Convair

And the memo is staggering to read.

It was authored by Don Applegate, the director of product engineering for Convair, which was the subcontractor that manufactured the fuselage and doors for McDonnell Douglas.

And he wrote it just weeks after the Windsor incident.

Right.

I've definitely confronted him about it.

I've definitely said to him, like, you want to take anybody else? You know what I mean? Convair about it.

But then you can't really play that game with someone who's, I don't know, 150,000 times bigger than you.

Yeah, it comes down to punk notes at the end of the day.

An inboard of those four jet engine pods hung in pairs added years after the original design when the Air Force decided the aircraft needed to go higher and faster than anyone had first imagined.

This is the Convair B-36 Peacemaker.

The one at Wright-Patterson is not a replica, not a mock-up, not a theatrical prop.

It flew.

The Intercontinental Bomber specification, 10,000 miles of range, 10,000 pounds of payload, service ceiling above 40,000 feet, speed fast enough to matter.

and they handed it to Consolidated Aircraft, the company already building the B-24 Liberator and said, build it.

Consolidated, which would soon become Convair, started design work in 1941.

The result was unlike anything that had come before.

A production contract for a full fleet of flying wing bombers worth hundreds of millions of dollars was canceled.

The Convair B-36 Peacemaker, a conventional design with a conventional fuselage and a conventional tail surface, got the work instead.

Jack Northrop believed until the end of his life that the contract was killed not because of technical failure, but because of politics.

Secretary of the Air Force Stuart Symington had reportedly told him that if Northrop Corporation did not agree to merge with Convair, the contracts would go away.

Jack Northrop refused.

He was not the merging type, and the contracts went away.

And he saw forward.

And when he acquired the rights to Convair, which is an old kind of an aircraft propeller driven, and had the vision that he could stretch that aircraft, that he could put new engines, new avionics, and it could become this very, very efficient transport aircraft.

And he actually bought the rights to Convair, the license.

So if you have a Convair anywhere in the world, All the spare parts are in Kelowna.

You have to come to him.

If that were the limit of Barry's vision, you'd say, what an entrepreneur.

There was a lot of plans to build stations, and there's been a lot of information that's come out of that.

So Convair had a military test space station, and they actually went as far as to build a ground-based simulator, essentially, so that they could test how things would fit.

The Apollo program had talked about doing Olympus, which was going to be a station that wasn't a circle, but it was spinning and had different levels, so that you could say, well, we're going to go to half gravity to do some work here, but tomorrow we're going to go further out and get a little more gravity or a little further in and get less gravity.

The military had planned to do the manned orbiting laboratory, and they even drafted astronauts, many, almost all, all but one, who became part of the NASA program when that program disbanded.

Two companies were invited to prove them wrong and the choice of those two says everything about how narrow the field really was.

Convair had the strongest possible resume for anything involving supersonic delta wings because they had actually built one and put it into service.

The B-58 Hustler was a genuinely beautiful nuclear bomber that cruised at twice the speed of sound, carried its weapon in a giant droppable pod under the fuselage and had the operational personality of a temperamental racehorse.

Building it had taught Convair more about high-speed aerodynamics and structural heating than almost anyone else in the country.

Their in-house successor concept was called the Super Hustler, and the target was Mach 4, which tells you their engineering department was not suffering from a shortage of confidence.

Lockheed brought a different kind of credential.

The frame is thin because thin is enough and every gram that is not making the bike go forward has been removed by someone with strong opinions and a hacksaw.

Applied to a spy plane, it produced a machine that was essentially a fuel tank with a camera bolted somewhere in the middle and a human being tucked into whatever space was left over, which was not much.