Page 75 - MY STORY

At the completion of my brilliant summary, the

conference room fell into a completely ominous silence,
while at the same time I noticed the pallor of Dr. Fritz’s
face turning into a bright red hue. My GD metallurgical

“buddies” were, for some strange reason, smiling (more
like smirking). It suddenly dawned on me why I had been
invited to this review. The metallurgical staff at GD had

been apparently trying to warn Herr Dr. Fritz about the
dangers of his alloy selections, but he had looked at the
metallurgical staff as not competent to critique his

engineering judgment.

So my “buddies” had invited me to drop the hammer on
their egocentric German design engineer in front of senior
GD management staff, in public, to let the high-level folk
realize that Fritz was not God’s gift to the design of their

supersonic transport. Like so many US government
sponsored exploratory efforts, the potential of a high

flying Mach 3 transport died on the vine.

The aircraft manufacturers could not justify the

procurement and operating cost to the commercial airline
companies, and the environmental impact of shock waves
emanating from supersonic flight would always be

problematic enough to prohibit overland flights.