Page 84 - MY STORY

HELLO AGAIN DOUGLAS AIRCRAFT

November 1960 to July 1997

Going back to the M&P group in Santa Monica was like
going home again. It was almost the same cast of

characters that I left behind some 2+ years earlier. Leo S
was gone and Joe W had moved up to Chief Engineer of
the Materials and Process Organization. There were a
few new faces, but a lot of the stalwarts remained.

The DC-8 was in full production and commercial and

military transport aircraft development was relegated to
the Long Beach facility. Those of us in Santa Monica
were now involved in missile and space systems. So our

focus was on space flight, e.g.; Saturn-Apollo, future
NASA and DoD manned systems, missile weapon
systems like Nike Zeus and Skybolt, and advanced

ballistic re-entry vehicles. The job was no less
fascinating and technically challenging, just different.
Triple redundant, high cycle fatigue issues were no longer

of importance. Extreme operating environments
consisting of, high G-loads, cryogenics to extremely high
temperatures, low cycle fatigue, fracture toughness,

became the operating environment of our hardware. A
new world to this materials engineer.