chapter 6 aerophysics lab

  The Aerophysics Laboratory became a crucible of innovation, fostering a collaborative environment where physicists, engineers, and technicians tackled complex technological challenges. As one of the first facilities of its kind in the United States, it embodied a broader shift in which private industry assumed roles traditionally held by academia or government laboratories. North American Aviation’s strategic foresight in establishing this facility ensured its relevance through the uncertain postwar years and well into the Cold War.

The biggest contract awarded to the Aerophysics Lab was a powered rocket called the Navaho. During its development in the early 1950s Evans began to ascend the management ladder. “Headed for the vice presidency?” his WashU professor Roy Glasgow might have asked. Recall that Glasgow had steered Evans away from his declared major of Engineering Administration. Fueling America’s aerospace industry in the 1950s was the threat posed by the Soviet Union. The USA and USSR were in an arms race. School children were subjected to Duck and Cover drills, not in fear of a shooter but an atom bomb. 

Dutch Kindleberger, the founding president of North American Aviation (NAA). hired J. Lee Atwood as his chief engineer in 1934. Atwood eventually became its Chief Executive Officer. In a 1989 interview[1]for an oral history project, Atwood described NAA’s postwar challenge, noting that during World War II, the company peaked as a military aircraft manufacturing powerhouse, employing over 100,000 workers nationwide. However, at the war's end, production ceased abruptly, reducing the workforce to about 5,000 employees. Atwood explained NAA’s strategy for survival.

Atwood: “When the (US-built) atomic bomb exploded (August 1945), and the obvious connection with the possible missiles work and all that became fairly apparent to us, we began to realize that there was going to be a need for a considerable national defense. The measures we took immediately after the war were to bring back everybody we had sent to these inland plants and to push some things we'd started in engineering. By 1948,we had 18,000 people. We were going to do missile work.”

The military’s goal was to develop an inventory of bombs. They assumed that each bomb would weigh 5,000 pounds and required a new unmanned delivery system capable of carrying 2.5 tons over 5,000 miles from U.S. launch sites to Soviet targets, with a precision landing within one mile of the target. Achieving these objectives demanded technological breakthroughs in rocketry and guidance systems.

Atwood: “I think we moved much faster and much stronger than other companies who had more conventional work lined up. … We hired quite a number of scientists. This was started as early as 1946-47. Dr. Bill Bollay was hired; he was the leader. We set him up with a department—what we called an Aerophysics Department—and that was given a kind of license to explore scientific advancements. … We had Niels Edlefsen in electronics. It wasn’t too long before we had quite a stable of well-qualified scientific people, most of them with PhDs in their fields. This began to grow because nobody else in the airplane business was looking at things quite that way.” Bollay initiated the inertial guidance program during this time.

At the same time, of course the gyroscope authority was Stark Draper of MIT, at the Instrumentation Lab. He'd been working that before the war, during the war, and after, and our Aerophysics Department was not exactly a competitor and not exactly a spinoff, but it was starting to parallel what was going on at the MIT lab and developed a guidance system for the Navaho. There wasn't anybody in the industrial sense prepared to develop that guidance system. And so, we undertook it.  The guidance system was tested aboard an old Army transport plane, C-47, one that the Army could afford to direct to us for test purposes. 

Here it is appropriate to break into Atwood’s account and explain why Evans’ contribution to the design of servomechanisms using the root locus method was critical to achieving NAA’s strategic goal: to become the aerospace industry’s leader in the production of high accuracy inertial guidance systems. Theyuse servomechanisms to achieve precise and responsive control of its components, which is essential for accurate navigation and stability.

[1] June 20, 1989 at North American in El Segundo, CA. Martin Collins was the interviewer.