Word: designs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Replied Air Force Chief of Staff General David Jones: "Even more would have come if they could have got away." The beribboned brass hats were there to honor the one man above all others who gave the U.S. Air Force its unchallenged technological superiority: Lockheed Aircraft's famed design chief, Clarence ("Kelly") Johnson, perhaps the most successful aviation innovator since Orville and Wilbur Wright...
...birthday, received the Air Force's highest civilian medal that December afternoon in Ohio, and later the same day was inducted into the Aviation Hall of Fame. Those were only the latest tributes in an extraordinary career. During more than four decades at Lockheed, Johnson personally directed the design and production of 40 planes, including the first American combat jet (F-80), the U-2 spy plane and the Mach 3 (three times the speed of sound) SR-71, which recently flew from New York to London in a record-breaking 1 hr. 55 min. As head of Lockheed...
Johnson's greatest talent was his ability to create aircraft that pushed men and materials to their limits-and beyond. Wedding glider design to jet technology, he created the long, thin-winged U2, which for almost four years flew so high (80,000 ft.) over Soviet territory that no plane or missile could reach it; it was only when Francis Gary Powers' U-2 was downed by a new Soviet missile in 1960 that the world learned of the spy plane's existence. Johnson's double delta YF-12 interceptor remained unchallenged for a decade until...
...retire to his cattle ranch near Santa Barbara, Calif, he is uneasy about the state of American aviation. "We are in a time of great confusion without any forward-looking programs," he told Hannifin. He does not expect an American SST before 1990. Nor does he expect any significant design breakthroughs soon. What he foresees is greater emphasis on fuel economy, with aircraft "flying higher and farther with good payloads, but not necessarily faster...
...gave poor health as the reason, but by all appearances, Leiding's main problems were bad luck in sales and some brusque boardroom politics. When he took over the top job at Volkswagen's Wolfsburg headquarters in 1971, Leiding recognized that the basic Beetle, essentially a 1937 design, was steadily losing consumer appeal, and he moved quickly to develop new models to replace it. Unfortunately, the oil crisis and the subsequent economic slowdown hit just as Leiding was rolling out his new cars. Caught in a classic revenue squeeze, Leiding started jacking up the price of the Beetle...