Full Circle

Sometime back—more than four (and a half) decades—I was a young NASA flight controller in Houston, working 60 or more hours a week learning the skills needed to put humans in space so that they could live and work more than 200 miles above the Earth. I was also a new airplane owner—the airplane being new to me, not “new” itself. In fact, my little Grumman AA1B had been the airport rent-a-wreck until the owners took pity and sold it to me (the only person who was renting it) for a trivial down payment and a promise to pay the rest when I could get it. It had faded paint, a threadbare interior, one Narco Omnigator MkIII NavCom in the panel that sorta worked (sometimes), and an engine that burned about a quart of oil every two hours. But it was mine, and it had potential.

When I wasn’t in training, I was at the airport working on my little machine. In the years I owned it, I incorporated almost every STC that was applicable, put in an IFR panel, stripped and painted the exterior, and eventually replaced the 108-horse Lycoming with a screaming 160. Yeah … I put way more money into the machine than it was worth, but I flew the heck out of it, built a lot of time, and learned a lot about wrenching on airplanes. A nice Houston evening saw me out at Spaceland Airport in my T-hangar, often until midnight because it was way too hot to work until the sun had set.

There wasn’t a lot of interaction between pilots and owners at Spaceland in those days—probably owing to the high percentage of NASA engineers in the population, most of whom were introverts by definition. I didn’t know my hangar neighbors as anything but voices on the radio—so I was slightly surprised during one late-night work session to see a pair of boots walking up (I was under the fuselage on a creeper, so the boots were inverted to my eyes, and the person they were attached to out of sight above the wing). “Hey, there—got a minute to look at something?” the deep drawling voice attached to the boots said.

I rolled out from under the wing and (after turning myself right side up) I was face to face with Deke Slayton. You’ve heard of Deke—one of the original seven Mercury astronauts, Chief of the Astronaut Office … yeah, that Deke Slayton. Deke was getting close to retiring from the space program, and I had probably only seen him in meetings once or twice in my short career—my years in Houston just starting as he was wrapping up. I’m sure he didn’t know me from Adam but probably figured that a young male working on an airplane in the heat and humidity late at night was an engineer in the program. And I am sure that he didn’t know that he and I both got our aeronautical engineering degrees from the University of Minnesota. And I didn’t know that he was my “back door” hangar mate—his little Formula One racer (N21X, a Williams W-17—now in a museum) living in the T-hangar behind mine. Honestly, I had no idea he was flying things that didn’t burn kerosene.

Deke was holding a fiberglass air intake—a piece of his cowling. “Hey, I’m thinking of changing the shape of this inlet, and was wondering what you thought of the idea. I’d probably have to make a bend here, cut this off, and maybe change the outlet area …” To be honest, I made up the details of that sentence just now—it was a long time ago, and all I really remember was that he was asking me about modifying his fiberglass inlet. And he was asking for my opinion because … why? Because my Yankee cowling was off and I was playing around with the crappy Cessna airbox or some other arcane piece of hardware? Maybe timing my mags? I have no idea—maybe he just wanted an excuse to meet whoever was hangared behind him. But we talked for a while, traded stories, got to know each other—not as space engineers, but as private airplane owners and pilots—guys crazy about airplanes.

(There were always two kinds of pilot-astronauts in the program—the guys who had never been in an airplane until they started basic military flight training, and Uncle Sam had bought all the avgas and kerosene they had ever burned … and the guys who grew up flying their father’s Cub before they were legally old enough and had more flight time before they entered the military than they accumulated afterward—they owned little airplanes to play with on the side even while jetting off in a T-38 for work. You can guess which guys I liked to hang out with.)

What prompted this little remembrance from long ago? Well, I was sitting at my workbench this afternoon, shaping the intake scoop for the F1 Rocket I’m building. The build manual says, “You probably want to use foam, fiberglass, and filler to make a smooth transition from the intake opening up to the airbox.” How you do that is up to the builder—and the pictures aren’t very helpful. Foam a little, glass a little, sand … a lot … and then take a look to see what you’ve got. And then question what you’ve done and look for someone to either agree with you or point out your flaws. And just like that, I understood Deke’s late-night walk around the hangar block, looking for some feedback. We can all use a second opinion, no matter how much we’ve done with flying machines.

Today, I live at an airpark, but we don’t have a large number of airplane builders with aeronautical engineering degrees, so I mostly look for feedback on the internet. It’s useful—but not the same as chatting with your hangar neighbor in person about what you’re doing, what you’ve done, and what you’re planning to do. If you find yourself closer (in years) to the end of a full career than to the beginning, remember to spend a little time (in person if you can or online if you must) with the newbies. At best, they’ll soak up some of your hard-earned knowledge; at worst, they’ll humor an old guy—but still enjoy the memories and the conversation. Either way, it’s a win-win—and it brings us back full circle in this grand world of aviation.