This Week In AFLCMC History – September 23 - 30, 2024
23 Sep 1994 (Bombers Directorate/Hill AFB)
Today, 30 years ago, the Spirit of California, a B-2 bomber (AV-9, tail number 88-0330), dropped a pair of inert 2,000-pound bombs at the Utah Test and Training Range, outside of Hill AFB. The test represented the first time a B-2 assigned to an operational unit, the 509th Bomb Wing at Whiteman AFB, Missouri, made an in-flight weapons drop. The B-2 Spirit’s first flight occurred in 1989, the first operational bomber was delivered to Whiteman in Dec 1993, and the aircraft achieved Initial Operational Capability in 1997. The Spirit saw its first combat use during Operation ALLIED FORCE in 1999, where it destroyed a third of selected Serbian targets in the first eight weeks of the campaign.
24 Sep 1919 (Propulsion Directorate/Wright-Patterson AFB)
On today’s date in 1919, McCook Field chief test pilot Maj Rudolph W. “Shorty” Schroeder set an altitude record of 30,900 feet for an airplane carrying a passenger—besting his own record made earlier that month by 1,900 feet in the same Packard-LePere LUSAC-11 biplane, equipped with an experimental turbocharger developed at McCook with General Electric. However, Schroeder was so unimpressed with beating his previous record by “only” 1,900 feet that he suggested they not even bother calibrating the figures, because he would just do better next time. Indeed, on 4 Oct, Maj Schroeder and Lt George Elsey smashed that record by reaching 33,450 feet. Schroeder’s Army career ended a few months later during a solo altitude record flight when his protective gear failed, nearly killing him and leaving him temporarily blind.
25 Sep 1979 (Mobility Directorate/Hill AFB)
Today, 45 years ago, the Directorate of Maintenance at Hill AFB, Utah, completed work on its first C-5 landing gear assembly. This was a new responsibility for Hill AFB personnel, and followed their assumption of all C-5 landing gear work from the San Antonio Air Logistics Center (which was, itself, later closed down as a result of the 1995 BRAC). As one of the largest military aircraft in the world, the C-5 Galaxy has the greatest capacity of any USAF airlifter, and requires 28 wheels total on its 5 sets of landing gear to distribute its weight.
26 Sep 1984 (Digital Directorate/Hanscom AFB)
Forty years ago today, Hanscom AFB’s Electronic Systems Division (ESD) released the Air Force Single Channel Ground and Airborne Radio System (SINCGARS) Request for Proposal (RFP) to industry. SINCGARS was an Army-developed jam-resistant VHF-FM radio communications system that allowed for command and control communication between infantry, artillery, and armored units, but the Air Force needed to develop their airborne piece so that it would be interoperable with the Army’s technology. And while the technology has been evolved over the decades, SINCGARS is still utilized today
27 Sep 2004 (Wright-Patterson AFB/88th Air Base Wing
Today in 2004, twenty years ago, President George W. Bush visited Wright-Patterson AFB while campaigning in southwestern Ohio. Both Air Force One and Marine One were maintained from the base while the president was in the region. Colonel Andrew K. Weaver, 88th Air Base Wing commander, and Lt Gen Dick Reynolds, Air Force Materiel Command (AFMC) vice commander, met the President upon his arrival. President Bush then greeted base personnel on the flightline before departing for scheduled speaking engagements in Springfield and West Chester, Ohio. President Bush would go on to narrowly win Ohio’s electoral votes later that year in the 2004 general election, with Ohio proving to be a major “tipping point” state in helping him to attain four more years in office.
28 Sep 1924 (AFLCMC)
On 28 Sep 1924, the first aerial circumnavigation of the globe (covered in more detail in the Sep 9th Heritage Hangar) successfully concluded with a 240-mile flight from Eugene, Oregon to Seattle, Washington (from where the mission began on 6 Apr). Their historic journey ’round the world had taken 175 days to traverse a total of 26,300 miles and was front-page news across the globe. The two surviving planes (of four that started the journey), New Orleans and Chicago, landed at 1:28 p.m. before a crowd of 50,000 spectators. Both planes were then returned to AFLCMC’s predecessor McCook Field in Dayton, Ohio, which had managed the effort and tested the aircraft.
30 Sep 1949 (Mobility Directorate/Air Force History)
Seventy-five years ago, the Berlin Airlift officially ended. Berlin, and Germany itself, had been divided in half at the end of WWII, with the western parts allied with the US, France, and the UK, while the east was controlled by the USSR. Berlin was deep in Soviet-occupied East Germany, leaving “free” West Berlin dependent on restricted ground routes from West Germany through hostile territory. As a political move in 1948, the USSR cut off that access, preventing supplies from
reaching West Berlin. Beginning on 24 June, the Allies responded with the “Berlin Airlift,” leveraging open air corridors to deliver more than 2.3 million tons of food, coal, and other supplies to the city over fifteen months. The Soviet Union lifted their blockade on 12 May 1949, but the airlift continued until September to dissuade any efforts to reinstate it. The episode taught the nascent USAF critical lessons about global airlift operations.
70 Years Ago in AFLCMC History: 29 Sep 1954 - First Flight of the F-101 Voodoo
Even before World War II was over, Army Air Force (AAF) leaders were looking ahead to the future. Wartime experience cemented the strategic bomber as the core of the future Air Force. In August 1945, the AAF released a request for proposals for a jet-powered, long-range “penetration fighter” to escort those bombers to their targets. McDonnell Aircraft, a relatively new corporation that had never built a production airplane, responded with its XF-88 Voodoo, which it described as having, in a bit of foreshadowing, “unusual freedoms from difficulties uncovered in flight.” Over the next few years, the XF-88 design was tweaked during its conventional prototype-development process. However, the evolution of jet-powered bombers like the B-47, and the need for air defense interceptors to protect against Soviet aircraft, killed the “penetration fighter” program in 1950. The XF-88 did have some impact on the future though: it used curved engine inlet ducts, leading the designers to discover many of the problems (and some solutions) associated with modern serpentine ducts typical for low observable aircraft. It also raised the question of whether engine afterburners—the aft part of the engine where fuel is sprayed directly into the exhaust stream for a temporary burst of power—was the responsibility of the airframe company or the engine maker. McDonnell took on the task with some success, but it was clear that future efforts should be left to the engine experts.
In 1951, the Air Force revisited its fighter decision and concluded that a long-range “strategic” escort fighter was in fact necessary, but its unadvertised primary mission was to carry and deliver its own nuclear weapon as a complement to those bombers. By this time, the Eisenhower administration had settled on a national defense strategy of “massive retaliation,” meaning it would forestall any future war by promising atomic annihilation for the antagonist. That posture elevated Strategic Air Command (SAC) to the pinnacle of military priority. For the Air Force, the side effect was that any system that lacked a direct or supporting nuclear mission was neglected. Therefore, the entire next generation of fighters, called the “Century Series” because of the their F-100+ designations, were designed either as air defense interceptors or nuclear strike aircraft, with conventional attack or air superiority roles secondary.
In the same period, Air Force acquisition was undergoing a major upheaval. The jet-atomic age had ushered in a technological revolution at the same time the Cold War created a new international world order and the Korean War demonstrated the persistence of conventional “limited” warfare. How should the USAF respond? In a famous review memo, now-retired Maj Gen Jimmy Doolittle wrote, “Although few were willing, we must sacrifice today to have better weapons tomorrow—the difficult decision must be made to give up quantity in the interest of quality. Therefore, we must organize to serve, to be served, and to conserve.” He was alluding to the late 1940s subservience of research and development to logistics and sustainment under the monolithic Air Materiel Command (AMC). To rectify this, the Air Force split off S&T and early acquisition into a new Air Research & Development Command (ARDC), which controlled programs until they became operational systems, which were then handed off to AMC. This avoided a logistics-focused MAJCOM from siphoning dollars from new programs to feed operational ones.
That change was accompanied by revisions to the acquisition process itself. While the Army Air Force, particularly at Wright Field, experimented with novel, rapid means of developing new systems, it had returned to a conventional, linear model of research, prototype, test-redesign, fly-off, and then production decision.
This changed starting in 1950 with the “Cook-Craigie Plan” (named for two Wright Field vets who were now the generals advocating for this). One aspect was the institution of the Weapon System Program Office (WSPO), that considered the aircraft as a holistic system from support equipment to engines to weapons, with a prime contractor, instead of separate procurement items. In these “joint” WSPOs, members of ARDC and AMC worked together in a single office to manage a program “from cradle to grave.” That eventually proved more effective on paper than in practice, but it was a step forward in the early 1950s.
The second major component of Cook-Craigie was the institution of “concurrency” as an alternative to linear acquisition. This was a revived WWII experiment that eschewed prototyping and instead skipped right to the construction of production tooling based on initial designs, which would churn out a handful of early models for flight testing. Any changes wrought by those tests would be retrofitted to the production facilities and the Air Force would commit to full-scale production while testing was on-going.
In theory, the combined elements of Cook-Craigie would produce new systems faster and at less cost. However, it was reliant on faulty assumptions: it was ARDC policy that aircraft would include only “FULLY DEVELOPED” components and subsystems, and (like with the XF-88), that difficulties encountered in flight tests would be minimal, resulting in few changes to the tooling. The practical experience proved to be much different. At its roots, Cook and Craigie’s timing was poor—their plan was predicated on success and certainty at the very moment when aviation was undergoing to most rapid, revolutionary advance since the Wright Brothers. Jet engines, supersonic flight, high altitudes, high temperatures, radar, electronics, guided missiles, and radical aerodynamics all were outside established bounds of knowledge and required significant re-thinking and experimentation to understand. There were no “fully developed” components that could be rolled together into complete, functional systems within previously-typical budgets and schedules. The Century Series aircraft, all radical and specialized, became the poster children for cost/schedule overruns, uncertainty, and even risk to aircrews. Despite those issues, these fighters produced flexible platforms that served roles well beyond those envisioned for them, and they were the mainstay of the USAF in the 1960s—though their limitations, resulting from having been designed for other purposes, were evident during the Vietnam War and led to the 4th Generation fighters.
The F-101 came out of a hybrid process, with the Air Force imposing the WSPO construct and without funding formal prototype, but McDonnell choosing to leverage more linear development, using the XF-88 as the de facto prototype for the larger, more powerful F-101. On 3 January 1952, McDonnell signed its letter contract for the new Voodoo, leading up to a July mockup inspection. The initial five “production” F-101A aircraft were slated for flight testing. The first one, tail number 53-2418, was completed a year later, then disassembled and shipped to Edwards, where it made its first flight on 29 September 1954. Over the course of 37 minutes, the plane flew to 35,000 feet and went supersonic. It also resulted in a long list of major problems, primarily engine compressor stalls (going back to the inlet duct design) and overall performance deficiencies. After just 11 flight tests, the Air Force issued an 8-month-long “stop work” order for the production line to correct the design problems, followed by another in 1956 caused by hundreds of necessary engineering change proposals. Nevertheless, the F-101 reached Initial Operational Capability in June 1956 and over 800 were built in interceptor, fighter-bomber, and reconnaissance variants