Chapter 5
The Boeing Company 1979-1989
I filled out an application and in a few weeks I was contacted for an interview. During the interview I explained to the avionics shop manager, Jim Hay that I didn't know one thing about airplanes but I did know lot about ships equipment which I figured was essentially the same stuff, autopilot, radar, communications, navigation. After some more questions, he said "How soon can you start!"

Avionics Technician
Two weeks later I reported in as a "new hire" electronics tech assigned to the avionics shop on the flight test ramp. I'd be working flightline maintenance in the avionics shop. I joined the machinists union and later I realized how lucky I was that the flight test dept had hired me and not the factory or a laboratory. Boeing was gearing up for the upcoming 757/767 program and needed lots of electronics types as this would be their first "glass cockpit" airplane model with all electronic displays and more complex flight management and flight control computers.
 

I quickly realized that Boeing never did anything in a small way. I'd been hired for a program that was two years away. Growing up in Seattle I'd seen Boeing go through the highs and lows and vowed to myself to give them 110% so that I'd be the last guy to be laid off.

Modern jet aircraft were a whole lot more complicated than anything I'd ever dreamed. With numerous diverse systems, all cross connected, redundant and installed with the quality to last decades, it was a technicians dream.

On the flight test ramp stood one of just about every model Boeing built. Each plane flew more or less every day with a plan for testing or certifying various modifications or changes. There was even a Korean War era F-86 Sabre used for chase and a Messerschmitt B105 helicopter.

Crews of mechanics, electricians and electronics techs worked day and night installing and removing changes, preflighting the planes and recovering them after the flights. It was incredibly exciting and I felt like a sponge learning and admiring how these complex flying machines worked. Crawling around inside a plane and seeing how well they were built, learning how everything worked and sitting in the cockpit operating the electronics was just incredible. Most of the test planes had racks of monitoring equipment installed in place of the seats in back, used for monitoring and recording airplane parameters under test.
During each flight, pilots would write up every airplane defect or anomaly they'd see and they were called "flight squawks". Each jet had to be in flawless working order and the pilots usually knew exactly how the whole plane was supposed to work.

It could be a burned out light bulb or a scratch on a panel, or anything else that came to their attention that wasn't 100% perfect. When a plane landed, people would ask "How many squawks?" The number of squawks written was always a good indicator of how well the plane was performing and how hard the ground crew would have to work to fix things on the overnight. Some squawks were generated by the experimental software or due to the nature of the test and those were answered by engineering. The others were to be fixed before the next flight. Sometimes they could be deferred but that was always a last resort and had to meet certain criteria. Everything that was done on the plane was documented by engineering and QA and all completed work was checked by a quality control inspector.
 

One plane at flight test was a used 727-100 called "E-209". The company used it for miscellaneous jobs but mainly to take in-flight photography of new customer planes. It had had a section of the forward interior with the sidewalls removed and no seats, so photographers could get their cameras and tripods right up against the windows. It had a galley installed and the ground crew assigned to the plane made the best coffee on the field. Word was that the 727 had come from a German airline and their coffeemakers made better coffee than anyone's. Looking back, it might have been a "French press" type. People would show up to that plane at coffee break for a great cup of ten cent coffee.

After three months, management sent me on loan to the Renton flightline avionics shop. I arrived there early on my first day and got a seat at the one of the tables. Boeing always made sure that each shop had a break room to gather, or a screened off area to eat lunch and have coffee breaks, and I didn't know anyone, these were all new faces. But I noticed that some of the guys were acting strange. I soon realized that everyone had their own seat, and I had mistakenly sat in a guy's chair that had been his for the last ten or twenty years. I quickly found another seat for myself and everything was soon healed over, but I always remembered that experience. The next twelve months were spent functional testing systems on the newly built 727s and 737s coming off the assembly lines. Everything obviously had to be tested and there were all kinds of tools and gizmos to make the plane's systems think they were in the air flying. One time I was testing the intercom on a 727 and I caused some damage and it freaked me out. I was working near the top of the tail because Boeing put intercom jacks all over the planes for ease of maintenance. I had to take a little square panel off to get to the jack and test it. So I had this pneumatic screwdriver and I put it on the screw and pressed the trigger.

The driver spun and completely ruined the head of the screw. So I went to the next one, pressed even harder and the same thing happened. I began to sweat because now the panel would never come off. The same thing happened to all four screws. I couldn't believe I did that because I knew my way around power drivers. Feeling a bit sick, I climbed down and went and saw the supervisor Chuck. He put me at ease telling me that that his happens to everyone when they first try to remove a screw on the outside of a new painted airplane. He went over to a cabinet and pulled out a tool called a Lester tool. It was a rivet gun with a screwdriver tip and a turn handle on it. You put it hard on the screw, leaned into it and hit the button, all while turning the handle. It made the nastiest screws come right out.

It was around this time that I read an article in the Boeing Newspaper that the company would begin paying for people to earn a degree in several disciplines including engineering. I went to the informational meeting at the corporate headquarters and ran into another new guy in our shop, a fellow by the name of Dolen. I didn't know him well but I'd seen him around, he'd been with the company for a while and had just come back from a Boeing project in Iran. After the Shah had fallen, he was back in Seattle looking for opportunities. Dolen was a wiry guy with quick bird-like motions and we started talking at lunch. He told me about a job opening he knew about in our shop and encouraged me to apply along with him. It was a job called flight analyst.
I'd befriended a couple of analysts while working in Renton and knew that they flew on test flights as in-flight technicians. One flew on every production flight out of Renton and Everett and the job required you to have a lot of general knowledge of how the systems on the plane worked, be well versed in the avionics and able to explain tough problems to the ground crews after the flight. There were probably twenty people in the Puget Sound area with this title. I admired that they were senior techs, better paid and with a ton of avionics experience. Seeing the career growth potential in a large company and not completely happy with staying an hourly electronics tech, I applied for the job.
 

I didn't have that much airplane experience but I was eager, energetic and knew how to work with diverse groups of people. Because of some luck or being in the right place at the right time, I landed the position. I'd be working out of my home organization at Seattle flight test along with Dolen and two other guys. I also applied for the night school engineering degree program at Cogswell College.

Flight Analyst
The job was a huge step and a prestigious one to boot. After all the systems testing, troubleshooting and simulation I'd done on the ground, all of a sudden I was sitting in the flight deck watching these big flying machines being operated by a couple of test pilots in blue jeans and baseball caps.

My first couple of flights left me thrilled to see everything working in the air after testing the aircraft systems on the ground. The engineering and flight operations department at flight test didn't have the same requirements to take a flight analyst on every flight, they only asked for one if they thought they needed one due to the testing for that day. My boss told me that they had to get a VP to sign off on my promotion because the pay raise was so large.

Test Engineering didn't like to admit it but they understood that a non-engineering "jack of all trades" technical type on every test flight could contribute to the success of the flight no matter what they were doing. Someone who could crawl around the cargo areas below the floor, change out a computer or radio in the electronics compartment, take a reading or look for some noise, smoke or smell in the back, or up in the ceiling. The other part of the analyst job was to talk with the ground crews and assist them in fixing a squawk or tough issue after the flight.
I began taking evening engineering classes and they went well for several quarters until I enrolled in a required class called Fourier Transforms. Needless to say, it involved calculus and differential equations and I could not fake it. You had to know your advanced math. I went back and took another math class at the community college but the instructor didn't inspire me, there was no good help and so I finally gave up on my dream.

After that failed class, I was really down in the dumps but I realized my goal didn't have to be shattered. I'd worked with enough engineers by then to have known a few good ones and a few bad ones. Boeing was an engineering company and engineers came in many shapes and forms. I even wondered how a couple had even gotten through Fourier Transforms.

Heck, I could still design and create things plus I could see the edge of an incredible career without being an engineer. Some acted as though they were better than the maintenance people and I had to be careful that I didn't take it personally because I had tried so darn hard but for calculus and Fourier Transforms.

But things were too busy at flight test to cry much. Simultaneous 757 and 767 test programs were operating at fever pitch, 24/7. Boeing used three or four of each new model plane in a big test program in order to get the FAA certifications done faster. Different testing scenarios were assigned to each plane.  

One would do brake testing, one would do performance, one would do engine tests, etc. The overall direction and sequencing of the test planes was determined by the test engineering group and was filtered down to the teams assigned to the planes. As the first test planes were going together in the factory, mechanics, electricians and technicians were assigned to each plane along with teams from the test engineering department and the instrumentation group.
 

Special orange-colored instrumentation wiring was installed as the plane went together because some of the sensors and wiring could not be accessed later. Each team would more or less stay with that plane for the duration of the test, some for years.
 

As the 757/767 test fleet started flying, pilots and some crewmembers were seen wearing flashy new blue nylon flight jackets with the flight test patch over the left breast. People started asking, how do you get one? And it was circulated that "anyone who was really flying" could get one. So then there was a big fight about who was unquestionably on flying status versus those who wanted that cool jacket really bad. It was a status symbol and it was defended pretty well by flight operations. You couldn't buy one anywhere, but I did see an awful lot of blue jackets around the flight line.
As I began flying, I was primarily working the 767 and I gravitated toward the #3 767 because I meshed well with the engineering people on that team. The guys were easy going and we had a mutual respect for each other. During the flights, I contributed to the success of the test any way I could, including bringing cups of coffee to the guys up front.
 

Everyone on #3 got along well and kept things light under the immense pressure to get a flight off every day and return with good data. We had one permanent pilot, Tom Edmonds who had a tan rugged look and a long string of flying accomplishments going back years. Relaxed, humble and gracious, his reputation was legendary. The other pilot on the plane would be assigned by flight operations and we'd see just about everyone in the pilot group as they were rotated around.
 

Some were cool operators and others were high strung. One time we were flying with a pilot named Twiggs and he became enraged while trying to keep the plane stable during the test. It was a flight where the center of gravity was being closely monitored and the test director told everyone to stay in their seats. Periodically Twiggs would get on the PA and yell at everyone in the back when he felt the plane change, he thought someone was walking around. We all looked at each other and shrugged our shoulders.   

But then he got the PA mixed up with the radio and he yelled at the air traffic controllers and sent a landing request over the PA. It got very quiet after that. Each plane became the personality of the people assigned to it and guys made patches and stickers with the a design around the type of testing. Patches went on your blue flight jacket or your toolbox and some planes even had a big decal by the nose or the pilots names below the cockpit window. Flight Testing was a huge task and the engineering people and the shop mechanics had to work closely to make sure the plane was in the proper configuration and ready to go for each test.
 

Even though there were teething problems and new equipment to figure out, everyone worked hard to prepare the plane for each day's flying. The owners manuals and operating instructions were being written as we went. One tough problem early on happened just as the plane was ready for departure. With the engines running, the pilots would switch from ground power to airplane power and one of the new digital flight control boxes would illuminate a yellow fault light in the cockpit due to the power spike.

It was exasperating because the engines were running and we were ready to go and no faults could be displayed when we left the gate. This began to happen regularly and was being worked in the labs and it was hugely frustrating to the pilots. I was usually called up to the cockpit to offer advice. One day I suggested that we power off, and back on the CSEU's or "shoeboxes" and see if the faults would reset. It worked and became the standard operating procedure until updated parts arrived several months later.  Seems easy now but this was 1982 and computers were new, desktop PCs were just beginning to show up.
 

FAA certification standards called for proving the new models to airports that were really hot, really cold or the highest in the world to prove the brakes and performance or some other criteria. Another advantage of being in the testing dept was that there was a fair amount of travel involved.

Mechanics and technicians, other support people and numerous engineering types and pilots were needed to accompany the plane, and some trips could involve up to sixty or seventy support people, and then there were sales tours, demonstrations and air shows. 
Flying as a part of the test crew was cool, you got to know many of the pilots and test directors and you had a seat in the cockpit during parts of the flight. The rest of the time you sat in the racks of instrumentation watching the conduct of the test or sometimes I just looked out the window listening to the intercom and radios on a headset.

Sometimes we'd fly all day, halfway across the US; other times we'd spend the entire day in eastern Washington making takeoffs and landings or doing maneuvers that would make people sick.
 

The test aircraft were wired with hundreds if not thousands of sensors and every parameter was recorded on three large tape recorders. Most flights had about 10-15 people on the plane. Some guys ran the instrumentation and others were engineering people engaged with the test being flown that day. Other passengers were not allowed on the plane unless they had a job to do.

One time early in the test program, we were doing flights out of Everett field and just as were getting ready to taxi out and take off, we had a failure of the autopilot control panel. That was a big deal and a show stopper for the day's flying. There were some phone calls and the correct part was found at Boeing field, probably an hour drive each way. The B105 helicopter happened to be at Everett for some reason and I was tasked to jump in, make the run down to Boeing field, get the panel and immediately return with the part and install it.

I went over to the copter and got in and the pilot Dave noticed I was wearing a blue flight jacket. We talked a bit on the intercom as he swung out over Puget Sound and after a few minutes, he said "do you want to take the controls?" Sure! I said. So I flew it a bit and was beaming for the rest of the day. I never knew if he thought I was a pilot or not, but I'm sure the blue flight jacket helped.

Because of the all day flights, the test director would order a bunch of soft drinks, water and a variety of box lunches, one for each person on the flight and maybe a few extra for late add-ons. Each lunch had a sandwich, a piece of fruit and a candy bar. Sometimes there'd be extravagant platters of snacks and other goodies. As the test crew boarded for the flight, guys would grab their favorite box lunch out of a cupboard at the front of the plane and take it back to their seat. The pilots, who came on board last, sometimes got what was left and they got grumpy about it.

Usually pilots made sure that a someone grabbed their favorite sandwich and put it aside for them. Any box lunches left over were fair game and would be rifled for the candy bars by opportunists on the flight. One time, our pilot was busy and forgot to get his lunch. I watched someone rifle the remaining lunches for the candy bars. The guy had just put a lunch back in the cupboard and with his head tilted back, was emptying a whole bag of M&Ms into his mouth, just as the pilot came out of the cockpit to grab his lunch. I watched this poor guy choke on a huge mouthful of M&Ms just as the pilot roared "Who took my candy bar!"

I was a very small part of these huge programs and it was exciting to be a part of the team. All of us knew we were making history testing these new jets. There was a lot going on, the work was serious, fast paced and highly technical and I found myself meeting and working with a lot of really smart people. We were testing and documenting the very core of how these new planes performed.
 

As is true everywhere, there were some big egos and stubborn personalities, but for the most part, the test engineering and the maintenance shop worked together in harmony. Usually I was the only non engineer on the flight and I felt like a pariah in some ways and much appreciated and valued other times. One thing I quickly learned about working with pilots was tact and diplomacy. They had a lot of people feeding them information during the flight and your credibility was everything.
 

Sometimes I'd get called up to the cockpit and the pilots would show me something, a warning light or message or something. If you didn't know the answer to a question, you had better say so because if they ever detected that you didn't tell them the honest facts as you knew them, they would never listen to you again.
 

On the #3 767, "VA003" we did a lot of performance testing. That meant full days of takeoffs and landings, flying low over the eastern Washington farmlands and eventually transitioning to further more risky testing in the high desert of southern California. Boeing had long standing arrangements to use the runways at Edwards Air Force Base on a non-interference basis.

Soon we were off to Edwards with a ton of support people to further document the #3's performance in stopping distance and other criteria. The old 727 E-209 was pressed into service to ferry all the extra crew to and from California so that made it really easy. Advance logistics people had made arrangements for hotel rooms, rental cars and access badges so all you had to do was concentrate on keeping the plane flying and getting the needed test data. Every night there was a party in the hotel bar and you had to be careful working hard and playing hard. Mostly the engineering group stayed in one hotel and shop maintenance people stayed at a different hotel.

There was a purposeful gap between the mechanics and the engineers, a distinct separation and there wasn't a lot of mixing. Maybe they thought the maintenance guys were uncouth and ragtag. Testing for performance landings began early before the wind came up so it was an early takeoff, maybe 5 or 6 AM and the night shift had the plane ready to go as we walked across the ramp at sunrise.

Each day's test was carefully planned and choreographed in advance. Everyone was ready, right down to the photographers stationed on the runway edge.

I recall endless days of takeoffs and circuits amount the pattern and then performance landings where the pilots tried to stop in the shortest amount of runway. We'd hit the ground and everyone in the plane would be heavily thrown forward in their seatbelts as we went from 140 mph to zero in the shortest runway length possible. Then the pilots would add power and we'd take right back off, and with the gear down, fly around the high desert valley for fifteen or twenty minutes to cool the brakes and then do it again. I remember looking up at the partially installed ceiling and interior and watching it shake and rattle as the plane quickly decelerated. It all held together but I watched it out of the corner of my eye each time.
After the flight there'd a debrief and off to the hotel for a run and dinner. Our hotel advertised a heated pool and I wanted to swim, heck it was California and I had brought my bathing suit.
 

The water was cold, and I think it was October or November so I went and talked to the manager about heating the pool and he asked how many people wanted to swim. I circulated a petition around the plane and ramp and had twenty or more signatures on it and I presented it to him the next day. He looked at the paper and curtly told me he wanted to see "some butts" in the pool the next day. There were many more trips to the high desert of southern California where twelve hour days, good weather and the long runways allowed you to get a lot of testing safely done in a short amount of time.
 

An idea for a patent occurred on one of these flights and it was to be one of the highlights of my Boeing career. My idea was based on the fact that everyone on the test plane was required to be "on a headset" connected to the main intercom which was connected to one of the cockpit audio panels. The audio panel is a small control panel that has volume and mike selections for three or four radios and a couple of intercoms.

Occasionally someone would plug in a defective headset and it would short out every headset on the plane. It was dangerous business to affect intercom communications and it was during one of these searches for the "bad headset" that it occurred to me to design an isolator that would electrically separate the headsets in the front of the plane from those in the back.

I'd read about a new chip called an optoisolator and built a working test circuit. My boss, Jim Hay was impressed. He found some budget $ to have one of the electrical shops build a prototype and it worked! I fooled around with it for a bit and tested it on a plane, made some changes and applied for a patent. I spent an interesting six months working with one of Boeing's patent attorneys and the unimaginable happened, it was granted!
Unfortunately the instrumentation engineering group that had responsibility for the headsets and the intercom connection had the "not invented here" mentality and declined to use it. No big deal, Boeing thought it was useful, they owned the patent and paid me a nice bonus. Time marched on and I had a blast flying on test flights and witnessed many of the milestones of certifying the new 757 and 767 models.

There was a notable trip as the final pieces of 767 certification were put together. One of the FAA requirements were long flights and landings at diverse airports for a test called "F&R" for function and reliability. It was decided to combine F&R with a sales trip to Europe and the Middle East. So the #4 767 was finished out with a nice interior and a list of maintenance and engineering people was put together and I was asked to go on the trip too. Boeing took full advantage of the flight giving it a lot of publicity.

The plane was to take the president of Boeing, TA Wilson and group of press people from Seattle to Boston Logan and drop them off and then we'd fly direct to Torino, Italy. There was a Boeing supplier at Torino that built the 767 trailing edge flaps and they had invited us to park on their ramp. There was a lot of excitement on the plane as this was the first real look the press had with the 767 plane and T Wilson was like a proud father as he gave interviews while standing among the rows of mostly empty seats. I met him as he walked the aisles and chatted with everyone.

Later I saw a picture published in the Boeing News with T Wilson doing an interview and me in the background sipping on a bourbon and seven. We used Torino as a base and did day trips to five cities in Italy where we had open house tours and did demonstration flights. It appeared to me that we were courting Alitalia, the Italian state airline.
 

Here I saw a pattern that I would see repeated over many years in many places. The airline pilots got to fly the plane, the flight attendants got to play with the new galleys and airline VIPs sitting in first class were served champagne and snacks as we flew around their cities for an hour.  And then there were maintenance people from all over the airport that would drive over to the shiny new plane on any old flightline baggage loader or truck and wanted a tour. We were happy to show off the inside and had a stack of caps and stickers to give away.

Another notable trip was when the Sultan of Brunei bought two 757s and had one modified as his VIP plane. It had been flown to a modification center in Santa Barbara and upon completion, I was sent there with a flight crew to do the standard Boeing new airplane checkout profile. The mod center had done an excellent job building the VIP 757. It had a bathroom near the front with gold faucets, lots of hand rubbed mahogany, a nice sitting area with a big couch and a television, a bedroom, shower, a big galley with china and first class seating in the back.

I arrived there and began doing some test checks, running the standard built in test on the systems in the electronics compartment checking for faults. But something wasn't right, several tests failed and it appeared that something was wrong with the autopilot equipment in the tail. I was mystified because I'd never seen indications such as these. I had a guy help me verify some of the wiring to the tail and it checked okay. Still the equipment indicated a problem.
The flight crew and mod center management were standing around and the pressure began to mount to say what was wrong. I had worked a 20 hour day and still could not locate the problem. I was completely frustrated because the wiring all checked out but the test would not pass. I believed the test box in the electronics compartment and decided  to order an instrument from our Seattle shop called a Time Domain Reflectometer, or TDR. We'd played with it a bit in the shop and I was fascinated by what it could do. It had the ability to locate faults in wiring. It could tell you how far away (in feet) a wiring fault was located. The TDR was normally used by cable companies to find cable faults before digging up a street and it was meant to be used with coaxial cable but we had found that it worked with most kinds of wiring. I got some sleep and the next day it arrived. We hooked it up to some of the wires leading to the tail and it indicated a fault about eleven feet from the electronics compartment.

Measurements showed that eleven feet was directly behind the fancy lavatory with the gold faucets. I let the mod center know that they might have to move the lav and their eyes got really big. That led to a meeting where I stood by my guns that there was a problem behind the fancy lav. I don't think it was ever built to be moved. The order was given to get behind the lav and they was soon discovered that someone had drilled a hole through a critical wire bundle as it ran up the sidewall. The mod center got permission to splice the wires, the tests all passed and the check flight went off without a hitch. I was happy and relieved that I'd been able to work under pressure and find the problem but I was very, very tired.

Next came a new 737, the -700 with a glass cockpit to test and certify and then came the Saudi and RAF AWACS and Tanker program. I began to see that a career at Boeing was just going to be one program after the next. 
 

I had to get certified to fly on military planes and it involved a more thorough physical, a secret clearance and a ride in the altitude chamber. A group of us were sent to the Navy base at Whidbey island for a day and sat in classes all morning with the main theme being that you needed to be able to detect when you were getting hypoxia, the thing that happens to you when there is not enough oxygen in your bloodstream.

After lunch the group was all trooped over to the building with the altitude chamber. Each of us was paired with another participant and we went into an airtight metal room with several glass portholes on each side. Each of us were given an aircraft-type oxygen mask on a hose and a deck or cards or other task to complete with the partner.

The test director then began raising the altitude of the chamber. They must have made an announcement in the building because all of a sudden there were several faces gawking at us through each porthole. The altitude was raised while trying to play a card game with our partner until we all began to feel the effects of hypoxia. I felt like I wanted to fall asleep.
 

The test director got everyone's attention, we all put on our oxygen masks and everything came back into focus. With the military flight qualification, I began flying on military test flights. All the flight crews were issued olive green flight suits and nomex gloves and the flights were a little more serious. Each flight suit had a Velcro piece over the left breast for a leather patch with your name and insignia and so I ordered one like everyone else with my name and title and a set of wings on it. A guy came up to and told me I probably shouldn't have the wings because only pilots could wear wings. It was probably true but I kept the patch anyway. These planes were all militarized 707s with new generation 737 CFM56 engines, but still with a full flight engineer panel and older instruments and avionics. These flights had a different theme because it was not flight testing, it was production acceptance testing for the military.

Boeing pilots would fly the acceptance test profile and engineering guys would check out the military communications and radar equipment in the back and we would fly the plane as many times as needed until the pilots were satisfied that it met the Boeing criteria. Part of that meant that after each flight, the list of "squawks" would get smaller and smaller until there were none.

Then the Air Force pilot would sit in the left seat and Boeing pilot in the right seat and they'd fly the profile again and  Air Force crews would run the equipment in the back until all were satisfied. Even though these planes were destined for foreign countries, the Air Force accepted the deliveries.  

The AWACS planes were especially interesting with the huge radar dome on top and the inside crammed full of radar displays and communications equipment. The radar itself was so complex and powerful that it had a dedicated radar "operator". There wasn't a heck of a lot for me to do except observe the test and be ready to verify and note airplane problems. I'd sit and watch the pilots for a while and then walk to the back and watch the military hardware being exercised.
 

During one set of tests, we'd fly a 500 mile racetrack pattern off the California coast and the object was to use the AWACS radar and communications equipment to talk to two F16s flying out of Fairchild AFB in Eastern Washington.
 

The test of the AWACS was to follow a plan where one plane was an enemy intruder and the other F-16 the interceptor. The AWACS was essentially "over the horizon" from the "battlefield" and could see everything in the air over probably the whole western half of the US. The radar operators would direct one jet to intercept the intruder, all while over Montana and the Dakotas. It was a hoot watching the whole thing unfold and all the systems working together.

For the 707 Tanker acceptance tests, Boeing had to use a USAF "boomer" to test the refueling boom and the associated systems. The tankers had a place at the very back of the plane where you climbed down a short ladder and laid on a big pad on your stomach. From there you could see out of a large panoramic window just below the tail and there was room for two people side by side.

The boomer Jim, was sent up from McCord AFB south of Seattle and walked around like he was a celebrity seemingly because of his special status as a the guy who actually stuck the refueling probe into the receiver plane. He wore an orange jumpsuit festooned with patches from all of the projects he'd worked on. It was all foreign to me but he was a nice guy and we had fun getting to know each other during the testing. He and I worked together, as my job was to make fine adjustments to the control rods hooked to the joystick he used to fly the probe into the receiver plane. It was breathtaking to lay on your stomach at 35,000 ft looking out at two or three F-16s below, each one ready to fly into position and receive fuel. You weren't supposed to be back there on landings but a few times I laid back there and watched the earth get closer and closer, it was exhilarating. About then, my boss urged me to go into management. Another big program was on its way, the 747-400. I had worked with a few first line managers and it looked like fun to have a say in the way things were done. I was ready to do something new and decided to give it a try.

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