It was
natural that one would want to work for Glenn L. Martin
by David B.
At the Glenn L. Martin
Company in Middle River Maryland, in
1951, Mr. E. E.
(Pete)
Clark,
the
chief of aerodynamics,
interviewed
me for several hours, including lunch and afterwards. We agreed I should work there. It was the gift of a
lifetime! Mr. Clark found out that I had built model airplanes all my life and had
worked at a grass strip airport covering wings, welding and riveting, repairing, inspecting
and modifying light planes. He found out, too, that I had earned a Bachelor of Science at Virginia Polytechnic
Institute in aeronautical engineering. I had graduated with honors, and was placed
number one in the class. I felt lucky to be hired.
Starting on August 2, 1951, the company
assigned me to the Canberra project in the aerodynamics group. Joe Burghardt
was the project engineer and Howard E. (Howie) Schick was in charge of stability
and control, so I
sat
next to him. The English Electric Company had earlier delivered three Canberra aircraft to be used at Martin, and we still had WD932
and WD940, in the effort to turn it into the United States Air Force B-57. It required not just
changing skin gauges and rivet sizes, but meeting MIL-SPEC-F-8785 ASG,
the flying quality spec for piloted aircraft. It was said, at the time, that this was something to do with the balance
of payments abroad, having to do with the war. This was hard to swallow, as we still had
a Martin XB-S1 on the field, a really advanced aircraft with swept wings, two pod-mounted jet
engines, a high T-tail, bicycle landing gear and other features to make it a really high-speed bomber. Later, it became
clear that
the
Canberra had the greatest ratio of low speed to high speed of anything in the inventory, and this became increasingly important as we improved
the high subsonic capability in flight test and then were invited to build a special purpose
high-altitude variant.
Wing
Commander W. E. W. Petter had designed a beautifully streamlined, low-drag airframe
with lightweight structure. He had chosen the equivalent of a NACA 0012 airfoil, inboard, which had
plenty of room for deep spars but also avoided the early Mach problems over the
upper surface of cambered airfoils. Contributing to low weight, he had avoided hydraulics
on the controls, and used geared and spring tabs on the ailerons, elevator and
rudder.
All
of this later enabled us to use the aircraft in a special high altitude variant—the BS7D.
These are my first memories at Martin. Thank you!
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| The Martin B-57 Canberra |
