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believe me! When he told me that the new airplane we had just sent in (to the university wind tunnel) was no good, and it was unstable in all directions, I was a little bit taken aback. And I wasn’t so surethat we ought to hire the guy. But then I thought better of it. After all, he came from a good school and seemed to be intelligent. So, I thought, let’s take a chance.…”
    As a start, I was assigned to work with Bill Mylan in the tooling department, designing tools for assembly of the Electra, until there was more space in the engineering department and a job for me there. Mylan was an old hand and knew his business.
    “I’ll build them, kid, and you can draw them later,” he explained to me.
    I learned some useful lessons. For one, I learned to read the fine print. One of my first jobs for Mylan was to design a heat-treat furnace for the new dural aluminum materials that would be used in production. I didn’t know much about such furnaces, so I went downtown where there were several in operation and studied them, then went back and drew up what I thought we would need. A few days later, I went out in the shop to see how it was coming. The workmen were standing up to their ankles in brick chips. They had a big, powerful band-saw and were trimming bricks.
    “What are you doing? Just lay the bricks in there. Why are you cutting them?” I wanted to know.
    “Mr. Johnson, we’re just following your orders.”
    In the corner of the shop order was a line in small print, “Unless otherwise specified, all tolerances are to be met within 1 / 32 of an inch.” So they were sawing the bricks because I had listed 2½ by four by nine inch brick.
    I discovered that there was a lot to learn about tooling. My first design for a jig—that’s a pattern or framework in which the airplane and its parts are built—allowed room to work on one side only—unless the workmen crawled under it and worked over their heads!
    After a few months, Hibbard called me into his office.
    “Kelly, you’ve criticized this wind-tunnel report on the Electra signed by two very knowledgeable people. Why don’t you go back and see if you can do any better with the airplane?”
    Hibbard sent me back to the University of Michigan windtunnel with the Electra model in the back of my car. It took 72 tunnel runs before I found the answer to the problem.
    It was a process of evolution. On the seventy-second test, I came up with the idea of putting centrollable plates on the horizontal tail to increase its effectiveness and get more directional stability. That worked very well, particularly when we removed the wing fillets, or fairings onto the fuselage—put on apparently because they were coming into style and being used successfully on such airplanes as the Douglas DC-1. And we avoided the trouble others had with them when not used properly.
    We then added a double vertical tail because the single rudder did not provide enough control if one engine went out. That was so effective we removed the main center tail. And there you had the final design of the Electra. The distinctive twin tails on all of the early Lockheed metal airplanes, and the triple tail of the familiar Constellation airliner of the mid-’40s and ’50s, were the result of these tunnel tests.
    I have saved a letter Hibbard sent me while I was still working at the university wind tunnel. He had airmailed some cowls for a more powerful engine, with 550 horsepower, that Pan American Airlines wanted in the airplane. The airline was “very, very much interested,” he wrote. “… in fact, want them so badly that they are actually going to pay for these last tests which you are running up there now.”
    “Dear Johnson,” the letter began. “You will have to excuse the typing as I am writing here at the factory tonite and this typewriter certainly is not much good.
    “You may be sure that there was a big celebration around these parts when we got your wires telling about the new find