Word: convairs
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When the early missiles were planned, it hardly seemed worthwhile to try for very long ranges. And so the most glamorous missile, the 5,000 mile ICBM (Intercontinental Ballistic Missile), got a low priority. An early contract with Convair was canceled, and work would have stopped entirely if Convair had not continued with its own money. Emphasis was put on defensive missiles-the ground-to-air Nike and the air-to-air Falcon-and on short-range offensive missiles for use near enemy lines...
...first thermonuclear tests in the Pacific in 1951 had only a distant bearing on missiles. The early hydrogen devices were not bombs. Later models became droppable bombs, but they were still much too heavy. Convair, nevertheless, was given a contract for a limited amount of work on an intercontinental missile-just in case...
...morning of last Aug. 4, American Airlines Flight 476, a Convair 240 with two 18-cylinder engines, took off from Springfield, Mo. headed for St. Louis. Twenty-one minutes later, at 12:17, the pilot called on the radio: "Does anybody read 476?" American's radio at Springfield acknowledged, but got no reply. The ground station in St. Louis and two other American airliners heard Flight 476 reporting a fire in No. 2 engine. Three minutes later one of the airliners heard: "Springfield, are you reading 476? We have a bad engine fire." That was the last message from...
Visual Check. After prying into the records and questioning personnel, the CAB detectives found that both rules had been ignored. The flange had been checked only "visually" (by looking at it) before the cylinder was installed in No. 2 engine of the Convair that crashed as Flight 476. An airline inspector testified that this corner-cutting technique was "handed down" to him by a predecessor. The hand-down proved disastrous. When the flange, slightly bent by the earlier failure of its studs, was drawn tight on the second installation, the stresses set up in the steel must have caused fatigue...
...point, the two men piled into Hughes's Convair and took off for Las Vegas. As the plane droned over the desert, Hughes and O'Neil dickered in the cockpit, while two lawyers dozed in the seats behind them. At one point Hughes casually turned the piloting over to O'Neil (although he had never flown a plane), came back after a while and said, "Well, Tom, you're a great pilot...