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COLBY FAMILY VOUGHT AIRCRAFT HERITAGE
Chauncey Milton "Chance" Vought, an American aviation pioneer, formed the Lewis & Vought Corporation in partnership with Birdseye B. Lewis in 1917; it was the second aircraft manufacturing company in the United States, preceded only by Boeing. The first Vought designed aircraft, the VE-7 Bluebird trainer, went into production the following year; it would become the first American aircraft to take off from an aircraft carrier. Lewis died in France during World War I, and in 1922, the company was reincorporated as the Chance Vought Corporation; by the end of 1928, it had become a leading manufacturer of American military aircraft. It had outgrown its production facility in Long Island City, New York, and construction was begun on a new plant in East Hartford, Connecticut.
In February 1929, the Chance Vought Corporation joined with Pratt & Whitney Aircraft, the Boeing Airplane Company, Northrop Aircraft Corporation, Sikorsky Aviation Corporation, Hamilton Standard, and eight smaller firms to form the United Aircraft and Transport Corporation. A year and a half later, Chance Vought died unexpectedly of septicemia; he was only 40 years old. By 1934, the fallout from the so-called "Air Mail Scandal" (a rate fixing fiasco) had forced the breakup of this large corporate entity; the commercial airline operations became United Airlines, and the manufacturing divisions (including Vought) became part of the United Aircraft Corporation.
The East Hartford facility, which Chance Vought himself had helped to design, was completed just before his death. Despite the Great Depression, the Chance Vought subsidiary of United Aircraft continued to flourish through the 1930s. The O2U and O3U series Corsair scout and observation aircraft, first built in 1926, became a mainstay of U.S. Naval aviation, and versions were exported to 13 different countries. By 1935, nearly 500 Corsairs had come off the production line in East Hartford. It was an O2U Corsair which battled King Kong at the top of the Empire State Building in the original 1933 film.
During the latter part of the decade, the company's design and manufacturing focus shifted to the new SB2U series Vindicator scout and dive bomber, the first low wing monoplane aircraft accepted by the U.S. Navy for carrier operations. Then, early in 1939, United Aircraft moved their Chance Vought subsidiary from East Hartford to Stratford, Connecticut and merged it with their Sikorsky Aircraft Division. The new subsidiary was called the Vought-Sikorsky Aircraft Division.
The move to Stratford, coupled with the advent of World War II, ushered in a period of vigorous and sustained growth for this already robust company. Hundreds of the highly versatile OS2U Kingfisher, one of the most rugged and dependable aircraft in the fleet, came off the production line during the first years of the war, and versions of this observation scout model were also sold to both the British and the Dutch. It was a Kingfisher which carried out the famous rescue of Capt. Eddie Rickenbacker and his crew in 1943 after they had been lost and adrift in the South Pacific for three weeks.
In January 1943, the Chance Vought Aircraft Division resumed its separate identity when United Aircraft reconstituted the Sikorsky Division and moved it to a new site in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where it would concentrate on helicopter development and production. Ten months later, in November 1943, my father accepted a new job with Chance Vought Aircraft, and my parents moved to Stratford. I was 17 months old. We rented the lower floor of a two story house at 4805 No. Main St.; that house is still there, though it has been extensively renovated, and the lower floor now serves as a day care center.
Even as the OS2U Kingfishers were rolling off the production line in Stratford, Vought was developing what would become arguably the most successful new aircraft in its long history. It had quickly become obvious that the Japanese Mitsubishi A6M Zero was superior in speed, range, maneuverability, and firepower to any existing Allied fighter aircraft. Vought's answer was the iconic inverted gull wing F4U Corsair, which had been on the drawing board even before the outbreak of the war. Reviving the name which had first been used for the popular O2U and O3U series, Vought flew the first F4U prototype in March 1940, and by mid 1942, the line was in full production. The first fighter aircraft to exceed 400 mph, the F4U Corsair was rigorously flight tested in the Pacific theater with the assistance of the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh, who was serving as a civilian technical advisor to United Aircraft. The first Corsairs were deployed for combat in 1943 out of Marine Corps bases in the Solomon Islands, and after some carrier landing issues had been resolved, they became the preferred Allied carrier based fighter/bomber aircraft for the remainder of the war. Their durability and performance were legendary, and during the climactic year of 1945, they played a major role in the Tokyo Raids and in combat and close air support operations in the Philippines and at Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and Formosa. By the end of the war, F4U Corsairs had flown more than 64,000 action sorties. Even after World War II ended, F4U production continued, and the planes also filled a close air support role during the Korean War. Eventually, more than 12,500 Corsairs, in 16 different variants, were delivered to the armed forces of seven countries over a span of 13 years. It was the longest production run of any American piston engine fighter aircraft. Today, both the OS2U Kingfisher and the F4U Corsair are represented in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution.
For its outstanding contributions to the war effort, Vought and its employees received the coveted Army-Navy "E" Award, which was given for excellence in production of military equipment. This recognition went to only about four percent of the companies engaged in manufacture of wartime materiel. I still have my father's "E" Award pin.
After the defeat of the Axis powers, the rising threat to American interests was the Soviet bloc of nations, and the Navy became concerned that U.S. military aircraft manufacturing facilities were concentrated on the vulnerable eastern coast. In April 1948, they offered inducements for the Chance Vought Aircraft Division of United Aircraft to move the company to Grand Prairie, Texas. Back in 1940, the U.S. government had built an aircraft manufacturing complex between Dallas and Grand Prairie as part of the World War II industrial mobilization, and they had leased it to California based North American Aviation. At the conclusion of the war, North American Aviation closed its Dallas area facilities, and this Naval Weapons Industrial Reserve Plant (NWIRP) sat vacant for two years. The smaller eastern portion of the facility (the NWIRP "A" section) was leased in 1947 to the Texas Engineering and Manufacturing Corporation (TEMCO), an aircraft subassembly company which had been organized by two former North American Aviation executives. The following year, the larger "B" section was leased to Chance Vought Aircraft. Over a period of 14 months, Vought moved 27 million pounds of tooling and equipment and 1,300 employees from Connecticut to Texas. It was the largest industrial relocation in American history up to that time. MGM planned a motion picture (tentatively entitled Yankee in Texas, with Spencer Tracy starring) based upon this historic move, but political pressure from Connecticut's governor, Chester Bowles, killed the film. Bowles would later become U.S. ambassador to India, and he was a controversial undersecretary of state during the Kennedy administration.
We were in the vanguard of that massive relocation, arriving by automobile the first week of July 1948; I was six years old, and I remember that it was brutally hot! For more than a month, we lived in a motel on Ft. Worth Avenue in Oak Cliff while my parents searched for a house; my main recollection of that motel is that I spent as much time as possible in the swimming pool. Finally, just in time for the start of school, my parents purchased a home at 6314 Mimosa Lane in the Preston Hollow section of north Dallas. That pleasant middle class neighborhood has since been largely gentrified, and our old house has now been demolished and replaced by a "McMansion."
The new Grand Prairie facility was twice the size of the one in Stratford, and unlike the Stratford plant, it had been designed specifically for efficient assembly line aircraft production. It was also located immediately adjacent to the Dallas Naval Air Station (Hensley Field), thus facilitating expanded flight operations. The city of Dallas had built Hensley Field (named for Maj. William N. Hensley, another American aviation pioneer) as a flight training facility in 1929, and by the start of World War II, it had become the site of an Army Air Corps Reserve Base. The Navy also had units there, and the Dallas Naval Air Station (NAS Dallas) was formally established in 1943. The main runway was subsequently lengthened to 8,000 feet to accommodate the newest innovation in military aviation: jet aircraft.
Although the F4U Corsair continued in production until 1953, the era of the propeller driven aircraft was drawing to a close. The first Vought jet fighter to go into large scale production at the Grand Prairie location was the revolutionary F7U Cutlass, which had a highly unconventional swept wing design with twin wing mounted tail fins. The first production F7U flew in March 1950, and 288 of the aircraft were delivered over the next five years. The Cutlass was the Navy's first supersonic jet fighter. Those of you who remember the toy box in the back hall closet at my parents' Timber Trail house may recall that a large, hard plastic model of the F7U Cutlass was one of the items contained therein.
In 1954, United Aircraft spun off the Chance Vought Aircraft Division, and the company once again became an independent prime manufacturer. The new president of Chance Vought Aircraft Inc. was Frederick O. Detweiler, a 16 year United Aircraft veteran who had been general manager of the Vought Division. Under his leadership, the company enjoyed what my father always regarded as the halcyon years of its history.
By the mid 1950s, my father had become the administrative assistant to John W. McGuyrt, who was manager of flight operations. Despite being a large, successful corporation, the company still had very much of a "family feel" to it; my parents knew the various corporate officers both socially and personally. As I look at the names on the corporate organizational chart from that period, I realize that I knew them too. Fred and Edna Detweiler were occasional guests in our home, as were company treasurer Bert Whitten and his wife Doris and other members of upper management and their wives. Detweiler was a modest, unassuming, fiercely ethical man who disliked bureaucracy and believed that the company had an obligation to promote and protect the well being of its employees. John McGuyrt was a regular participant in my father's Thursday night poker group, as were Charlie Coleman, assistant flight operations manager (whose daughter, Mary Ann, I dated briefly); John W. Konrad, chief experimental test pilot; and numerous others. These men were my father's friends, his card playing, golfing, and bowling companions, and as a boy, I did not fully understand that they were also important officers in his company.
Prior to becoming the flight operations manager, John McGuyrt had been chief test pilot, and in April 1954, he barely escaped with his life when his F7U Cutlass spun out of control. Fighting the crushing 2.5G force for almost a minute while the plane fell 20,000 feet, he finally managed to eject only 13 seconds before impact. I was 11 years old, and I remember this incident vividly, since he showed up at our house the following evening for the regular Thursday night poker game. My mother fussed over him at some length, asking if there were anything special she could do for him, and he responded, "Tanny, all I really need is a pillow for my chair; that ejection seat packs a heck of a kick, and my behind is really sore!" There was a cockpit camera which survived the crash intact, and it recorded McGuyrt's frantic struggles to eject; three years later, some of these photos appeared in Life magazine (you can see them here, along with the accompanying article):
https://books.google.com/books?id=VT8EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA14&lpg=PA14&dq=john+mcguyrt&source=bl&ots=bBEOz Gr9A9&sig=vE0tfvl44AgM_yEHJ8d2GfIXNUc&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CDIQ6AEwBGoVChM I-pfxsPLZyAIVAkwmCh2OHwb7#v=onepage&q=john mcguyrt&f=false
The entire video segment can be viewed here (note that the earth is reflected in McGuyrt's helmet visor as the plane spins):
http://www.texasarchive.org/library/index.php/Chance_Vought_Aircraft_-_Spin_Maneuver_and_Subsequent_Ejection_(1954)
The successor to the Cutlass was the F8U Crusader (later redesignated as the F-8). Winner of a heated competition with seven other companies, the Crusader was designed under the direction of chief engineer Russ Clark, another of my father's friends, and featured an advanced variable incidence wing and a remarkably potent array of ordnance (including the new AIM-9 Sidewinder air to air missile). The Crusader prototype made its maiden flight in March 1955, with John Konrad at the controls, and after an unusually short period of development, the first production aircraft flew only six months later. Fleet deliveries began in 1956, and in that year, Vought was awarded the Collier Trophy for "conception, design, and development of...the first operational aircraft capable of speeds exceeding one thousand miles an hour" (in August 1956, a Crusader established a new national level flight speed record of 1015 mph). The Collier Trophy (named for Robert J. Collier pioneer investigative journalist, publisher of Collier's magazine, and aviation enthusiast) has been awarded annually since 1911 by the National Aeronautic Association for "the greatest achievement in aeronautics or astronautics in America." In July 1957, Major John Glenn (who would later become the first American astronaut to orbit the earth) flew a Crusader from California to New York in less than three and a half hours, becoming the first man to complete a transcontinental flight at an average speed greater than Mach 1. It was an RF-8 (a reconnaissance version) which supplied the famous 1962 low level aerial photographs revealing the presence of Soviet missile emplacements in Cuba. The original prototype Crusader aircraft is currently on display at the Smithsonian Institution.
Another innovative product developed by Vought during the 1950s was the SSM-N Regulus I surface to surface subsonic guided missile, designed to be launched from a submarine or cruiser platform. Interest in guided missile technology had been spurred by the introduction of the German V-2 rocket during the last part of World War II, and as the Korean conflict broke out and the Cold War intensified, Vought accelerated testing of the Regulus. Early test versions were actually fitted with landing gear and parabrakes so that they could be recovered and reused. The first production Regulus I missiles were deployed in 1955, and 514 of them were eventually delivered to the Navy. With a 500 nautical mile range and nuclear warhead capability, the Regulus was a key element of America's first nuclear strategic deterrence force. The threat posed by the Regulus was of crucial importance in helping to resolve the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, and it was the forerunner of later more sophisticated missiles (including today's Tomahawk cruise missile). In the late 1950s, program control and planning for the Regulus I was headed up by Hal Nelson, who would become my parents' next door neighbor in 1961 when they sold my boyhood home on Mimosa Lane and moved to their new house on Timber Trail.
Without question, Chance Vought Aircraft was an important part of my boyhood years. The affairs and fortunes of the company were often the subject of conversation between my parents, and I suspect that I absorbed more information than they perhaps realized. And since my father's position in the flight operations department occasionally necessitated extended business trips to Edwards Air Force Base in southern California (the nation's premier military flight test facility), I was certainly aware of the challenges which my mother faced whenever she had to manage the household during his absence. But what I remember best were the tangible evidences of the "family friendly" corporate culture fostered by upper management. From time to time, for instance, the company would host an "open house" for families of employees (and sometimes the general public). In November 1957, to commemorate the 40th anniversary of its founding, Vought held a two day open house which drew more than 100,000 attendees. I remember that one very well; employees brought their families on Saturday, and the general public came in on Sunday. I was 15 years old, and we spent much of the day walking down the Crusader and Regulus production lines, taking in the special exhibits, visiting the low speed wind tunnel, and getting up close and personal with the finished aircraft and missiles themselves. And because my father worked in flight operations, as a special treat, we were actually able to go up into the flight control tower at the edge of the airfield.
Another "perk" of being part of the Chance Vought family was admission to and favorable positioning at the air shows which periodically came to Hensley Field. I particularly remember watching the Blue Angels (the Navy's aerobatic exhibition squadron) perform there; their final performance before the Korean War was at NAS Dallas, and they returned several times thereafter. Of course, we didn't have to wait for an air show to see the jets; sometimes, my father would take my brother and me to the airfield just to watch them do "touch and go" landing maneuvers. Having a father who worked for a company which built military jet aircraft and guided missiles felt pretty special to us!
Yet another memorable event was the annual Christmas party sponsored by the Vought Employee's Club for children of employees. This party was always held at the State Fair Music Hall at Fair Park in Dallas, and it featured a variety of circus type acts, including clowns, magicians, juggling, and performing animals. The highlight, naturally, was the traditional visit from Mr. & Mrs. Santa Claus. And every child under age 12 received a Christmas present; we would line up in the aisles and await our turn to go up on stage to pick up our gifts at the booth marked with our age (gifts for children who were unable to attend could be picked up later at the Employee's Club office). These weren't cheesy presents, either; we could always look forward to receiving something really nice.
Not all my Vought related memories from this time period are quite so sunny, and not all inflight aircraft incidents turned out so well as John McGuyrt's. In June 1957, just as the Thursday night poker game at our home was breaking up, we heard a loud crash outside. Everyone ran out to investigate (my brother and I in our pajamas), and we discovered that a car coming down our narrow residential street had slammed into one of the vehicles parked in front of our house, damaging it severely. The damaged vehicle belonged to Jim Buckner, a pleasant, personable 31 year old Vought test pilot. Jim remarked ruefully to my mother that his luck had certainly been bad recently; he was the big loser in that night's poker game, and now his car was totaled. Jokingly, he said that with the way his luck was running, he'd probably have to bail out of his airplane the next day. Tragically, he did not have that chance. The day following that poker game, he made a low altitude high speed pass over Hensley Field in a demonstration flight for a group of graduating Naval aviation cadets. As he pulled his F8U-1 Crusader out of that pass into a zoom climb, the aircraft exploded, and he died instantly. I was at home when my mother took the phone call from my father telling her about the accident; she was extremely distraught, especially in view of the ironic jest Jim had made the night before. Here is a link to a brief newspaper article about that tragedy:
https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1913&dat=19570608&id=tdJKAAAAIBAJ&sjid=e_MMAAAAIBAJ&pg=5457,4218786&hl=en
By 1958, employment at Chance Vought Aircraft had swelled to more than 17,000, and employee parking at the plant was at a premium. Even as Regulus I missiles continued to roll off the line, and an improved Crusader model (the F8U-2) went into full production, Vought engineers and flight test personnel were hard at work on the next generation of both products. But just before Christmas of that year, catastrophe struck, and the good times ceased to roll. Within a couple of days in mid December 1958, both the F8U-3 and the Regulus II contracts were cancelled. Despite its inferior performance, the Navy had selected the two seat McDonnell Aircraft F4H Phantom over the single seat Vought F8U-3 Crusader, and the Regulus II program was scrapped in favor of Lockheed's new UGM-27 Polaris ballistic missile. Although management made every effort to retain and reassign as many employees as possible, thousands lost their jobs; I can remember quiet, worried conversations between my parents as they wondered how these events would impact our family.
Production of the Regulus I missile ended in January 1959, but deliveries of Crusader variants would continue until September 1964; eventually, a total of 1,219 Crusaders were built for the U.S. Navy, and remanufactured versions were also sold to the Philippines and to France. However, realizing that Vought had perhaps become overly dependent upon Navy contracts, management began working in 1959 to diversify its product lines. Several new subsidiaries were formed to market products and services as diverse as mobile homes, boats, military rough terrain vehicles, and data processing equipment, and the parent company began to explore new opportunities in the emerging field of space exploration. At the end of 1960, the name of the company was changed to Chance Vought Corporation to reflect this push toward diversification. It was during this tumultuous period that my father was transferred from the flight operations department to the engineering department and promoted to the position of manager of engineering administration.
None of the new ventures outside the aerospace field was immediately profitable, and a dip in the value of Chance Vought stock made it vulnerable to a hostile takeover bid by the opportunistic young Dallas investor James J. "Jim" Ling. An orphaned high school dropout with an astute business sense and a flair for innovation, Ling had merged his small electronics firm with TEMCO in 1960, and he almost immediately launched a campaign to buy up a controlling interest in his larger corporate neighbor on the west side of the NWIRP complex. The resulting struggle was ferocious. Fred Detweiler regarded Ling (with some considerable justification) as an unprincipled corporate raider, and Vought management filed a civil antitrust suit against Ling-Temco. Detweiler and his management team were well regarded and highly respected by Dallas civic leaders, and the acrimonious contest split the Dallas business community, leaving scars that would last for years. Mid level Vought managers came under heavy outside pressure to vote their shares in favor of the merger; my father was outraged when he received a threatening phone call suggesting that a failure to support Ling's bid might jeopardize his position with the company after the takeover was complete. By March 1961, however, Ling had acquired nearly 40% of the outstanding Vought stock, and the company's board of directors caved in. Fred Detweiler resigned, and the merger proceeded. The fledgling conglomerate would be named Ling-Temco-Vought (later shortened to LTV); never again would Chance Vought be an independent company.
From an organizational standpoint, things were pretty chaotic in the immediate aftermath of the merger. Ling had gone heavily into debt in pursuit of Vought, and in order to raise cash, he sold off all of Vought's non-aerospace related businesses, often at a heavy loss. The entity which had been Chance Vought Aircraft eventually became an LTV subsidiary called LTV Aerospace Corporation, with its various product lines separated into several different divisions. Dominant among these was the Vought Aeronautics Division, which accounted for around two thirds of the corporation's sales volume.
With Fred Detweiler gone, there were changes to the top management team as well. Gifford K. Johnson, who had been Vought's vice-president of production, became president of LTV Aerospace. My father always felt that Johnson had been complicit with Ling in the maneuvering which preceded the merger, undercutting Detweiler's efforts to stave off the takeover in return for the promise of a top position in the new organization. Ling subsequently eased Johnson out, replacing him with former TEMCO executive Clyde Skeen, and Johnson left shortly thereafter to lead the Graduate Research Center of the Southwest (which eventually became the University of Texas at Dallas). The new head of the Aeronautics Division was another acquaintance of my father's, W. Paul Thayer, who had been Vought's vice-president of sales. Thayer had preceded John McGuyrt as Vought's chief test pilot, and he had experienced a close escape of his own back in 1949 when he made a dead stick landing in the experimental XF6U Pirate (a Cutlass precursor which never went into full scale production).
I began my own career at Vought as a summer hire in 1961, following my freshman year at the University of Texas in Austin, and after getting married in July, I continued on as a regular employee. Looking back now, I realize that with all the turmoil through which the company was then passing, I was extremely fortunate to get that job. Obviously, my father had some considerable influence in the matter, and given my total lack of qualifications or experience, there is little doubt that his connections within the company were a determining factor. My first assignment was in Technical Publications, working as a technical writer on manuals for the F-8 Crusader program. I continued in that position for a little over a year, leaving at the end of August 1962 to return to college, this time at BYU. The final loose ends of the merger were tied up shortly before I left; my one year Chance Vought service pin was among the last ones ever given.
By the time we returned from Utah and I resumed employment with Vought in January 1964, things were looking up for the company. As United States involvement in Vietnam escalated, the need for a next generation close air support attack aircraft had become evident. Four prime contractors responded to the Navy's request for proposals; to minimize costs and development time, all entries in the competition had to be based on existing airframe designs. Vought's winning entry was the rugged, versatile A-7 Corsair II, with design characteristics derived from the Crusader but optimized for the light attack role. The A-7 featured a cutting edge avionics suite for accurate delivery of its substantial ordnance array (a single A-7 aircraft could carry three times the ordnance load of the World War II era B-17 Flying Fortress).
The A-7 was largely the brainchild of two veteran Vought engineers, Sol Love and Conrad "Connie" Lau, both of whom my father knew well. Like my father, both Love and Lau had joined the company in 1943. Love was director of engineering (and thus my father's line superior), and the brilliant MIT graduate Connie Lau was A-7 program director. Tragically, Lau (a native of Trinidad in the British West Indies) died unexpectedly at the young age of 43, only two months after the A-7 contract award was announced. As with the Crusader, development of the A-7 was remarkably smooth, with the initial flight coming in September 1965 and production deliveries beginning the following year. By the end of 1967, A-7 aircraft were being deployed in combat operations over Vietnam.
The Vietnam conflict was also the catalyst for an unusual service life extension program for the Crusader, and a total of 448 of the original F-8 model aircraft were remanufactured with various improvements. The Crusader regularly outperformed the Russian MiG-21 in Vietnam, and the fighter variant continued in active duty with the U.S. Navy until 1976. The Navy's reconnaissance variant remained operational until 1987, and the French Navy did not retire its last Crusader until 1999!
Upon my return to Vought in 1964, I had the opportunity to work for a while in the retrofit publications section of the Technical Publications department. Aircraft which had been delivered and placed in service were constantly undergoing incremental upgrades, either at the request of the military or at the suggestion of the contractor. These upgrades began as engineering change proposals (ECPs), and they ultimately culminated in formal change directives which specified in great detail exactly how the retrofit was to be accomplished. The change directives were then shipped to the field, along with kits of materials required to make the change, and the actual work was done by the military. My job was to compose the text of these directives and coordinate it with the illustrations included therein. It was in this capacity that I spent three weeks in 1965 at the North Island Naval Air Station near San Diego, doing a kit trial (a preliminary test installation to ensure that the instructions in the change directive were correct and accurate). It was my first business trip, and I remember being chagrined when the manager of engineering administration (my father) disapproved a $2.00 item on my expense report. Leaning over an F-8 main landing gear strut to photograph an installation on the forward wall of the wheel well, I got hydraulic fluid on my tie, and my father ruled that I could not have it dry cleaned at company expense!
I was not the only Colby to begin his career at Vought in the early 1960s. Fresh out of graduate school, with a new master's degree in physics from the University of North Carolina, my cousin Glen moved to Dallas (with my father's encouragement) to take a job with the company. He and his wife Louise purchased a home on Timber Trail, just a few houses down the street from my parents. My path and Glen's did not often cross in the workplace, since he was employed in what was at first known as the Vought Astronautics Division (headed by Russ Clark), and subsequently as the Missiles and Space Division. Under Clark's leadership, this division became involved with several cutting edge programs for the armed forces and for NASA. Vought was the prime contractor for the SCOUT multistage orbital launch vehicle and the Lance surface to surface battlefield missile, and a subcontractor for the Saturn I rocket and the Multiple Launch Rocket System (a surface to surface battlefield armament fired from a mobile platform). The highly reliable (96% success rate) SCOUT launch vehicle was a workhorse for NASA for almost 30 years, and a SCOUT rocket is today part of the Smithsonian collection. The Missiles and Space Division also played a role in a number of manned space flight programs.
Glen's tenure at Vought lasted over 20 years, and in truth, I am unsure as to exactly which of these programs he worked on. Successive waves of reorganization resulted in repeated renaming of the division, and much of what he did was classified. I do know that Glen was involved with advanced weapons development, and that his contributions were highly regarded; he was a favored protégé of Billie Smith, who joined Vought in 1966 and rose rapidly to become vice president of what was by 1983 called the Missiles and Advanced Programs Division. Glen's second wife, Janice, was also a Vought employee; they married in 1971 and made their home in Duncanville. Tragically, Glen was forced into medical retirement in 1986 by the onset of a particularly aggressive form of Parkinson's disease, and he died in 1990, less than two months shy of his 52nd birthday.
Once the F-8 remanufacturing program was underway, I was again assigned to work on F-8 technical manuals, with particular responsibility for the structural repair publications. By that time, I had become reasonably proficient at reading blueprints, but I vividly recollect a number of instances in which I had to go out to the assembly line in the main bay for a personal inspection; I would sometimes have to clamber all over the aircraft in order to be clear on the exact structural configuration. However, my time as a technical writer came to an end in 1967 when I finally completed my B.A. degree in History from the University of Texas at Arlington. With a National Defense Education Act (NDEA) fellowship in hand, I took a leave of absence from Vought to do graduate work at UT Austin.
Jim Ling had little personal involvement in the actual operation of the companies he owned; he was much more interested in financial wheeling and dealing. And wheel and deal he did, throughout the entire decade of the 1960s! His goal was to build a corporate behemoth, a mammoth conglomerate which would elevate him into the upper ranks of the nation's capitalist titans. Shrewdly leveraging the assets of his existing holdings, he embarked on a series of acquisitions which quickly drew the attention both of Wall Street and of the Department of Justice Antitrust Division. Among his major purchases were Okonite (a leading wire and cable manufacturer); Wilson & Co. (one of the nation's largest meat packers, which had also diversified into sporting goods, pet foods, and pharmaceuticals); and Greatamerica Corporation (which owned Braniff Airways, National Car Rental, and several insurance companies). In every case, Ling would restructure these businesses, redeploying them as multiple quasi-independent entities with separately traded shares of stock. Buoyed by the bull market of the late 1960s, Ling parlayed his LTV holding company into the 14th largest corporation in the country; at its height, in 1969, the conglomerate had 33 distinct subsidiaries offering some 15,000 different products and services.
Upon our return from Austin in May 1968, we bought the house here on Carlisle in Irving, and I once again picked up my career at Vought. This time, however, I accepted a new position in the Support Requirements section of the Logistics department, working on the A-7 program. My group was responsible for source coding every part on the aircraft, identifying logically replaceable repair parts and quantifying recommended supply item orders. This was intensely detailed work, and in the late 1960s, data processing equipment was very primitive. Analysts used punched card input/output with the company's IBM mainframe computer, and I became adept at reading punched cards even without the interpretive printout on the top edge. The end products were hard copy records and procurement recommendations which were shipped to Vought's primary logistics customers, the Navy's Aviation Supply Office (ASO) in Philadelphia and the various commodity management centers controlled by the Defense Logistics Agency (originally the Defense Supply Agency).
In an effort to modernize and automate delivery of support requirements information, the Vought Logistics department pioneered the development of a tape to tape data exchange program which would permit transfer of logistics data directly into customer computers. I had the opportunity to work on the task force which came up with this new methodology, and in this capacity, I made the first of what would eventually be many business trips to Philadelphia. Then, as more advanced Corsair II models joined the fleet, the identification of complex support requirements and the rapid entry, storage, retrieval, and delivery of logistics data became ever more critical. Improvements in data processing technology made it possible to contemplate creation of an even more sophisticated and comprehensive logistics data management system, and I was assigned to participate as the end user representative on an internal Vought team charged with a complete overhaul of the way in which we handled logistics data. The result was the Vought Supply Support Integrated Data System (SSIDS), and together with our streamlined Logistics Order Through Shipment (LOTS) order tracking module, it ushered in a new era in military aircraft logistics data and order management.
Scarcely was the SSIDS provisioning module operational than it had to be redesigned to meet the requirements of a new customer; for the first time ever, Vought was building aircraft (the A-7D model) for the U.S. Air Force, and the upgraded system (dubbed SSIDS II) had to accommodate the significant differences between Navy and Air Force provisioning methodology. It took several years of unrelenting work to bring these revolutionary new ideas to fruition, but the finished system was so successful that Vought used it to bid on and obtain logistics data management contracts for military end items manufactured by other contractors. These projects, undertaken at the very dawn of the modern age of information technology, came to determine and define the trajectory of my subsequent career at the company.
Jim Ling finally overreached himself when he purchased a controlling interest in Jones & Laughlin Steel, a venerable Pittsburgh based company with roots in the mid 19th century. The timing was unfortunate; the American steel industry commenced a decades long decline shortly thereafter, and the recession and bear market of 1969-1970 exposed Ling's tenuous and dangerously overextended financial position. What goes up must come down, and Ling's highly leveraged corporate empire came apart in a hurry! In a stunning reversal of fortune (colorfully termed the "Palace Revolt"), Ling was ousted by the board of directors and replaced as CEO by Paul Thayer. If his fall from grace was not as brutal as that of F. Scott Fitzgerald's fictional antihero Jay Gatsby, it was at least as quick and surprising. Ling would live another 34 years, but despite repeated efforts at resuscitating his business career, he never replicated the success which he had enjoyed during the 1960s.
Faced with an ongoing antitrust lawsuit, Thayer was forced to partially dismember Ling's conglomerate in order to save LTV. A number of subsidiaries were sold (including Okonite and Braniff), and the company was converted from a holding company to an operating company. He refocused on core businesses, and by the mid 1970s, the company's affairs had stabilized. In 1976, the Vought name was resurrected, and the LTV Aerospace subsidiary became Vought Corporation. Paul Thayer emerged as a prominent figure in American business, and he served a term as the president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. In early 1983, he left the company to become Deputy Secretary of Defense in the Reagan administration. Sadly, little more than a year later, he was forced to resign in disgrace when he was charged with illegal insider trading during his tenure with LTV. In 1985, he was sentenced to four years in prison for obstruction of justice, and he died in relative obscurity 25 years later.
Time was taking a toll on my father's old group of friends. Sol Love (who had also risen to the echelons of upper management) eventually retired, and following repeated reorganizations, LTV management came increasingly to be dominated by outsiders who had not come up through the ranks at Vought. Time was taking its toll on my father, too; in September 1970, he called me to his office for a private conversation. It was a tough year for my parents; my mother had recently been quite ill, and my grandmother's health had been declining steadily. My mother and father were planning a trip to New York to help her sell her home and move to Texas to live with them, and I expected this conversation with my father to revolve around those matters. He had other news instead; he revealed that he himself had been diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia. Over the next few years, the deterioration of his health and the frequent absences associated therewith began to interfere with his work. He was eased out of his position in middle management, and in January 1974, he was forced into early retirement at age 62. He was quite resentful about this, and he attempted to fight it, but he no longer had the connections within the company which had served him so well over the years. After retirement, his illness progressed quickly, and he died in August 1974.
Despite all the corporate reshuffling, my own position with Vought remained secure, though the company's financial difficulties through the early part of the 1970s had a chilling effect on salaries; I went five years without a raise (during which time we added four children to our family and built the upstairs addition on the house). The Vietnam War continued to rage, and I had provisioning responsibility for several of the highly sophisticated A-7 avionics components. In January 1973, I made an extended five week business trip to New Jersey and New York to conduct a configuration audit at vendor facilities on the equipments for which I was responsible. The weather was uniformly terrible, and the work was grueling, but I did seize an opportunity one weekend to drive out to the north shore of Long Island to visit with my cousin Nora and her family. The trip finally wrapped up in early February, and I made it back home just four days before Katharine's birth!
Even before the final American withdrawal from southeast Asia in 1975, the Air Force had begun transferring its active duty A-7D aircraft to the Air National Guard (ANG). Anxious to keep the production line open, Congress continued to authorize additional A-7D procurements through FY 1976, and by 1981, there were no fewer than 15 fully equipped A-7D ANG squadrons. Throughout the remainder of the Cold War, these ANG squadrons were regularly deployed in joint international exercises in Europe, Central America, and the Caribbean, and they played a role in the 1989-90 U.S. invasion of Panama. Navy A-7 aircraft continued to fly in active duty carrier based squadrons for many years, and they provided close air support for combat missions in Grenada (1983), Lebanon (1983), Libya (1986), and Iraq (Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, 1990-91). All in all, a total of 1,545 A-7 airframes were manufactured, and as with the Crusader, there was also a remanufacturing program. Navy and Air Force models together racked up over five million flight hours, and during its service life, the A-7 was probably the most cost effective aerial weapon in the arsenal of the U.S. armed forces. Not only was it notable for its heavy ordnance load, but it also boasted an amazingly efficient maintenance to flight hour ratio (about 10:1), superior weapons delivery accuracy, long range, ease of handling, and a remarkably low accident and combat loss rate. During the Vietnam War, the A-7D flew 12,928 combat sorties with only six losses (the lowest rate of any aircraft in the theater). Not counting prototypes, there were 12 A-7 production variants (including four different two seat configurations), and versions were sold to Greece, Portugal, and Thailand. Foreign variants continued to fly for many years; the Greek A-7 Corsairs were not finally retired until 2014! Today, an A-7D Corsair II which famously survived almost nine hours of anti-aircraft fire during a successful 1972 search and rescue mission in Vietnam is on display at the National Museum of the USAF near Dayton, Ohio.
As logistical support of A-7 remanufacturing and engineering change activity continued through the 1980s, my role in the Requirements group expanded. I still had provisioning responsibilities, and I continued to make periodic business trips (primarily to the Air Logistics Center at Tinker AFB in Oklahoma City), but by assignment from my manager, I also began to coordinate our inputs into all change proposals, and to track and oversee budget expenditures. This shift into a quasi-administrative function helped me to add another set of skills to my résumé -– a development which may have played a part in prolonging my employment at Vought for another decade.
Even after the conclusion of hostilities in Vietnam, the aerospace component of LTV was still turning a profit, but the other divisions were struggling. An ill advised 1978 decision to double down on steel holdings by acquiring the Lykes Corporation saddled the company with a huge debt load, and it was poorly positioned to weather the “double dip” recession of 1980-82. Heavy layoffs followed, and repeated restructuring over the next few years failed to improve operational results. Finally, in July 1986, LTV filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. At the time, it was the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history, and it proved to be one of the most complicated and protracted, lasting seven years. Under court order, the company was forced into a series of piecemeal divestitures, the most painful of which was its profitable aerospace division. In 1983, that division had once again been separated into two segments, and the aircraft component (which would retain the Vought Corporation name) was sold in 1992 to California based Northrop Corporation and the Carlyle Group, a private equity investment firm. The missile component was bought by Loral Corporation (later part of Lockheed Martin). After Northrop acquired Grumman Aerospace in 1994, that newly combined company then purchased Carlyle's interest in Vought (ironically, LTV had made a failed bid for Grumman back in 1981).
At the worker bee level, I was largely insulated from all of that corporate turmoil, though there was a running joke about what company name would be imprinted on the next batch of pencils! Nonetheless, I was concerned. The A-7 was Vought's last hurrah as a prime contractor, and as that program wound down, the aircraft division began to reposition itself as an aerostructures subcontractor. There was plenty of business -– Vought manufactured large portions of the C-17 Globemaster III air transport aircraft for McDonnell Douglas, and parts of several popular commercial jetliners for Boeing –- but those primes kept their logistics activity in-house, and things were beginning to look bleak for the few people still hanging on in the Supply Support organization.
For our family, it was a singularly inauspicious time for job insecurity; we had taken out an FHA Title I loan for a major house renovation, Katharine was about to start college, and we still had four younger children at home. And then, unexpectedly, I was transferred to a new program which I had not known even existed!
By the mid 1970s, stealth technology had advanced to the point that a long range strategic stealth bomber appeared feasible. Northrop won the competition for this “black” project in 1981, and design and development proceeded throughout the 1980s on what would eventually become the B-2 Spirit advanced technology bomber. When I was first assigned to the project (around 1991), Vought's involvement was still a highly guarded secret; workers were situated in a secured, controlled access area, and not only could I not tell my family (or anyone else) about what I was doing, I could not even reveal where at the NWIRP complex I was working! My security clearance was upgraded, and I began work on the program just as it was moving into its production phase.
Vought's B-2 subcontract from Northrop included not only a significant portion of the revolutionary flying wing airframe, but also (atypically) an associated logistics support package. However, provisioning for the B-2 was quite different from what I had been used to. Since the customer was another contractor rather than a military end user, Vought analysts could not utilize any of the software programs which I had helped to develop; instead, they entered data directly into the Northrop database. And there were no more business trips for me; meetings with Northrop personnel were conducted either by videoconference or at the Vought facility. However, drawing on previous experience, I did continue to coordinate change proposals and manage budgets for the Requirements group, and I handled other miscellaneous administrative tasks for the Director of Logistics, Dr. Jerrell Stracener (now a mathematics professor at SMU).
The B-2 was intended primarily to fill an all altitude heavy penetration role, probing deep into Soviet airspace to attack high value targets. It was also an extraordinarily expensive aircraft to build, support, and maintain, and as the Cold War waned, the program was scaled back from 132 planes to 75. Then, after the collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991, Pres. Bush reduced the buy still further. Northrop Grumman tried throughout the 1990s to convince the Air Force to procure additional planes, but as projected life cycle costs spiraled past one billion dollars per aircraft, Congress eventually pulled the plug, and in 1997, B-2 production was finally capped at only 21.
For me, it was the end of the road at Vought. With no other military logistics contracts in hand, the Logistics department gradually went into shutdown mode. There was enough B-2 work to sustain a steadily diminishing work force through the end of 1998, but the handwriting was on the wall. By October, I was one of only a handful of remaining analysts, and I quietly applied for early retirement, to be effective at the end of January 1999. When Dr. Stracener called me into his office a month or so later to tell me that Northrop Grumman was pulling all remaining logistics effort back in-house as of the end of December, I told him that my retirement date was only a couple of months away, and he arranged for me to spend my last month working as a technical writer with the Procedures group. My final day at Vought was 29 January 1999; I had been there, with only two short breaks for schooling, for more than 37 years.
Thus ended my family's 55 year association with the company. Vought was sold and bought several more times after I left, and it operates currently as the Vought Aircraft Division of Triumph Aerostructures, with principal offices in Red Oak, Texas. The Grand Prairie NWIRP facility was shuttered and sold in 2014; today, it is the Dallas Global Industrial Center, a largely vacant commercial property populated by a half century worth of ghosts and memories.
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