If you look at how many

thousands of wind tunnel hours were run on the Space Shuttle, and wind tunnels that Dan Goldin is

ttying to close now. When he gets around to replac ing the Shuttle, he's going to need those wind

tunnels aga in. He doesn' t understand that. The expertise that went with those turu1els and the

,Jk.d di~o(f':l,~-':t'.s expertise of the4 aeronauticsA ~ high !t'eed..aerOJJaJ! t:Ws, he transfet wd peepla, rea lly pulled the

Ptft..,f,;,/ '1t1 -ht/ko),~ Shuttle des ign out of the fire. They had a disaster. They didn ' t understand. I~ about pressme

I • A J hr:~or•"'"l) '

interferencell Ileati r~g it~terferenc.e. ma~8 8 aigger ila::ap~uiQn. I ~BEM-;]f you' re going around

estimating heat loads without considering interference affects, you can be off by a factor of ten or

more, twenty in some cases.

Conway: It happened with the X- 15 when they tried that dummy rocket test. Burn it off. That's

where we learned it.

HarTis: The Shuttle was going to do the same thing at the attachment points with the external tank,

aRe! th~Sbutt le l'l=!atch tog@tR8F. You have the interference effects in there that were going to do the

same thing to tl118t as what happened to the X- 15. It waj!;ronautics people who came in and A

1 , .J.-~e .J-!.Jei1

ot'>IIO~~"~

pointed that out to them, worked the problem, showed them how to ~t. You bad to tai lor the ~~..}r(l.~"-t ~ k,., .. ,., ~111"'5~. A

ti les and protect p so that you don 't have • · The space people didn ' t have a clue. If you don't A ~

k I I I . 4.-t~l 1 . I I d . . ' . eep a 1ea t 1y aeronautics program m t 1ose t1mes w 1en t 1e space program nee s 1t, 1t s not gomg

to be there.

Conway: And industry won't do it.

Han·is: And industry won't do it. Industry can't do it. ~'s always been this way in

J..en industry. It's more so now. You go back to the World War II era ~11we were producing a new

heav1 airplane every year. Even then you could see a cycle to the demand on wind tunnels_ f;MM~tfi"!!!l'!!!'l!'l!l!~

II

Today that cycle is decades.

Conway: One plane every twenty years, you don ' t spend a lot of time in the wind tunnel.

evB¥'1 .J..-v.P ,}- 61,J 6JI.w ;br¥ j.g~(•LaJh&~ So Boeing can ' t afford ie infrastructure -c wind tunnes ifthey're only going to use ~ ../..~e---

4 4 }. /1. Harris: Right.

once eve1y twenty years. But they desperately need it, and it's stupid to think that we can always

rely on Europe. Right now, maybe it's okay. Ma~be they will protect our data. I don ' t beli eve it..bJ!f-J-dcx~ ::tt Ut7 doJJ;,J..s J

~aybe Airbus doesn't see Boeing's wind tu1mel QMts when they test in Europe,-~ because of

$/·f.-~100 the~1 political sk ttt*I.Fe that exists today. One thing that we ought to know from hist01y is that

11 political arrangements are fickle.

Conway: So we have to do a lot of testing in Europe now?

Ranis: The Europeans have invested very heavily in wind tunnels in the last few years. They have

the most modem, most up-to-date wind tmmels in the world . For anybody to be competitive today,

you have to go to Europe to test. I think that is criminal. That is criminal.

Conway: That's a tragedy.

Harris: Even our military planes, JSF, Joint Sh·ike Fighter, is doing at least half its testing in

Europe.

Conway: Nobody on the congressional committee is concerned by that, I guess?

~e C~~re>S· Han·is: Well, there's this group I'm working w ith that 's trying to energize

11)(. The Virginia

delegation is fully energized. We're hy ing to build coa litions w ith the Ohio delegation where Gleim

is, and the California delegation where Ames and D1y den are, to tiy to build our political base to hy

b~tiJ Sk7'f"Dt'"} I to a • · But it' s a slow process, to , : c: I. il'l . It' s been a real education for me$ ince August of last _,

j..ll" year, it 's been close to a year now, been working these political kinds of things. I've spent my

J

whole life in the technical arena where people tend to speak the truth, and even when they don ' t,

it's because of a misunderstanding. You can go do a test and prove who 's right.

Conway: Doesn' t work that way in a political arena.

Han-is: Doesn ' t work that way in'f; oli tical arena. ll

Conway: Interesting. No, I hadn 't rea lized that the wind tunnel situation was quite that bad.

HatTis: That' s not to say we don't have good wind tunnels. We have some good wind tunnels, it's

just that we haven ' t invested in them. Wind tunnels are like any high-tech piece of equipment.

You can draw an analogy w ith computers. You cou ld go out and buy Microsoft Power Point, but

you've got to update it every year. They come out with the new version every year. You've got to

keep updating it or you 're going to be out of date pretty quick. The same thing--

[Begin Tape 2, Side 1]

Conway: It looks like I didn ' t get anything after I changed the disk. Well, that's too bad.

Harris: I can 't remember what we talked about.

Conway: We were talking about the computers again and how you thought industry, not just

Boeing, didn' t quite grasp the power, the computational utilities.

' ~ Harri s: There were individuals in the com pan)\ that understood it, but it took a while to sell their

..J-L.e ~--~~u l h management that we can beli eve~ tl,.i@ stuff, that we can really use it as the primary design tool.

Conway: Which isn' t surpri sing, since a research culture, you would expect, would grab on to the

latest thing. You had a lot fewer people to have to convince, too. Langley is a much smaller

organi zation than the aircraft design team.

Harris: We didn ' t really have to convince anybody. The culture, when I fi rst came to work there,

and I think somebody told me this my fi rst day, that my goal in life ought to be to find a technical

problem, an unso lved important technica l prob lem, )'91Lha¥£:Jbat 9-et:ti'l n ~t been sel:od, and to try

to become the world 's expert in that area. Find some area that 's not been solved and try to become

the world 's expert. Simple philosophy.

Once you had reached a certain threshold, once you had ~found your niche and had

started publishing and been accepted ti=iud of as the expert, a nationa l expert in that area, you've got

a free run. Bas ica lly, if you said, "This is the next thing I need to do, to develop th is technology

area," you were the expert, everybody accepted that. There was no question about it, never any

discussion about what it's going to cost, what schedule, what are you going to deli ver, when are you

going to deliver it. You basically, said, "I'm going to need a new w ind tunnel model," or use so

many hours on the computer, and you got it. Other than my immediate boss, I didn't talk to

anybody else about it.

Conway: Didn ' t have to justify it to headquarters.

Harris: No.

Conway: Under the Langley regime until the seventies?

Han·is: Right.

Conway: Once NASA sends Ed Cartwright down, things change a lot at Langley. Is it his regime

that that management style comes into play, which eve1ything has to be justified by a project of

some sort?

Han·is: I don't really associate it with Ed. I think Ed brought a project enviromnent to Langley, but

he did not force all the research into that project mode. He brought projects, and projects operated

Cllf' ..U..-ere that way 1t> Langley, but ;t was a clear delineation between who was doing research and who was

1\ ~ doing project~ aRE! tl::!ess ef tiS eoiAg ~SI!!aFCR .

I can remember some of my very first meetings with Ed. At that time when Ed Cartwright

first came to Langley, I had gotten involved with the intelligence community, again through these c::.upers.on ,'L "/~-enJ.J-.

codes. I had developed these techniques for analyzing~- The intelligence community heard II.

about it. This was in the era when the Russians were producing a new fighter every year. They had

the May Day Parade and they'd bring out all the surprises, you know, new things. So 1 was

involved with the intelligence community where they'd get~ photographs of something new,

and they'd ask me to analyze it, trying to figure out what can it do, what's its capabi li tiesoc,...-e ~

In fact, that's when Ed Cartwright came. Right at the time that he came, I was involved in a t .~.f.elle5 e~re OOW11Y11AI1't~

big squabble witH~he ~- They had seen the first photographs iiiiill of the Fox bat. The Air Force

Foreign Technology Division at Wright-Patterson took a look at it and said, "It's got a straight

I A--1' t)tyv'~01 \c~-t~t'd OV7

wmg. It 's a subsonic/ ' Of course, I'd been working supersonics . I took a look at it and I I• I I 2t

the inlet. One of the things about a supersonic inlet, it's easy to figure out what the Mach number

is. Very easy.

Conway: The shape of the in let's different.

Harris: Spike or a ramp. You look at the angles and figure out what the speed's got to be to put the 4 c n-tis, s ruJ ~f ,~ Itt

shock on the lip, and that tells you right where • is. So I looked at Eha t fhiHg and said, "I know n ~

that's supersonic. It's 2.8 Mach." That puts the shock right on inlet lip.

The FTD got incensed by that. The other thing that they didn 't like, they only had

photographs of the underside. They had photographs that somebody had taken standing outside the

-1-~e'1 hflld boundaries of an airfield as this thing was ta king off or landing, both takeoff and landing

01/N•Y",..t{' photographs. But nobody knew what the upper half of the~ looked like. So l took the

simplistic approach and said, "Well, let's assume they know how to do it, assume they have the

same techniques we've got. " So I just used my wave drag optimization. What does it need to be?

So I just sketched out what ~ it neet'to be. I drew the top side, which I had not seen, based on ~

the given area of distribution to match what it needed to be in order to be optimum. They said,

"Well, they don ' t have computers like we have. They can' t get·that resolution." I said, "Hey, you

verVJ can do this by hand. It wi ll just take you a lohg time."

A

Conway: You've got enough people, you can do anything.

Ranis: I did it. You can do it by band. You don't have to have a computer.

~ Conway: It 's certainly not a fast way, as you said. The 704 would do it, it would just take it a

tJ; couple hours.

Ranis: Things got kind of tense between the agencies. Finally the CIA called a meeting at

headquarters which I was called to and the FTD was called into. They had a bunch of other experts.

/..ockht>ed They had Kelly Johnson fi·om the.\ Skunk Works there, and other people, trying to tlu·ash it out. Of

course, when we got there, everybody agreed with me but FTD. A no-brainer.

Conway: Sure. You don't waste effort putting a supersonic inlet on a subsonic plane.

Harris: And also, if you look how sharp the leading edge is, you don't put a sharp leading edge on a

subsonic w ing. One of the things we had done, if you go back and look at the history of the

sMV"P I (A J ,;.~ eels t 51-1 per~on/c. fighters, the F-104 had a straight w ing and had a gees str.a+gb~, and had a good performance .

1 ~

eMt Me it. If you want a thick wing with a blunt leading edge, you have to have a high sweep ~ fe ~,.- ~~C.It'.-~c '1 ·

A supersonic/\ If you're willing to have a thin wing with a sharp leading edge, you can do just as well

. h . l . ,J- . speec4. . h . Y h d h d ff: b d wtt stratg 1t wmg supersonic as you can wit a swept w mg. ou ave to o t ose tra eo s ase ( ~

on the miss ion and what you want to do in the end.

I went back and did .f ~1alys i s of the F- l 04 win: ~pared to others, and said, "It's got a ~ ~

big F-104?S1~ on it." So it was really a no-brainer. But it's amazing how big an argument we got 4

into.

That's when Ed Cartwright came. That's why I remember. I was in the middle of that

battle when Ed Cartwright came. He came over one day, and there was just the two of us. Because

oftbe c lassification ~ of it, I couldn't do a big briefing. We just sat down in my office and I went

through what I had done, conclusions I had drawn. He listened to it and he says, "Of course you' re

right. It's a no-brainer."

responsible for getting me out of research and into management. He called me up one day. My

division chief, Mark Nicho l s~~~red. He had a heari attack and retired. I got a call from

-Coriwright and he said, "There's an advertisement out for division chief, and I want you to apply

for it." At that point I was happy doing research, thought I'd spend the rest of my career doing

research. He sa id, "I'm not promising you ' II get it. I'm asiGng a number of people to apply for it."

But he said, "You 've had enough fun for a lifetime. It's time you start earning your pay."

[Laughter]

Conway: Gee, that's a great way of putting it.

Han·is: "I'm going to put you into management. I want you on my management team," is the way

he put it. It turns out I didn't win that competition; somebody else did. ~l J; en mot1t:llY'4ttter,­k~L.v,

Dick ~eft [~hwot ic] was selected to replace Mark. A few months later, Johnny Becker retired. 1\

He called me up aga in, he said the same speech, "I want you to apply." I did, and I did get selected

Even in setting up my division, which was a research division, he pretty much gave me free

retgn. We had gotten to the point where we had to pay more attention to budgets, but I didn't think

it was onerous. I thought it was reasonable.

Conway: There's sort of a bias in Jim Hansen's work on this because he was so close to Larry

Loftin.

rep J~c~d h/w-. "" ,... 1 " /) ) "' Harris: Loftin was very bitter about Cortwright. Cortwrigh~hi•" 'l £i ree lttt:e r. Oc~ U/YPtl"u l' ""'"oY tron~tt 't~

Conway: Yes, I know. That's why I' m try to ask about the transition.

Harris: I've talked to Cortwright about that, not recently, but years after the fact. He told me

privately he thought he made a mistake, in retrospect. Larry was pretty unbending in his ways.

Cortwright made the statement to me--T don't know if I can quote him exactly--years after the fact,

"Maybe I should have bent a li tt le bit to his way. " It was clear Larry wasn't going to bend to

Cartwright' s way. [Laughter]

Conway: No, I don ' t think so. That's interesting.

Conway: What was his name?

Han·is: Bob Bower{~li e]. Now, I like Bob Bower as a person, and 1 was a division chiefthen

and Bob Bower was my boss. We argued all the time over technical matters. We hardly agreed on

anything technically. But we could have an argument and still be friends, you know what I mean?

If Bob Bower had been my next-door neighbor, I would have thought the world of him. As my

boss, I didn ' t li ke him a bit. The problem was that he--I guess Larry is right to this extent, Bob

Bower was more political than technical. He listened to the political winds.

In fact, after Cartwright left and Don Harth was director, I was very active in the AIAA. I

was on the board of directors, I was a vice president. There was something, I can't remember now,

'} something I wanted to do for the AIAA, and Bower did not like'--thought I was spending too much

~ time on the AIAA. I always fe lt that that paid off big time for Langley, the connections we got. It

was all positive for NASA and for Langley. Bower didn ' t see it that way. He gave me a hard time.

But he didn ' t stop me.

One of the things I found with some of my bosses in NASA, and you have to be careful

about how you play this because Dan Goldin will fire you, but Bower wouldn't. He would give me

a hard time when we were arguing, but he would not stop me. I think the reason he wouldn' t stop

me is he knew that although he didn ' t like what I was doing, his boss did. Cartwright did.

Cartwright was big with AIAA. He was supportive in what I wanted to do.

Then Don Harth came in and there was something I wanted to do and I went to Don and I

asked him for his support for something I wanted to do. I think I wanted to host an AIAA meeting

or something that was going to take a lot of Langley support and a lot of man-bow-s just to support

this conference. So I went to Don and asked him to support me in that. When I asked him for his

support, he said, "What does Bower say about this?" I said, "I haven't asked him." He paused for a

minute, a long thought, and he said, "I think I know why you didn 't ask him." [Laughter] And I

said, "You're right." He said, "Well, I'll support you."

That battle was for many reasons, because Bower was always looking for which way the

headquarters winds were blowing. We had come up in a culture at Langley that we would study ~_J.

something and decide technically/lthis is what ought to be done, and we would thrash it out, have

big arguments within Langley about whether this is right. Once we really knew this was the right

thing to do, then we would fight headqua1ters tooth and nail. We'd say, "We~ want to do

this," and beadquarter~giJf us static, everybody would give headquarters hell ti ll they came around.

9oJ. I Those were the~ old days.

Conway: That was the old NACA cultme.

Harris: The old NACA. There was a belief that there is a technical truth, and we can have honest

disagreements and opinions about the techn ical tmth, but because there is a technical tmth, there's

always a teclmical way to figme out what is the technica l truth. Ifyou 've got two people who don't

-;..f. agree, there's a test or some calcu lation, something can be done to reso lve1~. We would do that

test, and once it's resolved, then that 's the end of it. It 's resolved. It's a teclmical thing and

eve1ybody will accept it. That was hind &Pthe culture.

Like the thing with AIAA, although it was not a technical thing, it was clear to me. So I

was willing to buck my boss and go to his boss, because I felt his boss would understand and agree,

and he did. But I think Lany felt that the big change at Langley came when Bower came in4 aale1

Conway: Him and Orin N icks. There's another guy that Larry Loftin really didn't like, apparently.

Harris: Orin was an abrasive person. I got to know Orin fairly well and had a fairly good

relationship, but Orin was abrasive. He didn't like Bower, either. I remember a meeting, to show

"'r~ you how Orin was. Bower was having a staff meeting and he had all ~division chiefs in for the

meeting. Finally there was a bang on the door, Bower's door, and there was Otin Nicks standing

there. He'd say, "Goddamn it, Bower, I asked you a question an hour ago. Where's the answer?"

He said, "Well, I'm having a staff meeting."

He says, "Cancel your G.D. staff meeting, and get me my answer." [Laughter]

My first meeting with Orin, Orin had gotten a letter from somebody, an industry guy writing

a letter for something, and the way Orin worked, he would call somebody in and tell somebody to

draft a reply. He figured I was the expert in this area, so he called me and said, "Here' s the letter.

You draft me a reply."

"- "'J 10\ .J f'r I went back and I drafted a letter for Orin's signature, sat down with Orin. He talked to me

for an hour about that letter. At the end of that hour, I had no clue. All I knew was that he didn ' t

like my reply, but I had no clue what he wanted that letter to say. Don' t think he knew, he just

knew he hadn ' t seen it yet.

i vve~So I tri~d to draft something different. I must have had a dozen meetings with

Orin before I finally got that letter out. That's the way he was. He didn't know what he wanted,

but he wanted you to produce it for him, sort of like, "Bring me a rock. That's not the right rock.

Bring me another rock. That's not the right rock." That whole routine. I thought I was never going

to get that letter done.

To show you, as a contrast, I had to do a letter for Ed Cortwright. So I drafted the letter, I

went over to his office, he sat down and read it, and took out his pen, strike through this, wri te in

something. You know, he's sit there and make a couple of edits. He'd say, "Give it to my secretary

to type." He knew what he wanted and he knew this wasn't it, but he knew how to change it into

what he did want, and he just sat there and did it. In two minutes it was all over. Working with Ed

was that way. Working with Orin was the other way.

Orin also was the guy who liked to clean up. I can.JJe~au~, 18ne of the most unpopular

~+ things Orin ever did, he put out a memo~«- said, "I've walked around and looked at the offices."

He said, "They're all a mess, they look messy, they look awful." He said, "There are models on the

floor, wind tunnel models on the floor in crates." He said, "There's computer paper stacked sky

high." He said, "We are going to have a big cleanup." He said, "No longer are we going to keep

old wind tunnel models. If you've done the last test on it, get rid of it. Send it to the scrap heap." '"'"~}"\- t' rrr o~....- ~ o

Well, we kept all wind tunnel models. It

Conway: Yes. You kept it all.

Harris: You never know when you're going to--

Conway: Dredge out the X-15 again to validate some new tunnel, right?

Harris: Right. So we had models hidden all over. I was in the unitary tunnel, and we had all. kinds

of places out back. We had models in boxes with code names on them, no identification as a

model, hidden all over the place, hoping that Orin wouldn't find them. But we had to throw out a

lot of models. That was probably the most unpopular things Orin did while he was there.

I think those two guys would weigh very heavy on Loftin.

Conway: They must have driven him nuts.

Harris: I later developed a pretty good relationship with Orin. Even after he left NASA and went

down to Texas, he came back a lot. We actually supported him in some tests occasionally.

Conway: Were you in headquarters in the eighties, or were you down at Langley?

Harris: When I say headquarters, I mean Langley Headquarters Building. I spent my whole career

at Langley. I spent a lot of time in headquarters, but I've never been assigned to headquarters.

Conway: The Director of Aeronautics' Office has moved back and forth every once in a while. I'm

curious about the situation in the early eighties when the Reagan administration was essentially

trying to close down all the aeronautics facilities, as far as I could tell.

Harris: At that time, Bill Aiken was head of aeronautics at NASA Headqua11ers. Bill is one of the

most super people around. He's a guy you ought to interview.

Conway: I did.

Hanis: Ok. Bill and Jerry J~;idt~ne of Bi ll 's chief deputies . Jen-y is one of the most delightful

people you'd ever meet, and he's got the most fantastic sense of humor of anybody I have ever met

anywhere. When the Heritage Foundation did their study, NASA and DOD were going to gear up

--Hr~ il"" pn{>~'>PI/ ~ o,.kc.~/ &1.~/"QniiiiAj_, .. u N:se.~tr<-J._, and argue against aat. I think this was when the Reagan administration first came in. I got a call ~tl t ~t~Dr~11~

from Jen-y ~en saying, "How soon can you get to Washington? Can you be here by noon?"

~~~~-+-This is maybe~ o'clock, 8:30, I had just walked in the office. It was eight, 8:30 in the morning.

"Can you be here for a meeting at noon?"

Well, I had my secretary check, and I said, " Well, I cou ld ifl left right now Fs ?: 8t to the

airport, I could be up there by about eleven or something like that. "

He said, "Well , we want you to give a talk."

I said, "What do you want me to talk about?"

He said, "You have to cover all of aeronautics." He said, "Bill Aiken and I were going to

do it, but the A ir Force is bringing in Keith Ritchie, who is a technical guy from Wright-Patterson .w._g 1~ pr~~e,.,.f,},,v>

to do~*t:, and we think we ought to have a technica l guy rather than a headquarters guy to match up."

I said, "Well , you know I'm going to spend my whole time between now and the talk on an

airplane. When am I going to put the talk together?"

He said, "If you can get here by eleven, you' ll have an hour. We've got a stack of

viewgrapbs that we've picked out. You've got an hour to look at them and figure out what you

want to say."

I went up there and I did it. But fortunately, I was fami liar with all the aeronauti cs programs

wt-lL, i-ke~ H"' I really didn 't have a problem tMking. I basically went through their stack of viewgraphs and just

i could threw out the ones that I didn 't think I could talk from, kept those I thought I "~d. But there was

.-1

a huge effort that went on ~turn the Reagan administration around about that, and I th ink we

-eyh vt successfully did it. ThatA siwy that began with that meeting with Keith Ritchie and I giving

presentations to a bunch of headquatters muckety-mucks convinced them to take the fight to the

administration, which they did, and they convinced them that the Heritage study was wrong.

Conway: There's a committee that Jack Steiner at Boeing ran, too. How influential do you see that

being?

+J... '{' Hanis: Tl~ i s tb :ytLat I led wtiS tlie fi rSt meetirrg-thm-lffi up tg tbe:S1i"'iffi!t tll it'l'g. Did .1:8et

11Steiner

group produce the first Bird book?

Conway: Yes. There seems to have been two versions. There's one that circulated internally for a

while but was suppressed. Then the second one came out as, I guess, the Eagle Report. It had the

big eagle cover on it Bill Aiken actually brought that up. When I interviewed him back in

September, I hadn' t had much of a chance, and I still haven't had much of a chance to look into the

eighties' stuff. But he told me that Steiner's committee was really cmcial. I've got to ca ll Steiner

still and talk to him.

Harri s: Bill can probably tell you better than I can, because I just remember getting that call~

saying can I give a talk in Washington at noon to this group of top managers. I think what

. peop It . . •-r happened IS that the headquarters m~r:ei!; · MnteiEs who -.I heard th1s p1tch h~H 21 1 me and Keith

~ #-.~ h

Ritchie, - decided to advocate for • Steiner group, which eventually delivered the day. ~

Conway: This story I have to put together, since it had to deal with sort of the ups and downs of the

aeronautics program at the same time dealing with the SST stuff.

Han-is: Actually, I think that Loftin would say that the conversion of Langley from research to

project management started when Bower came in and replaced him. But it's been an evolutionary

thing that even within Langley, I think we kept a reasonably strong research culture all the way up

until the reorganization that Paul Holloway did.

Conway: Which would have to be somewhere in the late seventies?

Han-is: Nineties, early nineties. When Paul Holloway was director.

Conway: I don't have any histories after 1970 to work from.

•

Han·is:

.. r ' I "J. h4~ I~ T'~l

The problem that Langley has today>t~~~R crossed the bar. l-t"'s

It .bee~ been an evolutionary thing, f1 I • ,,

().C:hllrrli s. where there had been more and more project activities, and more program management rad ~tSil!8ing

11

A

~ at Langley, but there still was within Langley a healthy--maybe "healthy" is not the right word,

R~T ?~/ but at least an"~ culture that survived. At the time when

11Holloway was the Center director,

Jerry Creedon and I were--I was director for aeronautics, he was direct9r for flight systems. a /, 7'

Charley Blankenship was director of structures. We were unde~-a!t I · Ils of pressure from

headquarters. Goldin was already the administrator.

Conway: Yes, he started in the Bush administration.

~ Banis: Goldin ~administrator, was pushing. Goldin only understands program management.

doe>.., If-He ~~understand research at al l. Holloway was under pressure, so he fom1ed a group which

Jerry Creedon headed, and Jerry proposed this new management structure which basically says all

money comes from the projects. Research has to be--

Conway: In support of a project.

J1 IY!IIt$f

Harris: if Be in support of a project. There were two people--I'm telling this story, I guess, publicly

eti'\J l-ar>f/'t7 for the first time. I was a director forf part of theoi management team and I felt • that ~'the

~f +o"" arguments within management were private. The culture had always been at Langley that people

If !l . are free to argue their 4n!e I'~ the point of view they believe in, and that we'd argue them

fu lly. We had some of the most bitter, really knock-down drag-out arguments over technical things,

sometimes over management things, sometimes over cost things, but it always lziad l!>f stayed in the

family. We'd go into our private rooms. We 'd have our arguments, we'd hear everybody out, and

in the end the boss makes a decision. When he makes the decision, everybody lines up and we go

implement that decision and we don ' t let on that we weren't in favor of it. That's the way the

culture was.

When Jerry came up with this new management structure that basically put all the power

into the programs, and money flowed--all the money came to programs, and programs then funded

the research they wanted to support their programs. Again, we were putting a research organization

into this Catch 22, the NASP syndrome. The Center got into the NASP syndrome, because you

couldn' t do research unless it supported the project and the project was w illing to spend their

money on it. So they're not going to fund any way-out things, anything exploratory.

Most of the big developments that have come out of research fre9~ently come out of either

~er looking for a different answer and you stumble on the answer to~ questions that hadn't been

I) new 5o/J-,11:,s asked, or--there are so many serendipitous things where you stumble on~~ in research. Or

sometimes the researcher has just got this wild idea he wants to • look at. Nine out often of them

tum out to be dumb ideas, but one will be brilliant, that revolutionizes something. But you can't get

projects to ftmd somebody to @8t~ go alll&llEI atul l.ook at these wild ideas . So that was basically the

change.

+~",.,..., Charlie B lankenship and I were the only two on the central managemen~~ that opposed

that reorganization. W,e both fought it to the very end. But in the end when the fi nal vote ~~s .I. -e rtf~. ~co aliA~+ heve, pu~J,~/L ~enpwl-elre>d ~ ~"-."!>

taken, it was two .- ev~rybody else. Both Charlie and I, after that,,J don't thi;-& many people~ , J. ~ h~~~J ~

that we were against it. "We I ins@ up •• itlt it ana I ~:>a , c taMes 8J(f) lainiR@i it anck~Met It was that

.fo.., prior lo reorganization that we eliminated the director.,aeronautics' job, which I had ~that reorganization.

That's when I moved up into the director's office with Paul Holloway as the assistant director for

research and engineering. That's when Jerry became head of the--I forget what we called it. It was

a systems study9 ro 1.1 p ,

Conway: Systems Analysis Branch?

Po. Harris: No, it was called

1group, I think. But it was the one that did the systems analysis. Then

Ter~-J when Paul Holloway left, ~ move'd up to become the director, and Jerry's inhetited his own

organization now and it's a disaster. It really is. It really needs to change badly. AH8 I': e to lt;l ~"J

Conway: It's not going to change until Goldin goes, anyways, because it's clearly what Goldin

wants.

Harris: Yes. But I'm wonied whether the center can survive it, because the research culture--•

~let s , there's almost nob®dy left who knows how to rebuild it.

Conway: They're all retired. They didn't want to do project management, so they left.

Harris: I stayed on in the director's office for three years. It was yery frustrating to see the Center

going down technically. I stayed, though, because I thought it was so clear that eventua lly we were

w~ Wo/11/d going to go have to 9 1 u nd change it back and then iher& \NBS gli l l~§ i8 need ~somebody to do

,':.).-- "' that rebuilding. I thought I cou ld doAiMol:. But I didn ' t realize how much it was eating on me.

In the summer of '97, Jcny and l went up to headquarters in Washington to a meeting, and J

had a major heart attack at the meeting and wound up over in George Washington University

Hospital. It was after having a heart attack I realized that,~ this stuff is getting to me, and if I

stay, it's going to kill me. So 1 opted to retire.

Conway: Well, that 's food for a lot of thought as I work my way into the eighti es and nineties.

Harris: But it's clear. Loftin in a sense is right. 1 think we started that process when Cartwright

brought Bower in, although I don' t think we really crossed the bar, if you will, until Paul

Holloway's reorganization.

Conway: So the research cu lture survived until the late eighties or early nineties, really, at least in

some reduced form.

Harris: Right. . ,(Obe of the things that we did at the time we did Holloway's reorganization, ibl t\.

message to the people was sent out clearly. The old message in the research culture was that a

research engineer can go to the top of the pay scale. You don ' t have to go into management to get

to the top of the pay scale at Langley. We worked hard at that. That's why I was content as a

researcher to be a researcher for my whole career. I was doing well. I was making major

accomplishments, I was getting nice rewards, getting nice promotions. I had gotten, I think , to a

GS-16 before I ever took on any management responsibility. That's· at the top of the pay grade. )-..ell\ r

They don 't have the same pay scales now that they di~ I was content with that.

But today, the message after Holloway's reorganization was if you want to get ahead at w~ .J-I,e cLv.v.oe /"' fY'PIIIOflo.vo .. 1 .

Langley, you've got to manage programs. The thing that clenched it, ::1.-iiQR,- the tJ} in:e *rat :;~IJ .ike ~~ 'f,J-1",

'X""~e ,/cl CtA.f.J-u.,~,+he -fll"'iidi'PtiW'ISf thc t ea~ ke~isg ~n going up the technical side was publications. I mean, if you were

producing high-quality publications that were being recognized and used outside of NASA, that

was your ticket to promotions. When we had the high-grade promotion boards, that's what we

talked about. When a guy was up for promotion, we looked at his publications. What has he

published since his last promotion?

Conway: Like tenure review boards in universities, especially within the scientific end of it.

&jrJI4Y' Harris: Right. What is the impact of .fi6 publicatio~ what is the significance of it, what impact has

I}

it had? When Holloway had his reorganization, word went out we'd no longer consider ~e.W\ Qr'l'7 more ,

publications for promotion. We don't even talk about • It's not even something we will look at. ~ T- ~~~~)'e ;J, ; wJ- A +~c4Q

And publications died. If you look at the number of publications coming out of Langley,-itju~t rF:'tlS c+ w~c,-J-" ff/ .Jhws t..' ;"-f-uc,ed

i ,Y'a•er&ll I haven't seen any data recently on publications. --:1--o 1, ~ f~

Conway: Someone would have it. There's got to be data from the print shop or something.

Harris: But up until we crossed that bar, it was a gradual erosion. There were pockets that seemed

to be healthy, and the research that goes with it. It all died when that reorganization took place.

Conway: I don't think I have any more questions for this session, anyway. I haven't done the

detailed research on the seventies' program in order to be able to ask intelligent questions. So I'll

prevail upon you later on for another visit.

Harris: Be glad to.

[End of interview]