Alan Brown Interview by Peter Westwick, 15 November 2010

Alan Brown interview by Peter Westwick, 15 November 2010.

WESTWICK: We're here with Alan Brown on November 15th, 2010 in his home in Watsonville, California. Probably the best way to get started is just briefly to go back to the beginning, as it were. You're from England originally. You mentioned you started in the industry in 1945, but how did you get to that point?

BROWN: I was born in 1929. By the time I was about eight years old it was 1938 in England, and war was imminent, and that was pretty much known to everybody; Hitler had invaded Czechoslovakia. All the kids in that age were airplane nuts. Everybody I knew, we'd all go around going r-r-r, like that. I think that even by the time I was eight years old, rather surprisingly, I knew I wanted to be an airplane designer.

WESTWICK: Not a pilot but a designer?

BROWN: No, I never really had a strong interest in wanting to fly these airplanes, but I certainly was very interested in designing and building them. My father was a good engineering type, and he started me off building model airplanes probably when I was about six.

WESTWICK: This was with balsa wood and rubber bands?

BROWN: Yeah, balsa wood, rubber-band powered airplanes. We would fly them in the field behind our house. So I had parental interest in it, which influenced me. My friend across the street and I were both airplane crazy, it turned out. During the war, which was 1939 to 1945, of course, for the Brits, our hobby was getting on our bicycles on weekends and riding out to local Royal Air Force airfields, and hiding behind the hedges, watching for airplanes, and writing the registration numbers down in our little books, and stuff like that.

WESTWICK: Now, where were you in England?

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BROWN: This was near Newcastle-on-Tyne. I was within about a mile of the North Sea coast. So we got bombed, because Newcastle was a fairly prominent shipbuilding and armaments building area. The German bombers tended to drop their bombs on the coastline if they couldn't penetrate the defenses, so we had our little share of damage to our house and so on. As kids we would go out collecting bits of German airplanes or antiaircraft gun souvenirs, like all kids do during wartime. Then we used to go exploring the local airfields and looking for new airplanes, and writing down when we saw a new model Spitfire or Hawker Typhoon or whatever. So we were just in that mode. First of all, I should say that in England at that time the high school graduation system was different from what it is here. We graduated from high school at the age of 16. If you wanted to go on to college, you would usually stay on at high school in what was called the upper and lower sixth forms, which were definitely college preparatory. In combination this was similar to about first year in a junior college here, which is why bachelor's degrees in England, at least at that time, were three-year programs rather than the four they are here. I in fact elected to leave school at 16 with the normal high school finishing certificate and went to do an apprenticeship at Blackburn Aircraft, which was the nearest airplane company, about 120 miles south of where I lived. That was in Yorkshire. My friend across the street went down to London and he worked as an apprentice for Handley Page. So in other words, the two of us were both interested in this. Another friend down the street from us went in locally as a shipbuilding apprentice, because Newcastle was a big shipbuilding area at that time. So it was very typical that the kids there were engineering inclined. There seemed to be quite a few of us. Probably a lot of it was just the result of being brought up during a world war when there's a lot of engineering activity going on. Anyway, I spent five years at Blackburn Aircraft and finished there when I was 20. Then a friend of mine, another apprentice that I was with, suggested that I go on to Cranfield. Two or three of us were going to go on to Cranfield University to do what was then the equivalent of a master's degree. I did that from 1950 to '52, so by the time I was 22 years old, I had a master's. The apprenticeship that we did at Blackburn Aircraft was sort of a combination thing. It was really pretty interesting, and it stood me, I think, in very good stead because I knew the front end

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of an airplane from the back, which contrasted with a lot of university students that I would get later in America: new entries at Lockheed who knew the math and knew the engineering in principle but never really had touched an airplane. So that was sort of an interesting start. I did two years working in eight different shops in the company, like woodworking, metalworking, final assembly, machine shop, stuff like that. At the same time I went to two years of evening classes, and then two and a half years full time at the local technical college to get what was called a higher national diploma in engineering.

WESTWICK: This is the equivalent of a bachelor's degree.

BROWN: Equivalent to a bachelor's, except there was no what I call social studies. I mean there was no English, history, geography, or stuff like that. It was strictly an engineering tech school. Then I went back to Blackburn Aircraft for the last six months of my apprenticeship, where we did three months in the structures design department and three months in the aerodynamics department.

WESTWICK: Was this a government program?

BROWN: No. It was run by individual companies.

WESTWICK: So Blackburn was paying for your education?

BROWN: Yes. When I worked for Blackburn Aircraft as an apprentice, it started off you get paid according to your age. At 15 years old I was paid 15 shillings a week, which is three- quarters of a pound—which is why I never took up smoking, because cigarettes were about a day's pay. [laughter] All of the different aircraft companies had apprenticeship programs at that time. That was a very standard way of doing things. A five-year apprenticeship included the equivalent of getting a bachelor's degree. It's almost like a lot of the work-study programs in this country, where you stretch a bachelor's degree out for five years and intermittently work with a

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company, except that here the whole five years was a company-sponsored kind of thing. Then I went on to do a two-year diploma at the college of aeronautics at Cranfield, which was later sort of renamed as a master's degree because people didn't understand what that diploma meant. But it was essentially a master's, so by 1952, when I was 22 years old, I had an MS and went to work at Bristol Aeroplane Company in the southwest of England. I stayed there for about four years. One of the reasons that I went there particularly is that Britain in that period, 1952, still had national service. If you went into one of the industries that was doing military work, then you were exempt; that was equivalent to doing national service. So I went and worked in what was called the guided weapons department at Bristol Aeroplane Company for four years. When you were 26, then that national service thing expires, so you're then free to do what you like. One of the things I'd always wanted to do was to get more into aeronautical research. In Britain, although the quality of research was very good, the difficulty of getting into it was quite significant. The people who were doing it were the National Physical Laboratory and the Royal Aircraft Establishment, and for both of them it was fairly narrow as far as being able to get into those areas. The individual companies did not usually have research departments—they relied on the two major government areas that I just mentioned—whereas American companies all tended to have their own research. I thought that would be neat to do that, so I wrote off to about seven different companies in California and came up 0 for 7 as far as them wanting to hire me. I found out the reason for that was that about four years previously had been the height of what was called the brain drain, when a lot of engineers and people came over from Europe to America. Then the American companies found that when they tried to put them to work, as they weren't citizens and didn't have any kind of security clearances, they'd often spend a lot of time just paying them to play bridge and chess waiting for their clearances to come through. By the time I signed up they decided this was a bad idea. So that didn't work out, but a friend of mine who had also been at Cranfield was working for Aerojet in Southern California in Azusa, and they were having the University of Southern California do a lot of their wind tunnel work. He said, "They have a pretty good little research group at USC. I'll talk to them and see if they'll hire you."

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WESTWICK: So this would not involve a clearance presumably?

BROWN: This would not necessarily involve a clearance. It turned out they offered me what I thought was a princely sum. I found out later it was an absolute minimum amount, but that was okay. They were able to just have the clearance worked on while I was there without me doing things that required clearance, because I was doing basic research, which the airplane companies didn't tend to do so much. So that sort of was a very interesting start for me. My boss was a Caltech Ph.D. They did some classified work for the government, but they were able to put me and two other foreigners in a separate area while we got cleared, and we still were able to do useful work. So that was fine. I shared a room with an Indian and a Romanian: Krishnamurti Karamcheti, who later became a professor at Stanford, and Vasile Muraru from Romania, who later became a professor at Long Beach.

WESTWICK: Do you think this is fairly unique, having this international cohort?

BROWN: To some extent, yes. I think that the way that USC operated what they called their engineering center was that they had quite a fair amount of government contracts. This one that I mentioned with Aerojet was not government, but it was government related. And they had contracts with the U.S. Navy: USC operated the wind tunnels at the Navy station at Point Mugu for them.

WESTWICK: USC did not have wind tunnels on campus itself?

BROWN: They had small tunnels, but nothing big. The major wind tunnels that they used were the ones at the Navy station at Point Mugu. We were at that time on 37th Street, which you probably know. We were in a two-story sort of temporary building built during the war—since I've been there I can't even find where it was because USC has changed so much. I was fortunate there that we were able to do some useful work. And my boss, Lee Dailey, whom as I said was a

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Caltech Ph.D., thought I was reasonably smart to do this, I suppose. We got into a lot of work on supersonic propulsion, which was just really coming in at that time.

WESTWICK: That was going to be one of my questions: you start in 1945, so you see this transition from propellers to jet propulsion and rocket propulsion.

BROWN: Yes, absolutely.

WESTWIK: How did the school system and the industry handle that transition? Were they well prepared for it?

BROWN: Yes, I think it worked out pretty well. For instance, my apprenticeship at Blackburn Aircraft was, as you point out, all propeller-driven aircraft. Blackburn were a little bit like Grumman is in this country. It was a navy company, and they made naval aircraft, so we saw sort of the last of the big radial-engine torpedo bombers being built there. Blackburn actually had the government contract during World War II and subsequently to take all the American naval airplanes that the British were buying, like the Grumman Avenger and Grumman F6Fs, and convert them to Royal Navy standards: the different radios, avionics, or whatever, to make them compatible with British things. So those airplanes came through Blackburn as well. I never went into that particular department, as it turned out, but that was the background. And Cranfield, of course, was a very new university. Cranfield was set up by the government in 1946. I'm not sure if you know much about the history of Cranfield University.

WESTWICK: I don't, no.

BROWN: Well, let me tell you a little bit about it, because it will give you some background. It was pretty obvious after World War II ended that the British, although they produced airplanes like the Spitfire and the Lancaster bomber, were behind in several research areas in aeronautics relative to both Germany and the United States. One of the things that the government decided

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to do was to come up with a graduate school rather on the lines of Caltech, solely devoted to aeronautics, to try and bring up the level of aeronautic training. And that's where I went from 1950 to '52. So it was a fairly new school, and it had a very strong government financial interest. At the time I was there, for instance, there were only 120 students but 450 staff.

WESTWICK: Where did they get their faculty?

BROWN: Mainly from within Britain. Quite a few people came from places like the Royal Aircraft Establishment. The principal, Ernest Relf, came from the National Physical Laboratory. As I say, the research establishments in Britain, particularly right after World War II when they got a lot of information from Germany and found out where they were missing things, there's no doubt that they cranked up very, very quickly in that late '40s period.

WESTWICK: What did they see as the deficiencies?

BROWN: Well, for instance, Germany invented the swept wing fighter airplane. A lot of the supersonic concepts were developed in Germany, before they came to either the United States or Britain. Britain, however, had done well in developing the jet engine, and Britain and Germany probably simultaneously developed jet engines prior to the United States doing it. In fact the first successful American fighter, the Lockheed P-80, was originally developed using the English Whittle engine. You probably know that. So, there's no doubt that during the period from '45 to '50 there was a big ramp up in interchange of knowledge between German, United States, and British scientists and engineers, so by the time I was at Cranfield the curriculum was really pretty strong. Cranfield was recognized as probably one of the best graduate aeronautic schools in Europe at that time, even after that very short time. Then I went to Bristol Aeroplane Company, and there I worked on supersonic ramjet propelled missiles, and that was a new field then. That was called the Bristol Bloodhound, which is a missile that was actually in service in various parts of Europe and Britain for 30 years. It was the mainstay of ground-to-air missile defenses in Europe for a long time, so I was

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fortunate to work in that area. In the United States there was the Johns Hopkins laboratory, which was doing a lot of useful missile work as well.

WESTWICK: This is the Applied Physics Laboratory.

BROWN: The Terrier-Talos group did that. We worked with a lot of their material. There was a lot of exchange in that respect too. So I had a fairly good background for that first six years, between the two years at Cranfield and the four years at Bristol, to be reasonably knowledgeable in supersonic aerodynamics and propulsion. That's what I did research on when I was at USC. After a couple of years at USC there were various reasons why the guy that I worked for was dissatisfied with the USC administration. This was when Dean Vivian was in charge of the engineering there, and the aeronautical engineering at USC as far as instruction was concerned was really not very good.

WESTWICK: I was going to ask you how USC compared to, say, Cranfield.

BROWN: Oh, yes, not at all. I mean, there was no comparison, because at USC aeronautical engineering was a very small subset of the general engineering group, whereas Cranfield was totally an aeronautics university. So, no, it did not compare. In fact I got roped in teaching fifth year compressible fluid dynamics, so I was teaching master's degree students.

WESTWICK: You'd had a lot of theory in addition to the hands-on experience?

BROWN: Oh, yes, certainly between the apprenticeship that I had early on in my teens and then the two years at Cranfield. At Cranfield, as I said, it was very highly government-supported. It was actually an old converted Royal Air Force bomber station, so we had five different hangars, two of which were full of airplanes left over from World War II, both German and British, as demos. We used those for demonstrations of design, comparing a Messerschmitt-109 with a Spitfire and how they handled their pilots, and so on. The amount of money that was apparently

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available—and I say apparently because a lot of the stuff was sort of donated and captured material, left over from the war. Just like in this country, where P-51s were selling for a thousand dollars. We could also learn to fly there, so I started pilot lessons. I didn't keep them up very long, as it turned out, but that opportunity was available to us too. And then we had a very, very good flight test program, because we were on an airfield. We did the equivalent of a complete flight test program for a nominal airplane right from beginning to end over the two- year period, which most universities had no way of doing. Most universities didn't have an airfield, and didn't have a staff which included ex-Royal Air Force pilots to fly these airplanes. We had a number of airplanes that were essentially bought for us by the government. Our flight test airplane was a twin-engine DeHavilland Dove completely set up inside for six people, each with their own complete instrument panel. Well, in those days that was unheard of. No other university had anything like that.

WESTWICK: Cranfield sounds like a really unique institution. Looking at the long-term legacy for British aeronautics, for the British aerospace industry, do you think Cranfield really did help it catch up?

BROWN: Oh, yes, no question. In fact, Cranfield is still one of the dominant aerospace universities in the world. It’s listed in the top ten. It has expanded; it now has a business program as well, and it's listed in the top ten worldwide for M.B.A.s. I've been back there frequently because I have done short-course teaching there up until 18 months ago. In 2001 they gave me an honorary doctorate. I was the recipient for aeronautical engineering for that year. So I've kept in pretty close touch with Cranfield, and in fact just this morning I was looking at a letter which I need to reply to from an old professor of mine, Geoff Lilly, who is in his nineties. We still keep in touch. He actually was out here visiting as recently as a year from last Christmas, at the age of 90, so he's pretty alive and well. Overall, yes, I think the Cranfield experience was very good, and it still is a very well thought of university.

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WESTWICK: But you say you came to the U.S. in part because of the research? You wanted to get a little more into research.

BROWN: Yes, I was mainly interested in doing research. I finished up at USC. After a couple of years there the boss I worked for, who as I say was having some infighting with the administration about one thing and another—and I'm not quite sure about what—he thought it would be really a good idea to go out and branch off and have our own little company and become millionaires.

WESTWICK: Now he was at Aerojet?

BROWN: No, this is my boss at USC.

WESTWICK: This is Lee Dailey?

BROWN: Lee Dailey, my boss at USC. No, the Aerojet fellow, Tony Peduzzi, was just a fellow Cranfield student who had come to Aerojet before I came to America, and he's the one who recommended me to Lee Dailey at USC.

WESTWICK: So you were a USC employee, not an Aerojet employee?

BROWN: Correct. I was never anything to do with Aerojet. Aerojet was just the recommendation. In fact I didn't do any substantial work on the Aerojet program at USC. I was working all on supersonic air-breathing propulsion.

WESTWICK: How big were these wind tunnels at Point Mugu that you were working with?

BROWN: Oh, probably about eight feet square or something like that. Not like NASA-Ames or anything like that. They were just average sized things for testing models of the order of three to

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four feet wing span. USC had the operating contract for them from the Navy because I guess the Navy didn't feel they had the competency to do that. I also worked with Caltech and used the Caltech wind tunnels on occasion. We had a very good relationship with Caltech, based on my boss's background—this is Lee Dailey. After two years about six of us decided we'd go off and form our own company. Because of the impracticality of doing that just from scratch because of lack of funds, Lee had a friend called Tom Wiancko, who had a small company. He and Lee were both graduate students from Caltech, and Tom Wiancko had set up a company to make pressure transducers of his own patented design. Tom took us on as a department with the idea of setting us free once we got to a reasonable stage. We were on Foothill Boulevard in Pasadena in our little brick office there. Down the street from us about a hundred yards another young fellow set up just about the same time as us, called Abe Zarem. Abe Zarem's company eventually became Xerox.

WESTWICK: Right. Electro Optical Systems.

BROWN: Our company faded out after two years.

WESTWICK: Was there any relationship between Wiancko's transducer and the Dewey Simmons strain gauge, which had also come out of Caltech?

BROWN: It's possible. I'm not familiar with that, so I can't answer that. Tom Wiancko's pressure transducer was based on sort of a spiral tube that you blew pressure into, and that made the tube rotate, and that gave an analog result of pressure. That was the basis of his invention, and his company of course started doing other things, but that was the prime thing. Anyway, the bad news about us starting a company in 1958 is Sputnik in 1957. Our expertise was in air- breathing propulsion, and supersonic particularly, and dynamics, and we had a number of contracts. We had contracts with Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. We had contracts with Northrop on the F-5, with North American on the F-108 and the B-70, and with Lockheed on the

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F-104; on various problems that arose in conjunction with supersonic flight and the dynamics of the propulsion systems.

WESTWICK: Now, these contracts are not with the new company, the new start-up company, but these are with…

BROWN: These were with Wiancko. See, Wiancko acted as our administrators. He just took us on, because he was a personal friend of Lee. He took us on as a separate department and said “Okay, go do your thing. We'll do the administration and pay your paychecks and stuff like that, as a department of the company. Then hopefully you get big enough and you can spring loose.” Well, that never happened. The reason was that by late '59 and '60 a lot of the aircraft programs in Los Angeles were slowing down because missiles and space was what the Air Force was interested in at that time. Of course you will know that from your history studies yourself. We were in fact the last subcontractors to be laid off by North American on the B-70 because we were actually doing a reasonably good job for them. But the B-70 program got curtailed, and then they wound up just making one airplane, as you know. And the F-108 got canceled, and the attempts to make the F-5 into a Mach 2 airplane for Northrop were basically never possible; the thrust available from the engine was never adequate to do that. We did help solve the F-104 asymmetric lateral instability problem, which was due to oscillation of the two inlet ducts. So at least I got to know the Lockheed people and work for their propulsion department as a consultant in the '58-'59 period, which stood me in good stead later on it turned out.

WESTWICK: Now, why did companies need to go to you to do this sort of research? Why couldn't Lockheed turn to its own staff to do the F-104 stuff? Why didn't Northrop do it in- house?

BROWN: They tried. They tried, but there was some very special expertise in not only supersonic inlet and exhaust design, but also the dynamics of that: what happens when the whole shock system starts oscillating. That became a very specialized subject. We actually did work

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for Wright-Patterson Air Force Base for the U.S. Air Force on that. We just had become, in our two years at USC, experts in that field. In fact, when Lockheed had the problem with the F-104, what was happening is that the airplane with the inlet slightly yawed would go through a so- called unstart because of flow separation. Because of that the airplane would yaw in the other direction, and then suddenly at Mach 2 the guy’s getting his head banged around at 6 g inside the cockpit. That became a very specialized subject, and the U.S. Air Force propulsion department at Wright Field told Lockheed to hire us. So in other words, we had become sort of nationally known in this very small field.

WESTWICK: This very small group would have a capability that does not exist at Ames or any of the NACA facilities?

BROWN: As it turned out, yes. In fact one of the deflating comments that was made to me was one time there was a well-known aerodynamicist at Caltech called Lester Lees who had come from Princeton, and he was one of the top aerodynamicists in the country. Lee Dailey and I were over at Caltech one day and bumped into Lester Lees. Lee Dailey of course knew Lester and he introduced him and said, "This is Alan Brown. He's an expert in supersonic propulsion dynamics." And Lester's reply, he said, "Well, that's no surprise because these days there seem to be more fields than people." [Laughter] So I thought, well, that wasn't too nice though.

WESTWICK: That's pretty good. This is interesting, this little small group that you have, because when people think about the aerospace industry, it's the big firms, the Lockheeds and the Northrops, and TRW and Hughes.

BROWN: Right.

WESTWICK: But then you've got your little shop, you've got Abe Zarem starting up a little shop. How many of these little dinky contractors had people spun off with two or three friends?

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BROWN: It seemed like that section of Foothill Boulevard in Pasadena had a row of people like us.

WESTWICK: Every other block there was another aerospace startup?

BROWN: Another little something or other. I'd say Abe Zarem wasn't technically aerospace, but all some high-tech engineering specialty.

WESTWICK: Right. Was this spinning off of Caltech particularly?

BROWN: A lot of it was Caltech, yeah. Caltech I think was a big thing. One or two people from JPL, but I think mainly it was Caltech people who were spinning off there. Xerox is the one that I know about particularly. The rest I honestly have no idea whether they ever came to anything. I suspect a lot of them just amalgamated into big companies. Companies would buy them and just bring them into their shops, just for the expertise.

WESTWICK: It's a hard layer of the industry to map, but it seems like there's this substrate beneath the big companies, this layer of all these little entrepreneurial firms.

BROWN: That's right, yes. Well, anyway, as I say, the result of the 1959 cutback in aircraft work as far as the U.S. Government was concerned, compared to missiles and space, it was pretty obvious that our group was just going to fold. I mean, we just ran out of work. We finished the jobs for Northrop and Lockheed. We were working for North American, and then North American's program got cut substantially and we had to be laid off. There was nothing much else in the offing, so we all just went our separate ways. Lee went to TRW. Another called Ron Toms went to JPL. My English friend, Jack Headley, went on to Northrop to run the wind tunnels there. I looked around. I thought, well, missiles and space is the thing. I wanted to do research, so I thought, well, what's the best missiles and space research laboratory? I wanted to stay on the West Coast. I decided it was Lockheed in Palo Alto. Their Missiles and Space

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Company had just started up at that time, about 1957 to '58, and they moved up here. In fact one of my students at USC was working in the gas dynamics lab at the Palo Alto lab. He was going off to Stanford full time to do his Ph.D., so I wrote to him or talked to him, and I said, "Look, I'm going to tell your boss that I'm going to take your place. Clearly I'm competent to do that because I taught you compressible fluids in fifth year." So I just more or less bullied my way into telling the fellow who was in charge of fluid dynamics in the physics lab that I was going to come there. And I needed the work, so I joined there in February of 1960.

WESTWICK: Now, you had been outside of the big companies. What was your impression of Lockheed's reputation compared against Northrop's or TRW's? Did companies have a specific kind of image in the community?

BROWN: Now, there were some new companies then. The new companies were TRW and, oh, what's the other one? I want to say AirResearch was one.

WESTWICK: Aerospace Corporation?

BROWN: Aerospace is the other. TRW and Aerospace were the two companies that were coming up at that time.

WESTWICK: They came out of STL.

BROWN: I wanted to keep my hand in with the aircraft industry. TRW and Aerospace were totally new, missiles and space stuff and nothing else. I felt that was a bit out of my field. I wanted to have something where I could feel I had a foot in the aircraft companies side as well, which is why eventually I came to Lockheed. I spent six years in the gas dynamics laboratory there.

WESTWICK: But you're still working on air breathing stuff?

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BROWN: No, no. I felt I was sort of a reasonably competent aerodynamicist, and I did understand supersonic aerodynamics very well. So now that graduated from supersonic to hypersonic with the Polaris missile program. The group I was in was the high temperature wind tunnel group at the Palo Alto research center for Lockheed. We had what was called a shock tunnel, which was just an explosion of a huge room full of capacitors with a huge amount of electrical power that was generated for a very fast shock wave, like a shock tube but bigger and better. The tunnel that I was involved with was a high temperature tunnel that was heated to a high enough temperature to simulate Polaris type reentry temperatures at hypersonic velocities. So that was like a Mach 5 wind tunnel running at high temperatures. We had two separate situations—I'm trying to remember now—where we put nitrogen and oxygen in separately because there were some problems with the materials we used oxidizing. Anyway, that was a pretty interesting program. Dan Tellep at that time was a group engineer in thermodynamics in the main part of the missiles and space area in Sunnyvale, and he was doing the Polaris reentry. He would bring his models up to be tested in our wind tunnel, so Dan and I sort of knew each other as complete contemporaries. We're the same age within about a year or two, and we were both about the same level at that time. We were both like group engineers, which is like a lance corporal, that sort of thing. So I've known Dan since the mid-1960s. Then the work that I did got a lot into the analytical side of reentry and doing the analytical calculations. Of course when air is heated up to those kind of temperatures you get ionization and atomic separation and recombination; the basic nitrogen and oxygen gets displaced into different things. You get ionized materials, and of course the famous problem of those days was radio blackout, which means that because the air around the thing is all ionized, the telemetry transmission cannot be radiated from the missile because it's blocked by the ionized particles.

WESTWICK: Right. So this is a problem in electromagnetism; it's a problem in atomic physics with the ionization; it's a problem in aerodynamics; it's a problem in materials science.

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BROWN: Exactly. So it was a very interesting, exciting piece of research to be doing.

WESTWICK: Right. Were you working on all these?

BROWN: I was developing computer programs to calculate the flow around vehicles in hypersonic, ionizing and chemically dissociating flows. Suddenly it's not just the standard equations for air that you're dealing with for aerodynamics; you've got different chemical reactions so the chemical properties are changing. I developed also some very specific new instrumentation for making high temperature measurements in these kinds of chemically dissociating atmospheres. We were in a group called the Supersonic Tunnel Association, which was a nationwide group of people really devoted to the latest developments in supersonic wind tunnel design and the analytical work that go with that.

WESTWICK: So you're doing both the theory of this and doing the computer programs, but then you're also doing the instrumentation and some of the basic lab work?

BROWN: Yeah, and working with the wind tunnel itself. I was working in the wind tunnel when we blew the corrugated iron roof off due to one of our heaters exploding, oxidizing.

WESTWICK: So your approach to the RV problem is wind tunnels, where the model stays still and the air flows around it.

BROWN: Correct.

WESTWICK: There were other places, like I think GM Delco in Santa Barbara, doing hypersonic ballistics where they’re accelerating the RV; the air is standing still and they’re accelerating the RV.

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BROWN: No. We never got into that. This is all wind tunnel work. But the analysis, of course, was the general analysis of a reentry, related to Polaris and things like that and the entry physics of reentry bodies.

WESTWICK: Polaris has its own RV reentry vehicle problem. Were you intersecting at all with Atlas and later Minuteman RVs? There were a bunch of people working on that.

BROWN: No, we did not, as it turned out. During that period from '60 to '66 I would say it was predominantly working with the missile side of Lockheed in Sunnyvale rather than the space side. So we didn't get involved with like the Agena program during that time period.

WESTWICK: Well, I'm thinking also that places like Aerospace Corporation and TRW were doing a lot of work on reentry vehicles for Atlas and Titan and later Minuteman.

BROWN: Right.

WESTWICK: Were you working with them at all, or were they pretty much doing their own thing?

BROWN: No, they were doing their own. We were solely working for Lockheed with the Sunnyvale people who were developing the Polaris missile system. And of course subsets of that; extra things.

WESTWICK: I know that Polaris was pretty highly classified.

BROWN: Yeah.

WESTWICK: It's also a Navy program versus an Air Force program.

BROWN, ALAN

BROWN: Right.

WESTWICK: So was it just compartmentalized because you were for the Navy and this is Air Force? Or was it because we're Lockheed and they're TRW?

BROWN: No, not necessarily.

WESTWICK: Or was it because of classification?

BROWN: No, it was just solely because this was the Lockheed research labs, and we did whatever was the main interest of the Lockheed Sunnyvale people. So we never got into any of the question of whether we work with anybody else or not. The research labs were very much a subset requirement of whatever the main company is producing.

WESTWICK: Kind of a service department?

BROWN: Yeah. We were a service department essentially for them. Now, in the course of it we did develop our own analytical material. In fact what I was coming to was in the last two years, like 1964 and '65, that I was in that department, I was giving several papers nationally on the reentry physics and particularly hypersonic wake studies. That was a study of the wake behind the reentry body. That's difficult enough just for normal aerodynamics, but when you throw in the chemical and the electromagnetic stuff, it became pretty complicated. And one of the reasons why I finally decided that I wanted to get back into the aircraft industry, and move down to Southern California and get back into Burbank, is that I found that there were about six to ten of us in the country who were experts in this field, and at major AIAA conferences we would essentially be giving papers to each other.

WESTWICK: Yeah. Was one of them a guy name Les Hromas?

BROWN, ALAN

BROWN: Yeah.

WESTWICK: Because he's looking at the wake problem for discrimination for missile defense.

BROWN: That's right.

WESTWICK: He was at TRW.

BROWN: In fact, my boss Lee Dailey and he had some rather acid exchanges at times because they had some big disagreements.

WESTWICK: Oh, really?

BROWN: Some technical disagreement. I can't remember the meat of it now, but I remember that he was involved with Les Hromas back in the '60s.

WESTWICK: Now, were you involved at all in the discrimination side of it? The discrimination is more I think for missile defense.

BROWN: No, not at all. We were strictly just looking at the aerodynamics.

WESTWICK: For RV design?

BROWN: Yeah, for the design of the thing, and also just for understanding the physics, really. The reason that I eventually left there is that it just seemed to me that for two years I was not exactly spinning my wheels, but we were just doing refinements on this thing and just a few experts in the country were talking to each other. I'm sure that happens a lot.

BROWN, ALAN

WESTWICK: Well, this is what I was trying to get a sense of when I asked if you were intersecting the Atlas or Titan program: just how much was there a sense of community and collaboration among people at different firms, and how much of it was just that if you're at Lockheed, you're a service department and you're just working on Lockheed problems; you don't even really know what Aerospace Corp. or others are doing?

BROWN: No, not at all. No, it was strictly a service within Lockheed.

WESTWICK: But you were going to these conferences and giving talks?

BROWN: We were going to conferences, and you gave papers and we listened to other people's papers, but there was no sort of communicative interaction after that. Because again, each of us were working on our own thing. These papers would be in classified sessions.

WESTWICK: Well, that was my next question: who's putting on these conferences? Is it the AIAA?

BROWN: It is the AIAA, but they would have special classified sessions that might be sponsored by the U.S. Air Force or a U.S. Air Force-Navy combination.

WESTWICK: I know the stuff that people like Hromas was working on, the discrimination problem, is very closely held.

BROWN: That's highly classified, yes. Our stuff was more basic fluid dynamics, even though it was fairly technically advanced, I suppose. But yes, usually they were given in classified conferences. I can't remember whether they were all AIAA or some of them would perhaps be direct Air Force sponsorship or whatever.

BROWN, ALAN

WESTWICK: Okay. You were doing a lot of these tests. Were you also doing any range tests, like instrumenting reentry vehicles and launching them out to Kwajalein?

BROWN: No, all my work was inside the labs. Now, one of the reasons that I got involved with the aircraft company is that in the 1963 to '66 period Lockheed was working on the supersonic transport in competition with Boeing. Let's see when it would be: in maybe '64 or more like '65 the Lockheed people in Burbank put out a general request across the entire Lockheed organization for people who had supersonic aerodynamic experience, because they were clearly short in that area. My name popped up there because I had signed to say yes, I had this, this, and this experience. And as I mentioned earlier, I previously worked with the Lockheed aircraft propulsion department on the F-104. I guess that those two things clicked with them, and they actually negotiated with the Missiles and Space Company for me to come down and work on the supersonic transport for about a three month period in 1965.

WESTWICK: Now, this is not with the Skunk Works; this is with just Lockheed Aircraft?

BROWN: This is with the main aircraft side.

WESTWICK: Now, if your expertise is supersonic/hypersonic aerodynamics, at the time you went to Sunnyvale, in the late '50s, Lockheed was working on the SR-71, which would have seemed a natural, especially with inlets.

BROWN: Yeah, but of course I didn't know that. That was a very classified program. As I say, the feeling I had at that time was that missiles and space was the area to be in. In 1960 the airplane business was just going downhill. So I looked for missiles and space, and that was just it.

WESTWICK: Another kind of general question is that everybody talks about aerospace as a single thing, but how closely related were aero and space? And how well did expertise translate

BROWN, ALAN

from building aircraft to building spacecraft? You go from somebody who studied propellers in college and then switched to building air-breathing jet engines, but now you're working on reentry vehicle dynamics.

BROWN: True.

WESTWICK: How well did you make that transition, or did the industry make that transition?

BROWN: Well, as far as industry was concerned, the Lockheed Missiles and Space Company, as you probably know, started in 1957 in Van Nuys as a small section that Willis Hawkins started up. He was like a chief engineer at Lockheed in the main plant at Burbank at the time. Lockheed had started up a small group in Van Nuys on Van Nuys airport property, and Willis started up the Missiles and Space Company there. Then within a year the Lockheed Corporation decided to move it up to Sunnyvale and buy a big area of land there. They saw that the writing was on the wall, that missiles and space was going to be a big thing, and so they started the Missiles and Space Company with airplane people from Burbank. In other words, the airplane people went up to start up the Missiles and Space Company. Of course, like anything else, for the transition you have to start learning stuff. Some of it you know already, some of it you don't, and you do the best you can. I joined like a couple of years after they had moved up to the Bay Area, so I was at the research labs within a couple of years of them first starting. My knowledge of aerodynamics certainly was fine and worked well. I had to learn a bit more about chemistry and electromagnetics.

WESTWICK: I guess this is part of my question: how much of this was aircraft people learning the electromagnetism or the atomic physics or materials science, and how much of it was going out and hiring, say, a physicist or a materials scientist?

BROWN: I shall say it was about half and half. The interesting thing about the Lockheed labs—excuse me, I'm going to get a glass of water.

BROWN, ALAN

WESTWICK: I can pause this. [interview paused]

BROWN: I left the Missiles and Space company briefly in 1965 to work on the supersonic transport because I had been identified as someone with supersonic aerodynamic experience. The main thing I did while I was there was write a sonic boom program for them so that you could calculate the sonic boom going across the surface of the Earth. That was one of the big things that nobody had done at that time. Then I came back to Missiles and Space, but then decided to return. I did in fact return to work on the supersonic transport, because they clearly wanted people. They were short of people in that area, and I was getting bored with the repetitious stuff I was doing.

WESTWICK: This is 1966?

BROWN: Yes.

WESTWICK: Okay. Now, you say they were lacking people in supersonic expertise, but they had just finished building the Blackbird, which presumably involved lots of supersonic expertise?

BROWN: Oh, yes. Right, but with a fairly small staff. And the Lockheed Skunk Works, first of all, I knew very little about them when I went down to the main Lockheed plant. They certainly kept pretty much to themselves. Kelly Johnson would come over to the supersonic transport people to act as a consultant on design, based on the SR-71; but the SR-71 was not just a classified program, it was totally black. So nobody really knew about it. The reason he would come over is that the Lockheed board of directors recognized that he was doing work in this area, and would suggest that he go over and help as he had some expertise; he couldn't really reveal what it was, but he did know what he was talking about.

BROWN, ALAN

WESTWICK: But he couldn't bring people over and say, "You know, these guys have been working for five years on this very problem. This is the way we solved this on the Blackbird, so let's design it this way."

BROWN: They did not in fact do that. The people who were in this, as far as I know—no, I don't think so.

WESTWICK: Speaking of classification, you're working on the Polaris RV. Presumably this is fairly highly classified also.

BROWN: Right. Yes. I have to backtrack. I got my security clearance while I was at USC. I emigrated in 1956. I became an American citizen as soon as I could, which was 1963. At that time you could have a security clearance and still be an alien. You didn't have to be a citizen, if they were able to do a background check and you were from a, quote, friendly country. So I'd had a security clearance before I even came to Lockheed. I had a Secret clearance.

WESTWICK: Now, had you had a clearance in England?

BROWN: Oh, I had one in England, yes, because I worked on the Bristol Bloodhound, which was also a classified program there.

WESTWICK: But there was no translation there between…

BROWN: There wasn't a direct translation, but there was probably information passed across between organizations to say, yes, this is the background history that we've researched.

WESTWICK: Having a British clearance maybe greased the skids a little bit.

BROWN, ALAN

BROWN: Probably. Very likely, yes. So in other words, I got my clearance pretty much as quickly as one could reasonably expect it from my situation, and I had it before I came to Lockheed. So that was in place. Of course a requirement is that you become a citizen as soon as it's reasonably appropriate to do so. So I became a citizen I think in 1963, actually on the anniversary of the Wright brothers' first flight.

WESTWICK: Oh, really?

BROWN: Coincidentally, as it turned out.

WESTWICK: Now, you got to go through the clearance process on both sides. How did the clearance process compare, and the classification system?

BROWN: I think they were very similar. It was very transparent to me in both cases. For my security clearance in Britain, I had very little involvement—you know, you fill out normal identification papers, just identifying who you are. That goes into some system, and then the clearance comes through. It was no major effort on my part in either case other than just filling out my identification requirements.

WESTWICK: Then how about working with the clearance? Did you see that one system was maybe tighter than the other or more restrictive?

BROWN: No. Not really. In the British system the guided weapons department was all in one building and everybody who was in that had to have clearance to be in that program. You never worked in any other building, except for occasionally doing wind tunnel work or whatever. The same kind of thing was true in Lockheed as well. The Skunk Works security system was more stringent in some respects, inasmuch as there was only one entrance to the building and there were no windows in the buildings. Whereas at Lockheed in the main aircraft plant we certainly worked in buildings with windows in the normal sense.

BROWN, ALAN

WESTWICK: The rest of Lockheed was still classified; it was just not black.

BROWN: Yes, it was not black, right. A big difference. In Lockheed, the supersonic transport in fact was canceled about 18 months after I came down there in 1966. It was probably canceled in '68—it was right around Christmas or New Year's Day of '68, I think. And then I just stayed on. I moved into the advanced design area. I was what we just called a group engineer, which is one level below a department manager, for advanced propulsion. I worked with all the new programs that were coming up. Like, we were competing on what became the F-15 and the F-14 fighter airplanes. We competed on what became the Lockheed S-3 naval carrier-based submarine reconnaissance airplane, and so on. So in the period from 1967, after the supersonic transport was canceled, to the middle of 1969, I was in charge of advanced propulsion installation for all the new programs that were coming in at Lockheed.

WESTWICK: You mentioned using these computer programs. You were doing computer programs, first of all, on the reentry vehicles and the airflows and things like that, and then also using computer programs for the sonic booms for the SST.

BROWN: That’s right, yes. Now, I was not a computer expert. I want to just point out that in those days we had separate departments which had computer experts. We would sort of write the basic programs that we wanted, write down the list of instructions—because, you know, this was in the days of IBM cards.

WESTWICK: Right, punch cards.

BROWN: Punch cards, yes. Your level of academic excellence was how big a box of cards you carried around for the IBM computer. [laughter] But we all had special people who were computer experts for translating our equations into IBM computer card format. We didn't go all the way into that in those days, because these were the days of centralized computer systems.

BROWN, ALAN

The centralized computer systems had their own staffs who understood exactly how to load the equations into the machines via the punch cards, and that was a dividing line between what I did and what somebody else would take over.

WESTWICK: Now, were you kind of unique? You sound like somebody who's resorting pretty early to using computers. Is that so?

BROWN: Yeah, I'd say so. For instance, in writing this program for the sonic boom I certainly used new mathematical techniques and had to adapt that to what could be put into an IBM machine. I should have pointed out that while I was at Lockheed at the Palo Alto labs, I also decided to do a master's degree program at Stanford. I got a lot of Milton Van Dyke, who was a well-known ex-NACA aerodynamicist who went over to Stanford as an instructor and taught a course on what was called inner and outer expansions. That was a very new mathematical approach to aerodynamic theory. I used that in the sonic boom analysis, because you start off with the analysis of the flow around the airplane, and then you have to expand that to very low pressure differentials a large distance away. If you just go out there by a program that just expands constantly, you'll just lose accuracy completely, it turns out. So you have to have a method that deals with the local flow here and then can transform that to an outer flow here. That's what I used to in fact develop my sonic boom theory at that time. So, it was a big advantage to me to have taken courses at Stanford during the period I was at the laboratory. I was continually taking aerodynamic courses of that sort from people who were both professors at Stanford full time and from NACA people. Milt Van Dyke and John Spreiter are the two people I remember particularly who taught courses that I took, who were NACA aerodynamic experts. NACA-Ames, as you probably know, at that time was probably one of the, if not the, top supersonic aerodynamics theoretical place in the world.

WESTWICK: Right. Was there a sense that computers were transforming engineering practice at this point?

BROWN, ALAN

BROWN: A little bit, yeah. I mean they were mainly thought of as servants rather than masters, which they have perhaps become now. [laughter] But yes, there's no doubt that, for instance, this sonic boom program that I did, I couldn't have done without a computational background that was available from the IBM mainframes.

WESTWICK: Right. We usually think of aerospace as design engineers who are usually the people at the desks. In the '50s they were all in bullpens at these desks with the blueprints in front of them and the French curves and their slide rule, and they're calculating the design principles and tradeoffs; and then you have the manufacturing engineers who are more the shop floor people who actually have to go out and build these things.

BROWN: Right.

WESTWICK: It sounds like you're not so much in aircraft design, and you're not really on the manufacturing side. You're more like almost a research engineer?

BROWN: Almost like that, yeah. Because particularly, when I was in the aircraft side in the advanced design area, for instance, I had to develop on the F-15—or what became the F-15, our competitive work on that—I had to develop the inlet and exhaust nozzle designs but not actually the drawing board layouts. In other words, we would lay out how the area ratio had to change. For example, earlier on the supersonic transport there'd be a big drawing office, a design office, and then there'd be specialists in the aerodynamics departments who would work with the designers and say, “now, we have to have a certain area progression that goes through here in this way, and then we have to be able to have a narrowing point down here. The shock wave has to stand there, so we need to have this area at this point. Can you draw something like that?” So the guy would draw something out. And you’d say, "Yeah, that looks pretty good. What you've drawn looks like it matches my area progression requirements to suit the analysis." And so on. So I would be an analyst, who would be the precursor to the designer on the drawing board.

BROWN, ALAN

WESTWICK: Right. This is probably too simplified, but there's kind of research, design, manufacturing, almost like a flow chart.

BROWN: Correct. Exactly.

WESTWICK: How big was the research, if you can break it down? I'm not sure how sharp the boundaries are between the research and the design; it sounds like it's fairly blurry there.

BROWN: Well, it was blurry. We were not really doing fundamental research. People like NACA-Ames might be doing fundamental research. We would be designing an inlet and an exhaust system, for example, to run through a gamut of different speed ranges and altitude ranges and thrust power ranges and so on. We would do the layouts of how the area progression had to change, where we'd have to have blow-in doors because when you're at low speed you need to pull more air in than the inlet allows, and so on. So it was a little bit after research but before pencil-on-paper design. We were actually doing the basic layouts of what the designer had to work with to get from A to B, this kind of thing.

WESTWICK: Did you have much interaction with the manufacturing or production engineers?

BROWN: At that time, no. But much later, particularly on the F-117 program, very heavily.

WESTWICK: Okay. We can cycle back to that when we get there. Just to catch up, we're up to about 1970 or so, I think.

BROWN: Yes.

WESTWICK: Are you working on the F-15…?

BROWN, ALAN

BROWN: Yeah, the F-14, F-15, the S-3. Still working on existing Lockheed airplanes. And of course the L-1011 Tristar is coming as a private venture for Lockheed, as opposed to the other programs where we were responding to government proposals.

WESTWICK: Had you ever worked before on commercial products?

BROWN: No. No, I never had.

WESTWICK: The SST, though, was your first time.

BROWN: It was going to be commercial, that's right. The SST was commercial, but the way our side worked on it was as a supersonic propulsion problem. In other words, the fact of it having to carry passengers versus people with guns didn't make any difference.

WESTWICK: Okay. One of the general issues is how the commercial market related to the military market and how well technologies transferred between the two.

BROWN: On the SST, I mentioned that Lockheed had sent out a request all around the corporation for people with supersonic aerodynamic experience, so we pulled in just as many people as we could who had some knowledge in these areas. I would say that on the supersonic transport our technology was up to anybody else's, as far as we knew. We didn't know about the SR-71, but it turned out that Kelly Johnson would come over and give us some individually good ideas. The way it worked at the level where I was, it wasn't a big issue about whether it was military or civilian; it was a technical problem to be solved. I mentioned earlier that I'd worked on the North American B-70 bomber, which was a very similar set of problems. A similar kind of airplane, doing a similar kind of job.

BROWN, ALAN

WESTWICK: Now, you also mentioned that in the late '50s one of the reasons you went up to Sunnyvale was because you saw that the aircraft side was dwindling; it was after Sputnik and the space race was on and it was missiles and space.

BROWN: Right.

WESTWICK: But then in the late '60s you're back…

BROWN: Oh, things cycled back. The government got its head on straight and realized that it still needed an Air Force, and the commercial people realized they still needed commercial airplanes.

WESTWICK: Was the sense also that the space race was kind of…

BROWN: I don't know. I was never really strongly involved in the space area at all. In my case it was always missiles, and then I came down into the aircraft area. Probably I would say that the space situation was plateauing, between Russia and America. There was competition clearly, as with going to the moon, and Kennedy had made his statement that we'd go to the moon by the end of the decade. Everybody sort of lived with that and felt that was reasonable. But I was never personally involved with it.

WESTWICK: What about the Vietnam War? Was there a sense that this is part of the context?

BROWN: Not a great deal really, as far as we were concerned. Lockheed did not have an active aircraft with the Air Force at that time. Its last airplane with the Air Force had been the F-104. And that was really historic by the time of the Vietnam situation. The only area where Lockheed worked in that period of time with a strong military presence was antisubmarine with the P-3 and

BROWN, ALAN

then later the carrier-based S-3 airplanes. We were very peripheral to what I'd call the battlefront.

WESTWICK: Right. Well, the submarine stuff is not really part of the Vietnam strategic context either.

BROWN: No, not at all.

WESTWICK: Vietnam was part of this whole '60s culture; was there any sense within the aerospace industry of some of this broader social ferment going on? Especially here in California?

BROWN: That was clearly going on. The biggest influence that I felt was within my own family when I've got teenage daughters growing up. [laughter] But not so much within Lockheed at all. There was very little of what I'd call political influences. Over my whole history of working in the aircraft industry I felt political influences have been very, very small scale. Anyway, one of the things that I was working on in 1969 was the propulsion system for the L-1011. We had interaction, of course, with Rolls-Royce, who provided the engines. My boss, a fellow called John Stroud, suggested I should maybe go over there for two or three weeks to try and sort out the interaction between the airframe and the engine manufacturer with Rolls- Royce. I went over there for about three or four weeks and came back, and then I went over there for about six weeks and came back, and I said, "John, this is a much bigger job than we can solve in a week or two." So in 1969, about August I think it was, we moved as a family back to Rolls- Royce, and I became the main engineering rep for our small group, about a half a dozen engineering people, who went over to interact with Rolls-Royce.

WESTWICK: You mentioned your teenage daughters; you're married and raising a family at this point. You're also bouncing between Sunnyvale and Burbank. How did they go along with this?

BROWN, ALAN

BROWN: Oh, yes. Well, it was interesting. Everybody went along with it. Of course being with an English background and my wife's also English, I thought it would be a tremendous opportunity just from a family point of view. First, for the grandparents on both sides who still lived in England to see their grandchildren growing up for a while. Also I thought it was a very good experience for the children to go to school in a different country and just see what was what. I have to say that in retrospect, for my oldest daughter I think that didn't go too well because she was in tenth grade when she left England, and it really disrupted her high school education pretty comprehensively. She had to come back and get one of these post-high school things as if you failed your diploma.

WESTWICK: A GED.

BROWN: Yes. Of course it wasn't because she'd failed, it was because she wasn't in the country. So her education got disrupted somewhat, but I would say it was a good experience for all the girls, for all the family.

WESTWICK: One other question along the family lines: a few other people we've talked to have commented about working with a clearance; you can’t come home and talk about your work. The L-1011 and the Rolls-Royce stuff presumably you can discuss, but when you're working on the Polaris missile and things like that you don't come home from work and say, "Oh, how was work today?"

BROWN: Oh, right.

WESTWICK: Did that have any effect on you or did you think about that at all?

BROWN: No, it didn't. My wife was very accepting of that situation. We were first married just before we went to work in Bristol. She was aware of the fact that I was working on

BROWN, ALAN

classified programs there, and it was a way of life. It was never an issue as to what I was doing or whether I was away for times or whatever. So, fortunately I didn't have that kind of internal disruption to deal with.

WESTWICK: Now the Rolls-Royce issue eventually becomes kind of a major brouhaha, I guess, with Lockheed.

BROWN: Oh, yes.

WESTWICK: Were you involved in that episode?

BROWN: Oh, yes, absolutely. We used to have high level meetings every three months where the Lockheed chairman of the board, Dan Haughton, and other people on the board, like Willis Hawkins, would come over and have a quarterly meeting with their Rolls-Royce counterparts, and we'd also have a technical discussion of the state of the thing. There were two of us—there was a Lockheed group of about a dozen people there, and Matt Ehrhart was in charge of the administrative side of things with Rolls-Royce, finance and stuff like that, and I was in charge of the engineering side. One day in February of 1971, it must be, we were having our quarterly meeting, and Dan Haughton and Willis and Kelly Johnson and company were all sitting up there. Matt and I were sitting at the back of the room, because we were just the locals. There was a fellow giving a talk about the status of the turbine blade design, and at ten o'clock precisely a fellow in a nice dark blue suit came onto the podium, elbowed this fellow off, and said, "I have an important announcement to make. As of this moment Rolls-Royce is calling in the receivers." The reason he was making that precisely at that time is because the announcement was made on the London stock exchange simultaneously, and it had to be done coincidentally. The immediate reaction, Matt and I didn't have any clue about this at all. Rolls-Royce had kept it very secret. Our Lockheed people, Dan Haughton and Kelly and Willis Hawkins, turned around and looked at us with that “why the hell didn't you know?” expression on their faces. Because that was a part of our job, to know what was going on, and we hadn't a clue.

BROWN, ALAN

WESTWICK: So Rolls-Royce completely sandbagged you?

BROWN: Yeah. Well, it was not Rolls-Royce, to be fair. What had happened—do you know the background to this story?

WESTWICK: A little bit.

BROWN: Okay, let me tell you what my understanding of the background is. About a year earlier Loughborough University, which had both a very strong aeronautical department and a business degree department, decided that for its M.B.A. people it would give them a group problem. The group problem was to take one of the top-level, blue-chip British companies and analyze it fairly comprehensively as to its financial structure. Well, one of the most solid companies, of course, was Rolls-Royce. So they picked Rolls-Royce for their example, and when they went through this they found the financial statement for Rolls-Royce was, to their viewpoint, a pack of cards. They had a large amount of money, for instance, assigned based on the goodwill of the size of their engineering staff. It was pointed out that engineering people can leave at two-weeks notice. You know, that's not a valid long-term financials part of your statement. A number of things like that were clearly not done correctly, and it looked as if Rolls- Royce was in a much more precarious situation than it appeared from the outside. So the people at Loughborough, because Rolls-Royce was 30 percent owned by the British government at that time, felt an obligation to tell the British government what their conclusions were from this M.B.A. program analysis.

WESTWICK: I knew the British government got involved, but I didn't know it was a business school study that had kicked it off.

BROWN: Yeah. That was what started it. The British government immediately assigned a panel. The prime minister, if I remember, at that time was or had been recently Sir Alec Douglas

BROWN, ALAN

Hume. His brother, Lord Hume, was the chairman of the board of—I'm trying to think—one of the very big soap companies, a big manufacturing company like Lever Brothers or something like that in Britain. So they got Lord Hume to put together a committee to go through the Rolls- Royce thing. I know it started in April of 1970; I guess that's when the information was given to the government, and they started this program. Lord Hume was going to come up with his final conclusions in April of 1971 or whenever it was, something like that. He started going through this, and then by December of ’70 or January of '71, he decided he couldn't wait any longer. So he told the British government what the situation was and that Rolls-Royce were essentially a financial pack of cards; it was just not a workable situation, and they would have to call in the receivers. They were really a bankrupt company. He decided to forward the date from April to February to do this. Well, this whole commission had been done under fairly good government secrecy.

WESTWICK: So you didn't know about it?

BROWN: We didn't. Nobody, none of the common masses knew about this at all. At least I'm saying I didn't know. Now, whether other people at Rolls-Royce knew—surely some people must have known. I don't know. But as an engineering person I didn't have a clue about this.

WESTWICK: Right. There's a general question here about the relationship between finance and engineering people in the aerospace business. One thing about Lockheed, going back to Robert Gross, it was very financially oriented. Northrop was founded by an engineer and run by engineers after that; whereas Lockheed seemed more financially oriented. As an engineer, what was your perspective on this? As a business, it has to make a profit and return value to shareholders, and so on. How did you see this balance between the financial side and the engineering side playing out in the company?

BROWN, ALAN

BROWN: One of the things where this really came to a head was on the L-1011 program. Prior to that I would have said that I wouldn't have seen any, or even been aware of what the interactions were.

WESTWICK: The defense side is a bit different market.

BROWN: It's a different kettle of fish. You're working to a contract with the U.S. Air Force and so on. That's basically what I'd done right up to the L-1011 time. But the thing that was very clear with Rolls-Royce: Rolls-Royce had promised certain technical things on their engine, which didn't come true. There were two or three major issues, like the carbon fiber blades that were disintegrating in bird strikes and stuff like that. You may have heard about all that. The big thing that was very clear—I came back from Rolls-Royce in 1972. We still had people working there, but I felt that three years was long enough to be out of the mainstream of doing design work. I came back in '72. We were building L-1011s, and it was pretty clear—and this was true also in the SST. We lost the SST contract to Boeing. Boeing turned around immediately after they had won the contract and essentially adopted our airplane design. Technically we knew what we were doing, but clearly Boeing were the masters as far as interaction with the airlines and so on. We were amateurs at working with the airlines. That was very clear. In fact, the L-1011 got made; we just got put through the wringer by the airlines. Delta in particular managed to convince us to sell airplanes to them at $15 ½ million each, which were costing us $16 ½ million to make. We had a technically extremely good airplane, in my opinion better than the DC-10, but our sales and financial people just hadn't any clue how to work with the airlines, and just got themselves run through the wringer. There was not a strong interaction between engineering and the sales and finance people. You know, they were just a group of people who were selling the airplane.

WESTWICK: Well, maybe that's part of the problem.

BROWN, ALAN

BROWN: Oh, exactly. No question about it. In later life, when I got to a higher position and understood a bit more about this stuff, it was very clear that we were quite wrong in doing that.

WESTWICK: Now, the Rolls-Royce episode eventually turns into a little bit of a political issue across the Atlantic.

BROWN: Yes.

WESTWICK: Were you involved at all?

BROWN: Not really, no. When I came back from Rolls-Royce in 1972, I spent a fairly small amount of time on the L-1011 program. By that time the 1011 was pretty much a firm design. There was no more propulsion work to be done, and I was working on other airplane programs. I was working again as a group engineer in the propulsion department, on whatever new airplane problems were coming up. Predominantly I think it was still P-3 derivatives and the S-3 and stuff like that for those years from, say, '72 to '75.

WESTWICK: When did you get involved with Stealth?

BROWN: Now, that was interesting. I've often been berated by my colleagues for talking about my philosophy of doing things, because they think that philosophy and engineering are two totally different subjects. But one of the things I've always said is that you should always do what you regard as being the correct thing for the very long term. You should not worry about the administrators who are excited about quarterly returns, because the airplane business is not a quarterly-return business. You're not manufacturing soap or stuff like that.

WESTWICK: Well, maybe this gets back to this issue of the relationship between the business side and the engineering side?

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BROWN: Yes, exactly.

WESTWICK: The engineers may be looking more long term and the business people looking at the next quarterly shareholder report.

BROWN: Yes, and they have to be concerned with the shareholders, which is quite correct. But I always had a philosophy that you should do what you regard as the correct thing for the long term, and eventually you will be rewarded. Now, occasionally it will be after death, but in general that's it. [laughter] Well, it turns out that in the '60s, when I was working in advanced design, my boss was a guy called Leo Celniker—about four years older than I, ex-MIT, graduated at a very high level; a very smart guy. I would work with Leo, and he was in charge of all the very up-to-date advanced design items, along with another guy called Dick Scherrer. Well, unknown to myself, DARPA had put out some requests for a lightweight fighter. In 1971—of course I am in England at this time—DARPA came to the realization that, quite contrary to the case in the mid-1930s when the British prime minister would say “there is no defense against the enemy bomber,” now our bombers were incapable of penetrating the Soviet defenses. The situation was reversed. There was no chance of our bombers, which were strategic B-52s, penetrating the modern Soviet defenses. We had to come up with something that was going to enable us to do that. One of the things is reducing the radar cross section of our airplanes. Dick Scherrer, who was working with Leo Celniker in advanced design in the '60s, worked on a very small side contract called Harvey, named after the invisible rabbit, in 1973, to look at what designs they could come up with to improve the radar cross section. This is not in the Skunk Works; this is in the main part of Lockheed. What he came up with wasn't really terrific, but there was a general feeling that somehow things had got away from us. Why was it that the modern fighter, the F-15, which carried one man and armaments, weighed 50,000 pounds, whereas World War II fighters, also carrying one man and armaments, weighed 5,000 pounds? We'd just grown these airplanes, and they just got big; can we just make smaller airplanes? Well, it turns out that smaller is not good enough for a low radar cross section, but that was what Dick worked on in the 1973-'74 period.

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[interview paused]

BROWN: I was talking about Dick Scherrer's Harvey program. Leo Celniker got called over to the Skunk Works to help out in something that they were doing over there. Well, then Leo called me and said, "You know, I'm having a real hard time with the propulsion guys in the Skunk Works, because we're coming up with designs that are not going to do the job." I don't know if you're familiar with the basic radar equations; I'm sure you're not. The basic radar problem was that you could detect a B-52 at the horizon with Soviet early warning radars of that period, and of course much easier with modern ones now. When they're flying at 35,000 feet, that's 200 miles away. 200 miles is 20 minutes of flying at 600 miles an hour. That gives the enemy time to finish their cup of coffee, finish their cigarette, finish their conversation about whether Moscow Dynamo is a better soccer team than Kiev, and then call up the surface-to-air missiles and the airfields and say, "There's a guy coming in. Go and intercept him." If you cut the radar cross section down to a level where they're only picked up at 100 miles, then that drops it down from 20 minutes to 10 minutes, and you still have plenty of time to do all this. Now, it turns out that to drop the distance down by a factor of two, you have to drop the radar cross section down by a factor of 2 to the 4th. So it's a factor of 16, and you're still not doing any good. You really have to change the distance by about a factor of 10. You have to get to where there's only two minutes' warning instead of 20 minutes. And then it starts to be difficult for the enemy. Well, a factor of 10 on distance is a factor of 10,000 on radar cross section. That's a ludicrous engineering multiplication. Modern commercial transport designers, like Boeing and the European teams, will sell their families into white slavery for five percent of fuel economy. So a factor of 10,000…you know, the very simple analogy that I used to use is that this is like somebody at General Motors saying there's a great shortage of gasoline in the world. We are currently able to do 30 miles to the gallon. We have to multiply that by 10,000 and get 300,000 miles to the gallon. That's 12 times around the earth on a gallon of gas. Well, they would take you to the local lockup and put you in a straitjacket if you suggested that.

WESTWICK: Right. So the radar equations go as the fourth power?

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BROWN: Yeah, the fourth power relative to distance. So I'm quite sure that's why nobody even thought it was a practical thing to do. And I'll come back to that particular thing relative to the Russians later. Anyway, Leo called me and said, "Look, I'm having real problems. These guys in the Skunk Works are still trying to make an improvement of an SR-71 airplane." I used to have an imaginary sign over my door that says, "Nothing fails like success," rather than the old saying that "Nothing succeeds like success." Historically I found that people, particularly if they're in a winning situation, tend to stay with their last design, or last war or whatever it was. It's interesting to note how many times in military competitions the builder of the previous airplane or vehicle finishes last in the next competition. Classic examples are the competition for what became the F-22 Lockheed Raptor. This was a direct replacement for the F-15, but it had to be stealthy. McDonnell Douglas finished seventh out of seven in the competition after that. In the competition for what became the C-17 transport, Lockheed, which had built every transport for the Air Force prior to that, lost decisively to Douglas, later becoming McDonnell Douglas, because we didn't listen to the Air Force. It's the same thing: you tend to go in with, “this is what you really want, guys. We've done this before.” And the Air Force says, "You know, it would be nice if you would read what we asked for." That's very typical. So the SR-71 people, because the SR-71 is certainly an exceptionally good airplane but not a stealthy one, were still clinging to those ideas. So Leo said, "Will you come over and see if you can come up with a new propulsion installation design?" The F-15 airplane, for example, has a radar cross section at air-to-air frequencies of about 10 square meters. We measure things in square meters. The nose-on cross section, say, is about 10 square meters. The two inlets themselves contribute pretty much all of that 10 square meters. That's because energy that goes into a cavity will go in, rattle around, and come out like a pair of auto headlights pointing straight back to the radar. So that's the dominant return. He said, "This is giving me fits. We've got to solve the inlet problem." I came across, and I was going to come across for six weeks to work on these Have Blue—what was their airplane was called? The XST, Experimental Stealth Technology.

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WESTWICK: Right. So the DARPA program is now…

BROWN: The Harvey program is history. That really never came out.

WESTWICK: That was not Skunk Works. Harvey was Dick Scherrer…

BROWN: Harvey was actually done by Dick Scherrer outside the Skunk Works. Dick Scherrer, however, was brought over with Leo Celniker into the Skunk Works to work on the XST program.

WESTWICK: Okay. And your implication is that the Skunk Works people had become wedded to the SR-71 approach.

BROWN: That's what it seemed, yes.

WESTWICK: A lot of times the story that you get from the Skunk Works people is that the SR- 71 was stealthy in some respects…

BROWN: It was.

WESTWICK: …and that there was some heritage from that.

BROWN: Oh, absolutely. There was a big heritage. I'll explain all the bits and pieces of that. Let me just diverge, in fact, and talk about the SR-71. The SR-71 was probably one of the greatest engineering feats in an airplane in the postwar period. It still holds a great number of the altitude and speed records, and this is from 1965 to 2010, 45 years, a very substantial period of time. It was a brilliant airplane. It had a lot of innovations in terms of materials, how do you handle hydraulic fluid, the temperatures that you get at 100,000 feet, an enormous number of problems that came up.

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The general physics of what was needed was quite well known in the '60s. Books had been written about it and so on—well, not at the time of the SR-71. Books were written about it by 1967 to 1969. But there was no good calculation procedure that was good and quantitative because there wasn't the computer capability to do that. It turns out later, when I was eventually running the stealth technology part for Lockheed in the '80s, that our particular department was occupying 80 percent of the Lockheed computer capability. The stealth stuff is very computer intensive. So although the physics of stealth was known in the SR-71 days, there was no practical way of doing an analysis to really get a low observable airframe comparable to what we did with the XST and the F-117. However, there was a very good materials department, which determined how to make the material for the radar-absorbing edges that go all around the periphery of the airplane. These were about 12 inches to 18 inches deep—I think they're probably 12 inches on the SR, perhaps a bit more than 12; something like 12 to 18 in different parts. This was a very, very good piece of work. The materials lab started with the U-2. The U- 2 was recognized very early on as not being a very survivable airplane once Russia had active surface-to-air missiles, as of course was proven by the Gary Powers incident. Work was done almost immediately after the U-2 trying to come up with both improvements to the U-2 itself to improve its stealth characteristics, and on new airplanes that were going to replace it, which would be much more effective. Of course if you're fighting to survive, there are several approaches you can take. The SR-71 had a combination of moderately low radar cross section, primarily due to the very good materials lab work done on the edges, and also operational capability of Mach 3-plus and 95 to 100,000 feet. In fact very much later I attended meetings at the CIA long after the Cold War is over where Russian army people who were involved in their defenses would state categorically, having had the opportunity of looking over all the U-2 and SR-71 flight logs, that they had tracked our airplanes a hundred percent of the time. No, they had tracked every airplane but had no way, until the Gary Powers incident, of shooting down the U-2 because the MiGs fly up to 50,000 feet and the U-2 was at 68,000 feet, and they couldn't intercept. Our pilots would report seeing MiGs circle underneath them. So they identified them, but they couldn't do anything

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about it. When the SR came along, then their missile capability was totally unable to handle a Mach 3 airplane at that altitude. So the SR-71 was detected but never able to be intercepted. Now, the latest thing of course is that we want strategic bombers to penetrate Soviet Russia, and that doesn't work at 100,000 feet. You can't bomb very successfully from that altitude. So that was the reason for this. DARPA put out a request, we found out later, to all the people who had recently been involved in fighter development, to compete for the XST program. Lockheed was not included in that group because Lockheed had not built a fighter since the F- 104, which was prehistory. One of my particular complaints about our government security system is it works very well to some extent, but in this case the one company that had 90 percent of the radar reduction experience in this country was excluded because DARPA didn't know anything about what they were doing. The whole U-2 and SR-71 program was conducted under CIA guidance, and DARPA had no understanding of that. One of the issues that I've always had with the security in this country is there hasn't been enough cross-pollination across top high levels, within, say, the Pentagon or the Advanced Research Project Agency or NSA or whatever, so that top level people really know what's going on. There’s so much compartmentalization that brilliant things can be done and the right people don't necessarily know. That's not a side issue, but it's one that I'm very concerned about.

WESTWICK: Well, that was one of my questions actually.

BROWN: Anyway, we got into the XST program totally by accident. At that stage it was at a Confidential level and not Secret or Top Secret because there was no real strong feeling that the problem was soluble, because of the radar equation reasons I mentioned earlier. So it started off with the seven fighter companies, including people like Fairchild Republic, North American, Northrop, Grumman; McDonnell Douglas, of course, because they bid on the F-15. General Dynamics had done the F-16. So those were the seven companies I think I just mentioned. Fairchild Republic and some of the others were really not in the game at all. Well, these were the people who were asked. One of our program managers was managing a stealthy missile program for the U.S. Navy and was in the Pentagon. This fellow's name was Warren Gilmour.

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Because this thing was just Confidential, the Navy program guy he was talking to said, "By the way, are you guys in this new XST program that DARPA's running?" And Warren said, "No. Never heard of it." "Oh, you should be in it because you know all about this radar stuff." So Warren comes back and tells Ben Rich. Kelly had just recently retired; this was spring of 1975. Warren says to Ben, "Hey, there's a program going on that we should be in." So Ben gets on to DARPA, explains to them that although he can't give details, we do have some good experience in this area, and we'd like to get into it. DARPA says, sorry, we haven't got any more money. So Lockheed goes in on a free pass and spends its own money to do this development. Very quickly, it had gotten down to McDonnell Douglas and Northrop. McDonnell Douglas dropped out, and we came in about that time. So there was Northrop and Lockheed, and then we had a competition with them, which we won. But it was interesting that we got in the back door totally by an accidental conversation. Otherwise it might never have happened at all. Anyway, I was asked to come over, once we got this thing. Of course we were working very quickly because we just got in in the last month or two. Dick Scherrer was the one who did the initial layout design for our XST, along with one designer called Kenny Watson, and Denys Overholser was the man in the computational area who was doing the radar equation calculations.

WESTWICK: He was the one who read the Soviet paper and came up with a faceted design?

BROWN: Correct, right.

WESTWICK: Okay. And you had already come up with that design before the Northrop- Lockheed competition?

BROWN: Before the competition came down to just the two people. What happened was, at this time Denys had come up with a design which was sort of a shallow pyramid. The pyramid was actually screeched in a little bit. It wasn't a symmetrical pyramid; it had sweep-back lines, so there were no lines at right angles to directional flight. So it was a pyramid that came up like this, and then the peak was sort of moved forward up and then down. He said, this is going to

BROWN, ALAN

give a very low radar cross section. And I remember Ben saying, "Do you mean as small as an eagle?" And Dennis said, "Try an eagle's eye." Now that phrase, of course, is a Top Secret phrase, if anybody knows what a sphere the size of an eagle's eye would be. In fact Ben had this comment in his book The Skunk Works, which the security people at the Air Force went nuts about—I mean they were going to throw him in jail. Of course the good news was Ben was old enough and retired and revered. Eventually he died anyway, so it never happened. Anyway, that was the starting point. The aerodynamics people in the Skunk Works, who again were SR-71 folks, immediately decided to make a wind tunnel model of this to prove that it was totally useless as an airplane. They dubbed it the Hopeless Diamond. That's where that phrase came up, if you've ever heard it.

WESTWICK: Right. I have heard of that.

BROWN: Well, it came up because the aerodynamics guys called Denys's pyramid shape the Hopeless Diamond. Now, the pyramid shape was only intended to show how low of a radar cross section you could get out of some reasonable-sized object. I came on board and Dick Scherrer came on board about that time; I was just after Dick. The first thing we did is sort of chop the pyramid down and put a trailing edge of it on it, like the F-117. So the pyramid now starts to look a bit more like a possible airplane. I got involved about this time because that part of the pyramid at the back end was going to be our exhaust nozzle, and that was the shape it had to be. That's very different from an SR-71 exhaust nozzle, which is just two circles at the back and two circles at the front. The reason it was two circles at the front and back is that, although the radar guys would have liked to have puts slants on that thing, Kelly Johnson said, “you know, it's tough enough to make a Mach 3 inlet on an airplane that's going to work from zero speed up to about Mach 3-plus without you guys deciding to put a cross-wise slant on it, because an axisymmetric inlet is something I can cope with. We'll put lots of absorbing material on it to take care of that.” So the material side worked well, but in fact the main radar return from an SR-71 is from the combination of the inlet circle and the exhaust circle, energy going across the

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airplane and reflecting back directly off the inlet. And that was recognized. They did the best they could, and it came to a pretty low radar cross section. For instance, where the F-15 had a value of 10 square meters, the SR-71, which is a much bigger airplane, had a value of about one square meter. But that still wasn't the factor of 10,000 that you really need to be effective for something that works at low altitude. Anyway, I came on board to help on the inlet design, and I worked with Denys Overholser, who was the radar computation guy. I think because of some of my electromagnetic background and experience from the Polaris, and generally having a reasonable balance of electromagnetics and aerodynamics, I was able to understand what we needed and do a design for the inlet. I came up with an inlet design, which in fact is patented by Lockheed in my name— of course it doesn't do me any good because nobody else in their right mind is going to make something like that for other reasons. Whereas for the F-15 essentially a hundred percent of the energy that goes in comes out, that now reduced the radar cross section return to one part in a hundred thousand. So in other words, I essentially caught everything that was going in, as that was the dominant part of the return.

WESTWICK: So are there baffles in there or…?

BROWN: It was different things. I could actually show you some old viewgraphs that I have, or stuff on the computer which shows what this is like, or I could sketch it for you. Basically the way the periphery of the SR-71 is done, because of the high temperature, these edges on the SR- 71 are made of asbestos material, because that's essentially a so-called dielectric. On the F-117 it can be made of fiberglass because it's only a Mach 0.9 airplane. Basically for the edges, you want to have a sharp pointed edge. You don't want a rounded edge because that gives a very large return to radar. So you want a sharp pointed edge, but even a sharp pointed edge gives a significant return compared to what you want, particularly at low frequencies. So what we do is we go back about 12 inches with a fiberglass honeycomb—in the case of the SR-71 it was an asbestos honeycomb—and then we grade that in with carbon particles, where we have a very light loading of carbon particles initially and increase the strength of carbon particles until we get

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to a very heavy loading back here. And those carbon particles absorb the radar without giving you a strong reflection. It's like a soft hydraulic shock absorber; it's an electromagnetic shock absorber essentially. It starts off soft so the energy doesn't bounce off the front edge and then gradually hardens up.

WESTWICK: This is the leading edge of the wing?

BROWN: It's around the entire periphery of the airplane and on the fins and everything. So if you use the same technique on the inlet, instead of just making that just a fiberglass honeycomb leading edge, we'll make it a honeycomb going in this direction. And the dimensions of the honeycomb were about six-tenths of an inch because if you have a microwave transmission lines, these things tend to be rectangular tubes where you can send electrical energy with very small losses over very long distances. They use these in telephone, microwave…

WESTWICK: Like wave guides?

BROWN: Wave guides. It's a wave guide. And a wave guide which has dimensions equal to one wavelength is extremely efficient and with very low losses. However, if you reduce the wave guide size to being under half a wavelength, it suddenly acts like a drum skin, and energy does not penetrate it at all. So what we did is we made the fiberglass thing of dimensions which were less than half a wavelength at the highest wavelength that we thought we might encounter in the next 20 years, which turned out to be about five or six-tenths of an inch. And so these fiberglass tubes go back about six inches and have the carbon loading like the leading edges of the wings. So that's what we used for the inlet. Then once you're inside the inlet, you have a heavy amount of absorbing material. For the engines, it turns out the engine manufacturers knew nothing about Stealth. So the engines are just plain engines. In fact they were stolen off the T- 38 line by the U.S. Air Force for the Have Blue Program. So they just became major reflectors. But when they reflect back to the very highly loaded carbon area at the back of the fiberglass grid, it tends to bounce back and stay inside. So what energy does go through between the grids

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and the engine face and is not absorbed by the carbon, if it does bounce back, it just rattles around inside the duct.

WESTWICK: But you still have to get air…

BROWN: Oh, but the air comes through these six-tenths-inch diameter tubes, although that has drag in itself. For our pressure recovery, on an L-1011 the pressure recovery is .995, so you have .005 loss. In our case with these grids it was down to 92 percent, so we had an 8 percent loss of thrust. But these things also act as flow straighteners. So although it drops down to 92 percent, it maintains that 92 percent over plus or minus 20 degrees, both up and down and sideways. You also don't get engine stall because the flow is very smoothly directed into the engine. You don't get separation off the lips at high angles or anything like that. So there are pros and cons. And in fact this worked out okay. I've been on several Discovery and History programs talking about stealth. On one of them that was done shortly after the first Gulf War, about 1991 or '92, there was a popular ad on TV for the Roach Motel. The Roach Motel is for catching insects.

WESTWICK: “They check in, but they don't check out,” right?

BROWN: They check in and they don't check out. So they did an analog of this with my inlet, because the radar waves check in and they don't check out. They put the TV ad on right behind it, with this guy talking about the Roach Motel, which was quite funny. Basically that inlet design allowed the airplane to go forward successfully. So suddenly I'm a radar expert, by default, because that was probably the most difficult problem to solve except for the exhaust nozzle, which had to do exactly the same thing but at high temperatures. Then we had to worry about thermal expansion compatibility between the materials and the basic metals of the nozzle. We don't want alligator skin cracking, so we had to develop materials which had the same expansions as high temperature metals and so on. That became a major program. Because the inlet and exhaust were so much the most difficult parts of the XST radar

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cross section design, I quickly became sort of the radar expert and also had the good luck of being an aerodynamicist as well. So I could do both things. By the time we got to the competition between Northrop and Lockheed, I was the deputy program manager to Norm Nelson, who later became vice-president of engineering, because I was sort of the technical expert able to link the radar cross section with the aerodynamics and structural designs and know both subjects reasonably well. It was very interesting that we won that program. I never actually saw the Northrop design in great detail, but I saw one or two aspects of it many years later. John Cashen, who was the Northrop equivalent of me on the B-2 bomber and was the radar designer for their XST, said to me many years later, he said, "You know, we could have done what you did, but my aero and structures guys wouldn't let me." He had a Ph.D. in electrical engineering. I said, "John, if you had a bit more knowledge about airplane design, you would be able to argue with these guys." That was where I think we had the advantage. Again, I go back to my philosophy. I've always told people who work for me and whom I work with that I feel very strongly that your knowledge should form the shape of a capital letter T. You want to have good knowledge in depth of one particular subject, which is the vertical bar of the T, but you need to know enough information in all the other subjects of airplane design across the board, so you can talk knowledgably to the experts in that field and be able to discuss things with them without being bamboozled. My letter T is something that I've always sort of inculcated with people who work with me, and I really think it's very important.

WESTWICK: Well, I'm talking to John Cashen next month, so maybe I can ask him about Northrop's approach to it.

BROWN: Let me just comment on the letter T a little bit further. One of the young people who worked for me was Gary Ervin. Gary became a group engineer in the stealth department that we had and was in charge of the stealth for the F-22 airplane. Lockheed eventually won that competition against Northrop, and Northrop then tried to hire Gary. This was in the 2000's. They eventually hired him for an amount of money which was twice what he was earning at

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Lockheed and a lot more than Lockheed felt they could afford to pay. I'd always worked with Gary, and he had borrowed my books on airplane stability and control and stuff like that, because I'd said, you need to be able to talk to the other guys in other disciplines competently and not let them snowball you. Evidently that reputation got around, and Gary is now at Northrop in charge of all air and space systems.

WESTWICK: His name has come up as somebody we should talk to also.

BROWN: He was just one of the young kids who worked for me. In fact I've kidded him since then that if he had achieved his ambition—he graduated from UCLA with a degree in electrical engineering, but he also played for the UCLA baseball team that won the national championship in his final year. His ambition was to be a pro baseball player. About half a dozen of his team made it to the pros and he didn't quite. I said, "Now, Gary, if you had made it like you'd hoped, you might have been the third base coach for the Fresno Triple A Team now, instead of being in charge of everything at Northrop.” It's sort of funny how things work out like that.

WESTWICK: A couple questions just to follow up on a couple of these things. One is that it sounds like most of the Lockheed work on stealth came from in-house.

BROWN: Completely.

WESTWICK: Because there were people working on absorbing materials in other institutions.

BROWN: I think we were the acknowledged experts in the materials field. The materials lab started in 1950 with the U-2 program. We put in the first internal chamber for measuring radar cross section in the country that I know of, at least in the airplane business, in 1951. Ed Lovick is a guy who has just written a book. He must be in his nineties now, or late eighties. He's written a book called Radar Man. He was asked by Kelly Johnson to come up with radar

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improving designs for the U-2, so he was involved right from the beginning of that. He worked for me when I was head of stealth technology for Lockheed in the '80s.

WESTWICK: I think Northrop also had a materials lab that they'd set up going back a ways.

BROWN: Oh, yeah. There was no question that by the early 1970s the only two companies who were really knowledgeable in this field were Lockheed and Northrop.

WESTWICK: A couple other questions. There's actually a few components to stealth. One is this materials issue.

BROWN: Yes.

WESTWICK: One is the aircraft design, the shaping of it.

BROWN: Correct, the shaping.

WESTWICK: And there's also the infrared issue.

BROWN: Right. Okay, we had responsibility for everything, acoustics, IR, visible, radar, you name it, when the F-117 design was coming up.

WESTWICK: I think most people look at stealth, and it's just the shape of it that really captures your eye.

BROWN: Yeah. The thing that I used to say is, if we have to drop the radar cross section by a factor of 104, by 10,000, then externally three orders of magnitude are done by shaping and one order of magnitude by materials.

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WESTWICK: Okay, that's what I was getting at.

BROWN: If we're looking at the internal items, like cavities, inlets, and exhausts, it's the other way around. It's three parts materials and one part shaping. That’s a very simplified statement, but it is a very good way of looking at it from my point of view.

WESTWICK: And the inlets are more of the directional return instead of isotropic…

BROWN: Inlets is a directional return. The stuff that goes inside the inlet is going to come back unless you absorb it. The stuff that hits the outside of the airplane doesn't have to be absorbed so much as just deflected in another direction.

WESTWICK: And now the other question is, usually the Stealth is seen as a Skunk Works product.

BROWN: Yes.

WESTWICK: It’s the triumph of the Skunk Works. But it really seems from your story that you and Scherrer and …

BROWN: Leo Celniker, Denys Overholser.

WESTWICK: …are all actually coming from outside the Skunk Works.

BROWN: Denys Overholser was internal to the Skunk Works all the time.

WESTWICK: Okay.

BROWN: Leo and Dick Scherrer and I came in from outside.

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WESTWICK: But you almost have to persuade the Skunk Works people to change their mindset and accept this approach?

BROWN: Yes. Now, the Skunk Works was extremely strong in the materials area. They developed the materials lab and everything that went with it. Denys Overholser was the guy who developed the computations within the Skunk Works, but it was probably Dick Scherrer and Leo and I who put that into place, into an airplane which became the F-117.

WESTWICK: So it's not just the Skunk Works.

BROWN: No, it's not just the Skunk Works. But we were Skunk Works people when we were doing it.

WESTWICK: Right. But it was more like bringing in…

BROWN: Yeah, bringing in whatever expertise that they could.

WESTWICK: How did the Skunk Works differ? Was it kind of insular in some respects?

BROWN: I likened being in the Skunk Works to walking into a small village in Maine as an outsider. You know, if your great grandfather didn't live there, you were in trouble. In fact, for instance, it was the Air Force that told Ben Rich that they wanted—well, you see, what happened was that for Have Blue we built two airplanes in 18 months. This is from scratch, when we first got the contract. That was starting in April of 1976. We had the airplanes ready to fly in December of the following year, 1977. So that was really pretty fast. Then within another six to eight months we had shown quite conclusively that we had a very low radar cross section. So by December of '78 we had a contract to build a military airplane using the same principles. I'm sorry, there was a question you asked, and I just lost my train of thought.

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WESTWICK: The Skunk Works culture, or coming into the Skunk Works.

BROWN: Okay, how was it coming into the Skunk Works, sorry. What I was going to say is when we got the F-117 contract, the guy who was the Have Blue program manager for the Air Force was Captain Jack Twigg, an Air Force captain, a fairly low level at that time. He eventually, of course, became major and lieutenant colonel and colonel. But Jack Twigg insisted to Lockheed that the program manager had to be, quote, “the radar guy,” because he didn't want the traditional structures and aerodynamics people to dominate the design and not achieve what was achieved with the Have Blue. Because the Have Blue was an unstable airplane; it had to be flown by a computer. So that's why I got the job. I had never been a program manager before or even a chief engineer of a program or anything. Ben Rich was very supportive of me. He was a very good boss, from that point of view. He also was the person who was sort of Mr. Outside. He made sure that he got the money from the Air Force and from the Lockheed board and the support we required when needed. I was supposed to get on with getting the airplane designed. Immediately a couple of guys came to me and said, "You need to have a couple of assistant project engineers, one to do the structures and one to do the systems." The two guys, one of them was the one who came to me and said this, who was Bill Taylor. He was the systems engineer and Ed Baldwin was the structures engineer. Ed Baldwin had done the basic structures design for the SR-71. He had been a program manager for one of the smaller U-2 programs, not the main one but the two-seater version. Bill Taylor had been on the U-2 and the SR-71, and so had most of the design staff. The Lockheed Skunk Works was pretty much recognized, I think, as one of the top, if not the top, aircraft design organizations to work for in the country. Once people got into it, they didn't leave, so we had a very experienced staff. Ed Baldwin, for instance, who was doing the structural design, said to me straightforwardly, "Tell you what, I only said I'll design the goddamn airplane, and you can put your radar stuff on when I'm finished." I had to say, "Ed, that is not how it works. The radar design dominates the design, and that's where we start. The structures and aero guys have got to

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fit around that." So we started off conflicting really in that respect.

WESTWICK: Right. My question was going to be, is this a story of radar versus aerodynamics?

BROWN: The reason I say that the Air Force I think was quite right in putting me in charge is that otherwise we might have finished up with just another SR-71. They might have just said, “this Have Blue airplane is interesting as a research thing, but we can't make it in real life.” Well, in fact we did. The Have Blue and the F-117 are very similar looking airplanes, it turns out. The Air Force wouldn't allow us to make many changes. We wanted to make some improvements that would have improved the overall efficiency of the airplane in terms of range- payload. At that time the general feeling was that the whole business of radar cross-section reduction was black magic and maybe we'd just been very lucky. You know, that we had not to change anything to any significant effect. No, “just make it like the previous one because that worked fine.” Of course later when Northrop got to the B-2, the B-2 bomber had much less sweep-back than the F-117. The F-117 looks like this [demonstrating with hands]; the B-2 looks like this. And that's a much more efficient airplane. It has to be, because for a strategic bomber you have to have the range-payload characteristics that a B-52 has; otherwise, it's useless. So really, if you look at three airplanes in succession going from the F-117, we paid a fairly heavy penalty for stealth relative to range-payload of something like an A-10. By the time you get to the B-2 we were almost in parity. We found out how to design an airplane with curved surfaces and less sweepback and still have the good radar cross section characteristics, but have the good range-payload characteristics—not quite of a B-52 but getting close to it. Then you get to the F-22 Raptor, and that airplane has the same survival characteristics as the F- 117 and the B-2 and outdoes an F-15 by 20 percent in every conventional fighter performance aspect. So in other words, we've crossed the line from paying a penalty for stealth to having stealth and good performance as well.

WESTWICK: Now, did you know about what Northrop was doing for the contest for what became the F-117? Because Northrop had a very different approach.

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BROWN: You mean for their XST program?

WESTWICK: Well, there's two parts to this. One is the XST.

BROWN: I'll talk about that in a minute. On the XST, they had a hangar down at the Ratscat place in New Mexico.

WESTWICK: This is at White Sands.

BROWN: In White Sands, New Mexico. The hangar was divided by a curtain which was guarded by security guards. Northrop were on one side, and we were on the other. We weren't allowed to be working on our airplanes at the same time, and so on. So although the airplanes were in proximity, we never saw what theirs looked like. It wasn't until many years later that I even saw what their airplane seemed like.

WESTWICK: That's interesting, because it seems like DARPA would want, if you have two good ideas, let's maybe take the best of both and see if there's some way to combine their expertise and your capabilities?

BROWN: No. They just took each individual airplane, competed them against each other, and had a numerical system for deciding the answer, which was sort of interesting in itself. I'll explain that. There was a guy called Nick Damasko, who was a professor at—it may have been the University of Pennsylvania, or one of the Pennsylvania universities, anyway. Nick Damasko was head of the electrical engineering department at this university. He had helped the CIA in analyzing the SR-71 radar cross section, so he was an acknowledged expert in this field. They brought Nick in and said, "Nick, can you come up with some way of deciding which is the best airplane?" He came up with a formula. Because if you're just designing an airplane to win the world speed record, that's very simple: whichever airplane goes faster wins. Here we're dealing

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with a large number of radar frequencies covering a frequency range of 100 to 1, a large number of attitudes covering elevation and azmimuth angles, all of which have different degrees of importance. So Nick said okay, I'm going to divide the plan form of the airplane into segments at 45 degrees. There will be a nose sector, a tail sector, and two side sectors. 45 degrees will determine where the sectors are. I will assign required signatures for nose, tail, and side at different elevation angles and different frequencies. And this is how we'll average the things out. So he determined all that. When we came to the competition, we'll just add a whole bunch of numbers up according to his formula, and whoever comes up with the smallest number is the winner. So he'd come up with a formula that gave certain ratings to different frequencies depending on his view of their importance. The nose angle would be the highest rating and require the lowest cross section, because if you see something coming towards you, you can hang on that all day. Something going away from you is similar except for the speed differential, so it's not quite as important. Something off the side just flashes past you, and you can't do much about that. So the side sectors had easier requirements than the nose and the tail. Nick came up with a magic formula. Well, we won that against Northrop. Then we were just to build our airplane. Northrop was no longer in the picture, so there was no question of using the best features of both. We just had to build our airplane. We built our airplane. We demonstrated that it did what was required. That was another interesting exercise with the Air Force, because we had come up with a calculation that showed what our airplane characteristics would be in all these different situations. The Air Force said, yeah, that's interesting, but wait until you have a full scale model on a pole and you have to measure it, and you'll find it will be a little different. Well, we measured our real airplane and it came up just like the calculations. So they said, well, that's interesting, but wait until you have a real airplane flying, with hot parts that warp and change and ailerons and control surfaces. Well, we flew the real airplane, and that matched the model, which matched the calculations. We may have been lucky in that respect, because that was better than most people could reasonably have expected. But we did do very well in terms of calculations versus static tests versus a flying airplane. That was enough to convince the Air Force not only that we had won the competition but that we probably knew what we were doing. So we just took the airplane as is and built it.

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WESTWICK: Now, were you dealing with Bill Perry?

BROWN: Yeah. In fact, I'm going to show you something. Stay where you are. Anybody in Stealth is on that. [looking at list of names on plaque]

WESTWICK: Lew Allen.

BROWN: Yeah, everybody. Air Force officers. Bill Perry's on that.

WESTWICK: Hans Mark.

BROWN: Hans Mark. You know, that's sort of a who's who.

WESTWICK: The reason I asked about Bill Perry is because I'm going to interview him tomorrow.

BROWN: In Stanford?

WESTWICK: Yeah. So is there anything I should ask him?

BROWN: Well, he was the lead government person in getting this whole business going. He got the money, he was excited about it. Denys Overholser is on there. Ben Rich is on there somewhere.

WESTWICK: Bill Perry. This must be alphabetical order. Twigg is on there.

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BROWN: Yes, he is. There is Ben Rich. Tom Stafford, three-star Air Force general. Jack Twigg, who was the program manager. Bill Park was our chief test pilot. Dave England was the Air Force colonel who took over the management of the F-117 program.

WESTWICK: Now, did Lockheed then compete on the B-2?

BROWN: Yes, they did.

WESTWICK: Were you involved in that?

BROWN: No.

WESTWICK: Why not?

BROWN: Because I was doing the F-117. This gets back to our compartmentalized situation, and also the fact that the F-117 took my hundred and ten percent attention. We did not do well on the competition on that. That again gets back to the fact that often the leader doesn't do well the second time around. I was never even cleared on what our airplane looked like.

WESTWICK: You mean you weren't security cleared on it?

BROWN: Yeah.

WESTWICK: Really?

BROWN: No. I've never seen what the airplane looked like.

WESTWICK: Really? Lockheed's entry…?

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BROWN: Yeah. I think I could now. I think it would be possible for me to do so. But I wasn't at the time, because we were very compartmented. Even an office down the hall from us would have its own punch-in code, and you had to have a badge with a special letter on it to get in, and so on.

WESTWICK: It seems like you would want your B-2 design team to draw on the F-117 experience.

BROWN: They drew on it too much.

WESTWICK: Oh, really?

BROWN: See, that was the problem. The B-2 was a much better airplane. They had curved surfaces.

WESTWICK: This is the Northrop B-2?

BROWN: The Northrop one. They really had done a lot more work analytically while we were doing the F-117. Our guys who did our bomber really just made a bigger F-117. In fact one of the Air Force people who were judges on that, when I talked to him about it afterwards, I said, "Well, what did our thing look like?" He says, "You just took an F-117 and you went pffft, like this, just pumped it up." They didn't really advance the state of the art. They just took the state of the art that we had from our airplane. This sounds like not the right thing to say, but essentially we had our second team doing that. You know, our top team was doing the F-117. We had the contract to do it, and we had to build it very quickly. We had to build it quickly because once we showed that the Have Blue airplane did its job, then an Air Force colonel, Ken Staton, from the Pentagon, said, "Well, then, we've got a crisis. We need to have a stealthy attack bomber in a very short period of time. How quickly can you make one?" By this time it's sort of known that I would be the program manager for this. So I'm in Ben Rich's office with Ken, and Ben Rich,

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without batting an eyelid, says, "we can have an airplane flying for you in 18 months." My jaw could have been heard hitting my chest from several miles away when Ben said this. A comparative airplane, the F-15, from when it was first awarded contract to first flight, was five years. We had an airplane that was not conventional and revolutionary in both stability and control and in stealth, and Ben is promising 18 months. Well, I realized what his system was. He promises something which is almost impossible on the assumption that we will at least come close. And in fact we flew in two and a half years. So we flew in half the time that it took the F- 15 to develop. That was the way the Skunk Works operated.

WESTWICK: You mentioned earlier that this is where you got involved with the manufacturing and production engineering.

BROWN: Very much so.

WESTWICK: I don't know if Bob Murphy and Les Jonkey were still…

BROWN: Yes, Bob Murphy was the works manager. Les Jonkey was there. I still see them, because we're in the Lockheed retirees group. The way that operated was pretty good. It wasn't perfect, but it was very good. We had one building, which was a large building where airplanes were built. Adjacent to that is a two-story building tacked on the side of it, and our two-story building has one entry door and no windows. That's where you do all our design. And you can walk from our second story through a doorway onto a mezzanine, and you're looking on the production line. The designers can be down talking to the manufacturing people in a minute, and conversely, the manufacturing people can be up at the designer's drawing board in a minute to get things straight.

WESTWICK: So it's not just that the designers handoff blueprints and then wash their hands.

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BROWN: No. In fact, one of the requirements that Kelly Johnson always had in the Skunk Works—I don't know if you've heard about Kelly Johnson's 14 rules?

WESTWICK: Yes.

BROWN: That's worth looking at. One of his stipulations was that a designer is responsible for his product from cradle to grave, including when it's in service with the Air Force. In other words, you have a responsibility if the Air Force comes back and says, "We're having problems with the landing gear on this airplane, which you sold us three years ago." The designer has a responsibility to go out and check his design and see what can be done to fix it. That was an exceptionally good thing to do. Prior to that I had never really been closely involved with manufacturing at all. But in fact—and I think Bob Murphy will tell you this—I think I did work fairly well with the manufacturing organization, because the previous designers, the people from the original Maine village that I mentioned earlier, of course had a whole history of working this way. So it was the common way of doing business.

WESTWICK: Did you find that the manufacturing people had a little bit of a different background? They don’t have advanced degrees necessarily, but it's more…

BROWN: Well, Bob Murphy, for instance, started off as having a degree in aeronautical engineering. I think he had a bachelor's. He came into Lockheed into the Skunk Works as a flight test engineer, went all the way through flight test and eventually got promoted into works management. So in other words, he actually was not a manufacturing person all his life. And that was not uncommon. But I would say most of the people who worked for him had come up through the ranks of manufacturing.

WESTWICK: And then one of the things about the Stealth is you're trying to get this thing built in 18 months.

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BROWN: Yes.

WESTWICK: I assume you're probably working pretty long hours?

BROWN: Not necessarily. On occasions. Another of Kelly Johnson's rules were he expected people to work a 40-hour week. He expected them to have other outside interests, because those other interests invariably would (a), revitalize us and (b), perhaps bring other ideas into the company. So he didn't have any time for workaholics. Now, there were times when there would be a rush job and you felt you had to do some time. But in general that wasn't the case. For instance, the fellow who was in charge of structural dynamics, Doug Ford, did an outstanding job in that area, but he also had a side issue where he was the chief designer of the Budweiser hydroplanes that won all the races of the 1980s.

WESTWICK: Really?

BROWN: Pete Law, who was head of the thermodynamics department, is also still the world's expert on Merlin engines for the Reno races. He does all the carburetion and tuning for the Reno race guys in their P-51s. He also does the radial engines on Rare Bear.

WESTWICK: Thinking of those Budweiser hydroplanes, if you think about it, they do look a lot like the chines on the SR-71.

BROWN: Oh, yeah. See, he's a structural dynamicist, so he is in the analysis of structural loads against the aerodynamics or fluid dynamics; that is what he was knowledgeable about. The funny thing about Doug is that he was by far the richest of any of us. Because we were just on normal Lockheed salaries, but Budweiser paid him huge bonuses every time. There was a period of time when he had five Mercedes-Benzes because that's what they gave him, a Mercedes-Benz car, every time his Budweiser thing won. [laughter]

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WESTWICK: Well, this is kind of a general question for us. We’re talking about the aerospace industry, but also how it relates to California history. One of the things we're looking at is how all these aerospace engineers and people working for the companies contribute to California culture, whether it's building hot rods or contributing to surfboard design or other things like that.

BROWN: Yes, right.

WESTWICK: Can you think of other examples?

BROWN: Well, I'll give you an example, but it's still in the aircraft industry. In the period of time in the '60s when I was working in advanced design, Bill Lear of Learjet had been kicked out of his company by the board, and he was going to set up his own operation in Reno, Nevada. He was very upset. I think what happened was that he was not really as financially profit-and-loss oriented as some of the people on his board. He wanted to do things that were maybe interesting technically but not necessarily smart from the business point of view. So he was going to set up his own company in Reno, and this was a direct response to the fact that Howard Hughes had had his operation in Las Vegas. He was very upset that Gulfstream IV now was the world's fastest business jet, faster than his Learjet. So he was going to have his own company, separate from the Lear Company, which is in Wichita, Kansas. It would be based in Reno and called King Lear, which is a wonderful name for him. [laughter] He hired a number of people as part- time engineers to try and help him out, and he hired me when I was working in the '60s and several other people from Lockheed to come and be part timers. It was hilarious. We would drive over to his Beverly Hills mansion. Of course, you know he invented the eight-track Lear tape. I don't know if you knew that.

WESTWICK: Really? I did not know that.

BROWN: The eight-track tape was invented by Bill Lear. He was a very bright guy, but very ostentatious. He was married to the daughter of a fairly famous film comedy duo—oh, it doesn't

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matter who; it will come later [Moya Olsen, daughter of John Olsen]. She had been involved with the movie industry, so they lived in Beverly Hills. His was the first house I'd ever visited that had a remotely operated gate with a radio at the entrance and stuff like that. We had to go over to his house for a weekend to talk about our design inputs, and we'd be met at the door by a guy who was obviously an ex-wrestler, who was his personal bodyguard. Then we'd be ushered back to the swimming pool where all the guys are gathered around and talk, and we'd eventually go into a huge sort of billiards room and rec room where he'd set up movies. Some of our aerodynamics guys had done modifications to the wing section of the airplane, and had put wool tufts on the wing to get airflow directions. They were doing test flying of it totally illegally as part of the LAX landing pattern. They were actually doing test flights and not commercial flights, which they shouldn't have been doing. I don't know how Bill got away with that. My task on that, one of the things that he was very upset about was every time he opened the cowlings on his engines, it said General Electric on it. He wanted it to say Lear Engines. So he wanted to have his own engines. I said, "You know, Pratt and Whitney and General Electric have been doing this for a long time, and they've got very big research departments. It's probably going to be very hard to beat them." He said, "Well, I have a couple of professors at I think University of Toronto that have come up with an idea for an engine improvement that would improve the performance by ten percent, and that will get me to beat the Gulfstream IV speed record." So I looked at this pretty thoroughly. It turned out that the thermodynamic analysis of it was pretty good. They had what we call interface cooling. You've probably heard about scramjets and you know that when you're at high temperature you can light the fuel off just from the hypersonic flow that's going past. One of the things that you need to be able to do is get some corresponding rise in temperature over and above what's come in, to get the maximum efficiency out of the engine. If you go through a compressor to get the high pressure you need, you automatically get high temperature. Well, these guys were going through a system where they went through multiple compressors and were dropping the flow out and refrigerating it, so that it kept cold when it was going into the main engine. And that meant you could get a higher thermal efficiency out of it. Now, unfortunately, this kind of idea has been looked at by the major engine companies, and if you do the analysis and go all the way to the mechanics of it,

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which I did, it turns out that the extra weight of the engine from all this complication and the increased frontal area was just about equal to making a conventional engine of the bigger size. You really paid too much in mechanical complexity and weight for this theoretical improvement. So my view was that it was a trade and you were just going to have a more expensive engine doing the same thing kind of thing. Anyway, that was an example of how one branch of the aircraft industry interacted with another. A few of us just got pulled in weekends and evenings to help Bill Lear. Bill Lear apparently never hired full-time engineers. He did all his engineering with people that he persuaded to work part time.

WESTWICK: There's no overhead at least.

BROWN: No, exactly. But that was the only example I can come up with of an external interaction.

WESTWICK: And then I'm not sure of when exactly you retired.

BROWN: '92. I actually might look back and think I retired prematurely. Once the F-117 got into production Sherm Mullin took over the program management, because you can tell I'm basically a conceptual research kind of guy rather than a manager of a production line. Sherm was certainly much better at that than I would have been. So I went on then to manage what became the newly formed stealth technology division, which included the materials labs, the model making facilities where we did the test models for the radar ranges, and actually building radar ranges across the country for people. We built the new one for what was the RAMS program for the Air Force at White Sands. We got the contract to build that. And then we built several others for other companies: Martin in Florida, ourselves out between Palmdale and the Antelope Valley.

WESTWICK: Were you also involved with the stealth ship?

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BROWN: Oh, yeah. That was when I was running the stealth technology, and one of my groups did the analysis for the stealth ship. The program manager for that was Ugo Coty, who died two or three years ago. He did not work for me, but the people who did the stealth analysis on the ship worked for me. Basically, looking from the front view, that was an F-117 with the wings taken off. You've probably seen pictures of it.

WESTWICK: Yeah, I've seen pictures of it.

BROWN: So I worked on that. In, let’s see, 1989, by that time the F-117 was released to the public. I have sort of a funny little story that attaches to that, which may be of interest or not. I was on vacation with my wife and with the same Leo Celniker and his wife in South America. We're flying from Iguazu Falls to Rio in a Brazilian regional airplane. I pick up a Portuguese language newspaper, open it to page 3, and there's a picture of my Top Secret airplane. I thought, I better report to the consulate at Rio and let them know about this. Well, when we got to Rio and checked into the hotel, there was a news item, and the U.S. Air Force was revealing the existence of the airplane. The picture was the same one that they were showing on TV, so that was okay. Not long after that a number of universities that taught graduate courses in electrical engineering came to the Air Force and said, "This stealth business is very interesting. We know nothing about it, but we're giving guys Ph.D.s in electrical engineering." Well, we in fact would hire Ph.D.s. One of them was Clay Larsen, who worked for me for a long time and is still at the Skunk Works. He was from Ohio State, and Ohio State was one of the people who came to the Air Force and said, "Is there any way we can learn a bit more about this?" So the Air Force said, "We'll tell you what, we've got a couple of people that we can send out to the universities, and we can give you about a one or two-hour briefing on what we're allowed to tell you that will just get you pointed in the right direction. We certainly want your people to be knowledgeable enough to be able to teach this subject to help it out." The two people who were picked were John Cashen and myself, John from Northrop and myself from Lockheed. One of the places I went to was UCLA. I went to the electrical engineering department one Friday afternoon, and prior to that I got a phone call from the technical editor of Aviation Week. Oh,

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golly, I've forgotten his name. He got killed in a car crash a few years ago. Michael Dornheim. He was the West Coast technical editor for Aviation Week up to his death, which was about five, six years ago. He called me up and said, "I understand you're giving a talk about stealth to UCLA. Is it okay if I sit in?" I said, "Well, remember, I may not be able to answer your questions because I'm very limited, but yeah, fine." So I go to the meeting, and there is the chairman of the department, Nick Alexopolous. He was there, and so was the tech editor Mike Dornheim of Aviation Week, and another guy there with a foreign accent who's about my same age—I was about 60 or 61 then. I was introduced to him as Peter Ufimtsev. And Peter Ufimtsev was the guy who had written a thesis back in the Moscow Institute of Theoretical Physics in the '63 to '66 period on the physical theory of diffraction.

WESTWICK: This is the paper that Overholser read and it inspired him for the facets, correct?

BROWN: No. Okay, I'm going to tell you the correct story, because it's been garbled a lot. There's been a number of versions. Denys's boss—again, whose name I don't remember; his name is mentioned at Skunk Works—Denys's boss was the real radar smarts guy. Denys was the very good computer savvy guy who put the physical optics idea into a computer program which we could use to analyze. Physical optics is an approximation—I'm just going to show you this; use this plate as an example—which says if I have a flat plate of arbitrary shape, but all flat so it's all at the same angle to the radar, as I illuminate this with a uniform radar signal, the way it works is it doesn't strictly reflect. I illuminate it, and that particular area I illuminate then reradiates. It reradiates actually in all directions, but if you're doing it at right angles, although it radiates in all directions, all of these cancel out except the stuff that comes back because it's all in sync. Everything that comes back straight at you.

WESTWICK: Right. That's how you do the calculations.

BROWN: Yes. If I rotate this backwards, I'll get another answer. If I make it like a diamond, I get another answer. But physical optics is a simple theory we use that says that if I have uniform

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illumination, I'll get uniform return from every part of this plate. Now, we know that's not quite true because there's really a diffraction term around the perimeter which increases the signal, because as energy goes around the corner it sort of gets concentrated at this edge. So that actually gives a stronger signal from the periphery than it does from the rest of it. We all knew that. It would be neat to understand that. As it happened, because of the way that we do material attenuation on the edges, it didn't make a huge difference because we attenuated that diffraction by mechanical means. So in fact the signal we did get back was very close to physical optics. But it still would have been neat to have the diffraction term in there. Okay, Peter Ufimtsev has done physical theory of diffraction in his thesis in Moscow in the '60s, and this is a good example of the radar equation. It was published in a Russian magazine, the equivalent of, say, the Institute of Electrical Engineers monthly magazine, technical but unclassified, in 1971. The Air Force has a foreign technology division which looks at all of these things all over the world. It picked it up in 1971. He had published his PhD stuff in 1963 to '66, and the Air Force did it in '71. Denys Overholser picked up on it in 1974 and said, "Hey, I can add this into my physical optics to get the extra terms that I need to give a bit more accuracy.”

WESTWICK: So in addition to the standard physical optics reflection, you get the diffraction.

BROWN: I've now got the effect of the diffraction term, which is when the energy goes around the corner. That improves the accuracy. His first program was called Echo 1, and the program with the physical theory of diffraction added was called Echo 2. That was what we used in the design of the F-117. Okay. I go to give my paper, and I'm introduced to Peter Ufimtsev, and of course I've got to alter my paper to some extent and acknowledge exactly as I said to you just now, how we went from physical optics to the physical theory of diffraction using Peter's information. And it was very interesting to see his reaction. You know, you could see it facially. The first reaction was, “the enemy is using my stuff.” His second reaction, which came very quickly after that, was, “well, at least somebody is.” Because it had never been picked up in Russia as other than just an academic exercise—going back to our radar equation, the amount of

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difference you had to make was such that most people outside the U.S.A. didn't even think it was practical to attempt. So that's how the physical theory of diffraction got into our stuff.

WESTWICK: Now, when stealth goes public, it almost achieves a certain celebrity, and then the Skunk Works also comes out of the dark a little bit.

BROWN: Yes, exactly.

WESTWICK: Were you caught up in this? You mentioned you were on Discovery and these TV programs.

BROWN: Oh, sure. As I say, I was on several History and Discovery Channel things. I have to be very careful about what I say, because a great deal of this stuff is still classified Top Secret as far as performance is concerned.

WESTWICK: The RCS is still strictly classified, right?

BROWN: The actual values of the radar cross section, the RCS, are still secret. So I’ve got to be very careful not to fall into that trap. I actually got hauled over the coals once when we had a meeting at the CIA, when we had to first reveal to the CIA, who of course promoted the U-2 and the SR-71, the F-117 technology. What the Air Force people hadn't made clear to me was that we were not supposed to reveal the existence of the airplane; we were merely supposed to reveal the existence of the technology. One of the things that I said was in connection with infrared systems. We had to design infrared windows which allow your infrared seeker to look out of them but radar not to look in. One of the devices we used for that was making a giant crystal out of material called zinc selenide. It has the property of being able to transmit infrared light over the full infrared spectrum range, which glass does not. You cannot transmit infrared through glass very easily, only in one or two very unique frequencies. So you get the full frequency range for zinc selenide, and then you coat it with the equivalent of a microwave grid on the

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outside to reflect the radar and still allow infrared to penetrate, because infrared frequencies are so much higher than radar that they can penetrate very small dimensions. Of course microwave radar is a much lower frequency, and so it can't penetrate that, which is the principle we're going to use. So I said that, “we made this thing. It took about six months to make it,” and then I said, “when we installed it in a test fixture a fairly competent laboratory technician actually cracked it diagonally across just when screwing it in place, because this stuff is fairly fragile.” I said it cost $750,000. And my actual phrase was, "It cost $750,000 a ship set," meaning one for the bottom of the airplane, one for the top. Because we have to look at infrared ahead and also look at where the bomb drops. Immediately after I had given my talk two security guys from the Air Force came up and grabbed me by both arms and said, "You said ‘ship set.’ That's revealing that there's an airplane, and you're not supposed to do that." I said, "Oh, shit." [laughter] That was, when would that be? That would be before the airplane was revealed. That'd probably about in the mid-'80s.

WESTWICK: Now, you retired after the end of the Cold War. Was there a sense that the end of the Cold War was imminent?

BROWN: My actual experience at Lockheed was that we got a new president in 1989 at Lockheed in the aircraft side, and there were some rather, in my view, dumb decisions made about engineering and manufacturing. [clock strikes in background] You probably need to get going, don't you?

WESTWICK: Yes, we might have to wrap this up.

BROWN: Basically, a decision was made to move all the engineering at Lockheed Aeronautics to Burbank and all the manufacturing to Georgia. I said, "This is the dumbest thing anybody can do." I had fights with the president. It actually came initially from the chairman of the board. I wrote letters about this and eventually I got to a stage where I felt I had to quit. I probably should have stuck it out because the president got fired anyway. Then at the time that I was going to 73

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retire, which was 1989, as a result of these letters of mine just not working, the guy who was the chief scientist for the corporation noted that one or two good people, quote, were leaving Lockheed, California Company’s aircraft side probably as a result of this president, and offered me a job as corporate director of engineering. My job there, I didn't have anybody working for me, but I'd go around the corporation and try and make sure that we got the best parts of different parts of the corporation intermingling. In the mid-'80s in addition to doing the stealth technology, I had taken a big interest in concurrent engineering as a result of my F-117 work, and essentially became the concurrent engineering guru for the F-22 program as well as the stealth technology guy. This is the concurrent engineering you're probably familiar with. It's basically interaction, not just between manufacturing and design but all the other aspects. For instance, for the first time on the F-22 we brought the chief test pilots and all the test pilots into the initial design stages.

WESTWICK: Test and operations also?

BROWN: All the different testing, operations. So we had a much stronger concurrent engineering that we even had in the Skunk Works.

WESTWICK: Well, I'm sorry, but I just realized I've taken your entire morning plus something extra.

BROWN: That's all right. I've been doing the talking.

WESTWICK: Well, that's why we're here. We're not here to listen to me talk. This has been fantastic. [end interview]