Page 10 - Aerotech News and Review, July 6 2018

First Flights and Other Sorties at Mojave Airport
Jack Conroy’s Pregnant Guppy – First Flight to Mojave!
by Cathy Hansen
special to Aerotech News
Many great ideas have been trans- ferred from a person’s mind, through their fingers holding a pen, onto a pa- per napkin. That is exactly where a solution for hauling the S-1C rocket stage happened. The first stage of the American Saturn S-IV rocket was built by Boeing in 1961.
One of our aviation friends is Clay Lacy and no one can tell a story like Clay. I remember asking him about flying the Pregnant Guppy and he has a way of tilting his head and you can see in his eyes, the memories are flow- ing back and as he relives the flight in words for you to hear.
I’ll try to recollect some of his words and capture some of the es- sence of this program that touched our airport.
One of Clay’s closet friends at Van Nuys Airport was John ‘Jack’ Conroy, a former U.S. Army Air Force B-17 pilot in World War II and California Air National Guard pilot. Conroy ac- tually conceived the idea of joining two C-97 fuselages to create a larger inside diameter aircraft, that was ulti- mately named the ‘Pregnant Guppy.’ Jack knew that NASA was looking for ways to transport large components of the Saturn S-IV rocket. He also knew that Boeing 377 Stratocruiser’s were being phased out and his friend, Leo Mansdorf, an aircraft broker, was stor- ing this type of aircraft at Van Nuys Airport.
One night at the local airport restau- rant at Van Nuys, I think it was called Sky Trails, these guys sat together
The Pregnant Guppy.
talking about the different options that might be accomplished to haul the large rocket stages and how they might make a presentation to NASA with a solution. Of course, one of the guys grabbed a paper napkin and started drawing some ‘what if’ ideas. It was Jack Conroy who thought using the surplus 377 Stratocruiser’s was the answer by merging two 377s together, making the inside diameter of 19-feet. It was the only aircraft capable of car- rying the 40-foot long, 18-foot diam-
eter S-IV stage of the Saturn I rocket. The nose, cockpit, wing, engines and tail remained unchanged, while a new upper fuselage of approximately 16-feet was added, a whole cabin sec- tion of another 377. It gave the air- plane a strange double or even triple- bubble configuration when seen from the front. The aft part of the airplane was detachable to allow the loading of
large cargo.
Conroy was so confident in his idea
that he presented the concept of the
Courtesy photograph
highly modified Stratocruiser to of- ficials at NASA. Even though they were not highly impressed, he was a visionary businessman and knew it would work. There was one person who showed keen interest and sup- port: none other than Dr. Wernher von Braun. With that encouragement, Conroy went into debt by mortgaging his own home to pursue the project.
He founded Aero Spacelines In- ternational and initiated the building of the concept aircraft. He had one customer in mind — NASA. They needed a way to transport oversized cargo and he knew he could deliver. The rocket components were too large to travel by rail, as tunnels were not large enough, and there was no way to move by trucks as bridges and roadways weren’t compatible. The only way, for the time being, was to place them on a barge and go through the Panama Canal, taking at least one
month to get to Cape Canaveral. Aero Spacelines would transport the rocket components in one day.
On-Mark Engineering was hired to begin the conversion work. The Preg- nant Guppy was re-designed from an ex-PanAm airframe and a section from a former BOAC Stratocruiser was add- ed on top behind the wing.
The Pregnant Guppy, powered with four Pratt & Whitney R-4360-59 ‘Wasp Major’ radial engines, made its first flight to Mojave Airport from Van Nuys Airport on Sept. 19, 1962. Jack Conroy flew left seat and Clay Lacy was co-pilot.
After the flight to Mojave, Conroy took the airplane on a demonstration tour and headed east with a final des- tination of the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.
Von Braun was there to greet Con- roy and his crew. As a pilot himself, von Braun was anxious to experience the flight qualities of the Guppy first hand. According to a NASA histori- cal website, Conroy was determined to prove that the Guppy could fly with a heavy load, but there wasn’t time to fill the cargo bay with sandbags for simulation, so they just filled the air- craft with enough fuel to make up the weight difference.
With high ranking officials shak- ing their heads, two MSFC observ- ers were aboard the ‘heavy load’ test flight: Julian Hamilton, one of the key managers in the Saturn logistics pro- grams and Herman Kroeger, a former test pilot and member of von Braun’s V-2 program group in Germany. The takeoff was uneventful and during the flight, the two port engines (number one and two) were shut down and the aircraft maintained course and altitude using only light controls.
As quoted from NASA’s report, “This feat so impressed ex-test pilot Kroeger that he lapsed into German in describing it to his colleagues after the plane landed. Von Braun was so interested that he wanted to fly in the
See MOJAVE, Page 11
The Super Guppy over Mojave in 1962.
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Eber West Collection
Jack Conroy, Clay Lacy and Al Paulson being interviewed in Mojave after the “Pregnant Guppy” made its first flight in 1962. At that time, the aircraft was considered the world’s largest airplane.
Photograph from Lucky Me, book by Clay Lacy