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on the side of the car, because the streamlined cars would reach such high speeds on the straightaway that they would lose all their advantage by having to brake at the turn. This was a difficult effect, too, because if one brake opened a bit earlier than the other, the car would just swap ends. They still don’t use dive brakes today to my knowledge; but many other ideas from aerodynamics have been incorporated in the design of racing autos.
    The experience was a liberal education for me in the practical application of aerodynamic theory.
    Among the airplane models tested by the university was a new design from the recently-reorganized Lockheed company. The chairman of the board, Robert Ellsworth Gross, 35, had decided that the company’s future was not in the single-enginewooden aircraft that had been so successful in the past, but in the newer all-metal designs with twin engines and the capability of carrying more passengers.
    The new model was the Electra. It developed some very serious problems, I thought, from what I then knew of aerodynamics. It had very bad longitudinal stability and directional-control problems. But most aircraft of that day had similar failings. Professor Stalker, in consultation with Lloyd Stearman, already a recognized top-notch designer at age 33 and first president of the company, decided the figures were acceptable.
    When I left college with my master of science degree in 1933, I owed only $500 and had enough money to buy a used Chevrolet sedan to try again for a job in California. Don went with me, and once again we modified our car to stretch gasoline. Thanks to our work in the wind tunnel and the Sheehan scholarship that last year, I was relatively wealthy. We didn’t try to continue our consultancy work with the wind tunnel because it now was so lucrative that it was attracting the professors’ attention. Besides, at the university we certainly weren’t going to design aircraft—and that was my goal. But I didn’t make that much money again until 10 years later.
    When we got to California in 1933, I was hired at Lockheed by Cyril Chappellet, one of the original investors and now secretary of the company, assistant to the president, and personnel officer, and by Hall L. Hibbard, chief engineer. Both were young men themselves. I think an important reason for my being hired was that I had run the wind-tunnel tests on the company’s new plane. I was to receive $83 a month to start in tool design until they could assign me as an engineer. There were five engineers at the time, counting Hibbard. Don Palmer was hired at Vultee Airplane Company in Glendale.
    Practically the first thing I told Chappellet and Hibbard was that their plane was unstable and that I did not agree with the university’s wind-tunnel report.

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A Growing Airplane Company
    W HEN I ANNOUNCED AT LOCKHEED that the new airplane, the first designed by the reorganized company and the one on which its hopes for the future were based, was not a good design, actually was unstable, Chappellet and Hibbard were somewhat shaken. It’s not the conventional way for a young engineer to begin employment. It was, in fact, very presumptuous of me to criticize my professors and experienced designers.
    Hibbard didn’t comment on that first day, but he thought about what I had said.
    He grilled me thoroughly on my background. Could I draw? How much math had I had? Well, I’d had quantum theory and had tutored in calculus. I had good grades, recommendations from my professors, and the wind-tunnel experience.
    Hibbard himself was a fine engineer, with a degree in aeronautics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an outstanding institution. And he wanted to get some “new young blood … fresh out of school with newer ideas” in the engineering department, as he explained many years later in an interview.
    “He looked so young,” he said. “I was almost afraid that he couldn’t read or write!… We got some fresh ideas,