Bob Loschke and Ken Dyson Interview by Peter Westwick

Ken Dyson and Robert Loschke interview by Peter Westwick, 9 January 2012. .

WESTWICK: I'm sitting here with Ken Dyson and Bob Loschke on January 9th, 2012. Instead of the usual approach of going back and doing extended career oral histories, we're going to do a more focused one capitalizing on these two gentlemen's shared experiences, especially on Have Blue and the F-117A and Stealth. Maybe by way of getting into the conversation, if you could each just share how you made your way into the Have Blue and Stealth program. Ken, maybe start with you. Around 1976 you started working on classified programs. You're up at Edwards doing F-15 test piloting, still in the U.S. Air Force. And as a U.S. Air Force test pilot is when you got involved with the program?

DYSON: That's right. I don't know if you want to start with me. Bob was aboard it before I was. But you can go ahead and lead with me if you want.

WESTWICK: So let's start with Bob then. This is Bob's voice.

LOSCHKE: I first started in what became the Have Blue program in about 1974. The S-3A program had just been winding down. I'd been involved in the control system on that airplane. It was a carrier-based ASW aircraft. I had had some previous contact with Ben Rich on some other work, and he recalled that I had done control system things, so he requested that I come over to the Skunk Works at that point and help them make a proposal. That was when I first met Dick Cantrell and Denys Overholser. Denys was the fellow who had developed the program for predicting and calculating what the radar cross section would be. He knew how to take a specified shape and come up with a radar cross section for it, but he was a radar engineer and he didn't know anything about aerodynamics. So Dick Cantrell and I were the ones who kind of helped to guide him along; “this is the kind of thing that you need to make a flyable airplane.” Then Denys would go away, analyze it, tell us what the radar cross section was, and say, "Well, what you want to do here is not good." So it was an iterative process. It took about six months or so, and we finally came up with a viable shape that we used in our proposal. LOSCHKE, BOB and DYSON, KEN

So that was my introduction to that. We were awarded a contract then to develop the two prototype aircraft. I should go back: there was a test phase there, when the Air Force and DARPA wanted to know whether or not we were blowing smoke. Northrop was in competition with us at that time, so Lockheed and Northrop built full-scale models of their proposed design, and made them as close to real aircraft as they could. They were mounted on a pole and put out on the test range so the radar would be a known condition, and then you could rotate the model around on the pole and get radar cross section for different aspect angles and so forth. Northrop was in competition with us at that time, and they had their model also. At the end of this test phase Lockheed was awarded the contract to go ahead and build two prototypes to see if they could fly. Everybody was impressed with how low the radar cross section was. But the fundamental question was, could you actually build a real airplane that has all of the things like exhaust pipes and vents and things a real airplane has to have, and still show that low radar cross section? So that was when we went ahead and built it. And that was when I first met Ken.

WESTWICK: Now, you knew that you were competing with Northrop. Were you aware of their approach and their philosophy and their geometry and all that?

LOSCHKE: No, no, DARPA was very explicit about that. It was a fire wall between the two of us. They wanted to have complete independence, two different design groups working on that. So we knew that Northrop was working on something and we were working on something. I think a few Lockheed people got to see the Northrop test model, because we both tested down at RATSCAT in New Mexico.

WESTWICK: This is White Sands?

LOSCHKE: Yeah. But I'd say that 99.9 percent of the people who were working on it at Lockheed had no idea what the Northrop concept was.

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WESTWICK: But you got to see their model, so you had some sense of…?

LOSCHKE: I did not.

WESTWICK: Okay, some people did, though.

LOSCHKE: Yeah. There were a few people who happened to be down at RATSCAT, and I think they had it covered with a tarp and the wind blew it off for a second or two. [laughter] So they got a chance to see it.

WESTWICK: Okay. But there wasn't any feedback coming in like, "Wow. I saw that Northrop model, and it looked totally different.”

LOSCHKE: No.

WESTWICK: Okay.

DYSON: These guys made it by themselves.

WESTWICK: It was just curious that DARPA wouldn't say, "Well, there are good ideas on both sides. Let's take all those ideas and maybe make them…"

LOSCHKE: No.

WESTWICK: It was a very conscious…

DYSON: You know, it probably would have weakened the whole thing. One of the good things about this program was the small team: get together and hash it up and lash it up and go get it done.

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WESTWICK: So how many people?

DYSON: A small number. I don't know the number.

WESTWICK: Single digits?

DYSON: Oh, no.

LOSCHKE: At the initial part of Have Blue there were probably about a dozen of us, no more than that. Later on, after we won the contract to build the prototype, then it built up. We had probably a hundred people working on it at that time, on the engineering. And then when we actually built the two vehicles we had to bring in some shop people. So there were probably about another hundred people involved in the shop in the building process.

WESTWICK: Now, Ken, you were still Air Force, not Lockheed, right?

DYSON: I was Air Force and continued to be in the Air Force all the way through. That leads into what I was doing. I was working on the F-15, as you said, and that was and still is a heck of a fighter airplane. Of course now there's an F-22 out there that's a bit more in terms of avionics and thrust et cetera. But that was a hot baby. One day at Edwards I got a call to report to the general's office. I went and reported. Tom Stafford was the Edwards commanding general then. He was a former space guy who came back to the Air Force. He said, "Relax, Ken," and described to me an opportunity, if I wished to accept it, to work on something that would keep me away from everywhere. It'd be a very secret thing, and it had a lot of potential to our country. What did I think about that? "Yes, sir, I'd like to do that," I said. And then he gave me, off the top of his head because he had nothing written about it at Edwards, a description of the program and what it was about: the smallest, beyond-imagination radar cross section of a machine that was going to go fly. We had to build it, as Bob said, and put all the things in that shape that

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those smart guys concocted down at the Skunk Works. And then we'd go about flying it and prove it could fly. After that we would measure it in flight to see if indeed we had achieved what was done on the model that was stuck on a pole down at the special radar measuring range. I guess at this point these places are not so confidential or classified security-wise, but I still don't like to talk about them.

WESTWICK: And this is about 1976?

DYSON: Yes. General Stafford said, "Well, let's get with it." Immediately he told me to go down to the Skunk Works. "Do you know where that is, Ken?" "No, sir." So he told me how to drive there. Drive the freeways, get off on the appropriate street, turn into the gate and report, and say I was there for—and this has always interested me; I was to report for an unclassified visit to Norm Nelson. I'm to be a civilian, and not show any military look at all. So I did that. The guard told me how to get to building 52, I think it was. That sticks in my head. One of the old white buildings there left over from World War II, I think.

LOSCHKE: I think it was 82.

DYSON: 82? 82. I went there and knocked on the door, and I was met by a smart looking fellow named Norm Nelson. He ushered me in and there was a lovely California-looking woman who was his administrative assistant. She was way more than a secretary. Patty Gipple was her name. And I was just amazed. I went in there and saw those guys, and many of them looked well-experienced, slaving over engineering work spaces and doing their work. They were in the process of getting the thing laid out so it could be built.

WESTWICK: This was still the blueprint phase? Or were you doing scale models? You had done the RCS tests at White Sands.

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LOSCHKE: Yeah, there were scale models. After we did the tests in RATSCAT, that determined the shape. Then Dick Cantrell, who was the head of aerodynamics, he had to take that shape and put it in a wind tunnel and find out what its aerodynamic characteristics were. Now, this is totally backwards from the way you ordinarily develop an airplane. So we didn't actually spend too much time in the wind tunnel. It was very short. It was basically to find out what its stability and control characteristics were—which were all bad—and how fast it would go, and what the drag and lift coefficients were so we could determine what size engines to put in it. And that was the wind tunnel model that I showed you in those photos there. So we did not have a lot of scale models around there. Normally, when you're working on a program like this, people would have little scale models. But that configuration was classified top secret, so you could not leave this thing laying around anywhere.

DYSON: It was more than top secret even. It was top secret, sensitive, nobody can see it, special access. I mean, it was really out-of-sight black.

WESTWICK: So when you showed up, was there something that you could see, where you could just look at this thing and say either, A, that thing looks like it's going to fly or, B, as Kelly Johnson is rumored to have said, "That damn thing will never get off the ground”? Is that apocryphal?

LOSCHKE: No. No, that was pretty much it. Kelly hated the thing. You know, all of his designs previously had been very sleek aerodynamically and nice looking things. And when he first saw the 3-D drawing of it he said it looked like a tin shed after a hurricane. He thought it was awful. He didn't like it a bit.

WESTWICK: But there was something that you could look at that would…

DYSON: Oh, I came away from the first visit totally amazed. That thing didn't have anything aerodynamic looking about it. No pretty curvy lines, it was just all flat. But it also was sleek,

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pointy. It kind of got to grow on you. Before long, you thought it was a thing of beauty. And by the time the 117 was retired—which was sad, by the way. I made it down for the retirement at Holloman, the operational wing. They had a real fine party there. They had a 117 sitting in the hangar that people could walk around, paw over and look at and be amazed. What a pretty thing. God, what a great looking airplane. Very capable.

WESTWICK: Were you involved with the materials at all, the materials end of it?

LOSCHKE: I wasn't. No, I was in the aerodynamics and the stability and control aspects of it. So I was involved to the extent that I had to know how heavy it was and what its mass characteristics were for the moments of inertia and things like that.

WESTWICK: What was your relationship with the RCS people? You have these two or possibly three groups: you have the RCS, electromagnetism people and electrical engineers; and then you have aerodynamics, traditional aeronautical engineering; and then maybe you also have the third group of control systems and avionics. How did these three groups interact? Because they're almost at cross-purposes in some respects.

LOSCHKE: They were. I think one of the reasons that I was chosen for the job is because I had a dual degree. My first degree is aeronautical engineering. Second was electrical engineering. And then I had a third degree in control system engineering.

WESTWICK: So you've got a foot in each. Or three feet.

LOSCHKE: Yeah. So when the RCS guys couldn't understand why the aero guys wanted to do something, well, then I could kind of bridge over and explain the reasoning for it. And vice versa, when the RCS guys wanted to do something, well, then I could bridge back to the aero guys and explain why it was important. We could make a compromise as we worked along. So it was an iterative process, as I say. It took quite a while to work through there. The way it went

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is that we always joked amongst ourselves that Cantrell and I would teach the RCS guys Aerodynamics 101, and they would teach us RCS 101. So between the two of us we would reach a suitable solution.

WESTWICK: Overholser was the main RCS guy?

LOSCHKE: Yeah. He was the key fellow at the beginning, because he was the one who had developed the ECHO program. And then there was a fellow by the name of Bill Schroeder, who was a mathematician. Between Bill Schroeder and Denys, they were the ones that did all of the computer programming.

WESTWICK: When you say the ECHO program, that's the computer code for the RCS: the facets and the reflection from edges and the EM waves….

LOSCHKE: Right. Correct. Yes.

DYSON: Those guys were at the heart of it. And Bob touched every piece of the airplane, to include the surface and the shape and all that stuff, and made it work. As I think he described quite well, he was sitting there mixing it up with all the folks who needed it mixed up.

WESTWICK: Is the platypus an example of this iteration and compromise?

LOSCHKE: Yes.

WESTWICK: We talked about the platypus: you have the elevons out on the trailing edges of the wings. Then the platypus is this little thing back in the actual fuselage that basically flaps…

LOSCHKE: It was a big thing. It had big, big flaps.

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WESTWICK: Well, big flaps on the tail end back of the exhaust. But is that…

LOSCHKE: Yes, exactly. Yes.

WESTWICK: If you took that example of how that came about, is that the aerodynamicist going back to the RCS people saying, "Hey, look. You have to have something more here"?

LOSCHKE: Yes. That was exactly right. By that time we had set up a simulation of the airplane. Not a pilot simulation yet. We just had an offline type thing, so I could show them that if we just kept those little tiny elevons all by itself, that the airplane would probably crash on the first take-off, because those elevons were just too small.

DYSON: That amazing shape was able to fly through the magic of fly-by-wire, which has become more routine as time has ticked on, but that was a giant step: to take that very unstable machine and the only way you could fly it was to supply control power. By that I mean aerodynamic control power. And we had the rudders that were cocked off at an angle, and the elevons…

WESTWICK: The tails were canted.

DYSON: Yeah, I call that the rudders. They were not vertical tails; they were tilted inboard on this airplane.

WESTWICK: They were canted….

LOSCHKE: Inboard.

DYSON: Inboard. The experience of Have Blue led to a better machine with them kicked outboard. But we had to have that control power, and that was the flight controls guys and the

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aero guys and the RCS guys. RCS was king, there was no doubt about it. But those guys all got together and mixed it up.

LOSCHKE: The platypus was an add-on. We felt we could get it on the airplane and we could use the little tiny elevons in normal everyday flying, but there would be real-world situations where you'd run into a gust or something like that, and the elevons are not going to be large enough. So we just absolutely had to have an additional amount of capability there. And the platypus supplied that.

WESTWICK: Now, the fly-by-wire, first of all, people talk about fly-by-wire meaning kind of different things. I think it has come to mean more over time and just kind of expanded in definition. But back then when you're talking about fly-by-wire, what did you mean? And as a pilot, how was this received in the pilot community? Was this fly-by-wire basically using the computer because the reactions are faster than a human pilot can react? What did it mean when you talked about fly-by-wire?

LOSCHKE: An airplane by virtue of its shape and where the center of gravity is, it has certain aerodynamic characteristics. That's why during World War II all the airplanes looked pretty much the same. You know, the Japanese Zero looked pretty much like an American airplane, which looked pretty much like a German, and so on. They were all constrained by the same limitations. The physics was basically the same. Whenever you start to talk about some of these other newer, stranger type of things, those nice aerodynamics that were available to the classic airplanes were no longer available. So that made airplanes which were aerodynamically unstable every which way. Now, if it was just a pitch-axis problem, the pilot could handle that pretty well by himself. That's what the F-16 was. The F-16 was a fighter that had been designed at General Dynamics. That was the first airplane that the Air Force ever bought that had a fly-by-wire system in it. And that was strictly because it had pitch-axis problems. It did not have lateral directional problems.

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WESTWICK: When you say fly-by-wire, the computer corrects pitch control?

LOSCHKE: Yes. When the pilot puts in a command, he does it just like he would fly a normal airplane. He puts in a stick input or a rudder input, and that is a command to the computer. It says the pilot wants the airplane to do such-and-so. Then the flight control computer, knowing what the speed is and what the angle of attack is and everything, it moves whatever control that it has to to make that happen; whereas in the older times with the mechanical inputs and the pilot moved the stick, he only could move just the ailerons and so forth. With the fly-by-wire system you can move any control on the airplane in any way that you want just to make the airplane do what the pilot has commanded it to do. So there is no mechanical connection anymore between the pilot's input and the control surfaces. The real advantage of the fly-by-wire is that it can handle all of these cross-axis coupling problems, where ordinarily the pilot would lose control. If he's attempting to control pitch, the airplane would go out of control in yaw, or vice versa. So the flight control computer handles all of that for him. And as far as the pilot's concerned, it's just like a normal airplane.

WESTWICK: But as a control systems engineer, what you do is say, okay, if there are—how do you say it?—say, two pounds of forward pressure on the stick, we are going to add a half pound of sideways pressure for roll or….

LOSCHKE: It essentially does that, yes. The stick input for pitch would be a command to normal acceleration. Stick input for roll would be a roll rate, and for the rudder it'd be a sideslip angle. And all these things are measured. So you don't care what the airplane would ordinarily want to do all by itself. You actually measure the thing that the pilot is commanding, and you feed that back to the computer. The computer says, "Okay, we got what the pilot wanted. Stop." So it could use any control surface it has to make that happen.

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WESTWICK: Now can you think about these as almost like filters, where the computer is kind of filtering with these algorithms?

LOSCHKE: It's a computer program which was put into the computer, and so it handles all of that routine stuff.

WESTWICK: So now, Ken, as a pilot would you be involved in developing these? Would you be working with the control systems people developing this stuff? Or would they just kind of hand it over to you and say…

DYSON: I looked over their shoulders.

LOSCHKE: With great interest, I might add.

DYSON: With great interest. And I grew to understand it. And I had had education, a B.S. and master's degree in aero and in control systems as well. So maybe I could understand it somewhat with the help of somebody like Bob explaining it.

WESTWICK: Well, this is an interesting development, the fact that the Air Force sends you back for a master's. Did you go back on your own, or did the Air Force send you back for a master's in the early '70s to Arkansas? Alabama?

DYSON: Go Big Red, Crimson Tide.

WESTWICK: Sorry. I should probably back off on that. [laughter]

DYSON: I think there's a game pretty soon.

WESTWICK: There is a game tonight, isn't there?

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DYSON: Yeah. It was not a plan, other than I had dedicated myself towards airplanes. My first operational airplane was the F-100 Super Saber, which was a hot airplane in the early '60s, and then test pilot school. I returned from a Vietnam tour to go to Alabama U, for a master's degree. I concentrated on controls there, and then went to the test pilot school to be an instructor. There I demanded, or was allowed, to work on controls. I hopped onto various airplanes and ended up with the opportunity to work on that. What a wonderful thing.

WESTWICK: On Have Blue. You recognized though, to go back to get an advanced degree in control systems, you recognized that this is where aircraft are heading?

DYSON: Yes. It's where I wanted to go. Oh, yeah.

LOSCHKE: The basic idea of fly-by-wire had been around for forty years, but the technology to implement it safely was not there yet. It wasn't until the early 1970s that for the very first time you had transistorized electronics that were reliable enough and capable enough to do the job. At that point it became the enabling technology. So the control system idea and concepts had been around for years and years. Schools were teaching it a long time before, but it was always sort of like a theoretical ideal. You know, “we might be able to do that.” But suddenly with the development of the integrated circuit…

DYSON: I want to say this. I'm not sure why, but you could have fly-by-wire systems flying on ordinary stable aircraft. Just replace all the mechanical linkages. Think how much structural complexity and maybe weight savings you'd gain by just having wires running back and forth instead of rods and cables and pulleys.

WESTWICK: They had hydraulic power assist going back decades, which is a type of fly-by- wire?

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DYSON: No.

LOSCHKE: It's just the muscle.

DYSON: That muscle is still there. It's what moves the control surface. But the signal gets to it via a wire instead of via mechanical linkage. Fly-by-wire makes it feasible to not only replace that mechanical stuff but also to control unstable aircraft in a way the pilot just couldn't be able to figure it out.

LOSCHKE: Yeah.

WESTWICK: So you are keeping up with developments and microprocessers and integrated circuits and all this stuff. This seems to involve not only the computers that you put in the plane but then also the power on the ground. And do you guys have IBM 704s or what? I'm trying to think back what the…

DYSON: Bob, you tell them what went into the Have Blue airplane.

LOSCHKE: Okay. Yeah, we had a large computer, IBM computers, in the basement of the Skunk Works. We used that to do what we called offline simulation. So we could load the entire aerodynamic database in there. We would find out what the airplane would do all by itself. And then my job was to design the control laws to be loaded in the flight control computer so that the airplane would be safe to fly.

WESTWICK: And this is like this flow chart that you were showing me here of these various…

LOSCHKE: This is called the pitch axis control law on the Have Blue. And here's one for the lateral axis. This is one for the directional axis.

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WESTWICK: And then you would turn this into computer code?

LOSCHKE: At the end. Back then we were using analog computers that had been developed for the F-16 program. The F-16 was the very first Air Force production airplane that was going to have a fly-by-wire system in it. So we opted to use the technology that had already been developed for the F-16. We had to generate new control laws, but the basic technology, the integrated circuits, the power supplies and all of that sort of thing, already was in existence and had been certificated. They'd gone through vibration testing and heat stress and all that stuff. By coming up with a new set of control laws, well, then we could take that same physical box, stuff it with our new control laws, and mount it in the airplane. So there was a computer, which had all the basic housekeeping capabilities built into it already and already tested. So we were able to save about 18 months of time; if we had attempted to go ahead and do that on our own it would have taken much longer to do it.

DYSON: And it was cheap.

LOSCHKE: Yeah, it was relatively cheap.

DYSON: Flight proven. It was good to go.

WESTWICK: But the Skunk Works is gradually building up—you know, the Skunk Works is Kelly Johnson, aerodynamics, the U-2, SR-71. And then all of a sudden you have these RCS, electrical-engineer, EM types floating around. But now this seems like as crucial a part of it.

LOSCHKE: It was.

WESTWICK: And so is the Skunk Works learning a lot, quickly, about this control system stuff?

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LOSCHKE: Well, the SR-71 had an early version of this. They still had a mechanical linkage, and it was not as unstable as the Have Blue or the F-117. It could be flown with great difficulty if the stability augmentation system, the SAS system, failed; the pilot could just barely control it. It was not a nice thing.

WESTWICK: As I recall, its center-of-mass was aft, is that right?

LOSCHKE: It was programmed, so for subsonic the CG [center of gravity] was forward and for supersonic they would pump the fuel back to minimize the trim drag. But in any event, the advent of the fly-by-wire technology is what made all of these airplanes possible. Without that capability these airplanes would have been very interesting desk models. You know, they would have had no capability whatever. You'd have to go over and taxi them to death because you sure wouldn't be able to fly it.

WESTWICK: Now, Ken, you have a master's in aeronautical engineering and control systems engineering. Is this a change for the Air Force? Before you had the old kind of Curtis LeMay combat pilots, but now you have people like yourself. I think this is exactly the time when Lew Allen is chief of staff of the Air Force, and he has a Ph.D. in nuclear physics. This seems like a change.

DYSON: It's about that time, yeah.

WESTWICK: This seems like a change for the Air Force, from the old kind of hair-on-fire pilots to the more computer savvy, scientific or engineering…

DYSON: Well, the Air Force has been keeping up with technology because they fly things that are just way out of sight. And they've kept up with the guys—you know, GIs work on the equipment and keep it going. Of course the design of the flying machines has always come from the companies in our country. The Air Force has inputs into that: "I'd like this, that, and the

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other." It works along as a good team. And the test pilot school continues at Edwards and puts out two graduating classes per year. The students there for the most part are technically educated, and have degrees in the right kind of stuff. But you can also still find the guy out there with his business degree flying the airplanes.

WESTWICK: Yeah?

DYSON: Absolutely. That's a concept of the machines we have.

WESTWICK: I just wondered because you'd been at Edwards in the early '60s.

DYSON: Oh, I'd been there forever.

WESTWICK: In this period in the early to late '70s, did you see any change in more pilots having this technical background, like yourself, just to keep up?

DYSON: It's grown in that direction, I would say. But you still find the business admin-type guys out there coming along and doing a good job.

WESTWICK: Okay.

DYSON: I still want to get on the subject, because we went there, of fly-by-wire and unstable airplanes. I'm sure you'll remember, Bob, when I came down from chasing Have Blue and was just fascinated—I won't say amazed—by watching the airplane, watching the controls be applied as Bill Park was flying it. I was tucked in right close on him. In fact, I remember the first flight of course I tucked in so close Bill said, "Move out, Ken. You're too close. I can feel you." My airplane was pushing his airplane. I said, "Okay," and moved out. But a directional side slip's a very simple thing to do. If you were behind a Cessna and the guy wanted to do a side slip, he'd apply the rudder to the right, right rudder. The rudder

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would deflect that way. The nose would move to the right and stabilize. That's a basic kind of thing you want to be able to do with an airplane. And we were able to do that in Have Blue. Bill applied right rudder. The nose went to the right, and he stabilized. And by golly, he applied right rudder pedal, and the rudder was deflected to the left to stabilize in that situation. Because the control system knew that it had to do that to stabilize the airplane, to do what the pilot wanted to do. So I got to see that instability at work and the control system at work controlling that. Remember when I harped on that? I said, "Hey, that was the neatest thing."

LOSCHKE: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Just as an aside, in the cockpit in the simulator we had a little gauge there which would show the pilot where the control surface positions actually were. We were doing I think it was just a 1G decel. Normally whenever you have a conventional, stable airplane, the pilot just pulls the power back and he gradually slows down and keeps the airplane in trim. Then what happens on a stable airplane, the elevon will sort of slowly go trailing edge up. You slow down to the minimum speed, and then they just stay there. Well, with the Have Blue, since it was unstable and it wanted to pitch up as the pilot would slow down, why, the elevons would go down, because the airplane by itself, its instability was such that it just wanted to pitch up. The control system knows this, and it puts the elevons down to make sure that it doesn't go any further than what the pilot is commanding. So Bill is sitting there in the simulator, and he's watching those elevons go down, which he knows is absolutely backwards from all the other airplanes he's ever flown. "Bob," he says, "Are they really going to do that?" I said, "Yep." He says, "I don't want to know." [laughter]

WESTWICK: That was my question: how much of this is counterintuitive, the control system stuff?

DYSON: We flew Have Blue, and the rest of the airplanes that are out there flying that are unstable, we flew them. The pilot looks for response and gets what he wants. The control surfaces are doing what they need to do.

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WESTWICK: So how much of it, when it comes down to it, is still old fashioned quote-unquote “stick and rudder” flying? Can you just say, you know, “I'm going to ignore it. I’m just going to ignore what’s going on behind me. I'm just going to take whatever the airplane does, and if it does what I ask it to do I'm happy with it?’

DYSON: The pilot looks for a response with the airplane. I want the nose to go over here and stop, and I don't care what all those control surfaces do. Well, I do, [laughter] but you look for response. And it gives it to you. The science of control systems has developed enough that you get what you want.

WESTWICK: But you already knew the science from going to school. So you could talk to Bob and…

LOSCHKE: Oh, yeah. Yeah, it was a perfect set up between the two of us, because I didn't have to explain to Ken about something. I'd say, "We need to feed back some beta here, and we need some roll rate feedback." “Okay, I understand that.” So it worked out very nicely. I don't know of any other Air Force pilot I've met since then that was better suited for that kind of a job.

WESTWICK: Now, was Bill Park also…

LOSCHKE: He was the Lockheed test pilot.

WESTWICK: He was the Lockheed test pilot. So how was he in this relationship?

LOSCHKE: He was…

DYSON: A natural pilot. And he had flown, flown, flown.

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WESTWICK: So he's more the old-fashioned style pilot, right?

DYSON: Yes.

LOSCHKE: Yes, he is. Exactly. I don't think he had gone to test pilot school.

WESTWICK: He'd been with Lockheed for…

LOSCHKE: Well, he had been in the Korean War, so he had lots of combat time in F-86s and stuff. After he retired from the Air Force, he came to Lockheed and flew the U-2 and the SR-71, F-104s, everything. He was a great pilot. But he was not an engineering test pilot. I could explain something to Ken in about three words. With Bill I would have to spend a little more time explaining what it was we were trying to do and why. But he was an excellent pilot. He would just say, "What do you want me to do with the thing?" We would explain what the mission parameters were, and he'd go do it. He was not as intimately familiar with the control laws as Ken.

WESTWICK: It seems that the test pilot business had changed a bit in that it used to be, without the computers figuring out what the airplane is capable of, it was more the test pilot's job to go out and fly this thing and find out, okay, what is the envelope and what are the performance characteristics. Whereas, my understanding is by the '70s or so, with computing power, you can compute a lot of that in advance and that the flight testing becomes more flying data points and seeing if you can indeed match the flight profile to what has been predicted by the computer? Is that accurate?

DYSON: It is not always boring. The technology has grown so that most of the time the community, the engineers and the pilots and the whole gang, the team, understands what they're going to get. Most of the time it's real close. And sometimes it's not. You have to go out and

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find what needs to be done. Oh, maybe the rudder needs to be a little bigger. Wasn't that found on the 117 in flight, for example?

LOSCHKE: Yes. Right.

DYSON: And then you just have to do it, change it.

LOSCHKE: The fly-by-wire system is great when it works. And it was quad redundant. In other words, we had four computers and they checked each other.

WESTWICK: So it's like a vote?

LOSCHKE: Yes.

WESTWICK: Does it have to be a majority or how do you…?

LOSCHKE: There are different ways of doing that. In our particular case we would have one channel in standby, and we had three actives. And we'd pick the middle guy. So there's Channel A, B, and C. If A was saying go three volts and this one was saying 2 volts and this one was saying 2 1/2, you would select the middle guy. If they disagreed by some specified amount, then you'd say that guy is bad, so you'd vote him out. Then you'd bring in the fourth one, and then that would become the new triad and you'd continue on flying. So you could handle any two malfunctions that were exactly the same in two of the channels and still be able to fly the airplane.

WESTWICK: And this is all in this computer code?

LOSCHKE: In the flight control computer.

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WESTWICK: So how many lines of code?

LOSCHKE: Well, this was an analog computer. There was no code in it at all. An analog computer is where you use electronic analogs. That's what it means. You can design this filter, and you can set it up with the analog electronics so when you stimulate that filter with a certain input, then you will get the same filter out. Now, for the digital machine you actually have to write code, and it is a different kind of thing, but you can achieve the same thing. The real advantage of the analog for us was that it was much quicker. In those days there were no digital machines that were fast enough to actually do this kind of thing. Also it was much easier to check. If you have a digital machine, you know, you can have bugs in it. So you would have to have this very long V and V process, validation and verification. You have to go through very elaborate, long testing. So for an experimental airplane digital machines were tough at that time. They're better now.

DYSON: I'm recalling another thing that was amazing—maybe that's the right word. On one of our early flights on Have Blue we found directional damping was not as tight as it ought to be. The nose was too loose. It would wander back and forth after a disturbance. Bill was flying that flight. We came back and he reported it. We had a flight control guy, a computer guy, on site with us, and he rolled up his sleeves and went to work. The next morning it was fixed. He had just changed the electrical parts of that computer to make the thing appear to have more directional stability.

LOSCHKE: Wayne Burgland.

DYSON: Burgland, yeah.

LOSCHKE: Yeah, that was the real advantage when you have an experimental airplane. We had not really done that much wind tunnel testing; with a normal program you'd spend maybe 20,000 hours of wind tunnel testing, and we only did about 700 total.

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DYSON: And I did 800 of those 700. [laughter]

LOSCHKE: So, like Ken said, we could fix these problems as they showed up. Otto Boe was another guy from Lear Siegler there. I'd say, "Otto, we need to change this gain from .2 to .3." I would show him where it was, I would mark it up on his diagram, and I'd sign it so he would have authorization. He would go away, get new transistor components, do whatever else he had to do, and make the modifications. Then we'd take the box and do a bench test to make sure in fact that the change that I had asked him to make had been made properly. Then we would put it in the airplane. We'd do a ground check, a further check on it. And so, like Ken said, we could do a 24-hour turnaround; whereas if we had had a digital machine, it would have been on the order of about three or four weeks time frame.

WESTWICK: So when you say analog computer, basically what you have is a bread board; is that right?

LOSCHKE: Yep, yep.

WESTWICK: So it's like the old fashioned circuit board where you're putting in your cans or transistors and diodes or whatever?

LOSCHKE: Yep, yep. We actually soldered them in there, because of vibration requirements. But that's basically the idea.

DYSON: The example we're talking about also highlights how we had a small team. We were right there ready to do the work, and we had the authority to do it. We could do it and move on. The next day it was flying again.

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WESTWICK: But this must have been a pretty complicated bread board. I mean, the system sounds, in looking at these flow charts, like an incredibly complicated problem.

DYSON: One line at a time.

LOSCHKE: The actual flight control computer was about this wide, and it was about this long.

WESTWICK: So about a foot and a half wide and a couple feet long?

LOSCHKE: Yeah. It weighed about 50 pounds.

WESTWICK: How many elements in it?

LOSCHKE: There were 28 circuit boards in there.

WESTWICK: Stacked?

LOSCHKE: Yeah. They were vertical. You'd take the top of the computer off, and then you could reach in and pull up any one of these 28 panels. Since it was a quad redundant, that meant that with all of our control laws there were seven dedicated panels for Channel A, seven for Channel B, and so on.

WESTWICK: Each computer was seven panels, each panel maybe two feet by two feet.

LOSCHKE: Yeah. So whenever I would tell Otto Boe or Wayne that I needed to make a change in the directional axis, he would pull out Channel A directional axis, Channel B directional axis, and so forth, and he'd make the same modification to each of the four circuit boards.

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WESTWICK: Put in a resistor with, say, 6 ohms instead of 8 ohms, solder that thing in, then pop it back in the box?

LOSCHKE: Right, yeah. Exactly. He would do a test of the board all by itself first. Then he would put it back in the box for an overall test to make sure that they all worked. And we would insert failures to make sure the voting system was still working properly. Then we'd put the whole computer back together, put it into the airplane, and do a complete preflight ground check to make sure that we hadn't messed up anything with the interconnections.

WESTWICK: Now, Ken, Bill Park is the test pilot for Lockheed. But your job is to represent the Air Force and make sure that the Air Force is getting what it wants?

DYSON: No.

WESTWICK: But you're also inside Lockheed now.

DYSON: My job, I would not say it's what you said. Because there was transparency with what was happening with the airplane. Between Lockheed and the Air Force, that communication was going on all the time. My job was to work as a member of the test team. And Lockheed allowed me to come in here and be pretty much one of them. We were just all guys.

LOSCHKE: There was no adversarial relationship at all.

WESTWICK: So you and Park were the test pilots. It wasn't: Park is a Lockheed guy and you're the Air Force guy?

DYSON: No, not really.

WESTWICK: Okay.

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DYSON: Yes, you said it correctly.

WESTWICK: Did you have any image or idea of the Skunk Works before then? Had you heard about them?

DYSON: I had heard about them. Some of the parties they used to throw for the test pilot society, wild things. Yeah, I had heard about them, but I had no clue what I was going to find when I walked through that gate to that building, and then into that building, and then got briefed in on the program. I was allowed to do what Lockheed does with its pilots, did and still does, I’m confident, because I have lots of buddies who worked and still work with Lockheed—I figured out I'd go and I'd learn the fuel system, the control system, the air conditioning system, the instrument layout, the switches, how much room there was in the cockpit. By the way, there was not much room.

WESTWICK: You're fairly tall.

DYSON: I had to kind of slump to close the canopy. The canopy was like this, and I hit my head. My head would go from one side to the other. [laughter] I even, pretty early in the program, had—I think the guy's name was Rice who worked down there?

LOSCHKE: Elmer Rice, yeah.

DYSON: I had him coat my helmet with some soft kind of paint, a rubberized sort of thing to keep it from scratching up the inside of the canopy.

DYSON: Now, Park was a bit shorter. So he could sit up full.

WESTWICK: There wasn't anything saying, okay, anybody over six feet tall is ruled out?

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DYSON: The airplane was built for its mission.

WESTWICK: Here's a picture of the canopy.

DYSON: And the cockpit was as big as it was. It was not going to get any bigger.

WESTWICK: But they didn't say, well, Dyson, you're too tall for this. We're going to find a shorter guy.

DYSON: We never got to that point. No, no.

LOSCHKE: The whole concept was: we were trying to demonstrate this new technology. We wanted to build the smallest, cheapest kind of airplane we could possibly build and still demonstrate the technology. It had to be big enough, obviously, to get the two engines in and enough fuel for an hour or so carrying an instrumentation package. There's a photograph here of the pilot. I think this was actually Iron Mike. He was one of the mechanics.

DYSON: Kammerer? I think it is too.

LOSCHKE: Yeah, Kammerer. He was sitting in the cockpit. This photograph became available years later, and he said, "If I had known I was going to be so famous, I would have shaved that day."

WESTWICK: The F-117 was considerably bigger?

LOSCHKE: It was much bigger, yeah.

DYSON: This thing could almost taxi underneath the 117.

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LOSCHKE: It's a tiny little airplane.

DYSON: A very small thing.

WESTWICK: So then you're at the Skunk Works. You were still living up by Edwards, but were you coming down here every day?

DYSON: I was living on base at the time. I came to the Skunk Works when it seemed like I needed to. Of course the first week I just spent the whole time here. Some nights I'd spend in the city, and some nights I’d go back home. Our simulation was all done at midnight.

WESTWICK: Why was that?

DYSON: Well, secrecy. Classification and security was a part of it.

WESTWICK: I could understand the flights being done—which they were, I understand—at night. But the simulation also?

DYSON: Yeah.

LOSCHKE: At Rye Canyon, which was about 25 miles north of Burbank.

WESTWICK: Right. It's up by Valencia?

LOSCHKE: Right. That's where we did the simulation. So Ken did not have to come all the way down to Burbank to do the simulation. We did a lot of it at night simply because if you’d see lots of funny people running around in there, people would start to think, “what's this all about?” The intention was to keep it quiet. One of the things that I'm most gratified about is that

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we were able to keep both the Have Blue and the F-117 program completely secret. There were never, to my knowledge anyway, there were no leaks ever.

DYSON: Oh, it was absolutely airtight. Unbelievable. Aviation Week could not even find out about it.

WESTWICK: “Aviation Leak,” you mean? [laughter]

LOSCHKE: Yeah.

DYSON: Aviation Leak, that's right.

WESTWICK: Bob, you had been working in classified programs. You'd worked some on the SR-71, is that right? When you talked about the variable geometry, I assume that's the SR-71 engine inlets with the cones.

LOSCHKE: Yes. Right.

WESTWICK: Was this level of secrecy much greater than the SR-71 for you?

LOSCHKE: It was about the same. There were certain aspects of this one. Within the Skunk Works, the building itself that we worked in was building 311, and it had no windows at all. You came in there, and everything was compartmentalized. So if you were working on one aspect of a program, you did not know what was going on in the office next door. This compartmentalization kept the people—you found out what you needed to know to do your job, and that was it.

WESTWICK: Was this weird? Just for a work environment, for lunch or something like that, you'd sit around and not be able to talk about stuff with Joe in the office next door?

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LOSCHKE: No.

DYSON: Absolutely not.

LOSCHKE: No, you couldn't. Even if you saw somebody at work every day and you happened to run into them down at the grocery store or something like that, you could not acknowledge that. Because we knew that the Skunk Works at the time was under very close surveillance by the Soviets. If they found out that person A, someone they knew was working at the Skunk Works, and then he meets somebody at church or at the grocery store, and talks to him, "Hi, blah, blah," then they have a new lead. So we were specifically told not to acknowledge someone, even though we saw the guy every day at work—you know, if we happened to bump into him at the movies or whatever, don't say hello, don't do anything. No big Christmas parties.

WESTWICK: So you knew that the Soviets were…

LOSCHKE: Oh, yeah.

WESTWICK: Were there any examples where they caught people or where they found out what the Soviets were trying to do? Did you see anyone across the street with little directional antennas?

LOSCHKE: Oh,yeah. There were several cases that I heard about. I don't know anything particular about them. But our security people would go around the outside of the building, and they used every kind of sensor that they could think of to look at the building, to see if there was any kind of electromagnetic radiation leaking out. Like when you're working on a computer, the computer is making changes in the 1s and 0s, and all that stuff would ordinarily get radiated out. So all of our computers had to be inside what was called a tempest enclosure.

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WESTWICK: A Faraday cage, basically?

LOSCHKE: Yeah, exactly. So that nobody sitting outside could pick up any kind of leakage like that. We were not allowed to have radios—you know, just ordinary commercial radios— inside the building because if we were talking and there's an ordinary radio playing and if that vibration…

WESTWICK: It would couple?

LOSCHKE: Yeah. The vibrations in the walls would be picked up by a microphone or something outside. Knowing that it was a commercial station, then they could subtract that signal from it and then be able to obtain the additional vibrations that people would be using inside the room.

WESTWICK: These are just acoustic vibrations.

LOSCHKE: Yeah. So all of that kind of thing was done. For security, it was hermetically sealed as well as it could be done as far as the work space was concerned.

DYSON: Well, keeping it a secret for as long as we did until our country was ready to acknowledge it in fact was an accomplishment in itself. I kept a copy of this just so I can remember when it was.

WESTWICK: October '88.

DYSON: ’88. I ejected from the last of the two airplanes in '79. That's when the Sec Def Carlucci came down and said we did good.

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WESTWICK: So, Bob, you'd been in the Skunk Works for a while, but Ken, this level of classification is new to you, being suddenly this deep into the black world?

DYSON: The black world was new to me, but I knew about it, and I knew about security stuff because I had worked on various other things. After test pilot school, I worked at Eglin Air Force Base on weapons development. I went there from the test pilot school and then from there to Vietnam.

WESTWICK: You had done some of the first precision laser-guided…

DYSON: Oh, we developed it there. Of course that stuff was all secret too. But it was not black.

WESTWICK: So what was your impression then when you land in this black program?

DYSON: I loved it. I thought this was the greatest thing. And in fact it was. Wonderful people. Bright people. Can-do people. Man, we did it well. Right, Bob?

LOSCHKE: Yeah. It was hard on the families, I think. You know, for the Lockheed employees that were involved, they sent a letter out to the families, because we were going to have to be out of town for long periods of time. So Lockheed said that your husband, or whoever, is working on an important program. They would give them a phone number, so in case of an emergency they could call Lockheed and Lockheed could get a message to us. But we were not allowed to talk to our families about anything that we were doing. We just went to work every day and came home every night. My wife said she figured whatever I was doing I was happy at it because I didn't complain much. [laughter] It was absolutely the best program that I ever worked on. Partly because of the people that were involved, and that we were all working together as a team. We all knew that if we could make this concept work out, it would revolutionize tactical aviation. It was going to change the entire concept. There were a lot of challenges along the way, but like Ken said, we

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had the job to do and we had the authority to do it. We didn't have to go through huge layers of bureaucracy, like you would ordinarily have to do.

WESTWICK: Now, the layers, were you working mostly with DARPA or Air Force? Or both, or neither?

DYSON: I'll try to make an answer to that. The Skunk Works—our little team and the leader of that team—was in charge of doing what we were doing. DARPA had a presence there.

WESTWICK: So DARPA had a guy in the Skunk Works living out here basically?

DYSON: He just kind of would go where he wanted to. He'd be at the test place, or he'd be at downtown Burbank, or perhaps at the radar measuring range. Just wherever he wanted to be.

WESTWICK: But was he around constantly? Occasionally?

DYSON: Most of the time.

LOSCHKE: There were different people.

WESTWICK: Bill Perry was head of DARPA at the time, but it was a program manager…

LOSCHKE: No, he…

DYSON: Perry was maybe Secretary of Defense at that time, if I remember right.

WESTWICK: Harold Brown was secretary of defense. Perry was DARPA, I think.

DYSON: Well, I remember Dr. Perry, his presence, as being some big boss somewhere.

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LOSCHKE: DARPA assigned different people for different purposes. So DARPA assigned Dr. Atkins. He was the RCS guy.

DYSON: Allen Atkins.

LOSCHKE: I shared an office with him for a long period of time. So while we were doing this development work, why, he was there watching and seeing it, and he was participating.

WESTWICK: So is his role oversight or kind of helping…?

DYSON: Keeping up and helping.

LOSCHKE: Yeah, yeah.

WESTWICK: But helping or contributing? Because he's a scientist-slash-engineer, he has a Ph.D. in something.

LOSCHKE: Yeah. It was a lot of help. Because of the security considerations, Lockheed engineers were not allowed to go somewhere and find out something. So what we could do is that I could talk to my counterpart, Skip Hickey—he was with the Aeronautical Systems Division at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

DYSON: An engineer from Wright-Pat.

WESTWICK: He was Air Force or DARPA?

DYSON: He was Air Force.

LOSCHKE, BOB and DYSON, KEN

LOSCHKE: Yeah, so I would say, "Skip, there's going to be a conference on flight controls in Baltimore next month, an AIAA conference," and I would have a description of what the subject matter was.

WESTWICK: “I need these three papers”?

LOSCHKE: Yeah. So I would say, "When this guy gives a talk, why don't you ask him this." So I'd give him a list of questions. And then, "Could you get me copies of this sort of stuff?" Because they did not want to have any Lockheed engineer showing up at some of these conferences. Someone might say, “I wonder why Lockheed's sending engineers to this."

WESTWICK: Oh, really? So it was not only that you're not supposed to talk, but even going to conferences, you were constrained that way?

LOSCHKE: Yeah, yeah. We were not allowed physically to go to that kind of thing. So after Skip would go to the conference, we'd get on the scrambler phone and he would tell me what he heard. Sometimes while he was at the conference, I could do that. Then he would usually come out about, oh, at least once a month, and he would bring hard copies of whatever I was asking for at the time. Just to interject this is that the guys at Wright-Pat, they had a much harder time of it in terms of travel, because Skip was on the road at least 20 days a month. So his poor wife Janet, you know, she had to raise the kids and do all this other kind of stuff. In a sense we had it easy because we were just at home all the time, unless we had to go out to the test site or something like that.

DYSON: I think that particular fellow, Skip Hickey, just loved it too. He absolutely loved what he was doing, working with Bob and with the pilots and then the simulators and running errands and doing everything. So we had our test team building, developing, testing, flying, understanding it, doing what we do.

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LOSCHKE: Getting back to DARPA, their people would do the same thing for the RCS guys. If there was some question that I had that I needed to have answered, I could go to one of them and ask them to get it for me, and they could go out through their normal channels and it wouldn't raise anybody's eyebrows, because that was the kind of thing that they would ordinarily do.

WESTWICK: So you had the DARPA guys on the ground, or in your team. For the Air Force, Hickey was kind of serving the same function, maybe a little less present. But then you, Ken, were in there all the time. You were kind of the Air Force?

DYSON: I was with it all the time, yeah, after I split away from the F-15, where I'd been working. Well, I want to talk toward the organization, if that's what you want to call it. There was an Air Force program office at Wright-Pat that was small. The leader of that was Jack Twigg, and his chief engineer was Bill Elsner. They had various other engineers in whatever disciplines they wanted, to come out and look over the shoulders or help solve a problem. So there was that presence from the program office at Wright-Pat from the Air Force as well.

WESTWICK: Were you reporting to them at Wright-Pat, or were you reporting to Edwards?

DYSON: Yes. [laughter]

WESTWICK: Both?

DYSON: Yeah. We were all working together. But Edwards was still my boss.

WESTWICK: We talked a little bit about the simulation up at Rye Canyon, and you mentioned that you were doing that at night. But I think that's interesting just because the two of you were basically in the box, and, Ken, you were in the cockpit seat.

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DYSON: Either that or I'd be to the side or back with Bob watching what was going on when Bill was flying. Bill and I did most of the development flying in those days. Later we got a couple other guys into the sim, way later.

LOSCHKE: We tried to break it up, because just sitting there and trying to do this concentrated work hour after hour is difficult to do. So Ken would be in for an hour or so, and then he'd get out and take a break. Then Bill would get in and go for an hour or so, and then he would take a break. And then we could get out and compare notes. I always asked them to write up what their thoughts were, particularly when we were doing the emergency procedures and stuff like that. So we would discuss it, and then if there was any kind of a disagreement, we'd go back into the sim and try, you know, Alternate A versus Alternate B so we could come up with some agreed- upon solution as the best way to do a job.

WESTWICK: Had you sat down and said, "Okay, I'm going to map out a six-month or X-month simulation program. This week we're going to work out this part of the flight control system. Week two we do this, week three we do this, and by the end of six months we will have worked through the entire thing?” Or was it kind of as you go along: "Oh, we'd better test this," or "Wait a minute. This seems to be responding funny"? And how long did that take?

DYSON: [pause] I’m going to let Bob answer that. [laughter]

LOSCHKE: It's kind of a blur.

DYSON: My answer would be that, yes, there was a schedule we were working to, and also we would stop and figure out any kind of little sidetrack we got on as we were going through it. And we would take as long as it took.

LOSCHKE: Yeah.

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DYSON: But we were trying to get it done.

WESTWICK: Well, there was pressure because Ben Rich had said, "Okay, we'll deliver this thing in"—I forget what the time frame was, but it was 18 months or…

LOSCHKE: 18 months, yeah.

WESTWICK: So the clock was ticking.

LOSCHKE: Yes. Oh, it was, definitely. And because everybody realized how critical the fly- by-wire system was to the safety of the program, there was very high visibility. Ben Rich would ask me almost every week, “how are things going?” Kelly was already retired at that point. We'd have little briefings for him. He would come in a couple days a week and find out what was going on. We would tell him, "Well, we're having a problem with such and so." So they would find out. “Well, what do you need?” So we'd say, "Well, we just need some more simulator time." A lot of people would complain about that because it took overtime to do that. But Ben was our facilitator. No matter what we would ask for, he would get it for us. I'm trying to remember. I think we were starting pretty much from day one, from when we got the contract. We quickly built the simulation, got it up and running, and then we were working pretty much full steam all the way up. As the airplane itself physically came together, we would find various problems and such and then we'd have to go back and make some mods someplace.

WESTWICK: That's another one of my questions is the manufacturing of the two prototypes. But we can maybe circle back around to that. Because that's proceeding in parallel, I assume.

LOSCHKE: Yes. Yes.

WESTWICK: So you're doing the flight simulation while, it was Bob Murphy?

LOSCHKE, BOB and DYSON, KEN

LOSCHKE: Yes. Bob was the chief. He eventually became the vice-president of manufacturing. But he was a real hands-on guy.

DYSON: Back to the building of the machines, before they started building the machines that were going to fly, they built a wooden airplane, and it was fun for me to watch and be a part of.

LOSCHKE: A mock-up, yeah.

DYSON: A stick mock-up of the airplane, full size.

WESTWICK: Was this the RCS model? The one that went up on the pole?

DYSON: No. This was just nuts and bolts. It was helping the team figure out where to run electrical lines and bleed air lines. It was pretty much a stick model without skin on it of the airplane, kind of like you've seen kids make model airplanes, so that it could help the whole process get done more quickly. It was certainly 3-D.

LOSCHKE: There's a photograph of it. This is the F-117, but it's the same kind of thing. We were doing this very, very quickly. As the easiest way for everybody to visualize all of the different constraints that are there, we built the wooden mock-up. It was a full size mock-up, and we could actually get real engines to stick in there for mechanics so we could check to see if the door was big enough, so the mechanic could reach up in there and get his wrenches in and so forth, and running all of the hydraulic lines and electrical wiring and bundles, oxygen bottles, and the radios and everything else that had to be in there.

DYSON: It cost money to make that baby, but it paid off.

WESTWICK: This is the book F-117 Nighthawk by Paul and Alison Crickmore.

LOSCHKE, BOB and DYSON, KEN

DYSON: He's a Brit.

LOSCHKE: Anyway, the designers, the guys that actually were the ones in there designing the frames and the skins and everything else, they were sitting within about 50 feet of the shop. We had very experienced shop people. When we were putting things together, you know, building this stuff, if there was something wrong, they would trot right upstairs to the engineer and say, "You idiot. This is not going to work." So then they'd go down, and they'd say, "Oh, yeah, okay." So they'd mark it up and make the change to the drawing system. That way everybody was up to speed on what was going on. It was a very rapid way of doing business, not like we're forced to do it today. Today is a much more lengthy process.

WESTWICK: Well, one of my questions is how tightly integrated this was with the manufacturing engineering or production engineering, the shop floor, and whether the shop floor guys are coming back, Bob Murphy or whoever, coming back to the design people and saying, "You knuckleheads, we can't possibly build it this way."

LOSCHKE: Right.

WESTWICK: Because they're also working with these new materials and saying, "Okay, we can't machine it like this; we've got to do it like this." Or, “When we form it it's going to come out with this tolerance."

LOSCHKE: That's right.

WESTWICK: So how much of this…

LOSCHKE: That was all the time.

LOSCHKE, BOB and DYSON, KEN

WESTWICK: Can you think of examples of something like that?

LOSCHKE: Let's see, I’m trying to think. Well, on the platypus, for example, the platypus was a very complex structure because it had to take the full heat of the engine exhaust over the top of it, and so you'd get differential expansion. The upper surface would get hot and the lower surface would still be cool, so the thing would curl up like a potato chip. We went through about three or four different redesigns before we actually got that. We had a bunch of these high- powered quartz lamps, and we could put the platypus there in its jig, and heat the upper surfaces with these high-powered quartz lamps and just watch it curl up like that. Henry Combs, who was our structures guru, he would come up with something.

DYSON: I remember Henry, yeah.

LOSCHKE: So it went through about four redesigns, as I recall, before they finally got something that maintained dimensional stability. Because the RCS guys could not stand to have a gap suddenly open up. So that happened all the time. One of the things I hadn't mentioned yet was that we went to Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, which is where they have the scrap yard. We were attempting to use every possible bit of equipment that was already in production, where it was available to us. We did not want to spend an extra day or a nickel developing a landing gear if we could adapt another landing gear. So we went down to Davis-Monthan and we picked out the landing gears that we wanted. Davis-Monthan, they're in the business of salvaging airplanes, so they would show us what they had. They didn't know who we were. We would just come in and start picking through their stuff and say, "We want one of those, and we want one of those."

WESTWICK: Well, you can't say, "I'm from Lockheed Skunk Works." So did you have a cover story?

LOSCHKE, BOB and DYSON, KEN

LOSCHKE: Oh, yeah. Jack Twigg, who was our SPO officer, he did all of this. He'd say, "There's going to be some guys coming in, and they're going to want some stuff. Whatever they want, give it to them and send the bill to me." So that's how it went.

WESTWICK: Did this interaction with Bob Murphy in production, the shop floor, did that extend to you, Ken? Were you kind of wandering around the shop floor?

DYSON: I was sticking my nose into the engineering and the building of that thing and tracked it as it went along. I wasn't working for Bob. I was more learning than telling them what to do and understanding why they were doing what they were doing.

WESTWICK: But also while they're building this, the production is going in parallel with your stuff in the flight sim. So at that point you're more up at Rye Canyon than down in Burbank? Because they're building them in Burbank, correct?

LOSCHKE: Correct.

DYSON: The control system on an airplane wraps itself around the whole airplane.

LOSCHKE: Yeah.

DYSON: Everything there is. So the control systems engineer would know the airplane better than any other person on the whole team.

WESTWICK: And since you're working with the control systems, stuff you do then affects…

DYSON: The pilots did need to and we did learn lots of stuff about that beauty as it came together. We understood it quite well. There was no ground school we went to other than being a part of watching the airplane fly together.

LOSCHKE, BOB and DYSON, KEN

WESTWICK: Right. For the flight simulator you use the same flight computer, right? I mean, the same four-computer system is in the flight simulator?

LOSCHKE: Yeah, we first started out with a total simulation, so there was no real flight hardware involved initially. We programmed all of the control laws on the computer so that it would be easy to change as we were developing it.

WESTWICK: So stick resistance or whatever would be…

LOSCHKE: Right. Exactly.

DYSON: Yeah, the early simulation included a simulation of those boxes that you talked about earlier that came from the F-16.

LOSCHKE: And the actuators and the landing gear and the airplane aerodynamics. So later on, just probably about four or five months before first flight, we put together an iron bird. Now, this is where we took the actual real hardware…

WESTWICK: This is the mechanical hardware?

LOSCHKE: Yeah, the real actuators. We had dummy control surfaces. The real actuator is pushing around on these dummy surfaces. We had springs to simulate aerodynamic loads.

WESTWICK: This is up in Rye Canyon also?

LOSCHKE: Yes. We had big electric motors driving the generators and the hydraulic pumps to simulate when the engine rpm changes, when the pump rpm changes, and so forth. So we had all that networked together. Then we had the real honest-to-god flightworthy flight control

LOSCHKE, BOB and DYSON, KEN

computer hooked in, and the pilot could sit in the cockpit simulator. His commands now, instead of going to the simulated flight control system, it went to the real box.

WESTWICK: So now instead of sitting behind Ken, looking over his shoulder, you're actually in a little room off to the side or something?

LOSCHKE: Yeah.

WESTWICK: So how long was each phase of this?

DYSON: No, I don't even think of it as phases. We were moving along so quickly.

WESTWICK: So how long was the whole—you got the simulation going right after the contract?

LOSCHKE: It was up and going pretty quickly. The contract was let, if I remember, in about '75 somewhere. I don't remember now. The first flight was December 1st, 1977. I remember that. So we worked very, very quickly, as quickly as we could. I would say the simulation was up and running within two months from the time we got the contract. Then we did pure simulation for about a year, and then we did the iron bird for another six months or so.

DYSON: But that was all happening as the airplane was being designed and the engineers were scratching on their boards and the stick model was coming together. It was all happening all at once.

WESTWICK: Was this unique? Do they usually do that in series instead of in parallel?

DYSON: Way fast. Way fast.

LOSCHKE, BOB and DYSON, KEN

WESTWICK: But is the normal procedure to do that? You know, first you build…

LOSCHKE: No. Normally it would have been spread out in a longer period of time.

DYSON: Well, look at the F-22, for example. The YF-22 flew in '90. The F-22 got its first flight 15 years later? 10 years later? A long, long time.

WESTWICK: Is that because requirements are changing and the design keeps changing?

DYSON: Government procedures; the organization not being streamlined. They didn't do it the way we did it. We showed it could be done, that a challenging job could be done quickly, safely. Well, I don't know about safely. We crashed all the airplanes. I want to get back to going to Tucson to pick up stuff. It fits in with putting real equipment in the simulator as much as we could. We wanted to have a real F-16 stick in the simulator. I went to a friend at Edwards who worked on the F-16 and told him, "I'd like to borrow one of those." Bob Ettinger was his name, and he was high enough in the hierarchy, and he knew that I had big mojo and I could get anything I wanted from the general. So he said, "Sure." So I picked it up, without signing for it, and put it in the trunk of my car and drove it down. No paperwork at all. And then eventually got it back.

WESTWICK: So you pulled the stick out of an…

DYSON: He took it from their supplies. And they were rare, and valuable. It was early in the F-16 world.

LOSCHKE: I brought this.

WESTWICK: This is a memo, Loschke to Norm Nelson and Ben Rich, May 20, 1977. "Subject: Evaluation of prototype ‘movable’ F-16 stick and Have Blue simulator."

LOSCHKE, BOB and DYSON, KEN

LOSCHKE: We were talking earlier about how the Air Force was changing. Well, there were some people in the Air Force, old generals and everything, who were not happy with the idea of a side stick. These were the guys that had come up through World War II, and they had flown P- 51s and F-86s and such like. They felt that God had intended to have a center stick in an airplane. Having a side stick was anathema to them.

WESTWICK: A side stick meaning not between your legs, but off to your right hand.

LOSCHKE: Yeah.

DYSON: It was sitting on the console.

LOSCHKE: Ben Rich was getting all kinds of pressure from some of these old generals, "You guys are going down the wrong track on this thing." And the F-16 guys, there was a lot of disagreement on the F-16 test program. There were some people who loved it and some people hated it. So they were working around, coming up with some modifications on their stick. That's when Ken got it for us. We quickly ran it up into the simulator. We actually got the head of the F-16 flight test force, Colonel Rider, and he came down. He wasn't programmed onto the Have Blue. He knew nothing about it. We just said this is a study program we're doing. Well, he jumps in the simulator with Ken and Bill. He went through about a day's effort, as I recall, and got the pilots’ opinions of the new stick relative to the old stick. Then I wrote this letter so that Ben would have something to show to the generals, that we were not just blindly accepting something from the F-16 guys; we were keeping our eyes open; and if anything came along we would be able to take advantage of it. Like I said, we had carte blanche when it came to getting equipment made available to us. So that was the fun part. If somebody raised some kind of a point or an objection, Ben would call me up and say, "Hey, we got so-and-so complaining about something here, and can you give me some ammunition." Ken would be involved there too. He’d say, "Ken, can we get

LOSCHKE, BOB and DYSON, KEN

a hold of…" Because it was not easy; there was still a certain amount of bureaucracy involved. But by having a lot of personal relationships with the folks up at Edwards, why…

DYSON: Things worked well.

WESTWICK: Ken, when you're in the simulator cockpit and, Bob, you're looking over his shoulder, the typical thing would be to run through some sequence and, Bob, you're trying to test one variable, if it goes out how does Ken respond? You're not trying to trip him up necessarily, but…?

LOSCHKE: [quickly] Yes, I was. [laughter]

DYSON: Darn right. Darn right.

LOSCHKE: We would have some fairly carefully constructed experiments that I would ask them to do in the simulator. This would be a task like trying to land the airplane in a 20-knot crosswind. Then while he was doing that, I would throw an engine failure in on top of it. It would make the task harder. The idea was that when the pilot is attempting to do a precise task and then you upset the apple cart with something like an engine failure, you have suddenly changed his thought process. We wanted to see if there was anything in there like a latent PIO.

WESTWICK: Pilot induced oscillation?

LOSCHKE: Pilot induced oscillation.

WESTWICK: Right. Like what happened to Tom Morgenfeld?

LOSCHKE, BOB and DYSON, KEN

LOSCHKE: Yes. So I was always attempting to do that. I wanted to find out if by introducing an extra stressor to the pilot, would that cause the flight control system to be exercised in such a way that it would cause the pilot to get into an oscillation.

WESTWICK: Some kind of feedback or non-linear…

LOSCHKE: Yes. Correct.

WESTWICK: Can you think of some examples where you found that there was this kind of feedback?

LOSCHKE: Oh, yeah. As Ken said, when we got the airplane out there, we had picked out some landing gear off of an airplane of the same weight class as Have Blue. It was strong enough, but when we actually got it on the airplane, we found that it was flexible. So when we were attempting to steer down the runway on ship 1, we didn't have nose-wheel steering and the pilot was just using differential braking and rudder pedals for steering on the runway. Well, whenever the pilot would put the brakes on, why, it would cause the main landing gear to torque a little bit, and it was putting in steering commands every time. So it was sort of like a Volkswagen going down the road.

WESTWICK: You're weaving down the runway?

LOSCHKE: Yeah. Yeah.

DYSON: That was an insidious thing. We didn't find that in the sim, but it was worked in the sim after we found the trouble, trying to figure out the nature of the beast.

WESTWICK: This was something you found out in actual flight tests?

LOSCHKE, BOB and DYSON, KEN

LOSCHKE: On the actual airplane, yeah.

DYSON: It would be on landing and not all the time. Most of the time or half of the time or something the airplane would roll down the runway true. But sometimes, if it got upset by something, the nose would swing. And then it would start swinging, and if the pilot did not put in a rudder input to bring it back, it would have gone off the runway and rolled up in a ball. It was disconcerting.

LOSCHKE: To say the least.

DYSON: "Holy smoke, what is that?" It had to do with just the system, if you think of it as a mass-spring damper kind of system. You can design one with loose stability, and it's okay until it gets perturbed. But when it gets perturbed it will go boing, boing, boing, boing, boing.

LOSCHKE: So once we understood what the problem was, it was the fact that the gear was flexing when the brakes were going on, so we could simulate that. We had not put that in the simulator because we had not thought of it. When we actually went back to the simulator and put it in there, then we could duplicate the problem, and then we could fix it. But that was one of the examples. When we were on the F-117, after we had exposed this problem with the Have Blue, I made darn sure that the landing gear guys were made aware of that and it was not going to be a flexible gear again. So it was strong enough and it was rigid enough that we never had any kind of difficulty with it on the F-117.

WESTWICK: Now, were there other cases where you found in flight tests stuff that didn't crop up in the flight simulation? Or did the flight simulation, when you went to flying it, Ken, you found that, okay, this is pretty seamless with the flight simulation?

DYSON: I'd say we had few surprises on the airplane.

LOSCHKE, BOB and DYSON, KEN

LOSCHKE: There were at least two I can think of.

DYSON: In a simulator, you'll only discover what you intend to simulate, because it takes effort to write the equations that you put into that thing to make it happen.

WESTWICK: So in a flight simulator you almost know what the problems are that you're going to…

LOSCHKE: Yes. It's based on the aerodynamics, which we got out of the wind tunnel, and the mass characteristics of the vehicle and so forth. But there were a couple. You remember the asymmetric thrust vector problem? The exhaust nozzles on the airplane, they were cut in at an angle. And inside there, for infrared reasons, they had little…

WESTWICK: Little baffles or something?

LOSCHKE: Yeah. We wanted the thrust vector to not go straight fore and aft. We wanted it to be angled inward, toward the CG [center of gravity].

WESTWICK: So the exhaust would kind of mix behind the tail?

LOSCHKE: Here, I’ll draw it. [drawing] Here's the airplane.

DYSON: He used to do that a lot for me. [laughter]

LOSCHKE: Here's the nozzles, like so. They had little straightening vanes in there, so as the gases exited, they would have a tendency to flow out this way and this way. And so the net reactive force is going this way.

WESTWICK: The exhaust is actually canted away from the center line?

LOSCHKE, BOB and DYSON, KEN

LOSCHKE: Correct. That meant that the thrust vectors passed close to the CG, which was good because then if you have an engine failure you don't get much of a disturbance input. But what we did not understand until we got into flight test was that due to very small mechanical tolerance variations on the nozzles, this thrust vector could be changed by quite a few degrees. So on the left side you might have a thrust vector, say, of 6 degrees, and over here on the other side it'd be 9 degrees. So you had an asymmetric thrust on the airplane. We found that every time that the guys would work on the nozzles or we put in a new engine or something, the airplane had this strange characteristic. So a lot of the things that Bill and Ken were doing for us, we'd trim the airplane up at 200 knots and then just do a level acceleration. When they got out to 400 knots or so, the airplane would be all cocked over like this and they were going, "What's going on here?"

DYSON: Oh, yeah.

LOSCHKE: Then at 400 knots they'd retrim the airplane so it was all hands-off, and then they'd just slow down, and these thrust vectors were varying around here. So as you slowed down, then the airplane would wind up all cocked over funny the other direction.

WESTWICK: So is this something where you go back to Bob Murphy and say, "Hey, our machining tolerances are off"?

LOSCHKE: No, no. They were doing as good a job as possibly could be done. The real problem was caused because we were trying to use a lateral accelerometer as a pseudo measurement of the side slip angle. You could break this down into a component like this. We were seeing a net side force on the airplane and the lateral accelerometer said, "Oh, you must be in side slip." So then it would tell the rudders, okay, move, we have to get rid of this. It was a phony side slip because of the measurement, but it would make a real side slip to counter its so-

LOSCHKE, BOB and DYSON, KEN

called sense. So on the F-117 we measured the actual true beta with those probes out in the front, and we never had any problem with it afterwards.

WESTWICK: Beta is the angle from your flight direction—is it yaw?

DYSON: It’s how crooked the airplane is. If that's the way you want to go, you have the airplane crooked. You have beta on the airplane, and you're flying that direction; you're flying in a side slip.

LOSCHKE: We had to do a lot of testing. As you may well remember, we'd go up to 25,000 feet and set the power to idle and come gliding down, maintaining a constant Mach number and letting the air speed change so we could see what the effect was of air speed relative to Mach number. Then we did another one: do the same thing except this time you would come down at a constant air speed and let the Mach number change. And then we'd do the reverse. We'd do a climb. So we finally sorted out what was happening back here with that. There was some test flying that went on just to sort out some of these basic issues.

DYSON: To figure that out.

WESTWICK: So, Ken, you're involved then in concocting these flight profiles and saying, "Hey, this is what we fly to try to untangle what's happening here?"

DYSON: Yeah, that briefing would be that sort of thing. Bill and I would stay right on top of what had been done: how the results compared to the predictions, and what we were puzzling out, and the reason for doing particular flight maneuvers. Bob just described a couple of them for you. There's an infinite number.

WESTWICK: Now, at this point, when you're doing the test flights, the design is set, correct? Everything you're going to correct, you're going to correct through the flight control software?

LOSCHKE, BOB and DYSON, KEN

LOSCHKE: Pretty much so, yeah. We would do whatever we could. Now, in this particular case there was not a whole lot we could do. This just happened to be a nasty characteristic. So we fixed up workarounds.

WESTWICK: But were there things where you said, okay, we can't fix this through flight control software and we've got to send the plane back to the shop?

LOSCHKE: Yeah.

DYSON: Well, our goal was to make sure the airplane would fly well enough to go out and do the things that were required to measure the RCS. We did not need to kill all the little demons. We didn't have to do that.

WESTWICK: So this wasn't a normal flight test protocol or whatever the term is for it, where normally…

DYSON: That was a surprise.

LOSCHKE: Yeah.

WESTWICK: But normally when you're flight testing an airplane you're flight testing everything to qualify it for operation. In this case you didn't have to flight test it…

DYSON: Limited flight test is what we did.

WESTWICK: This is a limited flight test, okay.

LOSCHKE, BOB and DYSON, KEN

LOSCHKE: Just enough to do the RCS testing. So we had a limited flight envelope. It was like 3 Gs positive, 2 Gs negative or something, and 400 knots or whatever.

WESTWICK: And it's only when you get to the F-117A that you do the full-up flight test, for every possible contingency?

LOSCHKE: Yeah. But this was an extremely important thing. If we had not had Have Blue to help us discover this, the F-117 program would have been a disaster because we would not have known…

WESTWICK: This exhaust vector problem?

LOSCHKE: Yeah.

DYSON: This little fellow earned its keep, in leading to the -117.

LOSCHKE: Yeah. If we had not had Have Blue and we had been given a contract to build the 117, this problem, when it finally would have shown up on the 117, would have caused at least a two-year or three-year delay in the development of the airplane. Because to fix that…

WESTWICK: Once the plane was in production you would have had to go back and tear down the whole exhaust design?

LOSCHKE: Yeah. It was a very concurrent-like effort. We'd get everything done as quickly as we could, so we were concurrently designing, building, and everything all at once. So if you have to come back and start all over again, there would be a tremendous penalty.

WESTWICK: So the first flight in December '77 is the start of the flight test program, correct?

LOSCHKE, BOB and DYSON, KEN

LOSCHKE: Yes.

DYSON: That was the first flight. But the start of the flight test program had to do with the planning and the simulating and the skull sessions, putting it all together. The first flight was on that day.

WESTWICK: And that was at Groom Lake?

DYSON: I can't remember.

LOSCHKE: It was at a test site.

WESTWICK: Right.

DYSON: I still don't like to talk about where we did stuff, so I don't. It was wherever we were working.

WESTWICK: And Bill Park did the first flight? Was it the case of, okay, Bill Park flew a whole series and then you did the second model? Because there were two planes.

DYSON: No. The way we mixed that up was, I was ready to fly that first flight, but there wasn't any way I was going to get to do it unless Bill broke his neck or got killed in a car wreck on the 405 or something. We worked together. We both knew the same things and did the same things and studied the first flight profile. The engineers designed what we were going to do on that flight, the maneuvers, flight conditions, et cetera. We both practiced those things and got ready for it. Bill was in the cockpit for the first flight, and I was in the chase airplane. I took off first and came around, and Bill rolled, and I got on his wing, and we rolled out. And I was right there living through the things he was doing.

LOSCHKE, BOB and DYSON, KEN

He flew a few flights, I don't recall exactly how many, and then it was my turn. I might have flown two in a row, and then we started taking turns. I would chase Bill, and Bill would chase Ken in all the flights. I was on the wing in the chase plane the day that Bill got one gear stuck up and couldn't get it down and ran out of gas, and so had to eject.

WESTWICK: That was fairly late in that plane's sequence?

LOSCHKE: Yeah, that was on ship 1, and I forgot when it was. We had done 36 flights by then.

DYSON: It was something like that. It was in May, as I recall, of '78, so it was about six months roughly.

WESTWICK: Were you doing like a flight a day?

DYSON: No. Sometimes we would fly a flight a day, but generally we'd have a day or so between flights.

WESTWICK: Was this to kind of digest the data?

LOSCHKE: Yep. Right.

DYSON: Just to go slow enough to make sure we understood what we were getting. But sometimes we'd fly consecutive days.

WESTWICK: And now this is the same deal where you've mapped out a flight test sequence? So okay, we're going to have 40 flights. Flight 1 is going to test this; Flight 2 is going to test this. And it's not a question of, “okay, now that we've done Flight 10, for Flight 11 let's try this.” You're not making it up as you go along.

LOSCHKE, BOB and DYSON, KEN

LOSCHKE: No.

WESTWICK: I mean, you've mapped out a whole sequence in advance?

DYSON: We had it mapped out. And by the time we got to Flight 2 we had to change Flight 3.

LOSCHKE: Yeah.

WESTWICK: So you had it mapped out, but along the way you were finding stuff.

DYSON: We constantly reworked the scheme of things.

LOSCHKE: Yeah.

DYSON: We were just about through with the limited-air-worthiness, I called it, flight test to make it qualified to go out and be measured. In fact the boss at the Air Force program office, SPO, Systems Program Office, had asked me the day before that flight to think about whatever else we might need to do before we stood it down to configure the airplane for stealth and stealth flight. Jack Twigg was his name. I said, "Okay, I'll do that, Jack." I said, "I'll be thinking on that." There was no need to think on it. It was over.

WESTWICK: Right. Now, for your first flight in the plane you'd done how many hours in the simulator? Thousands of hours in the simulator probably?

LOSCHKE: At least a thousand. Yeah, I would guess.

DYSON: It was a whole bunch.

LOSCHKE, BOB and DYSON, KEN

WESTWICK: So when you strap yourself in the cockpit are you nervous?

DYSON: No. Amped up, ready to go. Probably like Tebow yesterday when he went out there to play that game.

WESTWICK: It was a good game. And you're flying chase on Park's flight.

DYSON: Yes. Lovely to see that thing fly.

WESTWICK: But I mean Park's flight, as I understand there was one landing gear stuck, would not deploy.

LOSCHKE: Right.

WESTWICK: And then he got halfway down or something?

DYSON: I don't know how deep you want to dig for this story. I can tell it pretty quickly. Or Bob could tell it.

WESTWICK: Well, if it's deeper than what is normally known, we'd like to get it.

LOSCHKE: Okay. As we mentioned, we were using airplane stuff from Davis-Monthan, and we had the landing gear off of a similar-weight airplane. The brakes on that gear, we knew they were going to be marginal, but we had a 19,000-foot runway, and we figured that that would be enough, and ship 1 also had a drag chute. Every flight that we had with both Bill and Ken, the brakes would be red hot at the end of the stop and we'd have to have the ground crew down there with cooling fans. We were blowing fuse plugs and everything.

LOSCHKE, BOB and DYSON, KEN

DYSON: That was every flight. They were cherry red, just scary looking. We learned to roll out, stop, and they'd be in position to run up with the fans and start blowing on them.

LOSCHKE: Because otherwise you're going to catch fire. So anyway, what Bill was trying to do was, he said, "I'm going to slow this thing down in flight, so when I touch down at a lower speed I won't have so much kinetic energy to get rid of.” And he got too slow. We always had told Ken and Bill to touch down at 150 knots indicated. That way it would give us a margin between the angle of attack—because the wing tips were so far back, you could fly at a higher angle of attack, but you'd be dragging the wing tips. So we wanted to touch it down at 150 knots indicated. I forgot what Bill got down to; it was about 20 knots below that, as I recall. And he was just about to touch down and he hit the magic 12-degree angle of attack limit which fired the platypus. He was getting to the point now where the elevons were almost full down and there was no more control power available. So when he got to that 12-degree angle of attack, the platypus went down, and it smacked the airplane down onto runway. And when the landing gear came down, it bent it a little bit, and the airplane bounced into the air. Just as a reflex, well, Bill jammed the power on and retracted the gear and the airplane went around. He came back, tried to put the gear down, and now that bent gear was up in there, and it would not come out. Well, you absolutely would not want to land with just one landing gear because this thing would just roll up.

WESTWICK: Now this is the nose gear or one of the main…?

LOSCHKE: It was the right main gear.

DYSON: Right main.

WESTWICK: And you're flying chase, so you hear what's going on.

DYSON: Oh, we were tucked in. I was in the back seat of the T-38 chase that day.

LOSCHKE, BOB and DYSON, KEN

WESTWICK: Did you fly underneath and take a look up?

DYSON: Eventually, yeah. For the normal approach after a routine flight test mission like this—we came on back, everything was swell, everybody had relaxed. Bill came in, and in the T- 38 we had to be back a bit, because we had a different minimum speed from his landing speed. So we timed going by him just as he was touching down. I was not flying. I was in the back seat of the -38 chase. I was stuck over in the corner looking at all that action that he described. They go around. Of course we joined up and looked and reported. We talked. We had in previous discussions said, "Well, if we end up with one main gear up, we're going to eject,” because we were pretty sure that it would roll up into a ball and it would be bad. I think that Bob was about to the point of describing Bill coming down and whamming the airplane, a hard touch on the good gear.

LOSCHKE: Yeah. Trying to knock the gear loose.

DYSON: It did not come out. But he hit it real hard. In fact he hit so hard, as I recall, that the right wing drug on the ground.

LOSCHKE: I don’t remember that. I think first we tried to just pull Gs.

DYSON: Oh, yeah. Positive Gs, negative Gs.

LOSCHKE: We thought that if the pilot would do this kind of maneuver, well, then he could at the same time try to put the gear down, maybe the Gs would be enough to dislodge it. But that didn't work. And so the next one was, we made two attempts I think where he touched it down on the left main gear.

DYSON: Seems like.

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LOSCHKE: That didn't do anything. And he did it one more time.

DYSON: A little harder.

LOSCHKE: By that time he was about out of gas.

DYSON: While we were doing all those things the gas was going out of the airplane. So we did a little talking from the chase and the control room, and Bill started climbing. One of the engines I recall started sputtering because it was about to run out of gas before the other one. That's just the way things happen. And he ejected.

LOSCHKE: Yeah.

WESTWICK: So then ship 2 comes in. And both you and Bill flew that one?

DYSON: No. Lockheed had decided that Bill was not going to fly any more ejection seat airplanes.

WESTWICK: That’s right, he got hurt?

DYSON: Well, that may be worth talking about, the story of his ejection, if you'd like to hear that.

WESTWICK: Sure. I've got all day. I'm burning your time.

DYSON: Let me talk about what we saw on Bill's ejection. We stood well clear. We were ejecting at a good place right close to the runway. The rescue chopper was airborne waiting for us, just covering us should he be needed. Bill would have told the story if he was here now. He

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had told the boss of the airfield that he'd like to continue to have the helicopter airborne. Bill would later say that saved his life, because it let those guys get to him quickly. So we saw the canopy go, and the seat came out. He had climbed up to around 10,000 feet, which is not real high, but that's what we had said we'd do, at least that. Then we in the T- 38 flew circles around, and we got the first report for Bill. He was unconscious. He had lost his helmet. His head was hanging. He was coming down under the chute, and that was good. When he landed, the survival kit had not deployed. I used to tease him that he was a chubby little guy, and all those straps and things just wouldn't let go. One of his legs rolled up around the survival kit, which was still strapped to his butt from the harness, and caused his leg to break something real awful. The chopper guys put down really quickly and the medics went out and got to Bill and he was not breathing. Besides his leg being busted real bad and being hit in the head during the ejection process, he had swallowed a mouthful of dirt. They had to clear his breathing. They did that and got him on his way to the hospital. They took him to a civilian hospital, and the whole community came up with some sort of cover story about how Bill, a Lockheed test pilot, was at a hospital there in Vegas. I guess I can say that. That was in the paper. He began to recuperate, but no, he was not allowed to fly it anymore. Somebody somewhere decided—it wasn't me, but I went along with it—that I would be the only guy who flew airplane 2. Bill's ejection was in May '78. We flew airplane 2 with a pretty darn quick turnaround. We flew in July. We were flying again in July.

WESTWICK: Now, were those planes absolutely identical? I thought ship 2 had some…

DYSON: Almost but not.

LOSCHKE: Yeah. On ship 1 we had a great big air data boom sticking out of the front so that it would actually measure real angle of attack, and it had this great big box back here with a drag chute on it. That would be intolerable for RCS. So ship 2 did not have the air data boom, and it did not have the parachute.

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DYSON: A tiny little total pressure probe.

LOSCHKE: Yeah, for stealthy reasons it could not have a conventional air data probe, so we had to have a bunch of static pressure ports scattered around there, from which we derived our air data. The number 2 airplane also had complete RCS coating on it. The first airplane only had partial coating in various places. And we'd learned a lot in the fabrication of ship 1, so ship 2 I think was actually a better airplane as far as tolerances and the angles and everything was concerned.

DYSON: Well, I recall Bill Elsner, the project office engineer who kind of stuck his nose in everything, telling me, "You know, Ken, I think this airplane 2 is better than 1."

LOSCHKE: Right.

DYSON: Airplane 1 was built by management. Lockheed guys went on strike. Airplane 2 was built by regular guys.

WESTWICK: I think I remember Bob Murphy talking about that.

LOSCHKE: Yeah.

DYSON: But they both were good. They both were good.

WESTWICK: Did that strike affect you all?

LOSCHKE: No.

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DYSON: Bill used to tell me to be still when we'd drive in the gate together at Burbank toward the Skunk Works. Some of the time we rode together to and from simulators and then to the buildings and such. He'd say, "You behave now. These guys get pretty mean."

WESTWICK: There was a picket line?

LOSCHKE: Yeah. This was the machinists union, and the ones who had been cleared to work on the project, they knew that there was a tight deadline. We were supposed to fly by December. So they thought they could put management over a barrel, and they went on strike about two months beforehand, thinking that, okay, we'll go on strike and they'll give in and we'll get our demands. Plus then we'll be behind, so there will be a lot of overtime. So when they went on strike, why, Bob Murphy got all of the guys—and guys like me, I'd go in and help on Saturdays too. I turned a few wrenches here and there. But Bob Murphy and his manufacturing supervisors were the head honchos there, and they built the whole airplane and shipped it out. When the strike was finally settled, well, the machinists came in thinking that they were going to have a lot of overtime available. “Where's the airplane?” Well, it's all done and all gone.

DYSON: Gone somewhere. [laughter]

WESTWICK: Were you talking to some of the union guys, kind of keeping tabs?

LOSCHKE: No. I mean, they were walking the picket line. And see, I'm an engineer.

WESTWICK: I mean, leading up to the strike did you know that this was afoot?

LOSCHKE: No, I didn't know that. I found that out later. The engineers, you know, are not supposed to do any kind of mechanical work in the airplane. So we could be there and we could spot a problem, and we'd have to get the foreman.

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WESTWICK: Get the steward?

LOSCHKE: Yeah, the steward, and say, okay, this is a problem that needs to be fixed. Even if you had your own wrench, you could reach over there and do it in five minutes, but you had to make sure that—which is a good thing. You know, you don't want to have a bunch of amateurs messing around with airplanes.

DYSON: Yeah, some engineers I would not like to see bending wrenches. [laughter] Some of the guys I met.

LOSCHKE: Yeah. So anyway, whenever we were working with the mechanics, they would do what we asked. But there were rules, the work rules that had to be followed.

DYSON: The way unions work.

WESTWICK: But during the strike those rules were out the window and everyone came in….

LOSCHKE: Well, yeah.

DYSON: One person we haven't talked about, and in my mind he was and still is one of the genius guys, was Alan Brown. A Brit, he was there from way back.

WESTWICK: Was he chief scientist then?

LOSCHKE: No.

DYSON: I didn't know what he was, but he was very much there and much involved sticking his nose in and helping us.

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WESTWICK: He was an electromagnetism guy, right?

LOSCHKE: I'll have to take you back a little bit there. Alan was a propulsion system expert. He had been trained in England, and then after the war when the English industry contracted, why, he came to the United States. He was actually teaching some of the aerodynamics courses down at USC, interior aerodynamics for inlets and what have you. The equations that describe the flow inside of an inlet duct are the same general form as the equations that describe the electromagnetic characteristics. So if you have an electromagnetic wave coming down a duct, this same equation, with different parameters in there, describes those two things.

DYSON: A crazy inlet too, with grids across the front. That was another part of the challenge.

LOSCHKE: Right. So Alan was brought in originally to help with the inlet design. He got RCS 101 also, and he saw those are the same equations. So he picked it up very quickly and he became a very adept student of the RCS guys. Pretty soon he was in the midst of both the inlet and the RCS.

WESTWICK: Well, we talked to him. I think it was from him that we got this idea, of not quite “RCS versus aerodynamics,” but a sense that there was a bit of back-and-forth and some haggling involved.

LOSCHKE: Yes. Oh, yeah.

WESTWICK: The RCS guys are pushing one thing, and the aerodynamics guys are pushing back, saying “that’s not an airplane,” and the RCS guys are saying, “Yeah, but the point of your airplane is RCS.” This kind of give-and-take.

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LOSCHKE: Right. Yeah, there was that iteration that was going on. Anyway, Alan was the guy. I don't know if maybe we've turned this into too much of a long thing for you.

WESTWICK: No, this is good stuff.

DYSON: We’re going to give you a degree in control systems.

WESTWICK: The one thing I might like to touch on super briefly, you have the photo that says, "First flight Bill Park; last flight Ken Dyson." The last flight, what happened on it?

DYSON: That's me in that, by the way. [looking at Have Blue photo from Ben Rich papers] I'm sure it is, because I'm the only guy who ever flew ship 2.

LOSCHKE: That’s ship 2. Any airplane that you see flying that is ship 2, Ken is flying it.

WESTWICK: Okay. I had Sherm [Mullin] identify that for sure as Have Blue.

LOSCHKE: It was 2, because it did not have the boom in the front.

WESTWICK: What was the profile you were flying?

DYSON: Well, again, we were in the limited-air-worthiness, the basic flight testing, to get it ready to fly. We were about to the end of our rope trying to understand what we could do with the airplane next. What can we do to measure something else? We had done everything we could think of. And we'd been able to get resources from everywhere—like in Ben's book when he talked about the Marines, with the wrong date. Ben's Skunk Works book speaks of being out in the desert in August of '79, with some marine corporal, and they had a radar battery looking out. The guys thought they'd caught us, but it was really the T-38 they caught, and then the Have

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Blue airplane went roaring on by. The date was wrong on that, because my ejection date was 7- 11-79, a month before August. I never got to tell Ben about some stuff like that in his book.

WESTWICK: So the flight test of the second one went on for more than a year?

DYSON: July '78 to July '79. We flew a good bit, sometimes close together, and sometimes we'd have stand-downs to do one thing or another. The mission that day was to fly against an F- 15 with its air-to-air radar instrumented from Edwards, so we'd have documentation about what was going on inside that state of the art, U.S. Air Force air-to-air radar.

WESTWICK: So you'd already done a lot of the radar tests?

DYSON: Oh, yeah. Ground-to-air stuff. Air-to-air missile, shooting stuff. Everything we could think of.

WESTWICK: Had you had any other close calls?

DYSON: No. All routine, to include this flight—for a while. The mission was to fly against the F-15. The chase took off and I took off. The chase came around checked me over, looked me over really good, to make sure everything was normal. It was. He said goodbye, and he went off to one end of the flying area. I started flying my track, which was to go outbound somewhere and then turn around, and we would fly a ground-controlled intercept with the F-15 being directed to me. I would go stealthy, but they knew where I was coming from. So they'd fly their track, and I'd fly where I was supposed to. I knew how to do that. I was still going outbound for the first turn, to go back for the first run, and I had hydraulic pressure start fluctuating down on one of the two systems. The control system is important in this airplane because it's unstable and has to have the controls. It also needs hydraulic muscles to move the surfaces. I said, "uh-oh, that's not good." So that pressure started oscillating downward and I aborted that run, turned around and started talking to the ground. I

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said that I was losing that hydraulic system. It did go to zero. And partway through the turn I had a caution light come on, fire overheat I think it was. I can't recall if we had two lights or one light in there combined. It was either one light that could tell two things, or it was two lights, one would tell fire overheat in one part of the engine and the other the other. So I said, "Well, that's not good," and left the throttles set for a tad, for a few seconds, and then pulled the engine back because I had the fire overheat light. I announced that to the ground. And then the remaining only hydraulic system started fluctuating down, and I thought, “This is not good.” I didn't have much time to talk about that. The airplane departed violently, when all the hydraulic pressures were lost. The controls probably went wherever the air flow made them go. They probably had a little residual hydraulic for a while until we used it all up. Anyway, the airplane departed violently, pitching down first. I remember Bob asking me later, "Ken, do you know which way the airplane pitched on its departure?" I said, "Let me guess. Up." And he said, "Nope. Down." It pitched down at a huge pitch rate. I have some numbers in my mind. Bob knows them better. 120 degrees a second.

LOSCHKE: Yeah. It went “pssheww.”

DYSON: Just huge.

LOSCHKE: It was down to about like that [gesturing with hands]. He pulled about negative 6 Gs or something.

DYSON: Negative-6, negative-7 Gs.

LOSCHKE: It was 120 degrees a second, and I think it got down to about 60 degrees. It was down there, so it was something like…

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DYSON: Essentially vertical. And then back up, over-G for the airplane. I think it went through a couple of cycles. I don't know. My arms were being thrown up as far as they could be and then thrown back down.

WESTWICK: Were you getting banged around?

DYSON: In the little space that I had to be banged around in. Somehow during one of the positive G cycles I found the ejection ring, which was between my legs, and pulled that. Happily the thing worked. I was above 20,000 feet, in the 20- to 25,000 feet ballpark.

WESTWICK: There was never any thought of, “Let me stick with this and see what happens”?

DYSON: That thing was toast. Stick a fork in it. It was very obvious all control had been lost. Well, the hydraulics had gone to zero, I knew that thing wasn't going to fly anymore. The instability took over, and it did this [gesturing with hands]. That's the way Bill's airplane had flown. I don't think I described that to you. After he ejected his airplane, it started this: flip, flop, flip, flop, bang into the desert. I heard the canopy fire, and I was aware of the chute deploying as I was going up the rails. I heard the chute snap open. Chutes are not supposed to deploy at high altitude. You're taught to expect torn panels if you do. But I was going essentially nowhere, except for this stuff [again gesturing with hands], from the angular rates on the airplane. I checked my canopy, and it was intact. I looked at my watch. I'd been airborne ten minutes.

WESTWICK: You looked at your watch on the way down? You just checked the time of day?

DYSON: On take-off roll-out I had looked at my watch, and it was 0800. At ten minutes after after eight I was hanging in the chute. The chute began to oscillate at some point, which gave me some concern because I didn't want to fall into the chute and cause it to collapse and all go down together. I had been taught to pull on risers to stop oscillations, and I did that, and it did

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stop the oscillations. I saw the chase airplane. The T-38 came looking for me. They found the smoke and crash. It made a big fire, unlike Bill's. There was very little fuel in airplane 1. But this one was essentially full and it made a big fire.

WESTWICK: Did you watch the plane spiral down?

DYSON: I did. I watched it just between my legs there. Doing this, flip-flop. And, oh, I was concerned the chase guys would run into me. It was Ray Goudey and Bill Fox in that airplane. So I was waving, trying to make myself more visible. They never saw me or the chute or me hanging in the chute.

LOSCHKE: Really?

DYSON: Yeah. It was a Stencel seat which had a slightly smaller than normal chute. It was a beautiful day out in the desert, and the wind was not much. I came on down and got ready for my parachute landing fall. That was my first ejection. I'd been trained how to hit the ground, and I did a good parachute landing fall, like I'd been taught. It involves trying to get a little sideways velocity and falling sideways, rolling into a ball to keep it from all hurting you. I did that well and jumped up. I decided that my back was hurting more than I liked, so I decided to get back down on my back and just lie there. I got my survival radio and talked. One other aspect of the parachute descent: that particular survival kit had a yellow and black handle for deploying manually. It had an automatic deployment which failed on Bill's, and mine was set up to be manually deployed. I looked at that thing, and I decided not to deploy it because my mind was a bit confused at that point. Part of it was hypoxia. I'd ejected high enough that I was up in the oxygen-thin regime above 20,000. I had experienced altitude- chamber training before, and I could tell that I was hypoxic to some degree. Anyway, I did not deploy the survival kit. I went ahead and did a good PLF, and I was just fine. I looked at my watch. I'd been in the parachute for ten minutes, because of the early deployment. Ejection seat

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chutes are built to to deploy about 10,000 feet. I was way up there, and took my time coming down. I went to the radio and talked to our chopper. I said, "Let's go to our special frequency,” which were frequencies other people wouldn't know and they couldn't hear what we were talking about. They said, "Okay, we got you in sight. Can you walk over here, or do you want us to come get you?" And I said, "You know what, I'd like for you to come get me." So a couple of the medics came out and got me on a litter and took me to the chopper, and away we went to the hospital.

WESTWICK: Now this is daytime.

DYSON: Yeah.

WESTWICK: Were all the flights daytime?

DYSON: Day.

WESTWICK: But you timed them so there wouldn't be satellite overflights or any other…

DYSON: We knew how to do that, because our country knew when the bad guys' satellites would be coming over. On one occasion we had to land early, and we rolled out to the recovery team. And the brakes were cherry red, and it would have caught on fire accept they were there to cool them down. A satellite was going to come by. So we were prepared for that. We had a big old parachute we draped over it. I remember standing at the leading edge of it causing a bump under the parachute and giving them the bird as it went by. [laughter]

LOSCHKE: Sometimes the satellites would be a surprise launch. We knew where their regular satellites were, but every now and then they would put up a surprise launch, and we'd only have

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like a 30-minute warning time. So they had what they called the scoot-and-hide. They’d go out there with the parachutes. One thing we didn't mention, and it was on Bill's ejection. He was rendered unconscious. He lost his helmet. There was a malfunction in the seat, and the seat was the same one that was being used in the early model F-16s. When we found out what the malfunction was, why, Jack Twigg wrote it up, and then he slipped it under the door of the F-16 SPO, and they grounded the F-16 fleet until they fixed that problem. That was the first one. I think all together we found three problems. One was in the seat, and two were in the F-16 flight control computer. Years later, after the program had become public, I met some of the F-16 guys, and they said, "We always wondered where that would come from. We thought, boy, those SPO guys are really smart. They'd come up with this, and we'd have never figured out this thing." [laughter] So we helped the F-16 guys a little bit there. Of course nobody can anticipate every possible problem.

DYSON: On my ejection, it didn't work quite right for me, but it worked. I loved it, man. That Stencel seat, it saved my bacon.

WESTWICK: Well, you're here talking to us right now.

DYSON: The Systems Command general came out and got a briefing on the Stencel seats, and he made the decision that there would be no more Stencel seats in any Air Force airplanes. They went to Martin-Baker after that.

WESTWICK: Stencel was the company that made it?

DYSON: Yes. It was a Stencel seat. It was a good, capable seat, zero-zero and stuff, but it had a smaller chute and it tended to oscillate more. You couldn't do four-line cuts and things like that. It was probably cheaper.

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LOSCHKE: It was lighter. It was quite a bit lighter.

DYSON: So that was pretty much that story. You just go off ready to do another routine test flight, ho-hum…

WESTWICK: At that point, had you gotten enough of the radar data where you could say, okay, we can go on to the F-117A now?

LOSCHKE: Yeah.

DYSON: Yeah. I should check in with my boss.

WESTWICK: Speaking of going on to the next phase… [end interview]