1 00:00:10,243 --> 00:00:11,911 >> Good morning. 2 00:00:11,911 --> 00:00:12,912 Good morning, welcome 3 00:00:12,912 --> 00:00:14,247 to the Armstrong Flight Research Center. 4 00:00:14,247 --> 00:00:17,183 I'm David McBride, the Center Director. 5 00:00:17,183 --> 00:00:18,885 Welcome, thank you for coming out today 6 00:00:18,885 --> 00:00:21,955 to hear this great talk about the 20th anniversary 7 00:00:21,955 --> 00:00:25,258 of our involvement in TU-144 Program. 8 00:00:25,258 --> 00:00:28,094 I'm glad to have Glenn Bever back with us to talk 9 00:00:28,094 --> 00:00:31,164 about his experiences on the program. 10 00:00:31,164 --> 00:00:34,067 Glenn Bever is the former Deputy Director for Research 11 00:00:34,067 --> 00:00:36,970 and Engineering here at the Center. 12 00:00:36,970 --> 00:00:40,006 Previously served as the Chief 13 00:00:40,006 --> 00:00:41,508 of the Flight Instrumentation Branch, 14 00:00:41,508 --> 00:00:44,644 Chief of the Flight Systems Branch here at Armstrong. 15 00:00:44,644 --> 00:00:47,180 He developed embedded systems for research aircraft 16 00:00:47,180 --> 00:00:50,016 at Armstrong for most of his 42 years at NASA. 17 00:00:50,016 --> 00:00:52,685 He also served as Project Chief Engineer 18 00:00:52,685 --> 00:00:54,988 for the Automated Aerial Refueling Project 19 00:00:54,988 --> 00:00:59,025 and as Chief Engineer for the C-17 Research Flight Computing 20 00:00:59,025 --> 00:01:00,693 Systems Project. 21 00:01:00,693 --> 00:01:04,564 Glenn has worked on at least 17 different aircraft platforms 22 00:01:04,564 --> 00:01:08,701 here at the Center including the F-104, F-16XL, CV-990, 23 00:01:08,701 --> 00:01:17,310 the SR-71, F-15D, high deck, FBF-116 -- or FBF-111, F-18, 24 00:01:17,310 --> 00:01:24,951 F-15, A-37, C-17, KC-135, C-140 Jetstar, Army OV-1 and TU-144 25 00:01:24,951 --> 00:01:27,287 and a few others that aren't on the list. 26 00:01:27,287 --> 00:01:30,857 For 16 years, Glenn was the NASA representative 27 00:01:30,857 --> 00:01:33,059 to the [Inaudible] AGARD Flight Test Techniques Group 28 00:01:33,059 --> 00:01:35,862 responsible for publications associated 29 00:01:35,862 --> 00:01:39,532 with flight test techniques and flight test instrumentation. 30 00:01:39,532 --> 00:01:43,002 Glenn authored the AGARDograph Digital Signal Conditioning 31 00:01:43,002 --> 00:01:44,370 for Flight Test. 32 00:01:44,370 --> 00:01:48,441 Between 1995 and 1999, Glenn spent much of his time in Russia 33 00:01:48,441 --> 00:01:51,578 as the U.S. Instrumentation and On-Site Engineer 34 00:01:51,578 --> 00:01:54,848 for the TU-144L High-Speed Research project 35 00:01:54,848 --> 00:01:57,317 which he will be talking about here today. 36 00:01:57,317 --> 00:02:00,220 Glenn's currently retired but holds the position 37 00:02:00,220 --> 00:02:03,723 of America's Engineer here at NASA Armstrong, the first person 38 00:02:03,723 --> 00:02:06,726 to hold an America's Engineering position here at the Center. 39 00:02:06,726 --> 00:02:09,496 So please Glenn a warm welcome. 40 00:02:09,496 --> 00:02:15,568 [ Applause ] 41 00:02:26,045 --> 00:02:27,647 >> It wasn't mine. 42 00:02:31,384 --> 00:02:36,723 First of all, I'd like to note that my son Sam is here. 43 00:02:36,723 --> 00:02:38,491 He was not alive for these events 44 00:02:38,491 --> 00:02:40,593 so he has a [laughter] chance 45 00:02:40,593 --> 00:02:44,631 to see what his old man did before he was the center 46 00:02:44,631 --> 00:02:46,599 of our lives. 47 00:02:46,599 --> 00:02:50,803 For that matter, how many people have even heard 48 00:02:50,803 --> 00:02:54,908 of this project prior to the presentation? 49 00:02:54,908 --> 00:02:58,411 Okay, good [laughter]. 50 00:02:58,411 --> 00:03:01,481 This is not a big Cold War secret. 51 00:03:01,481 --> 00:03:06,319 How many people actually worked on the program? 52 00:03:06,319 --> 00:03:13,092 I see Becky back there, and Bob Curry, 53 00:03:15,128 --> 00:03:18,665 and some other people watching, I think, from afar. 54 00:03:18,665 --> 00:03:26,739 Well, 20 years ago, on November 29, 1996 to be exact, 55 00:03:26,739 --> 00:03:29,342 it was the day after Thanksgiving 56 00:03:29,342 --> 00:03:31,377 so we spent Thanksgiving Day 57 00:03:31,377 --> 00:03:35,315 on an airplane eating delta rubber chicken on our way 58 00:03:35,315 --> 00:03:39,419 to Moscow to watch the first flight of this program. 59 00:03:39,419 --> 00:03:43,089 It didn't break the sound barrier that day 60 00:03:43,089 --> 00:03:45,959 but it broke a barrier of a different kind. 61 00:03:45,959 --> 00:03:49,329 It was the first American-Russian collaboration 62 00:03:49,329 --> 00:03:52,899 on an aeronautics flight research project. 63 00:03:52,899 --> 00:03:55,735 And as far as I know, it's the only one that we ever did. 64 00:03:55,735 --> 00:03:57,604 It hasn't happened since. 65 00:03:57,604 --> 00:04:00,807 So we were breaking a lot of new ground. 66 00:04:00,807 --> 00:04:08,014 I had a front row seat because I was the boots 67 00:04:08,014 --> 00:04:11,150 on the ground there. 68 00:04:11,150 --> 00:04:17,590 This story is a story partly about the program but mostly 69 00:04:17,590 --> 00:04:20,526 about my experiences there which I find the more interesting. 70 00:04:20,526 --> 00:04:23,997 It was the most interesting part to me in trying 71 00:04:23,997 --> 00:04:26,733 to get this thing literally off the ground. 72 00:04:31,037 --> 00:04:33,940 So what was the program all about? 73 00:04:33,940 --> 00:04:36,709 Well the NASA High-Speed Research Office 74 00:04:36,709 --> 00:04:39,779 out of Langley funded a program 75 00:04:39,779 --> 00:04:41,881 to gather some quantitative information 76 00:04:41,881 --> 00:04:47,053 on a passenger class supersonic aircraft with the goal 77 00:04:47,053 --> 00:04:48,721 of feeding that data into the design 78 00:04:48,721 --> 00:04:52,225 of the next generation supersonic aircraft. 79 00:04:52,225 --> 00:04:54,694 These things go in cycles and this is a cycle 80 00:04:54,694 --> 00:04:56,763 where Boeing was once again interested 81 00:04:56,763 --> 00:04:58,298 in pursuing something like that. 82 00:04:58,298 --> 00:05:01,868 But there are only two vehicles that existed at the time 83 00:05:01,868 --> 00:05:06,205 that fit that class of aircraft, the TU-144 and the Concorde. 84 00:05:06,205 --> 00:05:11,077 The TU-144 is known to Westerners sometimes 85 00:05:11,077 --> 00:05:15,381 as the Concordski much to the chagrin of the Russians. 86 00:05:15,381 --> 00:05:17,950 They really hated that avolation. 87 00:05:23,323 --> 00:05:26,592 So what was going on in Russia at the time? 88 00:05:26,592 --> 00:05:29,395 The Soviet Union had just fallen a couple of years before, 89 00:05:29,395 --> 00:05:32,365 1991 -- it had ceased to exist. 90 00:05:32,365 --> 00:05:35,101 It was now the Russian Federation. 91 00:05:35,101 --> 00:05:37,637 The Russian economy was in bad shape. 92 00:05:37,637 --> 00:05:42,942 It was a closed economy. 93 00:05:42,942 --> 00:05:45,478 They didn't have hard currency. 94 00:05:45,478 --> 00:05:48,915 A lot of people had jobs but no pay 95 00:05:48,915 --> 00:05:50,650 so how they survived with no pay? 96 00:05:50,650 --> 00:05:52,385 Well, it was largely a barter economy. 97 00:05:52,385 --> 00:05:54,987 It took us a while to figure that out. 98 00:05:54,987 --> 00:05:57,123 Some of the people I worked with were not getting paid 99 00:05:57,123 --> 00:05:58,791 for the work that they were doing. 100 00:05:58,791 --> 00:06:03,696 But their apartments were free, things like that. 101 00:06:03,696 --> 00:06:06,399 Russian aviation was in bad shape also 102 00:06:06,399 --> 00:06:12,004 because their customer base was essentially all in Russia. 103 00:06:12,004 --> 00:06:17,243 And now the Russians were able to buy Western aircraft. 104 00:06:17,243 --> 00:06:21,247 At least that possibility was open to them. 105 00:06:21,247 --> 00:06:24,016 And so in Tupolev, the Tupolev Design Bureau 106 00:06:24,016 --> 00:06:28,755 that designed the TU-144 found their customer base 107 00:06:28,755 --> 00:06:30,123 severely limited. 108 00:06:30,123 --> 00:06:34,160 There was a lot of interest in Western -- anything Western. 109 00:06:34,160 --> 00:06:36,529 You know, the wall had come down. 110 00:06:36,529 --> 00:06:39,031 The door had opened. 111 00:06:39,031 --> 00:06:42,668 They were very happy to see people from the West. 112 00:06:42,668 --> 00:06:44,971 Most Russians had never been out of the country, 113 00:06:44,971 --> 00:06:49,041 had never met anybody from outside of the country. 114 00:06:49,041 --> 00:06:54,947 And they needed -- they needed money. 115 00:06:54,947 --> 00:06:59,585 They were interested in buying anything Western or obtaining, 116 00:06:59,585 --> 00:07:04,223 whether we're talking about blue jeans, or if we're talking 117 00:07:04,223 --> 00:07:10,163 about McDonald's restaurants, or Pizza Hut, which they had, 118 00:07:10,163 --> 00:07:14,767 and TGI Friday that literally spelled that way in Cyrillic. 119 00:07:14,767 --> 00:07:19,439 I ate at a few of those places. 120 00:07:19,439 --> 00:07:23,810 And even Western religion, you know, 121 00:07:23,810 --> 00:07:28,414 the Russian traditionally was Russian Orthodox. 122 00:07:28,414 --> 00:07:33,853 Under Communist Russia, they had not fared too well 123 00:07:33,853 --> 00:07:35,221 but they still existed. 124 00:07:35,221 --> 00:07:39,091 A lot of the cathedrals had been turned into storage sheds 125 00:07:39,091 --> 00:07:40,359 and they were in the process 126 00:07:40,359 --> 00:07:43,930 of being turned back into cathedrals. 127 00:07:43,930 --> 00:07:45,331 That was actually a point of friction 128 00:07:45,331 --> 00:07:46,866 with some Russians I had met. 129 00:07:46,866 --> 00:07:50,937 They didn't appreciate that aspect of Western coming in. 130 00:07:54,073 --> 00:07:56,008 But it was kind of a chaotic time 131 00:07:56,008 --> 00:07:57,977 because they didn't know what was going on 132 00:07:57,977 --> 00:07:59,779 and what was going to happen. 133 00:07:59,779 --> 00:08:03,883 One Russian described it to me as "Chicago in the 1920s". 134 00:08:05,284 --> 00:08:09,021 Moscow was a pretty secure city before that, as you might expect 135 00:08:09,021 --> 00:08:13,459 with a dictatorship, and hierarchical regime 136 00:08:13,459 --> 00:08:16,062 and the secret police, and so forth. 137 00:08:16,062 --> 00:08:19,765 All that was swept away at least for the time. 138 00:08:19,765 --> 00:08:24,804 And now they had such nice things as murder in the subway 139 00:08:24,804 --> 00:08:27,440 and Czechian separatists setting off bombs 140 00:08:27,440 --> 00:08:31,477 in public transportation, all in places that I frequented 141 00:08:31,477 --> 00:08:36,015 so that was where it had personal interest to me. 142 00:08:38,651 --> 00:08:41,721 So how did the program get started? 143 00:08:41,721 --> 00:08:48,594 Well, the Vice-President Gore and Prime Minister Chernomyrdin 144 00:08:48,594 --> 00:08:52,265 of Russia formed a Joint Commission to study ways 145 00:08:52,265 --> 00:08:56,235 of collaborating between the United States and Russia. 146 00:08:56,235 --> 00:09:00,406 It was a historic opportunity and one that they didn't want 147 00:09:00,406 --> 00:09:05,545 to get by them, all kinds of concerns about, you know, 148 00:09:05,545 --> 00:09:07,780 proliferation of nuclear materials 149 00:09:07,780 --> 00:09:09,015 and other things like that. 150 00:09:09,015 --> 00:09:11,751 But pertinent to this discussion is in the context 151 00:09:11,751 --> 00:09:17,590 to that they endorsed the TU-144LL program in 1993. 152 00:09:17,590 --> 00:09:20,760 And in 1994, agreements were signed 153 00:09:20,760 --> 00:09:24,697 with the affected parties most of which are listed 154 00:09:24,697 --> 00:09:29,569 at the bottom there, NASA Langley, NASA Dryden, 155 00:09:29,569 --> 00:09:32,138 NASA Lewis which is now NASA Glenn 156 00:09:32,138 --> 00:09:36,943 and we're now Armstrong were involved. 157 00:09:36,943 --> 00:09:40,780 Boeing, Douglas and Rockwell -- Boeing gobbled up Douglas 158 00:09:40,780 --> 00:09:44,050 and Rockwell in the middle of this program, by the way. 159 00:09:44,050 --> 00:09:46,619 So that things were always changing. 160 00:09:46,619 --> 00:09:50,089 General Electric and Pratt Whitney had an engine testing 161 00:09:50,089 --> 00:09:52,792 and experiment that was run. 162 00:09:52,792 --> 00:09:57,330 Tupolev Design Bureau which owned the aircraft and IBP 163 00:09:57,330 --> 00:10:01,534 which is a small company out of England that had all the rights 164 00:10:01,534 --> 00:10:05,905 to the contract passed through to Tupolev. 165 00:10:08,007 --> 00:10:12,445 So I got involved in 1994 and I was sent 166 00:10:12,445 --> 00:10:15,781 to the Defense Language Institute up in Monterey 167 00:10:15,781 --> 00:10:18,684 which is a place where they train military personnel 168 00:10:18,684 --> 00:10:22,555 in all sorts of languages, mostly for listening posts 169 00:10:22,555 --> 00:10:25,257 and things like that during the Cold War. 170 00:10:25,257 --> 00:10:26,392 Well, the Cold War had ended 171 00:10:26,392 --> 00:10:28,227 and these people were struggling a bit also, 172 00:10:28,227 --> 00:10:31,430 in what their future held. 173 00:10:31,430 --> 00:10:32,999 And so we contract with them 174 00:10:32,999 --> 00:10:36,168 to teach a small group of us Russian. 175 00:10:36,168 --> 00:10:42,441 It's a 46-week course which they crammed into four [laughter]. 176 00:10:45,011 --> 00:10:49,415 Yes [laughter], that was one of the more humiliating experiences 177 00:10:49,415 --> 00:10:52,385 of my life, being poured out of that place with an expectation 178 00:10:52,385 --> 00:10:54,854 of knowing something about Russian. 179 00:10:54,854 --> 00:10:57,490 And I did get an overall structure of the language 180 00:10:57,490 --> 00:11:04,196 and it was helpful but it was not optimal. 181 00:11:05,564 --> 00:11:08,100 The flights ran from 1996, 182 00:11:08,100 --> 00:11:12,872 20 years ago this month, to April of 1999. 183 00:11:12,872 --> 00:11:17,476 27 flights in all, 14 of which were supersonic. 184 00:11:17,476 --> 00:11:21,147 And they were all flown out of Zhukovsky Air Base. 185 00:11:21,147 --> 00:11:24,183 This was a NASA program which was never flown 186 00:11:24,183 --> 00:11:26,152 in this country much less this continent. 187 00:11:26,152 --> 00:11:29,055 They were all flown out of Zhukovsky. 188 00:11:33,025 --> 00:11:37,997 This is the only chart I'm going to show you so take heart. 189 00:11:37,997 --> 00:11:41,367 But this is just to show kind of how people fit together. 190 00:11:41,367 --> 00:11:44,370 And this is my view of it. 191 00:11:44,370 --> 00:11:46,338 The High Speed Research HSR Office 192 00:11:46,338 --> 00:11:48,340 up in Langley had the program money 193 00:11:48,340 --> 00:11:55,214 and they funded Boeing Seattle to be the prime contractor 194 00:11:55,214 --> 00:11:57,950 to have a contract with the Tupolev Design Bureau, 195 00:11:57,950 --> 00:12:00,119 the people of the airplane but as I say it passed 196 00:12:00,119 --> 00:12:04,523 through IBP to make that happen. 197 00:12:04,523 --> 00:12:11,230 Dryden, shown prominently in red there, 198 00:12:11,230 --> 00:12:14,266 was funded from the High Speed Research Office 199 00:12:14,266 --> 00:12:18,304 but we essentially worked as a subcontractor to Boeing 200 00:12:18,304 --> 00:12:22,641 to handle the flight instrumentation issues, support 201 00:12:22,641 --> 00:12:24,276 and flight test management. 202 00:12:24,276 --> 00:12:26,412 We had a project management office here that was managing 203 00:12:26,412 --> 00:12:28,013 that part of the program. 204 00:12:28,013 --> 00:12:31,317 Ross Barber was the head of that activity. 205 00:12:31,317 --> 00:12:35,221 After that it got very squishy 206 00:12:35,221 --> 00:12:40,960 because the data coming off the aircraft flew -- 207 00:12:40,960 --> 00:12:43,996 came back to Dryden. 208 00:12:43,996 --> 00:12:48,100 We processed the data, applied the calibrations and so forth. 209 00:12:48,100 --> 00:12:50,603 Put it in our data archive and made it available 210 00:12:50,603 --> 00:12:55,474 to U.S. team members for analysis. 211 00:12:55,474 --> 00:12:58,844 But essentially all of the working issues on the ground 212 00:12:58,844 --> 00:13:03,549 in Moscow with the exception of a team from Langley 213 00:13:03,549 --> 00:13:08,387 for a cabin noise experiment, was all really run 214 00:13:08,387 --> 00:13:11,490 through Dryden and that meant largely through me 215 00:13:11,490 --> 00:13:13,959 because I was often the only guy -- 216 00:13:13,959 --> 00:13:18,831 the only American on site there for large parts of this program. 217 00:13:18,831 --> 00:13:23,169 So this is the TU-144. 218 00:13:23,169 --> 00:13:25,704 This is a picture at Zhukovsky Air Base. 219 00:13:25,704 --> 00:13:33,445 It's, and I think there's snow on the ground in this picture, 220 00:13:33,445 --> 00:13:36,148 it was painted white twice 221 00:13:36,148 --> 00:13:37,516 because the first time they painted it, 222 00:13:37,516 --> 00:13:40,119 they did such a poor job of priming it that it was -- 223 00:13:40,119 --> 00:13:43,989 the paint was coming off in very large clumps even before it ever 224 00:13:43,989 --> 00:13:46,158 got in the air. 225 00:13:46,158 --> 00:13:52,998 So they named the plane the [inaudible] which means Moscow. 226 00:13:57,002 --> 00:13:59,238 And by the way, the LL designation at the end 227 00:13:59,238 --> 00:14:02,808 of TU-144, that stood for [Inaudible] Laboratoria 228 00:14:02,808 --> 00:14:06,245 which means Flight Laboratory in Russian. 229 00:14:06,245 --> 00:14:08,914 I always make the distinction. 230 00:14:08,914 --> 00:14:13,586 This was the only LL aircraft. 231 00:14:13,586 --> 00:14:20,626 By contrast, here's a picture of the Concorde. 232 00:14:20,626 --> 00:14:21,927 It's kind of a poor quality picture 233 00:14:21,927 --> 00:14:23,395 because this is a screen capture 234 00:14:23,395 --> 00:14:26,332 from a videotape that I shot in Paris. 235 00:14:26,332 --> 00:14:29,935 This happened to be a Concorde that I flew in a year 236 00:14:29,935 --> 00:14:31,503 after the program ended. 237 00:14:31,503 --> 00:14:35,074 I had so many frequent flyer miles from flying to Russia, 238 00:14:35,074 --> 00:14:38,744 I got two free flights on the Concorde going 239 00:14:38,744 --> 00:14:40,346 to some meeting -- to and from some meetings 240 00:14:40,346 --> 00:14:41,714 that I had in Paris. 241 00:14:41,714 --> 00:14:45,684 And it's a real interesting experience landing before you 242 00:14:45,684 --> 00:14:46,385 take off. 243 00:14:46,385 --> 00:14:48,921 It's a fast airplane. 244 00:14:52,091 --> 00:14:55,995 But in comparing the two, the airplane in red -- 245 00:14:55,995 --> 00:15:00,966 whoops, is the TU-144 and the Concorde is the one in blue. 246 00:15:00,966 --> 00:15:02,468 So you'll see side by side, 247 00:15:02,468 --> 00:15:06,305 they are almost exactly the same size. 248 00:15:06,305 --> 00:15:11,410 The TU-144 is a little bit longer, a little bit taller. 249 00:15:11,410 --> 00:15:12,811 The wing shape you see is different. 250 00:15:12,811 --> 00:15:15,981 The placement of the engines is different. 251 00:15:15,981 --> 00:15:22,421 TU-144 is a little bit heavier as well. 252 00:15:22,421 --> 00:15:25,724 The ceiling was a little bit higher. 253 00:15:25,724 --> 00:15:29,929 And even the speed was a little bit faster than the Concorde. 254 00:15:29,929 --> 00:15:33,065 But the Concorde had a bigger range. 255 00:15:34,199 --> 00:15:36,669 Now, when we started our program, 256 00:15:36,669 --> 00:15:42,341 they replaced the engines with the NK-321 turbofans. 257 00:15:42,341 --> 00:15:44,810 Those were engines out of the Russian Blackjack bomber. 258 00:15:44,810 --> 00:15:51,550 The original engines for the TU-144 are no longer available. 259 00:15:51,550 --> 00:15:53,852 And one of my favorite stories about that, you know, 260 00:15:53,852 --> 00:15:56,522 after they re-engined it and changed the inlet configurations 261 00:15:56,522 --> 00:15:57,890 and so forth to make them fit, 262 00:15:57,890 --> 00:16:02,895 and one of their supersonic flights, they boomed the factory 263 00:16:02,895 --> 00:16:05,431 where the engines were manufactured and broke a lot 264 00:16:05,431 --> 00:16:10,169 of windows [laughter] -- payback. 265 00:16:10,169 --> 00:16:13,872 This is a picture of the Concorde or the -- 266 00:16:13,872 --> 00:16:15,741 excuse me, the TU-144 cockpit 267 00:16:15,741 --> 00:16:19,178 and after it was all put back together. 268 00:16:19,178 --> 00:16:21,080 The thing that strikes me about this is it looks 269 00:16:21,080 --> 00:16:24,783 to me all the world like one of our engineering simulators. 270 00:16:26,051 --> 00:16:29,655 It's very boxy, very functional. 271 00:16:29,655 --> 00:16:35,694 The aircraft itself was very stiff to handle. 272 00:16:35,694 --> 00:16:41,200 But the Russians built things that last. 273 00:16:41,200 --> 00:16:44,770 Just to cite an example, on a typical fighter, 274 00:16:44,770 --> 00:16:46,672 they put the inlets on top of the wings 275 00:16:46,672 --> 00:16:50,342 so that it doesn't suck up all the fog on the crappy runways. 276 00:16:50,342 --> 00:16:53,078 And the reasoning is we're fighting in a battle. 277 00:16:53,078 --> 00:16:54,179 We're not going to have -- 278 00:16:54,179 --> 00:16:55,748 we're going to have battlefield conditions. 279 00:16:55,748 --> 00:16:58,951 We don't -- we're not going to have pristine runways. 280 00:16:58,951 --> 00:17:04,156 So they approached things often differently than we did. 281 00:17:04,156 --> 00:17:07,726 Here's another screen capture of the Concorde in flight. 282 00:17:07,726 --> 00:17:12,798 I actually was in the cockpit during Mach 2 flight taking this 283 00:17:12,798 --> 00:17:16,402 picture, actually taking a whole series of videos 284 00:17:16,402 --> 00:17:18,470 of which this is a screen capture. 285 00:17:18,470 --> 00:17:21,974 This is, you know, a year-and-a-half before 9-11. 286 00:17:21,974 --> 00:17:24,576 And a flight attendant actually came up and asked me 287 00:17:24,576 --> 00:17:28,680 if I wanted a tour of the cockpit in flight. 288 00:17:28,680 --> 00:17:31,417 So I took my video camera, went up and I spent a long time 289 00:17:31,417 --> 00:17:34,520 up there videotaping the gauges and the pilot activity 290 00:17:34,520 --> 00:17:37,589 and putting my hand on the bulkhead, feeling the heat 291 00:17:37,589 --> 00:17:40,159 from the Mach 2 flight happening. 292 00:17:40,159 --> 00:17:42,795 Where the flight engineer has his hand is close 293 00:17:42,795 --> 00:17:48,400 to a gap behind the console where at Mach it's expanded 294 00:17:48,400 --> 00:17:51,537 by like, I think, about an inch or inch-and-a-half just 295 00:17:51,537 --> 00:17:54,973 from the friction, the heat from the Mach flight. 296 00:17:58,210 --> 00:18:01,046 So what were we actually measuring on this airplane? 297 00:18:01,046 --> 00:18:04,049 This is like -- and selected out of a whole group of experiments, 298 00:18:04,049 --> 00:18:06,018 this was what was selected. 299 00:18:06,018 --> 00:18:09,388 There are six experiments listed there. 300 00:18:09,388 --> 00:18:13,459 And we added a seventh in phase two flight, 301 00:18:13,459 --> 00:18:16,061 the quality of pilot assessment. 302 00:18:16,061 --> 00:18:20,132 But quantitatively, we had a handling quad as experiment. 303 00:18:20,132 --> 00:18:21,700 A boundary layer experiment -- 304 00:18:21,700 --> 00:18:23,469 you can see it listed some pressures 305 00:18:23,469 --> 00:18:27,005 like we had pressure strip of tubing on the starboard wing. 306 00:18:27,005 --> 00:18:30,509 We had thermal couples and RTDs and heat flux gauges 307 00:18:30,509 --> 00:18:34,713 on the port wing for surface structure equilibrium test. 308 00:18:34,713 --> 00:18:37,049 Ask Greg Stevens about that sometime. 309 00:18:37,049 --> 00:18:39,718 He was -- that was his experiment. 310 00:18:39,718 --> 00:18:43,755 Engine air flow and heat, slender wing ground effect. 311 00:18:43,755 --> 00:18:45,090 Ask Bob Curry about that. 312 00:18:45,090 --> 00:18:46,391 He's in the back of the room there. 313 00:18:46,391 --> 00:18:50,395 That was an experiment he was interested in which led 314 00:18:50,395 --> 00:18:54,500 to some other stories hopefully, I'll get to later. 315 00:18:55,534 --> 00:19:01,607 So 722 PCM data channels but those -- 316 00:19:01,607 --> 00:19:05,210 and oh, I forgot to mention the cabin noise experiment 317 00:19:06,178 --> 00:19:07,279 mostly inside. 318 00:19:07,279 --> 00:19:10,482 That was principally a Langley experiment 319 00:19:10,482 --> 00:19:12,684 with some participation from Boeing. 320 00:19:12,684 --> 00:19:19,758 So we were majoring all that as well various air data. 321 00:19:19,758 --> 00:19:24,363 You can see where the sensors were placed 322 00:19:24,363 --> 00:19:27,432 which is pretty far aft from where the inlets where. 323 00:19:27,432 --> 00:19:31,470 So we had some significant lags due to that. 324 00:19:31,470 --> 00:19:35,207 And they're also using Armenian sensors. 325 00:19:35,207 --> 00:19:37,676 And whenever I asked them, what sensors they use and they'd say, 326 00:19:37,676 --> 00:19:42,047 "Armenian," and then they'd laugh [laughter]. 327 00:19:42,047 --> 00:19:47,719 Okay, it turns out that Armenian to them was like made 328 00:19:47,719 --> 00:19:50,556 in Japan was here in the 1960s. 329 00:19:50,556 --> 00:19:52,991 They were considered poor quality instruments 330 00:19:52,991 --> 00:19:54,560 and they were a joke. 331 00:19:54,560 --> 00:19:57,396 It was no laughing matter to me because I had 332 00:19:57,396 --> 00:20:00,732 to analyze the data coming off of those sensors. 333 00:20:00,732 --> 00:20:04,703 And the characteristics of a fine sensor was a saw tooth. 334 00:20:04,703 --> 00:20:05,938 You'd go up an altitude. 335 00:20:05,938 --> 00:20:08,907 You continue up an altitude, continue up an altitude. 336 00:20:08,907 --> 00:20:12,411 So the calibration curve was constantly changing slope 337 00:20:12,411 --> 00:20:15,881 and there's hysteresis at those points so you could not predict 338 00:20:15,881 --> 00:20:17,015 where it was going to happen. 339 00:20:17,015 --> 00:20:20,352 I had to go and by hand in the data and figure 340 00:20:20,352 --> 00:20:22,788 out where those points where so I could apply the calibration 341 00:20:22,788 --> 00:20:24,089 curve to make that change. 342 00:20:24,089 --> 00:20:25,524 And if that change happened in the middle 343 00:20:25,524 --> 00:20:29,828 of a flight test point, not optimal. 344 00:20:29,828 --> 00:20:32,631 So I got tired of it finally and designed my own system 345 00:20:32,631 --> 00:20:36,535 and put it on board so I didn't have to mess with that. 346 00:20:37,936 --> 00:20:42,808 This is a screenshot of a chart I made showing all the flights. 347 00:20:42,808 --> 00:20:47,713 The phase one and phase two from 1996 to '99, 348 00:20:47,713 --> 00:20:49,548 these were all the flights where they happened. 349 00:20:49,548 --> 00:20:51,183 And if you can see the red on there, 350 00:20:51,183 --> 00:20:53,919 those are the supersonic flights. 351 00:20:53,919 --> 00:20:56,688 We had some gaps to handle some reconfiguration 352 00:20:56,688 --> 00:21:00,525 and aircraft issues and converting 353 00:21:00,525 --> 00:21:02,961 from phase one to phase two. 354 00:21:02,961 --> 00:21:07,099 Right here, you see U.S. evaluation flights. 355 00:21:07,099 --> 00:21:09,534 That was for these two guys. 356 00:21:09,534 --> 00:21:12,137 Most of you will recognize the guy on the left 357 00:21:12,137 --> 00:21:14,239 as our own Gordo Fullerton. 358 00:21:14,239 --> 00:21:19,177 Gordo was a bulldog in making sure this flight happened. 359 00:21:19,177 --> 00:21:22,347 He really wanted to fly this airplane 360 00:21:22,347 --> 00:21:25,517 and he really pushed it. 361 00:21:25,517 --> 00:21:27,552 Rob Rivers is the other pilot there. 362 00:21:27,552 --> 00:21:28,687 He's out of Langley. 363 00:21:28,687 --> 00:21:31,823 You can see the degree of his commitment also 364 00:21:31,823 --> 00:21:36,328 because you might notice that he's sporting a cane there. 365 00:21:36,328 --> 00:21:38,764 The reason for that was a month or two prior 366 00:21:38,764 --> 00:21:41,266 to that, he broke his leg. 367 00:21:41,266 --> 00:21:45,203 And he was not 100% healed frankly 368 00:21:45,203 --> 00:21:46,705 and hobbled around on that cane. 369 00:21:46,705 --> 00:21:48,774 But he managed to convince doctors on both sides 370 00:21:48,774 --> 00:21:51,643 of the Atlantic that he was fit enough to fly [laughter]. 371 00:21:53,011 --> 00:21:54,012 And remember what he said 372 00:21:54,012 --> 00:21:56,148 about the stiff handling of the TU-144. 373 00:21:56,148 --> 00:22:00,218 It was not an easy aircraft to fly if you were not 100%. 374 00:22:00,218 --> 00:22:03,322 But he did. 375 00:22:03,322 --> 00:22:06,291 So what's coming next is a video. 376 00:22:06,291 --> 00:22:09,695 This is about three-and-a-half minutes long. 377 00:22:09,695 --> 00:22:14,633 And this is video that was shot by -- 378 00:22:14,633 --> 00:22:17,969 mostly by Lori Losey here so we sent her -- 379 00:22:17,969 --> 00:22:21,239 Jim Ross and her to Moscow for these flights 380 00:22:21,239 --> 00:22:24,443 to get us some decent pictures. 381 00:22:24,443 --> 00:22:28,647 And this is Gordo's first flight. 382 00:22:28,647 --> 00:22:30,015 There's the takeoff. 383 00:22:30,015 --> 00:22:35,454 You can see the Snoopy ears there deployed, the winglets -- 384 00:22:35,454 --> 00:22:37,155 that's something the Concorde did not have 385 00:22:37,155 --> 00:22:39,391 but they had a [inaudible] problem with this aircraft 386 00:22:39,391 --> 00:22:42,227 and they had to put those on there to balance things out. 387 00:22:42,227 --> 00:22:45,263 And you'll also notice the drooped nose. 388 00:22:45,263 --> 00:22:48,633 Someone called this the sad dragon face. 389 00:22:49,968 --> 00:22:52,003 But it's drooped down 12-and-a-half degrees 390 00:22:52,003 --> 00:22:55,741 so the pilots can see the runway on takeoff and landing. 391 00:22:56,975 --> 00:23:00,011 Something else the Concorde also did. 392 00:23:04,116 --> 00:23:07,853 It was a beautiful aircraft. 393 00:23:07,853 --> 00:23:09,521 But that aircraft was -- 394 00:23:09,521 --> 00:23:12,758 this particular one was the 17th off the assembly line. 395 00:23:12,758 --> 00:23:16,595 It was the last TU-144 built. 396 00:23:16,595 --> 00:23:18,563 They had like 82 flight hours. 397 00:23:18,563 --> 00:23:21,266 It was retired in 1989. 398 00:23:21,266 --> 00:23:23,835 From commercial service, it retired, I think, about '79 399 00:23:23,835 --> 00:23:26,338 but they did some other testing up until '89. 400 00:23:26,338 --> 00:23:28,540 And then it sat there. 401 00:23:28,540 --> 00:23:30,308 So there were no flyable aircraft 402 00:23:30,308 --> 00:23:31,743 at the time we started the programming 403 00:23:31,743 --> 00:23:35,213 and the Russians resurrected this one. 404 00:23:36,581 --> 00:23:39,684 And they had high hopes that we would continue the program 405 00:23:40,852 --> 00:23:42,754 and make more use out of that. 406 00:24:02,007 --> 00:24:04,209 It's coming in for a landing here. 407 00:24:05,677 --> 00:24:08,713 Those aircrafts or one of its sister ships famously crashed 408 00:24:08,713 --> 00:24:11,483 in 1973 Paris Air Show 409 00:24:11,483 --> 00:24:15,120 under rather controversial circumstances. 410 00:24:15,120 --> 00:24:17,722 You can Google it on the internet sometime and find 411 00:24:17,722 --> 00:24:21,426 out all the different opinions about that. 412 00:24:21,426 --> 00:24:26,898 But it pretty well killed its commercial viability, 413 00:24:26,898 --> 00:24:28,099 at least in the Western world. 414 00:24:28,099 --> 00:24:31,236 And it spent the rest of its commercial life flying 415 00:24:31,236 --> 00:24:34,940 within the Soviet Union from Siberia and back again. 416 00:24:45,617 --> 00:24:47,018 The handling quality, by the way, 417 00:24:47,018 --> 00:24:50,589 are considerably different expectation in the U.S. pilots 418 00:24:50,589 --> 00:24:52,190 than the Russian pilots. 419 00:24:52,190 --> 00:24:54,326 When you talk to -- with Borisov [assumed spelling], 420 00:24:54,326 --> 00:24:58,897 the chief pilot of the TU-144 came out here and flew an F-18. 421 00:24:58,897 --> 00:25:03,635 They actually chased the SR-71 on one flight and Borisov said, 422 00:25:03,635 --> 00:25:06,505 "Well, I've chased an SR once before but it's over the Baltic 423 00:25:06,505 --> 00:25:08,340 and I couldn't catch it." 424 00:25:10,275 --> 00:25:13,178 But he said the F-18, its sensitivity, 425 00:25:13,178 --> 00:25:16,381 it was just way too sensitive an aircraft. 426 00:25:16,381 --> 00:25:18,884 And he talked to the American pilots flying the TU-144 427 00:25:18,884 --> 00:25:23,722 and saaid, "The thing handled like a truck." 428 00:25:23,722 --> 00:25:26,691 And the, notice he hangs onto his jacket through all this. 429 00:25:26,691 --> 00:25:32,030 This is a very Russian scene here. 430 00:25:37,302 --> 00:25:40,372 But the Russians also said during one of those things 431 00:25:40,372 --> 00:25:44,175 that the TU-144 flew like a good fighter should. 432 00:25:44,175 --> 00:25:47,479 So the whole expectation level 433 00:25:47,479 --> 00:25:50,048 between the two countries' pilots was just 434 00:25:50,048 --> 00:25:52,651 entirely different. 435 00:25:52,651 --> 00:25:55,887 Okay, so as Paul Harvey used to say, 436 00:25:55,887 --> 00:25:58,823 "Now for the rest of the story." 437 00:25:58,823 --> 00:26:00,559 That's pretty much it for the program. 438 00:26:00,559 --> 00:26:04,062 What were some of the challenges we faced there? 439 00:26:04,062 --> 00:26:07,732 Well, import and export was the big one. 440 00:26:07,732 --> 00:26:10,602 We didn't do a lot of importing and exporting in those days. 441 00:26:10,602 --> 00:26:13,238 And we certainly didn't do much to Russia. 442 00:26:13,238 --> 00:26:16,041 There were some Space Station activity 443 00:26:16,041 --> 00:26:18,910 but NASA didn't really have a hard and fast policy 444 00:26:18,910 --> 00:26:20,712 about how this is supposed to happen. 445 00:26:20,712 --> 00:26:22,447 I found myself on the phone to the guy 446 00:26:22,447 --> 00:26:24,583 at headquarters responsible for this a lot, 447 00:26:24,583 --> 00:26:26,184 sort of making it up as we went along. 448 00:26:26,184 --> 00:26:30,021 This is what I want to do, how do I do it kind of thing. 449 00:26:34,426 --> 00:26:37,295 On top of that, the Russians didn't have a good set 450 00:26:37,295 --> 00:26:40,865 of consistent policies and they were constantly changing things 451 00:26:40,865 --> 00:26:43,868 mostly when you weren't aware of it. 452 00:26:43,868 --> 00:26:45,337 Some of the items like the -- 453 00:26:45,337 --> 00:26:48,073 our GPS was used in the ground effect study. 454 00:26:48,073 --> 00:26:52,611 We wanted to keep limitations removed that are normally have 455 00:26:52,611 --> 00:26:54,512 to be in place when we export from a country 456 00:26:54,512 --> 00:26:56,481 and it took 17 levels 457 00:26:56,481 --> 00:26:58,750 of signatures including the Assistant Secretary 458 00:26:58,750 --> 00:27:01,753 of State's signature to allow us to export that unit 459 00:27:01,753 --> 00:27:03,989 to Russia for this program. 460 00:27:06,191 --> 00:27:10,295 Long distance travel was obviously an issue. 461 00:27:10,295 --> 00:27:13,465 It's a 7000-miles great circle distance from here. 462 00:27:13,465 --> 00:27:16,768 It's an 11-hour time zone difference 463 00:27:16,768 --> 00:27:20,071 which meant there was no common workday between here and there. 464 00:27:20,071 --> 00:27:25,577 The language and communication was certainly a big one. 465 00:27:25,577 --> 00:27:30,215 Few Russians on the program knew any English and none of them 466 00:27:30,215 --> 00:27:32,617 that I worked with did 467 00:27:32,617 --> 00:27:35,687 which meant given my meager Russian skills, 468 00:27:35,687 --> 00:27:38,056 I worked with a full-time technical interpreter 469 00:27:38,056 --> 00:27:39,724 who was quite good. 470 00:27:39,724 --> 00:27:44,562 Any Russian that was on the program 471 00:27:44,562 --> 00:27:47,565 that spoke English found themselves off the program 472 00:27:47,565 --> 00:27:50,635 pretty quickly because their skills were in short supply 473 00:27:50,635 --> 00:27:53,672 in the rest of the Russian industry. 474 00:27:53,672 --> 00:27:55,507 And that was a skill that they could market 475 00:27:55,507 --> 00:28:00,045 and actually get paid for. 476 00:28:00,045 --> 00:28:03,348 Interpersonal relationships, it was initially a challenge -- 477 00:28:03,348 --> 00:28:08,953 initially at least a challenge in getting to know the Russians 478 00:28:08,953 --> 00:28:12,791 and develop enough trust that we could move forward 479 00:28:12,791 --> 00:28:14,025 with the project. 480 00:28:14,025 --> 00:28:17,028 It was also an issue at home because we were spending 481 00:28:17,028 --> 00:28:18,196 that much time overseas. 482 00:28:18,196 --> 00:28:19,564 You can ask any serviceman 483 00:28:19,564 --> 00:28:22,600 on overseas deployment how easy it is 484 00:28:22,600 --> 00:28:26,304 to maintain personal relationships back at home. 485 00:28:26,304 --> 00:28:28,740 So that could be a challenge also. 486 00:28:28,740 --> 00:28:31,710 Zhukovsky Air Base -- 487 00:28:35,613 --> 00:28:39,217 Remember I talked about how abysmal the Russian economy was? 488 00:28:39,217 --> 00:28:43,188 If you square that and that's the infrastructure problems 489 00:28:43,188 --> 00:28:44,689 at the air base itself. 490 00:28:44,689 --> 00:28:46,958 To give you some idea, when we first arrived out there 491 00:28:46,958 --> 00:28:49,928 and someone asked to use the restroom, they pointed 492 00:28:49,928 --> 00:28:54,599 to the woods [laughter] because the restrooms were 493 00:28:54,599 --> 00:28:57,168 in really, really bad shape. 494 00:28:57,168 --> 00:28:58,236 The lights were out. 495 00:28:58,236 --> 00:29:01,206 The plumbing was gone. 496 00:29:01,206 --> 00:29:02,941 You were glad the lights were out because you didn't want 497 00:29:02,941 --> 00:29:05,477 to see what was in there. 498 00:29:05,477 --> 00:29:09,414 The Russians were embarrassed about some of these things. 499 00:29:09,414 --> 00:29:12,383 The dogs roaming the hallways 500 00:29:12,383 --> 00:29:14,285 and leaving little presents everywhere. 501 00:29:14,285 --> 00:29:18,957 It was -- when some foreign press made note of this 502 00:29:18,957 --> 00:29:21,993 in the early days, the Russians were not amused. 503 00:29:24,696 --> 00:29:31,469 Heat -- Russia is not known for being a balmy place. 504 00:29:31,469 --> 00:29:34,539 And when it's 40 below and you have no heaters, 505 00:29:34,539 --> 00:29:36,007 you know it's 40 below. 506 00:29:36,007 --> 00:29:39,110 They had heaters but they had no fuel for them. 507 00:29:39,110 --> 00:29:42,013 They couldn't afford it. 508 00:29:42,013 --> 00:29:46,885 So in the laboratory, we had a home-brew space heater 509 00:29:46,885 --> 00:29:49,420 which would have our safety people cringe. 510 00:29:49,420 --> 00:29:50,655 That was the only source of heat 511 00:29:50,655 --> 00:29:53,591 in the laboratory in the wintertime. 512 00:29:53,591 --> 00:29:54,893 And even the phone lines. 513 00:29:54,893 --> 00:29:56,427 This is in the days, you know, 514 00:29:56,427 --> 00:30:00,298 mid-90s before cell phones were ubiquitous. 515 00:30:00,298 --> 00:30:05,203 Just getting a phone line between Zhukovsky Air Base 516 00:30:05,203 --> 00:30:10,642 to Moscow 20 miles away, we had to walk three buildings over 517 00:30:10,642 --> 00:30:13,278 and up about two flights of stairs into a back office 518 00:30:13,278 --> 00:30:17,182 and get a phone line which had a lot of static problems. 519 00:30:17,182 --> 00:30:19,517 That was our phone line to Moscow. 520 00:30:19,517 --> 00:30:26,057 Boeing had hired a Russian to be sort of their eyes and ears. 521 00:30:26,057 --> 00:30:27,258 They issued him a cellphone 522 00:30:27,258 --> 00:30:29,961 and he was the most popular guy in the air base. 523 00:30:32,197 --> 00:30:35,800 Structurally, the Russians are very hierarchical and many 524 00:30:35,800 --> 00:30:37,569 of us were using -- used to operate 525 00:30:37,569 --> 00:30:39,938 in a more matrix-type of environment. 526 00:30:39,938 --> 00:30:41,973 Western business practices that are things 527 00:30:41,973 --> 00:30:43,141 that are just de rigueur 528 00:30:43,141 --> 00:30:46,878 to us were often not the way the Russians worked. 529 00:30:46,878 --> 00:30:49,614 Things like contracts, statements of work, 530 00:30:49,614 --> 00:30:51,883 managers wanting details of schedules, deliverables 531 00:30:51,883 --> 00:30:54,819 and costing -- just try to get that information 532 00:30:54,819 --> 00:30:56,221 out of the Russians, you know. 533 00:30:56,221 --> 00:30:57,722 You ask them what the schedule is like. 534 00:30:57,722 --> 00:30:59,524 "We will fly in March!" 535 00:30:59,524 --> 00:31:01,459 "Okay. Any problems?" 536 00:31:01,459 --> 00:31:03,995 "No! No problems!" 537 00:31:05,196 --> 00:31:08,933 Until the end of February [laughter] when you find 538 00:31:08,933 --> 00:31:11,436 out what the problems actually were. 539 00:31:11,436 --> 00:31:14,505 This drove our managers crazy and I was usually the guy 540 00:31:14,505 --> 00:31:18,643 on the ground that had to deal with that. 541 00:31:18,643 --> 00:31:21,412 Russian business practices, by the same token, 542 00:31:21,412 --> 00:31:23,448 they largely operated, in my experience, 543 00:31:23,448 --> 00:31:25,250 through summaries of discussion. 544 00:31:25,250 --> 00:31:27,986 This was something that at the end of each series of meetings 545 00:31:27,986 --> 00:31:32,090 or each visit, you would write out that everybody would agree 546 00:31:32,090 --> 00:31:33,324 to yes, this is what we talked about. 547 00:31:33,324 --> 00:31:34,893 This is what we're going to do next. 548 00:31:34,893 --> 00:31:37,962 So it was sort of an incremental contract what their next 549 00:31:37,962 --> 00:31:39,864 priority was. 550 00:31:39,864 --> 00:31:41,833 And I wrote those things. 551 00:31:41,833 --> 00:31:44,302 We didn't really understand initially how important they 552 00:31:44,302 --> 00:31:48,907 were to the Russians and what force of law they had with them. 553 00:31:48,907 --> 00:31:52,176 But we -- we came to understand that pretty quickly. 554 00:31:53,344 --> 00:31:54,779 And it was a major trust 555 00:31:54,779 --> 00:31:57,448 that initially we would write those things out both 556 00:31:57,448 --> 00:31:59,350 in Russian and English. 557 00:31:59,350 --> 00:32:00,551 We would both read those. 558 00:32:00,551 --> 00:32:04,789 We would sign the other copies and after a while, 559 00:32:04,789 --> 00:32:06,724 the interpreter would just read the -- 560 00:32:06,724 --> 00:32:09,961 translate the English version to Russian verbally 561 00:32:09,961 --> 00:32:13,598 and the Russians and we would all sign the English copy. 562 00:32:13,598 --> 00:32:15,533 Then it got to a point where the Russian would say, "You know, 563 00:32:15,533 --> 00:32:19,304 if you put the signature page by itself, 564 00:32:19,304 --> 00:32:21,506 if we had to make any changes, we wouldn't have to resign it." 565 00:32:21,506 --> 00:32:27,078 [ Laughter ] 566 00:32:27,078 --> 00:32:30,882 So since I was writing them, I was okay with that [laughter]. 567 00:32:30,882 --> 00:32:33,851 And I found a lot of Russians would come in 568 00:32:33,851 --> 00:32:36,955 and they would sign the signature page and then leave 569 00:32:36,955 --> 00:32:40,124 without ever hearing what the summary discussion said. 570 00:32:40,124 --> 00:32:42,660 And that's when I knew that I had their trust. 571 00:32:46,397 --> 00:32:48,967 August was a lost month because of holidays. 572 00:32:48,967 --> 00:32:52,403 The weather was often bad in the wintertime. 573 00:32:52,403 --> 00:32:58,242 The work pace was slower than we would have liked it to be. 574 00:32:58,242 --> 00:33:06,084 The technology was -- I've got a story about technology later. 575 00:33:06,084 --> 00:33:10,989 But let's just say it was probably 20 576 00:33:10,989 --> 00:33:13,658 or 30 years behind what we were used to seeing. 577 00:33:13,658 --> 00:33:17,061 And there's always the issue of flight research 578 00:33:17,061 --> 00:33:19,831 versus flight test and the quality of data 579 00:33:19,831 --> 00:33:21,499 which is no different there. 580 00:33:21,499 --> 00:33:25,203 Now I can't have a discussion about Russia 581 00:33:25,203 --> 00:33:28,206 without talking about vodka. 582 00:33:28,206 --> 00:33:31,909 I don't have time to talk a lot about vodka, 583 00:33:31,909 --> 00:33:35,446 but vodka was central to toasting, 584 00:33:35,446 --> 00:33:40,585 and toasting was central to the way Russians operate. 585 00:33:40,585 --> 00:33:45,656 Very, very cultural but spill a great deal over in the business. 586 00:33:45,656 --> 00:33:50,461 And virtually every meeting that I ever went to, every luncheon, 587 00:33:50,461 --> 00:33:54,032 every snack, vodka was available. 588 00:33:54,032 --> 00:33:57,235 And everybody was expected to toast. 589 00:33:57,235 --> 00:34:01,939 And toasting in the Russian tradition is where everybody 590 00:34:01,939 --> 00:34:07,145 in turn is expected to stand up and utter some piece 591 00:34:07,145 --> 00:34:12,950 of poetic wisdom to commemorate the occasion or something. 592 00:34:12,950 --> 00:34:14,919 They could toast whatever they wanted to but they had 593 00:34:14,919 --> 00:34:17,388 to come up with something. 594 00:34:18,456 --> 00:34:22,160 And so the larger the meeting you had, 595 00:34:22,160 --> 00:34:28,032 the more toasting you had because everybody had to toast. 596 00:34:28,032 --> 00:34:31,402 And I once saw that the [inaudible], the chief designer, 597 00:34:31,402 --> 00:34:36,040 Professor Pukhov [assumed spelling] knock back 21 shots 598 00:34:36,040 --> 00:34:40,645 in a row for every person that was in the room. 599 00:34:40,645 --> 00:34:45,316 Now after observing this in the initial days of the program, 600 00:34:45,316 --> 00:34:49,220 when the American management would come out and not 601 00:34:49,220 --> 00:34:53,825 to be outdone, they would be, you know, right in line. 602 00:34:53,825 --> 00:34:57,595 The next day, they couldn't function [laughter]. 603 00:34:57,595 --> 00:35:01,933 And I did some fast thinking and said, "You know, 604 00:35:01,933 --> 00:35:03,334 I'm going to be here a lot. 605 00:35:03,334 --> 00:35:05,970 I've got actual work to do. 606 00:35:05,970 --> 00:35:07,705 I can't afford to do that." 607 00:35:07,705 --> 00:35:09,207 So I just set the ground rule 608 00:35:09,207 --> 00:35:13,444 from the beginning that I didn't drink. 609 00:35:13,444 --> 00:35:15,546 Now the Russians thought that was kind of peculiar 610 00:35:15,546 --> 00:35:17,882 and maybe a little suspicious. 611 00:35:17,882 --> 00:35:20,751 I mean, after all, if you don't want to get drunk, 612 00:35:20,751 --> 00:35:23,087 you must be a spy, right? 613 00:35:24,622 --> 00:35:26,591 But they got used to it. 614 00:35:26,591 --> 00:35:29,160 It was a source of amusement. 615 00:35:29,160 --> 00:35:31,696 But they tolerated it. 616 00:35:31,696 --> 00:35:35,333 And I still toasted with water which looks just like vodka. 617 00:35:35,333 --> 00:35:38,369 In fact, there's only one letter difference in the Russian word 618 00:35:38,369 --> 00:35:40,271 for it -- [inaudible] versus vodka. 619 00:35:40,271 --> 00:35:44,575 Not that I was fooling anybody but nevertheless, 620 00:35:44,575 --> 00:35:47,979 you went through a ritual of toasting and so forth. 621 00:35:52,016 --> 00:35:55,987 That by the way is [inaudible], Golden Ring Vodka. 622 00:35:58,990 --> 00:36:00,725 That B is actually a V. There's a lot 623 00:36:00,725 --> 00:36:03,528 of interesting differences like that. 624 00:36:03,528 --> 00:36:06,864 This was a dinner -- my final dinner 625 00:36:06,864 --> 00:36:09,133 with Professor Pukhov who's sitting there at the end 626 00:36:09,133 --> 00:36:11,702 with a coat and tie and his wife sitting next to him. 627 00:36:11,702 --> 00:36:15,239 It was the first time we've met his wife in this entire program. 628 00:36:15,239 --> 00:36:18,576 They didn't usually mix personal and professional that way. 629 00:36:18,576 --> 00:36:24,715 The thing that sticks out of my mind most about this dinner was 630 00:36:24,715 --> 00:36:29,420 when Professor Pukhov's wife turned to him and berated him 631 00:36:29,420 --> 00:36:31,722 for not being more like me [laughter]. 632 00:36:34,525 --> 00:36:37,195 He drinks too much. 633 00:36:37,195 --> 00:36:37,995 I don't drink at all. 634 00:36:37,995 --> 00:36:39,363 You should be more like him. 635 00:36:39,363 --> 00:36:43,067 What do you do with that? 636 00:36:43,067 --> 00:36:46,871 Smile and keep quiet mostly. 637 00:36:46,871 --> 00:36:48,773 But Russians would also say things like, 638 00:36:48,773 --> 00:36:50,575 "You're every Russian woman's dream! 639 00:36:50,575 --> 00:36:52,210 A man that doesn't drink." 640 00:36:52,210 --> 00:36:53,911 But then they have to ask themselves, 641 00:36:53,911 --> 00:36:55,813 why isn't he drinking? 642 00:36:58,049 --> 00:37:00,218 So that's vodka. 643 00:37:01,552 --> 00:37:02,820 Technical challenges. 644 00:37:02,820 --> 00:37:06,057 Well, remember this is the mid-'90s. 645 00:37:07,391 --> 00:37:09,393 Internet was still kind of in its infancy. 646 00:37:09,393 --> 00:37:14,532 There wasn't -- it was there but the entire data link for all 647 00:37:14,532 --> 00:37:18,102 of the American teams in Moscow was a one-and-a-half megabit per 648 00:37:18,102 --> 00:37:21,606 second data link, a T1 link. 649 00:37:21,606 --> 00:37:22,907 That's not a band -- you know, 650 00:37:22,907 --> 00:37:25,142 by contrast, I checked last night. 651 00:37:25,142 --> 00:37:30,248 My internet at home is 70 megabits per second. 652 00:37:30,248 --> 00:37:35,286 This was one-and-a-half for all of the city of Americans 653 00:37:35,286 --> 00:37:39,724 in the same so it wasn't bandwidth to support web access 654 00:37:39,724 --> 00:37:41,125 so we didn't have that. 655 00:37:41,125 --> 00:37:45,062 When I transferred data back, it was at 10 kilobits per second. 656 00:37:45,062 --> 00:37:48,099 It literally took all night to transfer a flight 657 00:37:48,099 --> 00:37:53,504 of 120 megabytes back to the machines here. 658 00:37:53,504 --> 00:37:55,239 The only email I had originally was 659 00:37:55,239 --> 00:37:57,608 through a local internet service provider. 660 00:37:57,608 --> 00:38:03,781 Telephone costs at the hotel were $7.50 a minute. 661 00:38:03,781 --> 00:38:10,187 Now the per diem at the time for overseas was $7 a day. 662 00:38:13,424 --> 00:38:17,895 And the phone system, as I mentioned before, 663 00:38:17,895 --> 00:38:20,364 was not optimal in the first place. 664 00:38:20,364 --> 00:38:22,800 In fact, if we had telecons between Russia and here, 665 00:38:22,800 --> 00:38:25,803 it usually took 10 or 15 minutes just to set up the telecom, 666 00:38:25,803 --> 00:38:28,906 and every half-hour like clockwork, it would drop off 667 00:38:28,906 --> 00:38:31,208 and you would have to start the process all over again. 668 00:38:31,208 --> 00:38:35,946 And that was outside of the common workday as well. 669 00:38:39,950 --> 00:38:43,054 In data processing, this one fell heavily on me 670 00:38:43,054 --> 00:38:48,559 because I received the data -- I received the calibration files. 671 00:38:48,559 --> 00:38:51,829 They did some funny things 672 00:38:51,829 --> 00:38:55,766 with their data using what's called ratio metric calibrations 673 00:38:55,766 --> 00:38:58,669 because the power supplies were of such poor quality 674 00:38:58,669 --> 00:39:01,105 that you had to measure the power supply at the same time 675 00:39:01,105 --> 00:39:04,075 as the data so you could ratio those things 676 00:39:04,075 --> 00:39:06,577 to make sure you knew what the output was. 677 00:39:06,577 --> 00:39:11,215 We hadn't done that in probably, I don't know, 30 years here. 678 00:39:11,215 --> 00:39:12,583 We just improved our power supplies. 679 00:39:12,583 --> 00:39:18,522 So none of our calibration systems would deal with that. 680 00:39:18,522 --> 00:39:26,997 The data that I got on disk was not compatible 681 00:39:26,997 --> 00:39:28,933 with the way we did things in our range. 682 00:39:28,933 --> 00:39:30,801 And so bit by bit, I found 683 00:39:30,801 --> 00:39:34,372 that I replaced the entire Dryden system 684 00:39:34,372 --> 00:39:37,108 with programs that I wrote. 685 00:39:37,108 --> 00:39:40,578 Data coming off the aircraft, doing a software decommutation 686 00:39:40,578 --> 00:39:42,713 to dealing with the embedded system time which, by the way, 687 00:39:42,713 --> 00:39:50,554 ran backwards sometimes, to select any calibrations 688 00:39:50,554 --> 00:39:53,157 to formatting them, and compressed 689 00:39:53,157 --> 00:39:55,893 for a format applying the calibrations to that, 690 00:39:55,893 --> 00:39:59,430 and then depositing it directly into [inaudible]. 691 00:39:59,430 --> 00:40:01,565 So from end to end, I just [inaudible] from the Russians 692 00:40:01,565 --> 00:40:03,334 through my programs into our archive 693 00:40:03,334 --> 00:40:04,902 where it still sits today. 694 00:40:04,902 --> 00:40:09,039 So that was a challenge. 695 00:40:12,643 --> 00:40:16,280 For some reason, when the Russians came to Williamsburg, 696 00:40:16,280 --> 00:40:18,616 they visited Langley and I took them to Williamsburg. 697 00:40:18,616 --> 00:40:21,051 I couldn't get them into the Stocks. 698 00:40:24,855 --> 00:40:26,090 So I took one for the team 699 00:40:26,090 --> 00:40:29,460 and had their picture taken that way. 700 00:40:29,460 --> 00:40:32,696 But we took them to Langley. 701 00:40:32,696 --> 00:40:37,435 The first thing they want to do is go to Wal-Mart [laughter]. 702 00:40:37,435 --> 00:40:40,304 One guy wanted to get a prescription glasses. 703 00:40:40,304 --> 00:40:42,573 Everybody else was running around buying blue jeans 704 00:40:42,573 --> 00:40:46,043 and shoes like they're going out of style. 705 00:40:46,043 --> 00:40:49,180 They're actually just going into style in Russia. 706 00:40:49,180 --> 00:40:50,347 Well, you want to try this on? 707 00:40:50,347 --> 00:40:51,549 No, it doesn't matter. 708 00:40:51,549 --> 00:40:53,284 They were just buying them for family and friends 709 00:40:53,284 --> 00:40:55,186 and you know, maybe to sell. 710 00:40:55,186 --> 00:41:02,259 We took them to Disneyland and Universal City when they came 711 00:41:02,259 --> 00:41:05,429 out here in the beach and some of those kind of places. 712 00:41:05,429 --> 00:41:07,531 And Wilson Van Dyer [assumed spelling], 713 00:41:07,531 --> 00:41:09,433 who was my immediate predecessor 714 00:41:09,433 --> 00:41:14,839 on this project before he retired, was driving 715 00:41:14,839 --> 00:41:19,176 and Sergei [Inaudible], our interpreter, pops open a can 716 00:41:19,176 --> 00:41:21,745 of beer in the back seat. 717 00:41:21,745 --> 00:41:23,848 And Wilson about came unglued. 718 00:41:23,848 --> 00:41:25,015 "You can't do that!" 719 00:41:25,015 --> 00:41:26,150 "You can't do what?" 720 00:41:26,150 --> 00:41:27,985 "You can't open a beer in a moving vehicle!" 721 00:41:27,985 --> 00:41:30,387 "Well, why not?" 722 00:41:30,387 --> 00:41:34,992 "We have a rule again -- we have a law against that." 723 00:41:34,992 --> 00:41:36,994 "Well, why? 724 00:41:37,928 --> 00:41:39,363 What kind of democracy is this?" 725 00:41:39,363 --> 00:41:43,701 They just didn't understand it. 726 00:41:43,701 --> 00:41:46,437 We'd be driving out in the desert here. 727 00:41:46,437 --> 00:41:51,408 You come to a stop sign and you stop, right? 728 00:41:51,408 --> 00:41:54,478 And the Russians would say [laughter], 729 00:41:55,813 --> 00:41:56,780 "There's nobody coming. 730 00:41:56,780 --> 00:41:57,982 Why did you stop?" 731 00:41:57,982 --> 00:41:59,483 "It's a stop sign." 732 00:41:59,483 --> 00:42:02,820 And they just couldn't understand that. 733 00:42:02,820 --> 00:42:06,457 And after watching driving in Moscow sometime later, 734 00:42:06,457 --> 00:42:08,893 I could understand their confusion. 735 00:42:11,862 --> 00:42:13,931 And then we went to Paris 736 00:42:13,931 --> 00:42:17,768 because they had selected a French instrumentation system, 737 00:42:17,768 --> 00:42:23,007 the Damien 5 which was manufactured 738 00:42:23,007 --> 00:42:25,476 in [Inaudible], south of Paris. 739 00:42:25,476 --> 00:42:27,244 And we spent two weeks there 740 00:42:27,244 --> 00:42:30,948 with the Russians learning the system at the same time. 741 00:42:30,948 --> 00:42:33,984 And so they were kind of neutral territory. 742 00:42:33,984 --> 00:42:37,388 This is some of the Russians sitting with me on the couch. 743 00:42:37,388 --> 00:42:40,057 [Inaudible] in the center is one of those English speakers 744 00:42:40,057 --> 00:42:41,292 that didn't last long with the program 745 00:42:41,292 --> 00:42:43,894 because well, she spoke English. 746 00:42:45,129 --> 00:42:49,233 Alexander [Inaudible] right there was my counter -- 747 00:42:49,233 --> 00:42:51,001 instrumentation counterpart. 748 00:42:51,001 --> 00:42:54,605 Sergei [Inaudible], one of our interpreters. 749 00:42:54,605 --> 00:42:56,674 Sergei's smile says it all. 750 00:42:56,674 --> 00:42:58,876 He was a character. 751 00:42:58,876 --> 00:43:01,478 He was a former Russian Army major. 752 00:43:01,478 --> 00:43:03,480 You ever ask him how many languages he speaks, he says, 753 00:43:03,480 --> 00:43:04,181 "I speak one, Russian. 754 00:43:04,181 --> 00:43:05,482 The rest I interpret." 755 00:43:05,482 --> 00:43:11,422 [ Laughter ] 756 00:43:11,422 --> 00:43:14,758 But that was, it was interesting to get to know the Russians. 757 00:43:14,758 --> 00:43:16,927 This was the first time I had met many of them 758 00:43:16,927 --> 00:43:18,996 of the working level people. 759 00:43:18,996 --> 00:43:20,965 Because most of the working level Russians were not allowed 760 00:43:20,965 --> 00:43:24,268 to travel the United States. 761 00:43:24,268 --> 00:43:30,074 But in class, the classes taught by a Frenchman speaking English 762 00:43:30,074 --> 00:43:34,044 and the interpreter would translate the English 763 00:43:34,044 --> 00:43:35,312 to Russian. 764 00:43:35,312 --> 00:43:38,515 And sometimes when I would ask a question in English, 765 00:43:38,515 --> 00:43:41,218 the Frenchman didn't understand what I was talking about. 766 00:43:41,218 --> 00:43:42,987 He didn't understand me. 767 00:43:42,987 --> 00:43:45,456 So the Russian interpreter would translate my English 768 00:43:45,456 --> 00:43:49,627 to English [laughter] that the Frenchman could understand. 769 00:43:49,627 --> 00:43:52,563 So he said we should pay him extra for that. 770 00:43:52,563 --> 00:43:56,867 As we're walking around Paris, 771 00:43:56,867 --> 00:44:00,537 one of the Russians not pictured here was going 772 00:44:00,537 --> 00:44:01,705 on about things he observed. 773 00:44:01,705 --> 00:44:04,041 He had never been out of the Soviet Union before 774 00:44:04,041 --> 00:44:06,710 and he was just buffaloed by some of the stuff he saw. 775 00:44:06,710 --> 00:44:10,948 He'd see a patch of grass like a 10 by 10 foot lawn 776 00:44:10,948 --> 00:44:13,817 in somebody's front yard and he'd say, 777 00:44:13,817 --> 00:44:14,818 "What a waste of space. 778 00:44:14,818 --> 00:44:15,953 They should plant vegetables there. 779 00:44:15,953 --> 00:44:17,588 What are they going to eat in the wintertime?" 780 00:44:17,588 --> 00:44:22,026 It gives you some idea of what they were used to. 781 00:44:25,763 --> 00:44:31,802 And then it was on to Moscow. 782 00:44:31,802 --> 00:44:36,974 I spent -- I made 19 trips there in that four-year period. 783 00:44:36,974 --> 00:44:39,643 Average stay was about two weeks so about every other month, 784 00:44:39,643 --> 00:44:42,246 I was there for half the month. 785 00:44:42,246 --> 00:44:45,949 Total time I spent there was eight months. 786 00:44:45,949 --> 00:44:48,719 I hit every month of the year at least once. 787 00:44:48,719 --> 00:44:56,660 It was -- this is a picture in Moscow so you can get an idea 788 00:44:56,660 --> 00:44:59,897 of the -- you see the clean car sitting there. 789 00:44:59,897 --> 00:45:03,801 By the way, there was a law in the city that you had 790 00:45:03,801 --> 00:45:05,169 to keep your car clean. 791 00:45:05,169 --> 00:45:07,104 There was also a law in the city 792 00:45:07,104 --> 00:45:15,012 that you couldn't wash your car in public. 793 00:45:15,012 --> 00:45:19,149 Seatbelts were required. 794 00:45:19,149 --> 00:45:23,320 The fact to know that seatbelts worked was immaterial, I guess. 795 00:45:23,320 --> 00:45:25,055 But we'd be driving down the road 796 00:45:25,055 --> 00:45:26,957 and there'd be a policeman standing on the side 797 00:45:26,957 --> 00:45:28,525 of the road with a white stick. 798 00:45:28,525 --> 00:45:31,095 If he pointed to the car, they were supposed to pull over. 799 00:45:31,095 --> 00:45:32,930 The driver would nudge me. 800 00:45:32,930 --> 00:45:35,432 He'd throw a seatbelt over his lap, 801 00:45:35,432 --> 00:45:38,202 pass the policeman then throw the seatbelt off. 802 00:45:38,202 --> 00:45:41,338 It didn't work anyway. 803 00:45:41,338 --> 00:45:43,140 But there's no place I have ever driven 804 00:45:43,140 --> 00:45:48,078 that I needed a seatbelt more than driving around Moscow. 805 00:45:48,078 --> 00:45:50,547 I mean, if the streets were clogged, they'd just get out 806 00:45:50,547 --> 00:45:52,983 and drive down the opposing traffic lanes. 807 00:45:57,121 --> 00:46:00,591 So what was a typical daily life there like? 808 00:46:00,591 --> 00:46:03,360 I stayed at a very nice hotel. 809 00:46:03,360 --> 00:46:07,865 It was very expensive. 810 00:46:07,865 --> 00:46:13,704 One time I investigated getting a local sort 811 00:46:13,704 --> 00:46:15,873 of subletting an apartment which I could have done 812 00:46:15,873 --> 00:46:17,875 for much, much cheaper. 813 00:46:17,875 --> 00:46:18,842 But there was a catch. 814 00:46:18,842 --> 00:46:21,078 I had to do it in cash. 815 00:46:21,078 --> 00:46:23,614 It was very much a cash carry economy. 816 00:46:23,614 --> 00:46:25,716 So I went to our legal office and asked them, I said, 817 00:46:25,716 --> 00:46:28,886 "I can save the government a lot of money if I just do this 818 00:46:28,886 --> 00:46:30,187 but I have to do it in cash." 819 00:46:30,187 --> 00:46:31,955 They looked at me and said, 820 00:46:31,955 --> 00:46:33,323 "Don't try to save the government money. 821 00:46:33,323 --> 00:46:34,491 It just confuses them." 822 00:46:34,491 --> 00:46:38,695 [ Laughter ] 823 00:46:38,695 --> 00:46:40,898 So I abandoned that approach. 824 00:46:40,898 --> 00:46:44,234 But frankly, I needed the hotel communications that was growing 825 00:46:44,234 --> 00:46:47,838 up at this particular hotel anyway to do my job. 826 00:46:47,838 --> 00:46:49,606 But it was a very nice hotel and it had a very, 827 00:46:49,606 --> 00:46:51,475 you know, opulent breakfast. 828 00:46:51,475 --> 00:46:54,311 They had people playing harps in the upper tier. 829 00:46:54,311 --> 00:46:57,014 A lot of out-of-work musicians running around Moscow. 830 00:46:57,014 --> 00:46:58,849 You'd see string quartets playing 831 00:46:58,849 --> 00:47:03,053 in the subways, you know, for money. 832 00:47:03,053 --> 00:47:05,589 Their attitude about drivers was interesting. 833 00:47:05,589 --> 00:47:09,993 To them, a driver of a car was like a captain of the ship 834 00:47:09,993 --> 00:47:12,062 and what the captain said, goes. 835 00:47:12,062 --> 00:47:13,964 You know, wherever he decided to go and when he decided 836 00:47:13,964 --> 00:47:16,300 to go, that was his job. 837 00:47:16,300 --> 00:47:17,401 We viewed it somewhat differently. 838 00:47:17,401 --> 00:47:20,470 We hired the driver and the vehicle to go 839 00:47:20,470 --> 00:47:22,639 where we wanted him to go. 840 00:47:22,639 --> 00:47:24,942 And so sometimes, they come running and say, 841 00:47:24,942 --> 00:47:26,109 "The driver wants to leave." 842 00:47:26,109 --> 00:47:27,110 We'd say, "So?" 843 00:47:27,110 --> 00:47:32,182 He'd just have to wait. 844 00:47:32,182 --> 00:47:38,188 I often found myself with what I call holding court 845 00:47:38,188 --> 00:47:41,525 because as a liaison, I would carry requests 846 00:47:41,525 --> 00:47:45,162 from the American team and issues and requests 847 00:47:45,162 --> 00:47:47,231 from the Russian team back. 848 00:47:47,231 --> 00:47:50,834 And so I'd sit in a conference room and sort of single file, 849 00:47:50,834 --> 00:47:52,803 one after the other, Russians would come in and kind 850 00:47:52,803 --> 00:47:56,773 of with hat in hand and give me their request 851 00:47:56,773 --> 00:47:58,442 or give me some information and request. 852 00:47:58,442 --> 00:48:00,744 And I kind of felt like the Godfather. 853 00:48:00,744 --> 00:48:03,046 What could I do for you? 854 00:48:03,046 --> 00:48:07,718 But I got to talk to a lot of interesting people that way. 855 00:48:07,718 --> 00:48:11,555 People that had designed systems on the original TU-144 856 00:48:11,555 --> 00:48:14,391 like a guy from Rockwell was looking at the fuel system 857 00:48:14,391 --> 00:48:16,860 and he asked me, "Well, how's the fuel system laid out?" 858 00:48:16,860 --> 00:48:18,662 So I asked Tupolev and they sent in the guy 859 00:48:18,662 --> 00:48:19,930 that designed the fuel system. 860 00:48:19,930 --> 00:48:23,033 And he sits down with a pencil and paper and sketches 861 00:48:23,033 --> 00:48:25,335 out the whole system and how the fuel was transferred 862 00:48:25,335 --> 00:48:28,705 and I translated that as best as I could 863 00:48:28,705 --> 00:48:31,408 and sent it back to the States. 864 00:48:35,512 --> 00:48:39,082 Russian chocolate was a particular favorite of mine. 865 00:48:39,082 --> 00:48:43,654 And they very quickly discovered this. 866 00:48:43,654 --> 00:48:45,222 I guess I gave it away when I said, 867 00:48:45,222 --> 00:48:47,925 "Where do you get this marvelous chocolate?" 868 00:48:47,925 --> 00:48:49,259 Because I wanted to buy it myself 869 00:48:49,259 --> 00:48:51,361 and they never would tell me. 870 00:48:51,361 --> 00:48:53,530 But they always took great delight in making sure 871 00:48:53,530 --> 00:48:55,032 that that chocolate was available 872 00:48:55,032 --> 00:48:56,967 on a table wherever I was sitting. 873 00:49:00,904 --> 00:49:04,474 And like I said, the hotel was expensive and it was. 874 00:49:04,474 --> 00:49:08,445 Most things in the city for a foreigner were very expensive. 875 00:49:08,445 --> 00:49:10,681 But it was a two-tier structure. 876 00:49:10,681 --> 00:49:14,985 They had, say if you went to a museum, 877 00:49:14,985 --> 00:49:17,321 the price for a local is probably 10 times less 878 00:49:17,321 --> 00:49:19,556 than it was for a foreigner. 879 00:49:19,556 --> 00:49:21,625 And one time, we were at a museum and my interpreter looks 880 00:49:21,625 --> 00:49:23,593 at me and he says, "You look Russian. 881 00:49:23,593 --> 00:49:24,695 Keep quiet." 882 00:49:24,695 --> 00:49:27,197 And goes over and buys us two local tickets 883 00:49:27,197 --> 00:49:28,999 for us -- for the museum. 884 00:49:33,036 --> 00:49:37,107 But speaking of museums, one day I was in a museum by myself. 885 00:49:37,107 --> 00:49:38,342 They have two costs there. 886 00:49:38,342 --> 00:49:42,212 You can go in a museum with a camera for one price, 887 00:49:42,212 --> 00:49:45,082 without a camera for a lower price. 888 00:49:45,082 --> 00:49:47,651 I didn't feel like paying extra money so I left my camera. 889 00:49:47,651 --> 00:49:51,288 I was up on the second or third floor and I spied 890 00:49:51,288 --> 00:49:54,491 over in the corner, this pile of junk 891 00:49:54,491 --> 00:49:57,627 but I noticed there was Air Force markings on them. 892 00:49:57,627 --> 00:49:59,296 So I went over and looked at it. 893 00:49:59,296 --> 00:50:02,299 It was Francis Gary Powers' U-2. 894 00:50:02,299 --> 00:50:05,669 For those of you that don't know, that was a plane 895 00:50:05,669 --> 00:50:09,606 that was famously shot down in 1960 over Soviet Russia, 896 00:50:09,606 --> 00:50:12,642 great to the embarrassment of the Eisenhower administration. 897 00:50:12,642 --> 00:50:16,480 I had occasion just a couple of days ago to talk to a guy here 898 00:50:16,480 --> 00:50:21,051 in town that had met Francis Gary Powers and he asked him, 899 00:50:21,051 --> 00:50:24,221 "Why didn't you bite down on the cyanide capsule?" 900 00:50:24,221 --> 00:50:27,524 And he said, "That's kind of permanent, don't you think?" 901 00:50:27,524 --> 00:50:36,500 [ Laughter ] 902 00:50:36,500 --> 00:50:38,135 This is a picture of some of the people I worked 903 00:50:38,135 --> 00:50:43,106 with in the laboratory out at Zhukovsky. 904 00:50:43,106 --> 00:50:45,809 That was invariably a pleasant experience other 905 00:50:45,809 --> 00:50:47,744 than the lack of heat. 906 00:50:47,744 --> 00:50:49,046 Because the people I worked 907 00:50:49,046 --> 00:50:51,415 with were very professional and very pleasant. 908 00:50:51,415 --> 00:50:55,752 We got along very well, never had an issue with working 909 00:50:55,752 --> 00:50:58,822 with -- as I've often discovered in my career, 910 00:50:58,822 --> 00:51:00,991 you get the managers out of the way, the people tend 911 00:51:00,991 --> 00:51:03,026 to work together pretty well. 912 00:51:05,328 --> 00:51:08,598 And at the time, I was not a manager. 913 00:51:08,598 --> 00:51:12,636 I was an Indian surrounded by managers from the U.S. team 914 00:51:12,636 --> 00:51:15,105 when they were there for drinking vodka. 915 00:51:15,105 --> 00:51:18,041 But otherwise, they were back home and didn't bother me. 916 00:51:23,413 --> 00:51:27,250 Here are some of the -- some of the U.S. team. 917 00:51:27,250 --> 00:51:28,452 You can guess who one 918 00:51:28,452 --> 00:51:30,954 of the Americans is wearing the Purdue t-shirt. 919 00:51:30,954 --> 00:51:35,092 That's Steve Rizzi, Donna Gallagher, 920 00:51:35,092 --> 00:51:37,561 Keith Harris, and myself. 921 00:51:37,561 --> 00:51:40,864 They were here for the cabin noise experiment. 922 00:51:44,000 --> 00:51:48,004 I got to talk a little bit about some of the key players. 923 00:51:48,004 --> 00:51:51,441 Bottom right-hand corner is Bill Adams who's a program manager 924 00:51:51,441 --> 00:51:52,809 from Rockwell. 925 00:51:52,809 --> 00:51:55,679 He was often called the father of the TU-144 program 926 00:51:55,679 --> 00:52:00,550 because I gather it was his vision and foresight that led 927 00:52:00,550 --> 00:52:03,687 to the creation of this program in the first place. 928 00:52:03,687 --> 00:52:08,091 Our own Ken Szalai, who was the Dryden Director at the time -- 929 00:52:08,091 --> 00:52:12,829 very material in made sure this came about. 930 00:52:12,829 --> 00:52:16,032 And the [Inaudible] himself, Alexander Pukhov, 931 00:52:16,032 --> 00:52:18,969 the Chief Designer of Tupolev NTK 932 00:52:18,969 --> 00:52:23,440 which is basically this joint stock company. 933 00:52:23,440 --> 00:52:28,645 He was the sparkplug that made things happen 934 00:52:28,645 --> 00:52:30,247 for the Russian side. 935 00:52:30,247 --> 00:52:37,087 He was one of the designers of the original TU-144, a leader, 936 00:52:37,087 --> 00:52:40,957 diplomat, vodka drinker. 937 00:52:40,957 --> 00:52:44,661 You know, he was a force to be reckoned with. 938 00:52:44,661 --> 00:52:49,432 But another force to be reckoned with was Judith De Paul. 939 00:52:49,432 --> 00:52:51,501 Judith was the President and CEO 940 00:52:51,501 --> 00:52:55,539 of that small company I talked about, IBP which is actually run 941 00:52:55,539 --> 00:52:59,209 out of England but she was from New York. 942 00:52:59,209 --> 00:53:02,746 Judith had a very interesting background. 943 00:53:02,746 --> 00:53:08,351 She started her career in show business as a dancing matchbox 944 00:53:08,351 --> 00:53:13,990 in a cigarette commercial when she was seven years old. 945 00:53:13,990 --> 00:53:17,594 She later was an opera singer at the New York Met, 946 00:53:17,594 --> 00:53:19,663 performed with Pavarotti. 947 00:53:19,663 --> 00:53:23,667 I think she did some shows with Placido Domingo 948 00:53:23,667 --> 00:53:25,035 because she moved into production 949 00:53:25,035 --> 00:53:29,906 and produced some plays, musicals -- 950 00:53:29,906 --> 00:53:32,342 two of which she got an Emmy for. 951 00:53:32,342 --> 00:53:36,546 I've seen them at her place in England. 952 00:53:36,546 --> 00:53:41,017 And -- but she also was brought into Russia by Armand Hammer 953 00:53:41,017 --> 00:53:44,621 and introduced to a lot of people in the 1980s. 954 00:53:44,621 --> 00:53:48,391 And she was well-positioned after the Soviet Union fell 955 00:53:48,391 --> 00:53:51,828 to look at some business opportunities there. 956 00:53:51,828 --> 00:53:57,000 And she managed to get all of the rights to Western contracts 957 00:53:57,000 --> 00:53:59,803 to Tupolev which is why we had to pass through her company. 958 00:53:59,803 --> 00:54:03,373 She got all the film rights to the Russian film archive 959 00:54:03,373 --> 00:54:08,378 and made a documentary on Russia's involvement 960 00:54:08,378 --> 00:54:13,116 in World War II during the program. 961 00:54:13,116 --> 00:54:16,253 She was first and foremost a businesswoman 962 00:54:16,253 --> 00:54:19,155 who was always looking for an opportunity. 963 00:54:19,155 --> 00:54:23,426 One of the things she liked to say was, "Is there money in it?" 964 00:54:23,426 --> 00:54:25,662 But she was very much a dominant presence 965 00:54:25,662 --> 00:54:27,430 because of her show business background. 966 00:54:27,430 --> 00:54:29,332 She knew how to make an entrance. 967 00:54:29,332 --> 00:54:31,434 Whenever Judith came into a room, 968 00:54:31,434 --> 00:54:33,570 everybody knew Judith was there. 969 00:54:33,570 --> 00:54:36,673 And she was the dominant presence there. 970 00:54:36,673 --> 00:54:39,409 She once told me that she never crashed 971 00:54:39,409 --> 00:54:41,211 through the glass ceiling. 972 00:54:41,211 --> 00:54:44,047 She landed on top of it [laughter] 973 00:54:44,047 --> 00:54:46,182 and that is the best description of Judith 974 00:54:46,182 --> 00:54:49,986 that I think I've ever heard -- from her own lips. 975 00:54:49,986 --> 00:54:54,024 And by the way, all the interpreters 976 00:54:54,024 --> 00:54:55,425 that I had worked for her. 977 00:54:55,425 --> 00:54:59,095 We had a contract with them for that. 978 00:54:59,095 --> 00:55:02,632 This just shows the typical office at Zhukovsky. 979 00:55:02,632 --> 00:55:09,406 Very reminiscent, I think, of a 1950s feel here to me. 980 00:55:09,406 --> 00:55:12,108 Some key players in there, Borisov, 981 00:55:12,108 --> 00:55:13,810 the Chief Pilot in the center. 982 00:55:13,810 --> 00:55:17,080 The Chief Engineer, the Chief Instrumentation Engineer, 983 00:55:17,080 --> 00:55:20,984 the Chief Designer, and I'll be mentioning this character a 984 00:55:20,984 --> 00:55:22,986 little bit later. 985 00:55:22,986 --> 00:55:26,456 A couple of shots on the aircraft 986 00:55:26,456 --> 00:55:28,425 to show they actually did do some work 987 00:55:28,425 --> 00:55:30,927 on the aircraft when I was there. 988 00:55:30,927 --> 00:55:35,398 By the way, just about every American that came there wanted 989 00:55:35,398 --> 00:55:38,001 to buy one of these Russian hats. 990 00:55:38,001 --> 00:55:40,470 I never did. 991 00:55:40,470 --> 00:55:45,008 I found them too bulky and too hard to deal with. 992 00:55:45,008 --> 00:55:47,010 With my little ski cap, I could do stuff 993 00:55:47,010 --> 00:55:48,978 with my pocket and I was good to go. 994 00:55:51,981 --> 00:55:55,585 I'll talk a little bit about safety at Zhukovsky, 995 00:55:55,585 --> 00:56:00,023 in particular -- I kept losing equipment on the workbench 996 00:56:00,023 --> 00:56:04,994 and I was noticing some spotty sensor alarms going off 997 00:56:04,994 --> 00:56:06,596 so I measured the voltage difference 998 00:56:06,596 --> 00:56:09,733 between the power outlet and the ground on the bench. 999 00:56:09,733 --> 00:56:11,368 It was 90 volts. 1000 00:56:11,368 --> 00:56:15,105 This is not good [laughter]. 1001 00:56:16,673 --> 00:56:19,142 But it goes to the infrastructure again. 1002 00:56:19,142 --> 00:56:21,344 I talked about the seat belts already. 1003 00:56:21,344 --> 00:56:26,983 The briefings were what I called dog and pony shows. 1004 00:56:26,983 --> 00:56:31,087 If we went through a flight readiness review that consisted 1005 00:56:31,087 --> 00:56:32,355 of a bunch of people sitting 1006 00:56:32,355 --> 00:56:35,792 around a table saying, "We're good to go. 1007 00:56:35,792 --> 00:56:37,193 We're good to go. 1008 00:56:37,193 --> 00:56:37,961 Nyet problem. 1009 00:56:37,961 --> 00:56:39,562 No problem." 1010 00:56:41,030 --> 00:56:45,702 And it wasn't like one of our flight readiness reviews 1011 00:56:45,702 --> 00:56:48,838 or tech briefs where we're trying to dig 1012 00:56:48,838 --> 00:56:52,776 into make sure everybody understands what they don't 1013 00:56:52,776 --> 00:56:55,278 understand and have thought 1014 00:56:55,278 --> 00:56:57,247 about what they need to think about. 1015 00:56:57,247 --> 00:57:00,116 That was not transparent to us. 1016 00:57:00,116 --> 00:57:01,851 In fact, I was sent one time -- 1017 00:57:01,851 --> 00:57:08,324 or commissioned by the managers here to find out more about that 1018 00:57:08,324 --> 00:57:10,794 because they said -- they weren't getting the schedule 1019 00:57:10,794 --> 00:57:13,797 and costing information and all that kind of stuff. 1020 00:57:13,797 --> 00:57:15,465 And after I asked him, the Chief Engineer, 1021 00:57:15,465 --> 00:57:16,766 some questions he said, "Well, 1022 00:57:16,766 --> 00:57:19,469 I'm surprised you don't know this stuff." 1023 00:57:19,469 --> 00:57:20,703 One of the other Russians pointed 1024 00:57:20,703 --> 00:57:23,306 out that they never invite me to the meetings. 1025 00:57:23,306 --> 00:57:24,441 How am I supposed to know about that? 1026 00:57:24,441 --> 00:57:27,911 They still never invited me to the meetings. 1027 00:57:32,182 --> 00:57:33,583 This was a real FRR. 1028 00:57:33,583 --> 00:57:39,389 A bunch of Russians gathered by the aircraft making the go no -- 1029 00:57:39,389 --> 00:57:44,427 no go decisions in close communication 1030 00:57:44,427 --> 00:57:47,897 because it was cold. 1031 00:57:47,897 --> 00:57:50,467 A few items about some things that were off nominal. 1032 00:57:50,467 --> 00:57:54,537 I mentioned on the starboard wing, we had a strip of tubing 1033 00:57:54,537 --> 00:57:56,806 for measuring pressures. 1034 00:57:56,806 --> 00:58:03,480 We had one of those come off at Mach 2 and peel back and wrap 1035 00:58:03,480 --> 00:58:07,116 around the pressure rigs of the aft end of the aircraft. 1036 00:58:07,116 --> 00:58:09,819 I had a cockpit window crack. 1037 00:58:09,819 --> 00:58:12,789 And then there are things that I consider off nominal. 1038 00:58:12,789 --> 00:58:14,491 You know, paying for a quarter-of-a-million pounds 1039 00:58:14,491 --> 00:58:19,496 of pull with a suitcase of cash literally is not something we 1040 00:58:19,496 --> 00:58:21,698 typically do around here [laughter]. 1041 00:58:25,001 --> 00:58:27,737 The very first time I arrived in Moscow, 1042 00:58:27,737 --> 00:58:30,607 I got as far as passport control. 1043 00:58:30,607 --> 00:58:33,543 And the passport agent was asking me a bunch of things 1044 00:58:33,543 --> 00:58:35,678 in Russian that I didn't understand. 1045 00:58:35,678 --> 00:58:37,580 When they finally pointed over to the section of the floor, 1046 00:58:37,580 --> 00:58:39,048 there's this little square. 1047 00:58:39,048 --> 00:58:40,216 So I went over and I stood 1048 00:58:40,216 --> 00:58:44,087 on this square thinking, "Now what?" 1049 00:58:44,087 --> 00:58:46,389 My interpreter is on the other side of the security boundary 1050 00:58:46,389 --> 00:58:48,725 and any other American I was with was also over there. 1051 00:58:48,725 --> 00:58:53,796 I was by myself, had no idea what the issue was. 1052 00:58:53,796 --> 00:58:55,298 My interpreter finally managed 1053 00:58:55,298 --> 00:58:58,535 to talk his way past the security boundary and come over 1054 00:58:58,535 --> 00:59:01,371 and asked the passport agent what the problem was. 1055 00:59:01,371 --> 00:59:04,474 And it turned out that the spelling of my name 1056 00:59:04,474 --> 00:59:07,176 on my visa was different than the spelling of my name 1057 00:59:07,176 --> 00:59:10,079 on their list which isn't a big surprise 1058 00:59:10,079 --> 00:59:12,815 because it was all transliterated from our alphabet 1059 00:59:12,815 --> 00:59:16,119 to Cyrillic, and there's a number of ways you can do that. 1060 00:59:16,119 --> 00:59:18,655 And they just chose two different ways of doing it. 1061 00:59:18,655 --> 00:59:21,658 And then Sergei followed all that up 1062 00:59:21,658 --> 00:59:23,560 by asking the passport agent for a date. 1063 00:59:23,560 --> 00:59:27,463 And that pretty well defined Sergei. 1064 00:59:27,463 --> 00:59:35,271 [ Laughter ] 1065 00:59:35,271 --> 00:59:38,007 I wasn't going to core drill that one too much. 1066 00:59:39,576 --> 00:59:45,281 Okay, some things scared me a bit. 1067 00:59:45,281 --> 00:59:49,085 And top of the list is what I called the GPS incident. 1068 00:59:50,453 --> 00:59:53,790 I told Bob Curry a few months ago that he nearly landed me 1069 00:59:53,790 --> 00:59:55,925 in jail and he didn't know what I was talking about. 1070 00:59:55,925 --> 00:59:58,728 But what happened was one morning I'm sitting in my hotel, 1071 00:59:58,728 --> 01:00:02,265 reading the Moscow Times -- this is an English language paper. 1072 01:00:02,265 --> 01:00:07,070 And there's this little article there about a Qualcomm engineer 1073 01:00:07,070 --> 01:00:13,176 that had just been arrested for doing a GPS survey outside 1074 01:00:13,176 --> 01:00:15,845 of a former Soviet military base. 1075 01:00:15,845 --> 01:00:18,615 My blood kind of ran cold 1076 01:00:18,615 --> 01:00:21,985 because I was doing exactly the same thing except I was 1077 01:00:21,985 --> 01:00:25,355 on a former Soviet military base [laughter]. 1078 01:00:26,756 --> 01:00:29,325 This is the survey of the field so that we could get, you know, 1079 01:00:29,325 --> 01:00:32,662 data for the ground effect to know exactly how far 1080 01:00:32,662 --> 01:00:34,530 above the air field the plane was 1081 01:00:34,530 --> 01:00:37,600 because the Russian radar was crappy. 1082 01:00:37,600 --> 01:00:42,672 Now this is one of those cases 1083 01:00:42,672 --> 01:00:44,907 where the Russians made up a new rule. 1084 01:00:44,907 --> 01:00:47,677 He was officially arrested for having -- 1085 01:00:47,677 --> 01:00:52,915 not having the right import license for his GPS unit. 1086 01:00:52,915 --> 01:00:54,717 There was no such thing. 1087 01:00:54,717 --> 01:00:59,822 At least it wasn't at the time that we imported our units. 1088 01:01:01,190 --> 01:01:04,160 So they had me kind of sweating there for a while wondering 1089 01:01:04,160 --> 01:01:06,562 when the other shoe was going to drop. 1090 01:01:06,562 --> 01:01:08,131 They eventually released him 1091 01:01:08,131 --> 01:01:09,932 and not much more was made out of that. 1092 01:01:09,932 --> 01:01:13,736 But other GPS's I don't have time to go into. 1093 01:01:13,736 --> 01:01:17,006 The streets of Moscow, as they say, were problematic. 1094 01:01:17,006 --> 01:01:18,341 There were two classes of drivers, 1095 01:01:18,341 --> 01:01:21,210 the professional drivers and the amateur drivers. 1096 01:01:21,210 --> 01:01:24,947 And the amateur drivers usually had no training whatsoever. 1097 01:01:24,947 --> 01:01:28,051 And both types of drivers drove very aggressively. 1098 01:01:30,820 --> 01:01:34,924 One of our drivers -- it turns out he was the driver 1099 01:01:34,924 --> 01:01:36,859 of the former head of the KGB. 1100 01:01:36,859 --> 01:01:41,764 In fact, he was the driver that drove Solzhenitsyn 1101 01:01:41,764 --> 01:01:46,869 out of the country when he was expelled some years before that. 1102 01:01:46,869 --> 01:01:51,207 One day, I was sitting in the office 1103 01:01:51,207 --> 01:01:55,078 of Mr. [Inaudible] having lunch. 1104 01:01:55,078 --> 01:01:56,512 We often had lunch in his office. 1105 01:01:56,512 --> 01:02:02,485 He was not in attendance that day and we're talking 1106 01:02:02,485 --> 01:02:05,354 about something and I commented that there was a guy back 1107 01:02:05,354 --> 01:02:06,923 at Dryden that reminded me 1108 01:02:06,923 --> 01:02:10,026 of Mr. [Inaudible] only Bill was a redneck 1109 01:02:10,026 --> 01:02:12,695 and [Inaudible] was a communist. 1110 01:02:12,695 --> 01:02:14,831 And the Russians got big saucer eyes and said, 1111 01:02:14,831 --> 01:02:17,500 "How did you know [Inaudible] was a communist?" 1112 01:02:17,500 --> 01:02:22,038 [ Laughter ] 1113 01:02:22,038 --> 01:02:23,372 There's a picture of Lenin hanging on his wall [laughter]. 1114 01:02:23,372 --> 01:02:27,043 I thought that was a clue. 1115 01:02:31,280 --> 01:02:33,015 And there's always cultural mistakes 1116 01:02:33,015 --> 01:02:35,818 that you run across, most of them small. 1117 01:02:35,818 --> 01:02:39,489 But some of them larger than others. 1118 01:02:39,489 --> 01:02:44,594 The -- we were in -- 1119 01:02:44,594 --> 01:02:47,964 we had dinner at our interpreter's house one day. 1120 01:02:47,964 --> 01:02:50,333 This was the first and only time we ever was invited 1121 01:02:50,333 --> 01:02:52,769 into anybody's home there. 1122 01:02:52,769 --> 01:02:57,206 And we arrived -- we decided it would be a good idea 1123 01:02:57,206 --> 01:02:59,942 to take some roses for the hostess. 1124 01:02:59,942 --> 01:03:03,613 And so, bought some flowers, I think it was a dozen roses 1125 01:03:03,613 --> 01:03:06,749 and our interpreter said, "You know, it's bad luck 1126 01:03:06,749 --> 01:03:10,219 to give someone an even number of flowers." 1127 01:03:10,219 --> 01:03:12,421 No, didn't know that. 1128 01:03:12,421 --> 01:03:14,423 So we started to enter and shake hands. 1129 01:03:14,423 --> 01:03:15,424 She says, "Oops, bad luck 1130 01:03:15,424 --> 01:03:17,794 to shake hands across the threshold. 1131 01:03:17,794 --> 01:03:20,296 You got to come inside to do that." 1132 01:03:20,296 --> 01:03:22,565 Okay, didn't know that either. 1133 01:03:24,333 --> 01:03:28,137 Refusing to toast obviously was a faux pas. 1134 01:03:28,137 --> 01:03:31,707 We were visiting a monastery one weekend 1135 01:03:31,707 --> 01:03:34,377 out of -- it was [Inaudible]. 1136 01:03:34,377 --> 01:03:35,511 And we got a tour 1137 01:03:35,511 --> 01:03:37,180 by an English-speaking Russian Orthodox nun. 1138 01:03:37,180 --> 01:03:42,785 And at one point, we're standing inside the cathedral 1139 01:03:42,785 --> 01:03:46,289 and she starts admonishing us because several 1140 01:03:46,289 --> 01:03:48,057 of our members were standing there 1141 01:03:48,057 --> 01:03:49,926 with their hands in our pockets. 1142 01:03:49,926 --> 01:03:54,063 And by way of example, she says, "You know, if you were talking 1143 01:03:54,063 --> 01:03:55,431 to your boss, would you stand there 1144 01:03:55,431 --> 01:03:57,633 with your hands in your pockets?" 1145 01:03:58,801 --> 01:03:59,468 Sure. 1146 01:03:59,468 --> 01:04:03,139 [ Laughter ] 1147 01:04:03,139 --> 01:04:04,340 And she was aghast. 1148 01:04:04,340 --> 01:04:07,777 I thought Americans had more manners than that. 1149 01:04:07,777 --> 01:04:12,915 So -- just for the record, I wasn't standing with my hands 1150 01:04:12,915 --> 01:04:17,420 in my pockets but you just never know. 1151 01:04:17,420 --> 01:04:25,261 And the Wilson in the earlier days, I stayed back in Zhukovsky 1152 01:04:25,261 --> 01:04:29,799 or at Tupolev one day and he went back to the hotel. 1153 01:04:29,799 --> 01:04:32,501 He was on the subway talking to our interpreter and a woman gets 1154 01:04:32,501 --> 01:04:36,572 up and starts berating Wilson for something in Russian. 1155 01:04:36,572 --> 01:04:37,640 He had no idea what it was. 1156 01:04:37,640 --> 01:04:39,508 And she got off and a young man comes up 1157 01:04:39,508 --> 01:04:41,944 and does the same thing. 1158 01:04:41,944 --> 01:04:43,579 Wilson had a heck of a time getting the interpreter 1159 01:04:43,579 --> 01:04:46,449 to tell him what the problem was and she said, "Well, 1160 01:04:46,449 --> 01:04:48,417 she was unhappy with you crossing your legs 1161 01:04:48,417 --> 01:04:50,786 on the subway." 1162 01:04:50,786 --> 01:04:53,489 But he never would tell us why. 1163 01:04:53,489 --> 01:04:54,757 We had a few guesses. 1164 01:04:54,757 --> 01:04:57,493 Maybe he was showing the sole of his foot 1165 01:04:57,493 --> 01:04:59,061 or maybe he was taking up too much space. 1166 01:04:59,061 --> 01:05:01,030 I don't know but it was apparently a no-no that -- 1167 01:05:01,030 --> 01:05:02,598 one of those unwritten rules 1168 01:05:02,598 --> 01:05:04,967 that foreigners were just not going to know about. 1169 01:05:10,039 --> 01:05:15,611 One day, I was in a telecom in Russia talking to the U.S. team 1170 01:05:15,611 --> 01:05:18,848 and Norm Prince -- and some 1171 01:05:18,848 --> 01:05:23,686 of you might know who's worked projects in conjunction 1172 01:05:23,686 --> 01:05:25,321 with us later, he was doing 1173 01:05:25,321 --> 01:05:28,758 and handling quality assessment for Douglas. 1174 01:05:28,758 --> 01:05:31,694 And I knew that he had to coordinate with the Russians 1175 01:05:31,694 --> 01:05:33,863 for flight cards and I said, "Norm, if you want to come 1176 01:05:33,863 --> 01:05:36,432 to Moscow to coordinate your flight cards, 1177 01:05:36,432 --> 01:05:38,968 now's a good time to come." 1178 01:05:38,968 --> 01:05:40,369 And the Deputy Program Manager 1179 01:05:40,369 --> 01:05:43,239 at Boeing jumped all over my case. 1180 01:05:43,239 --> 01:05:45,041 "I don't know how they do things at NASA but at Boeing, 1181 01:05:45,041 --> 01:05:47,376 we let our managers make those kind of decisions." 1182 01:05:47,376 --> 01:05:51,314 Okay, so I said, "Well, I don't know how you do things at Boeing 1183 01:05:51,314 --> 01:05:53,716 but at NASA, we like to give our managers information on which 1184 01:05:53,716 --> 01:05:55,718 to base their decisions." 1185 01:05:55,718 --> 01:05:58,587 And that's all I was doing and I wasn't a manager at the time. 1186 01:05:58,587 --> 01:06:00,623 I certainly wasn't Norm's manager but I was the guy 1187 01:06:00,623 --> 01:06:03,726 at the ground that had the intelligence, the information 1188 01:06:03,726 --> 01:06:07,430 and I was passing it on. 1189 01:06:07,430 --> 01:06:10,199 I often found it easier to work with the Russians than to work 1190 01:06:10,199 --> 01:06:15,805 with Boeing at this project [laughter]. 1191 01:06:15,805 --> 01:06:18,240 To be fair, they were the prime contractor 1192 01:06:18,240 --> 01:06:20,242 and so it was their responsibility 1193 01:06:20,242 --> 01:06:24,580 to run this program but they weren't sending people 1194 01:06:24,580 --> 01:06:26,182 over to actually do that. 1195 01:06:26,182 --> 01:06:27,817 And one thing I discovered with the Russians -- 1196 01:06:27,817 --> 01:06:32,221 unless you're there, your job has a lower priority. 1197 01:06:32,221 --> 01:06:35,391 And I was the guy that was there 1198 01:06:35,391 --> 01:06:38,027 so I was passing on the information. 1199 01:06:43,966 --> 01:06:46,302 It was often because of the import-export issues, 1200 01:06:46,302 --> 01:06:50,573 it was hard to send things back for servicing. 1201 01:06:50,573 --> 01:06:53,976 So in at least one occasion, I was trained by the factory 1202 01:06:53,976 --> 01:06:57,947 to do the servicing on our flight recorder unit myself 1203 01:06:57,947 --> 01:07:01,951 because it's easier to send me there to do it on site. 1204 01:07:01,951 --> 01:07:03,753 And as many times as I was there, 1205 01:07:03,753 --> 01:07:06,555 my participation was still kind of an event. 1206 01:07:06,555 --> 01:07:07,723 It wasn't just seamless. 1207 01:07:07,723 --> 01:07:08,624 Oh, you're here again. 1208 01:07:08,624 --> 01:07:10,292 Let's go do stuff. 1209 01:07:10,292 --> 01:07:12,495 There's a bit of ceremony often involved. 1210 01:07:12,495 --> 01:07:15,598 You had -- you didn't have direct access to people. 1211 01:07:16,899 --> 01:07:20,870 And I already talked about the issues of keeping warm. 1212 01:07:20,870 --> 01:07:23,239 But you can see how they kept warm. 1213 01:07:23,239 --> 01:07:26,909 This is a very common winter garb for the women 1214 01:07:26,909 --> 01:07:29,011 and there's a reason for it. 1215 01:07:36,052 --> 01:07:37,920 Here's a typical lunch at Zhukovsky 1216 01:07:37,920 --> 01:07:39,822 and you probably can't tell 1217 01:07:39,822 --> 01:07:42,958 but that's Donna Gallagher beneath the burka there. 1218 01:07:46,295 --> 01:07:50,800 Completely wrapped including gloves just to keep warm 1219 01:07:50,800 --> 01:07:53,969 at our literally cold lunch. 1220 01:07:56,572 --> 01:07:59,508 There were some positive things about this and back 1221 01:07:59,508 --> 01:08:02,411 in those days, the airline baggage limit was larger 1222 01:08:02,411 --> 01:08:03,245 than it is now. 1223 01:08:03,245 --> 01:08:04,980 And I usually used it to the max 1224 01:08:04,980 --> 01:08:08,617 because I was transporting all kinds of stuff back and forth. 1225 01:08:08,617 --> 01:08:10,719 Airlines still serve foods. 1226 01:08:10,719 --> 01:08:13,355 Security was such that I could carry bottles of water 1227 01:08:13,355 --> 01:08:19,361 from California to Moscow and not have it confiscated. 1228 01:08:19,361 --> 01:08:23,933 I even often got upgraded to business class automatically. 1229 01:08:23,933 --> 01:08:26,102 That was a bit dicey in the early days 1230 01:08:26,102 --> 01:08:28,838 because the government had rules against that, 1231 01:08:28,838 --> 01:08:31,140 that were changing at the time. 1232 01:08:31,140 --> 01:08:35,311 In fact, the frequent flyer miles rules changed during this 1233 01:08:35,311 --> 01:08:36,011 as well. 1234 01:08:36,011 --> 01:08:37,113 I accumulated the miles 1235 01:08:37,113 --> 01:08:39,048 and never expecting I'd be able to use them. 1236 01:08:39,048 --> 01:08:41,350 I ended up using them for the Concorde flight 1237 01:08:41,350 --> 01:08:42,918 but that was officially a business trip 1238 01:08:42,918 --> 01:08:44,954 because I was going to Moscow for a -- 1239 01:08:44,954 --> 01:08:48,057 I mean to Paris for a meeting. 1240 01:08:48,057 --> 01:08:50,059 The 11-hour time difference allowed me 1241 01:08:50,059 --> 01:08:51,527 to take advantage of a double shift. 1242 01:08:51,527 --> 01:08:56,132 I'd get information at Zhukovsky and Tupolev in Moscow, 1243 01:08:56,132 --> 01:08:58,167 go back to my hotel, write emails. 1244 01:08:58,167 --> 01:09:00,469 Go to bed, wake up in the morning. 1245 01:09:00,469 --> 01:09:02,271 Meanwhile the people in the States have had a chance 1246 01:09:02,271 --> 01:09:05,875 to work their normal work day. 1247 01:09:05,875 --> 01:09:08,577 I'd take the answers and go back to Tupolev. 1248 01:09:08,577 --> 01:09:10,779 So that -- if you handled that right, 1249 01:09:10,779 --> 01:09:12,448 that worked out rather well. 1250 01:09:12,448 --> 01:09:15,651 It also gave me the ability out of necessity 1251 01:09:15,651 --> 01:09:17,987 to operate pretty autonomously. 1252 01:09:20,856 --> 01:09:22,291 There was nobody to talk to 1253 01:09:22,291 --> 01:09:24,527 and limited ways in which to do that. 1254 01:09:24,527 --> 01:09:26,729 I couldn't call them on the phone initially. 1255 01:09:26,729 --> 01:09:28,864 They wouldn't be there first of all. 1256 01:09:28,864 --> 01:09:30,833 Second, it was prohibitively expensive initially. 1257 01:09:30,833 --> 01:09:34,970 Emails -- I was going through a local ISP so I had 1258 01:09:34,970 --> 01:09:36,505 to be somewhat careful 1259 01:09:36,505 --> 01:09:39,041 about what information we were transferring back and forth. 1260 01:09:39,041 --> 01:09:44,513 I was the only guy there so I got 1261 01:09:44,513 --> 01:09:51,720 to make decisions somewhat to Boeing's chagrin. 1262 01:09:51,720 --> 01:09:53,222 So what I'd do on the weekends? 1263 01:09:53,222 --> 01:09:54,823 One of my favorite pictures. 1264 01:09:54,823 --> 01:09:56,025 I took this picture. 1265 01:09:56,025 --> 01:09:59,528 This is a park just a few blocks from my hotel. 1266 01:09:59,528 --> 01:10:04,133 The Russians were very fond of walking the park with the family 1267 01:10:04,133 --> 01:10:07,069 and with sleds, as you see -- 1268 01:10:07,069 --> 01:10:10,206 very pleasant if cold environment. 1269 01:10:11,540 --> 01:10:13,642 And I was a frequent visitor to this place, 1270 01:10:13,642 --> 01:10:15,744 the [Inaudible] Flea Market. 1271 01:10:15,744 --> 01:10:19,582 I would take the Moscow subways across town 1272 01:10:19,582 --> 01:10:23,586 and you could buy everything there from matryoshka dolls 1273 01:10:23,586 --> 01:10:26,622 to surplus military hardware. 1274 01:10:28,157 --> 01:10:30,459 Not wanting to deal with customs issues 1275 01:10:30,459 --> 01:10:32,294 with the surplus military hardware, 1276 01:10:32,294 --> 01:10:35,731 I opted for the matryoshka dolls. 1277 01:10:35,731 --> 01:10:37,900 And I became quite adept at picking 1278 01:10:37,900 --> 01:10:39,802 out good quality matryoshka. 1279 01:10:39,802 --> 01:10:42,671 Those are stacking dolls. 1280 01:10:42,671 --> 01:10:44,807 Sold by the artists of those things, 1281 01:10:44,807 --> 01:10:48,677 people that actually painted them, 1282 01:10:48,677 --> 01:10:50,212 good quality for a low cost. 1283 01:10:50,212 --> 01:10:51,547 Like you go to the same -- 1284 01:10:51,547 --> 01:10:53,716 I could find the same dolls in the GUM Department Store 1285 01:10:53,716 --> 01:10:57,987 in downtown Moscow for probably five times the cost. 1286 01:11:01,757 --> 01:11:04,793 And to get there, I'd use the Metro. 1287 01:11:04,793 --> 01:11:08,364 The Metro stations themselves were rather opulently appointed. 1288 01:11:08,364 --> 01:11:11,166 There's a lot of marble columns and statues 1289 01:11:11,166 --> 01:11:14,336 and sometimes chandeliers. 1290 01:11:14,336 --> 01:11:17,506 The subway cars themselves were very boxy 1291 01:11:17,506 --> 01:11:20,509 and functional and blue. 1292 01:11:20,509 --> 01:11:26,382 And the markings -- unless you could read Cyrillic, 1293 01:11:26,382 --> 01:11:28,484 you had no clue where to go on the subways 1294 01:11:28,484 --> 01:11:32,288 because all you had was just a stack of names about this long 1295 01:11:32,288 --> 01:11:37,626 in the Cyrillic alphabet that listed the stops. 1296 01:11:37,626 --> 01:11:40,896 If you had some kind of a map, they were listed as color coded 1297 01:11:40,896 --> 01:11:42,364 but none of the color coding ever made it 1298 01:11:42,364 --> 01:11:44,033 into the subway itself. 1299 01:11:44,033 --> 01:11:47,603 And I think this is initially a security feature 1300 01:11:47,603 --> 01:11:48,837 to the Russians. 1301 01:11:48,837 --> 01:11:50,372 They didn't want foreigners wandering around knowing 1302 01:11:50,372 --> 01:11:52,408 where to go, you know. 1303 01:11:52,408 --> 01:11:53,876 Putting things like military bases 1304 01:11:53,876 --> 01:11:57,313 on the maps is a foreign concept to them as well. 1305 01:11:57,313 --> 01:12:00,883 And you might have seen St. Basil's Cathedral 1306 01:12:00,883 --> 01:12:02,918 at the end of Red Square. 1307 01:12:02,918 --> 01:12:05,287 It's a very famous icon. 1308 01:12:06,522 --> 01:12:12,328 Okay, we had -- we had good technical interpreters. 1309 01:12:12,328 --> 01:12:17,800 I'll mention one story where that didn't work out so well. 1310 01:12:17,800 --> 01:12:22,671 We were doing a summary discussion at the end of one 1311 01:12:22,671 --> 01:12:26,175 of my visits and looking at a shipping document that listed 1312 01:12:26,175 --> 01:12:27,509 where I had left some things. 1313 01:12:27,509 --> 01:12:31,146 And I read off some items, the interpreter said something 1314 01:12:31,146 --> 01:12:33,816 in Russian and the Russians got this confused look 1315 01:12:33,816 --> 01:12:35,250 on their face. 1316 01:12:35,250 --> 01:12:37,186 So I said it again and I listened 1317 01:12:37,186 --> 01:12:39,688 to what the interpreter was saying and I knew just enough 1318 01:12:39,688 --> 01:12:42,725 to recognize he wasn't saying it right. 1319 01:12:42,725 --> 01:12:45,060 So in desperation, I broke into Russian myself. 1320 01:12:45,060 --> 01:12:47,463 Anybody here speak Russian? 1321 01:12:47,463 --> 01:12:48,764 Good [laughter]. 1322 01:12:50,132 --> 01:12:51,467 But I said. 1323 01:12:51,467 --> 01:12:55,003 [ Speaking in Foreign Language ] 1324 01:12:55,003 --> 01:12:57,706 Which means items one, two and three are Zhukovsky and four, 1325 01:12:57,706 --> 01:12:59,074 five and six are in Moscow. 1326 01:12:59,074 --> 01:13:01,677 And they got another startled expression on their face 1327 01:13:01,677 --> 01:13:03,679 and from then on, they never were quite sure how much Russian 1328 01:13:03,679 --> 01:13:04,480 I understood. 1329 01:13:04,480 --> 01:13:08,384 [ Laughter ] 1330 01:13:08,384 --> 01:13:10,519 And they all handled it in different ways. 1331 01:13:10,519 --> 01:13:12,654 Some guys would go off and whisper in the corner. 1332 01:13:12,654 --> 01:13:15,524 Other guys would come right to my face 1333 01:13:15,524 --> 01:13:16,859 and start chattering away at Russian 1334 01:13:16,859 --> 01:13:18,227 and assume I knew everything they were talking 1335 01:13:18,227 --> 01:13:20,996 about which was not often the case. 1336 01:13:26,201 --> 01:13:29,738 Briefly, the Germans sent a film team out and for three days, 1337 01:13:29,738 --> 01:13:32,875 they followed me around and did a documentary, 1338 01:13:32,875 --> 01:13:36,812 kind of like a reality show before there was such a thing 1339 01:13:36,812 --> 01:13:38,614 in which I figured prominently. 1340 01:13:38,614 --> 01:13:43,218 I have a copy of it only because it aired in Germany 1341 01:13:43,218 --> 01:13:47,489 and a colleague of mine -- his daughter saw it, 1342 01:13:47,489 --> 01:13:49,992 recognized my name and hit the record button 1343 01:13:49,992 --> 01:13:52,995 and so I got a copy of that in German. 1344 01:13:58,467 --> 01:14:04,039 The calibration lab -- they were giving me a tour 1345 01:14:04,039 --> 01:14:07,976 of how they calibrated pressure transducers and at the end 1346 01:14:07,976 --> 01:14:11,914 of it, the interpreter or the head of the lab, 1347 01:14:11,914 --> 01:14:14,817 the aforementioned communist turned to me and asked, 1348 01:14:14,817 --> 01:14:16,618 "So tell me, are we behind?" 1349 01:14:16,618 --> 01:14:21,390 And I was thinking, "Heck, yeah." 1350 01:14:21,390 --> 01:14:25,494 But what I said was -- I started my career at NASA 1351 01:14:25,494 --> 01:14:26,962 in the pressure calibration lab. 1352 01:14:26,962 --> 01:14:30,632 My first job was to design an automatic program 1353 01:14:30,632 --> 01:14:32,134 for automating the process 1354 01:14:32,134 --> 01:14:33,936 of calibrating pressure transducers. 1355 01:14:33,936 --> 01:14:36,038 And some of the stuff I just seen there was antiquated 1356 01:14:36,038 --> 01:14:40,175 when I arrived at NASA over 20 years before that. 1357 01:14:40,175 --> 01:14:44,413 But what I told him was, "Well, we do an automated process 1358 01:14:44,413 --> 01:14:47,983 but what I've discovered is the technicians have often lost 1359 01:14:47,983 --> 01:14:50,752 touch with the physics of the situation." 1360 01:14:50,752 --> 01:14:53,822 And the technician drew herself up proudly and said, 1361 01:14:53,822 --> 01:14:56,592 "I understand the physics of the situation. 1362 01:14:56,592 --> 01:14:58,460 Let's move on." 1363 01:14:58,460 --> 01:15:03,165 [ Laughter ] 1364 01:15:03,165 --> 01:15:05,601 And just quickly, Mark Twain, 1365 01:15:05,601 --> 01:15:09,037 I discovered was a popular favorite author in Russia. 1366 01:15:09,037 --> 01:15:10,439 And I let it slip one day 1367 01:15:10,439 --> 01:15:12,407 that he was actually a distant relative of mine. 1368 01:15:12,407 --> 01:15:14,676 And that got them all excited. 1369 01:15:14,676 --> 01:15:17,946 To the extent of next day, they brought in copies 1370 01:15:17,946 --> 01:15:22,484 of Russian works of Mark Twain and had me autograph them 1371 01:15:22,484 --> 01:15:27,389 [ Laughter ] 1372 01:15:27,389 --> 01:15:30,292 And I said, "But I'm only a distant relative." 1373 01:15:30,292 --> 01:15:32,761 They said, "Well, don't put that part." 1374 01:15:32,761 --> 01:15:36,164 So I used my toasting experience to say, "From the banks 1375 01:15:36,164 --> 01:15:39,134 of the Mississippi River to the banks of the Moscow, 1376 01:15:39,134 --> 01:15:39,968 we send you greetings." 1377 01:15:39,968 --> 01:15:41,003 And signed my name to it. 1378 01:15:41,003 --> 01:15:42,838 So they were very happy. 1379 01:15:47,976 --> 01:15:51,647 Now some of these -- if you tell me what they mean 1380 01:15:52,714 --> 01:15:55,450 but there were things that were uttered. 1381 01:15:55,450 --> 01:16:03,992 [ Laughter ] 1382 01:16:03,992 --> 01:16:07,663 I was asked to help them with a Windows problem one day. 1383 01:16:07,663 --> 01:16:09,464 And remember the little -- 1384 01:16:09,464 --> 01:16:13,001 [ Laughter ] 1385 01:16:13,001 --> 01:16:14,102 Remember the little flying folder 1386 01:16:14,102 --> 01:16:15,737 of copying and the countdown? 1387 01:16:15,737 --> 01:16:18,507 Well, it kind of would get down to zero 1388 01:16:18,507 --> 01:16:21,810 and sit there while the folder was still flying. 1389 01:16:21,810 --> 01:16:24,313 And I said, "Wait for it." 1390 01:16:24,313 --> 01:16:27,049 Sure enough, about 30 seconds later, it finished and that's 1391 01:16:27,049 --> 01:16:28,750 when one of the Russians said that line [laughter]. 1392 01:16:28,750 --> 01:16:33,889 On a more serious note, one of the conversations I had 1393 01:16:33,889 --> 01:16:38,560 with my interpreter, you know, they were still trying to figure 1394 01:16:38,560 --> 01:16:40,762 out how things worked. 1395 01:16:40,762 --> 01:16:41,897 They knew how things worked 1396 01:16:41,897 --> 01:16:43,699 under communism whether they liked it or not. 1397 01:16:43,699 --> 01:16:45,400 They knew how it worked. 1398 01:16:45,400 --> 01:16:48,437 Under capitalism, they didn't know what was going on. 1399 01:16:48,437 --> 01:16:50,572 But one interpretation was there -- 1400 01:16:50,572 --> 01:16:52,874 it's every man for himself are expected to do their worse, 1401 01:16:52,874 --> 01:16:55,410 could not work for the common good. 1402 01:16:55,410 --> 01:16:59,481 So that was a very interesting observation on the part 1403 01:16:59,481 --> 01:17:01,550 of someone who grew up in that system. 1404 01:17:01,550 --> 01:17:05,220 That's Mr. [Inaudible], 1405 01:17:05,220 --> 01:17:08,924 the communist there and Mr. [Inaudible]. 1406 01:17:12,194 --> 01:17:15,297 So I'm trying to wrap it up here. 1407 01:17:15,297 --> 01:17:16,798 What happened afterwards? 1408 01:17:16,798 --> 01:17:19,735 Boeing decided that engine technology, it just wasn't there 1409 01:17:19,735 --> 01:17:21,370 to support the next generation 1410 01:17:21,370 --> 01:17:25,173 of supersonic transport in the late '90s. 1411 01:17:25,173 --> 01:17:28,310 They couldn't make the economic case and at the same time, 1412 01:17:28,310 --> 01:17:32,914 the high speed research program ended for various reasons, 1413 01:17:32,914 --> 01:17:36,118 one of which I gather is that it looked 1414 01:17:36,118 --> 01:17:39,021 like Boeing was thinking NASA was going to do all the research 1415 01:17:39,021 --> 01:17:42,991 for them so they cut back the research program and NASA looked 1416 01:17:42,991 --> 01:17:44,793 at Boeing cutting back the research program and said, 1417 01:17:44,793 --> 01:17:45,827 "Well, this is no longer of interest 1418 01:17:45,827 --> 01:17:48,897 to them so we cut back ours." 1419 01:17:48,897 --> 01:17:54,670 The Space Station was way over budget 1420 01:17:54,670 --> 01:17:57,172 and if they got the appropriation line stuff sorted 1421 01:17:57,172 --> 01:18:01,877 out, I gather than all the money kind of went that direction. 1422 01:18:01,877 --> 01:18:05,480 But I will say that these things go in cycles. 1423 01:18:05,480 --> 01:18:10,018 And as you know, the supersonic [inaudible] lab is over land 1424 01:18:10,018 --> 01:18:11,987 and that has a renewed emphasis. 1425 01:18:11,987 --> 01:18:17,259 And I think a lot of data gathered 1426 01:18:17,259 --> 01:18:19,327 on this program could still be quite useful in that. 1427 01:18:19,327 --> 01:18:24,266 And we still have it and as the instrumentation is here, 1428 01:18:24,266 --> 01:18:27,335 I know how to interpret it. 1429 01:18:27,335 --> 01:18:31,573 But we did learn a great deal. 1430 01:18:31,573 --> 01:18:33,909 I gathered a great deal of quantitative data. 1431 01:18:33,909 --> 01:18:38,113 And I personally learned how to work with Russians and hone 1432 01:18:38,113 --> 01:18:40,282 down some of my diplomatic skills 1433 01:18:40,282 --> 01:18:41,550 like in the calibration lab. 1434 01:18:41,550 --> 01:18:45,587 It was an opportunity to build trust with the Russians 1435 01:18:45,587 --> 01:18:48,957 which I think we did pretty effectively. 1436 01:18:48,957 --> 01:18:53,495 And it was a unique experience to work in an environment -- 1437 01:18:53,495 --> 01:18:57,065 I did a lot of traveling before this but I had never really been 1438 01:18:57,065 --> 01:18:59,668 in a place where it was hard to find someone 1439 01:18:59,668 --> 01:19:02,137 who spoke my language. 1440 01:19:02,137 --> 01:19:05,874 And I knew more of the local language than they knew of mine. 1441 01:19:05,874 --> 01:19:10,112 So it was kind of forced the issue to use it a bit more. 1442 01:19:10,112 --> 01:19:12,514 And it was an experience of a lifetime. 1443 01:19:12,514 --> 01:19:15,784 When I left the program, when the program ended, 1444 01:19:15,784 --> 01:19:18,186 some of my Russian colleagues put together this collage 1445 01:19:18,186 --> 01:19:23,391 and signed it to give to me which I appreciated. 1446 01:19:23,391 --> 01:19:26,795 They also gave me a medal. 1447 01:19:26,795 --> 01:19:28,597 This is actually the first medal I ever got. 1448 01:19:28,597 --> 01:19:31,700 I got a few from NASA subsequently 1449 01:19:31,700 --> 01:19:33,535 but this is the first medal I was ever awarded. 1450 01:19:33,535 --> 01:19:37,038 And it was for excellence in the field of aviation technology. 1451 01:19:37,038 --> 01:19:40,408 Now the kicker there -- the reason I show you this is 1452 01:19:40,408 --> 01:19:43,145 because they told me I was the -- 1453 01:19:43,145 --> 01:19:47,415 only the second foreigner they had ever given this medal to. 1454 01:19:47,415 --> 01:19:49,251 Want to know who the first one was? 1455 01:19:49,251 --> 01:19:50,485 The head of North Korea. 1456 01:19:50,485 --> 01:19:58,026 [ Laughter ] 1457 01:19:58,026 --> 01:19:59,427 My old buddy, yeah [laughter]. 1458 01:19:59,427 --> 01:20:02,798 One thing and please don't tell my security services 1459 01:20:02,798 --> 01:20:04,966 about this, okay? 1460 01:20:06,434 --> 01:20:09,571 And a year after the program ended, 1461 01:20:09,571 --> 01:20:12,774 the Russians sent this certificate. 1462 01:20:12,774 --> 01:20:18,380 And I want to read you what it says 1463 01:20:18,380 --> 01:20:22,717 on there as closely as I can. 1464 01:20:22,717 --> 01:20:25,954 "This given certificate is in confirmation of your ability 1465 01:20:25,954 --> 01:20:28,890 to cope with all difficulties in extreme situations similar 1466 01:20:28,890 --> 01:20:32,194 on the character of flood, fire, earthquake, volcano eruption, 1467 01:20:32,194 --> 01:20:34,529 marriage or family life." 1468 01:20:34,529 --> 01:20:39,100 [ Laughter ] 1469 01:20:39,100 --> 01:20:41,403 "Let us congratulate you on your marriage. 1470 01:20:41,403 --> 01:20:44,005 At last it happened. 1471 01:20:44,005 --> 01:20:47,275 We congratulate your bride on very good taste. 1472 01:20:47,275 --> 01:20:49,211 We swear before her and before the God 1473 01:20:49,211 --> 01:20:51,346 that she has chosen a very reliable man 1474 01:20:51,346 --> 01:20:53,081 to herself as a husband. 1475 01:20:53,081 --> 01:20:55,784 Wishing you happiness and good luck through all family life." 1476 01:20:55,784 --> 01:20:58,854 And it's signed by the Chief Designer, Alexander Pukhov. 1477 01:20:58,854 --> 01:21:04,526 I think I broke the cultural barrier. 1478 01:21:06,194 --> 01:21:07,495 Thank you. 1479 01:21:07,495 --> 01:21:16,238 [ Applause ] 1480 01:21:16,238 --> 01:21:18,874 Sorry, I took longer than I expected to, right. 1481 01:21:18,874 --> 01:21:21,843 As long as I feared but longer than I expected to. 1482 01:21:21,843 --> 01:21:23,712 But anyway, we have time for a few questions, 1483 01:21:23,712 --> 01:21:25,413 if anybody is still awake. 1484 01:21:25,413 --> 01:21:27,916 >> I have a question [inaudible]. 1485 01:21:27,916 --> 01:21:32,187 Did you make any significant measure -- 1486 01:21:32,187 --> 01:21:36,958 did you make any significant measurements in the inlets 1487 01:21:36,958 --> 01:21:40,595 since that is such an important factor in high speed flight? 1488 01:21:40,595 --> 01:21:45,133 It's as much important, maybe more so, than the engine itself. 1489 01:21:45,133 --> 01:21:47,369 >> Well, we took a number of measurements. 1490 01:21:47,369 --> 01:21:51,239 There were pressures and temperatures in the inlet. 1491 01:21:51,239 --> 01:21:53,575 We also tried to measure the fuel flow. 1492 01:21:53,575 --> 01:21:56,211 We were using an acoustical sensor 1493 01:21:56,211 --> 01:22:00,015 which I arranged to bring there. 1494 01:22:00,015 --> 01:22:03,818 It wasn't very successful because the noise environment -- 1495 01:22:03,818 --> 01:22:06,655 the acoustical environment of the engine was just too much. 1496 01:22:06,655 --> 01:22:08,590 The acoustical sensor would have worked okay 1497 01:22:08,590 --> 01:22:10,158 in an engine test stand. 1498 01:22:10,158 --> 01:22:13,128 But it wasn't working in flight. 1499 01:22:13,128 --> 01:22:17,666 I am not an expert in any of the actual results 1500 01:22:17,666 --> 01:22:19,634 of the data that were gathered. 1501 01:22:19,634 --> 01:22:23,471 There were some reports that were published at that time. 1502 01:22:23,471 --> 01:22:26,341 But I don't know what the quality 1503 01:22:26,341 --> 01:22:27,676 of those were considered to be. 1504 01:22:27,676 --> 01:22:31,246 >> I wonder also about dynamic measurements as contrasted 1505 01:22:31,246 --> 01:22:33,715 with static measurements of pressure. 1506 01:22:33,715 --> 01:22:37,118 Did you get high frequency pressure measurements 1507 01:22:37,118 --> 01:22:38,453 on anything? 1508 01:22:38,453 --> 01:22:40,088 >> We did. 1509 01:22:40,088 --> 01:22:41,189 I'd have to go back and look 1510 01:22:41,189 --> 01:22:44,993 to see what the frequencies were of those. 1511 01:22:49,397 --> 01:22:52,968 But I don't know that right off the top of my head. 1512 01:22:56,004 --> 01:22:56,805 Terry. 1513 01:22:56,805 --> 01:22:57,772 >> You neglected to mention. 1514 01:22:57,772 --> 01:23:00,141 Talk about the mugging [laughter]. 1515 01:23:00,141 --> 01:23:04,846 >> Yeah but it wasn't my mugging [laughter] 1516 01:23:04,846 --> 01:23:12,354 but what happened was I found a dictionary 1517 01:23:12,354 --> 01:23:20,128 of Russian obscenities in a bookstore here in the States 1518 01:23:20,128 --> 01:23:25,100 which I took with me to Moscow and one of my colleagues 1519 01:23:25,100 --> 01:23:29,237 from Langley took great delight in reading off different parts 1520 01:23:29,237 --> 01:23:32,674 of that to our driver on the way to the air base [laughter]. 1521 01:23:37,045 --> 01:23:38,813 I have to tell the Steve story now 1522 01:23:38,813 --> 01:23:40,582 as you opened that Pandora's Box. 1523 01:23:40,582 --> 01:23:45,653 Steve in one day talking with the Chief Designer, 1524 01:23:45,653 --> 01:23:47,389 the Chief Designer said something 1525 01:23:47,389 --> 01:23:53,428 and he uttered a phrase which basically meant up yours. 1526 01:23:54,796 --> 01:24:00,101 And the Chief Designer thought that was hysterically funny. 1527 01:24:00,101 --> 01:24:02,103 Steve became his best friend. 1528 01:24:02,103 --> 01:24:02,937 This is really cool. 1529 01:24:02,937 --> 01:24:06,374 He was able to swear in Russian. 1530 01:24:06,374 --> 01:24:11,312 So Steve is feeling really good about this and the next day 1531 01:24:11,312 --> 01:24:13,314 or two, he had occasion to use the same phrase 1532 01:24:13,314 --> 01:24:18,286 with another Russian and nearly got called out to a duel, so. 1533 01:24:18,286 --> 01:24:21,389 But anyway, one of my interpreters wanted 1534 01:24:21,389 --> 01:24:25,060 to borrow my dictionary when I went back home one time. 1535 01:24:25,060 --> 01:24:27,395 And the next time I came back, he met at the airport 1536 01:24:27,395 --> 01:24:33,535 and he had a black eye and he had cuts over his eye 1537 01:24:33,535 --> 01:24:37,505 and he had -- he was -- his face had obviously been messed 1538 01:24:37,505 --> 01:24:38,740 and I said, "What happened?" 1539 01:24:38,740 --> 01:24:41,876 He said, "I got mugged." 1540 01:24:41,876 --> 01:24:43,244 He said, "I'm sorry to tell you that you know, 1541 01:24:43,244 --> 01:24:45,146 they took my briefcase and your dictionary 1542 01:24:45,146 --> 01:24:47,182 of Russian obscenities was in the briefcase." 1543 01:24:47,182 --> 01:24:50,085 I said, "Oh, that's too bad. 1544 01:24:50,085 --> 01:24:51,219 I'm sorry to hear that you got mugged." 1545 01:24:51,219 --> 01:24:53,488 And he said, "But I felt so bad about that." 1546 01:24:53,488 --> 01:24:56,925 He went out and he bought another Russian obscenities 1547 01:24:56,925 --> 01:25:00,695 dictionary in Moscow that was published in Russia. 1548 01:25:00,695 --> 01:25:04,132 So now I had a dictionary that had the Russian expressions 1549 01:25:04,132 --> 01:25:07,869 and the literal English translations 1550 01:25:07,869 --> 01:25:13,007 which often made no sense whatsoever [laughter]. 1551 01:25:14,375 --> 01:25:18,246 So I actually traded up at his expense. 1552 01:25:18,246 --> 01:25:21,049 Any other questions? 1553 01:25:21,049 --> 01:25:23,251 >> I have a question. 1554 01:25:23,251 --> 01:25:23,952 >> It's [inaudible]. 1555 01:25:23,952 --> 01:25:27,622 >> All right, oh thanks. 1556 01:25:29,724 --> 01:25:37,765 So related to the Tupolev, the Blackjack versus the B-1, 1557 01:25:37,765 --> 01:25:41,202 I was just wondering if you could add an opinion, you know, 1558 01:25:41,202 --> 01:25:42,971 just being in that environment and working 1559 01:25:42,971 --> 01:25:45,673 with people associated with that company? 1560 01:25:45,673 --> 01:25:49,477 I've had some just sort of security training 1561 01:25:49,477 --> 01:25:53,581 where they kind of drive home the point of, you know, 1562 01:25:53,581 --> 01:25:56,751 keeping a secret by showing the image of the B-1 1563 01:25:56,751 --> 01:26:00,488 and the Tupolev Blackjack. 1564 01:26:00,488 --> 01:26:02,290 And it's just sort of see it, 1565 01:26:02,290 --> 01:26:07,462 be quiet otherwise you know, this is what happens. 1566 01:26:07,462 --> 01:26:13,835 And I'm wondering if over there, is the opinion quite reversed? 1567 01:26:13,835 --> 01:26:17,372 Does the aerospace community over there thing 1568 01:26:17,372 --> 01:26:20,508 that we copied the Tupolev designs with our B-1? 1569 01:26:20,508 --> 01:26:21,976 So which is it? 1570 01:26:25,046 --> 01:26:32,720 >> I've never heard anybody express that opinion over there. 1571 01:26:32,720 --> 01:26:35,690 That wasn't weighing on their minds, if it was. 1572 01:26:35,690 --> 01:26:38,593 I saw the Buran which is the Russian Space Shuttle 1573 01:26:38,593 --> 01:26:47,602 which was quite clearly very similar to the one we put on. 1574 01:26:48,937 --> 01:26:51,506 And they are sensitive to thinking that they copied some 1575 01:26:51,506 --> 01:26:54,475 of our designs like with the Concorde. 1576 01:26:54,475 --> 01:27:00,748 But remember that the industry, there was hurting 1577 01:27:00,748 --> 01:27:02,717 and they were looking for a customer base. 1578 01:27:02,717 --> 01:27:06,187 And we represented their best hope at a customer base. 1579 01:27:06,187 --> 01:27:10,925 They were hoping to continue this project after phase two 1580 01:27:10,925 --> 01:27:13,061 and as I said, that didn't happen. 1581 01:27:13,061 --> 01:27:16,164 But the Russians had actually invested some of their own money 1582 01:27:16,164 --> 01:27:17,265 in this refurbishment. 1583 01:27:17,265 --> 01:27:18,900 We didn't pay for the entire thing. 1584 01:27:18,900 --> 01:27:20,902 They put a fair amount of money 1585 01:27:20,902 --> 01:27:23,738 into their own refurbishment efforts. 1586 01:27:24,939 --> 01:27:29,978 But security was not -- was not a real key factor. 1587 01:27:29,978 --> 01:27:35,383 The only problem I had with security was trying to find ways 1588 01:27:35,383 --> 01:27:38,519 at passing my information back to the States 1589 01:27:38,519 --> 01:27:42,490 that our growing IT security infrastructure would put 1590 01:27:42,490 --> 01:27:44,125 up with. 1591 01:27:44,125 --> 01:27:46,227 Because every time I came up with a method, they said, "Oh, 1592 01:27:46,227 --> 01:27:47,729 we don't really like that." 1593 01:27:47,729 --> 01:27:49,530 So I come up with something else 1594 01:27:49,530 --> 01:27:50,665 so I get some more data transfer. 1595 01:27:50,665 --> 01:27:52,700 "Oh, we don't like that one either." 1596 01:27:52,700 --> 01:27:55,703 So I was always trying to keep a step ahead of the restrictions 1597 01:27:55,703 --> 01:27:59,207 that were put on me for actually getting the information 1598 01:27:59,207 --> 01:28:02,977 out of Russia back to the United States. 1599 01:28:07,982 --> 01:28:09,050 Christian. 1600 01:28:09,050 --> 01:28:10,585 >> They [inaudible] shared or something? 1601 01:28:10,585 --> 01:28:13,788 Was the data mutually shared with the Russians? 1602 01:28:13,788 --> 01:28:16,658 >> Yes. I mean, I got the data from them. 1603 01:28:16,658 --> 01:28:19,827 I mean, when I -- the data files off the aircraft, 1604 01:28:19,827 --> 01:28:21,896 I got from the Russians. 1605 01:28:21,896 --> 01:28:23,865 Originally with the flight data recorder, 1606 01:28:23,865 --> 01:28:27,268 we eventually used a Russian PC basically 1607 01:28:27,268 --> 01:28:31,406 that captured the data in commutated form. 1608 01:28:31,406 --> 01:28:34,075 So that was raw information I got. 1609 01:28:34,075 --> 01:28:36,511 All the calibration files I got for the parameters, 1610 01:28:36,511 --> 01:28:39,547 I got from the Russians and calibrated them. 1611 01:28:39,547 --> 01:28:41,716 They typically did their own data analysis 1612 01:28:41,716 --> 01:28:46,754 in their own systems but I had the data that was translated 1613 01:28:46,754 --> 01:28:48,790 and used by the American team. 1614 01:28:48,790 --> 01:28:50,491 So it was a complete sharing of data. 1615 01:28:50,491 --> 01:28:52,193 It was their aircraft. 1616 01:28:52,193 --> 01:28:53,661 Sometimes sensors that -- 1617 01:28:53,661 --> 01:28:56,164 often sensors that we bought but they installed. 1618 01:28:56,164 --> 01:28:59,233 So it was a real collaborative effort. 1619 01:28:59,233 --> 01:29:00,635 Like I said, it was unique. 1620 01:29:00,635 --> 01:29:04,205 At the time, we had some Space Station activity going 1621 01:29:04,205 --> 01:29:06,040 on in Moscow and I'd run across, you know, 1622 01:29:06,040 --> 01:29:07,875 Goddard people and JSC people. 1623 01:29:07,875 --> 01:29:10,978 In fact, I didn't tell a story about the Abbey Express 1624 01:29:10,978 --> 01:29:15,249 which I often took that originated in Houston that kind 1625 01:29:15,249 --> 01:29:20,355 of puddle jumped across the Atlantic as a charter flight 1626 01:29:20,355 --> 01:29:25,526 but this was the only -- the only game for aeronautics 1627 01:29:25,526 --> 01:29:28,196 and it was a complete sharing of data. 1628 01:29:28,196 --> 01:29:32,500 By the way, I'm -- my plan is 1629 01:29:32,500 --> 01:29:35,069 to produce a memoir about this program. 1630 01:29:35,069 --> 01:29:41,476 This is a kind of -- the surface of what's going to be 1631 01:29:41,476 --> 01:29:42,744 in the book because there's just a lot of -- 1632 01:29:42,744 --> 01:29:44,812 I figured out, if you could spend four or five years 1633 01:29:44,812 --> 01:29:47,882 in a place, there's a lot of stories that come out of it. 1634 01:29:47,882 --> 01:29:50,118 I'm trying to capture those. 1635 01:29:52,286 --> 01:29:52,787 Anything else? 1636 01:29:52,787 --> 01:29:53,955 Yes? 1637 01:30:00,661 --> 01:30:04,632 >> Glenn, I'm curious if you keep up with the people you met 1638 01:30:04,632 --> 01:30:08,302 over there, the colleagues and do you have a desire 1639 01:30:08,302 --> 01:30:11,205 to go back and if you do, why? 1640 01:30:12,573 --> 01:30:15,843 >> Well, first of all, I have not maintained communication 1641 01:30:15,843 --> 01:30:17,145 with the people there. 1642 01:30:17,145 --> 01:30:20,481 It was initially very, very, very difficult to do that. 1643 01:30:20,481 --> 01:30:23,918 They often did not have email addresses 1644 01:30:23,918 --> 01:30:25,787 or electronic communication. 1645 01:30:25,787 --> 01:30:29,490 I did keep up with one of my interpreters for a little while 1646 01:30:29,490 --> 01:30:33,728 but it was difficult to do that for various reasons, 1647 01:30:33,728 --> 01:30:37,965 some of which I don't understand but suspect. 1648 01:30:44,038 --> 01:30:47,608 One of my relatives once said, "Never get good at something 1649 01:30:47,608 --> 01:30:53,915 that you don't want to be doing." 1650 01:30:53,915 --> 01:30:59,253 And it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. 1651 01:30:59,253 --> 01:31:00,488 And once is probably enough. 1652 01:31:00,488 --> 01:31:01,622 I mean, I would like to go back. 1653 01:31:01,622 --> 01:31:03,891 I never did get to St. Petersburg, for example. 1654 01:31:03,891 --> 01:31:08,296 I always -- I got a visa because in Russia, you got visas 1655 01:31:08,296 --> 01:31:09,530 for the city you were visiting. 1656 01:31:09,530 --> 01:31:11,899 If I wanted to visit two cities I had to get a visa 1657 01:31:11,899 --> 01:31:14,235 that included both cities on it. 1658 01:31:14,235 --> 01:31:16,504 And I actually got a visa that included St. Petersburg 1659 01:31:16,504 --> 01:31:18,239 but to get there, it was like -- I don't know, about a six, 1660 01:31:18,239 --> 01:31:22,710 seven-hour ride on a train and I kept hearing horror stories 1661 01:31:22,710 --> 01:31:24,745 about people getting gassed and robbed 1662 01:31:24,745 --> 01:31:26,113 on the train and so forth. 1663 01:31:26,113 --> 01:31:29,250 And I was by myself and so I was a little reluctant to travel 1664 01:31:29,250 --> 01:31:32,920 around too far from the fort in that environment. 1665 01:31:32,920 --> 01:31:34,388 But I always regretted that I never -- 1666 01:31:34,388 --> 01:31:37,325 never made it up to St. Petersburg. 1667 01:31:37,325 --> 01:31:40,394 And I would like to see how some things have changed now 1668 01:31:40,394 --> 01:31:47,969 but all this was pre-Putin Russia, just barely. 1669 01:31:47,969 --> 01:31:49,270 And one thing that I discovered is 1670 01:31:49,270 --> 01:31:55,209 that Russians really respect a strong leader regardless 1671 01:31:55,209 --> 01:31:58,346 of where they come from. 1672 01:31:58,346 --> 01:32:01,015 The Secretary of State at the time, Madeleine Albright, 1673 01:32:01,015 --> 01:32:05,953 who also spoke Russian because she was from Czechoslovakia -- 1674 01:32:05,953 --> 01:32:10,558 they respected her because she was regarded as a strong leader. 1675 01:32:10,558 --> 01:32:12,727 So that transcended gender as well 1676 01:32:12,727 --> 01:32:16,430 as nationality although there are some interesting 1677 01:32:16,430 --> 01:32:20,434 gender-related stories that you can ask Lori Losey 1678 01:32:20,434 --> 01:32:23,004 about some time. 1679 01:32:23,004 --> 01:32:24,939 The Russian views about access 1680 01:32:24,939 --> 01:32:28,309 to aircraft immediately before a flight did not include the 1681 01:32:28,309 --> 01:32:31,312 concept of allowing women on board. 1682 01:32:31,312 --> 01:32:33,281 And that was a tough nut to crack. 1683 01:32:33,281 --> 01:32:37,652 One of the technicians, Donna Gallagher, had the same issue. 1684 01:32:37,652 --> 01:32:41,722 And I had to argue vociferously in some meetings to get them 1685 01:32:41,722 --> 01:32:43,791 to allow that to happen because they were just critical 1686 01:32:43,791 --> 01:32:45,993 for what we needed them to do. 1687 01:32:52,333 --> 01:32:53,668 Bob. 1688 01:32:53,668 --> 01:32:58,205 >> I think I just -- you know, one perspective that I saw 1689 01:32:58,205 --> 01:33:00,408 and that was a little different from Glenn's 1690 01:33:00,408 --> 01:33:02,443 because I was an experimenter and, you know, 1691 01:33:02,443 --> 01:33:06,280 so lots of us experimenters -- but Glenn, you know, 1692 01:33:06,280 --> 01:33:08,649 is responsible for the instrumentation system 1693 01:33:08,649 --> 01:33:12,019 which is critical to all the experiments, 1694 01:33:12,019 --> 01:33:15,890 much more critical -- lots of the experiments cancelled 1695 01:33:15,890 --> 01:33:18,559 or dropped out along the way. 1696 01:33:18,559 --> 01:33:22,630 You know, Dryden had undertaken the most visible and high -- 1697 01:33:22,630 --> 01:33:24,265 you know, if they had failed, 1698 01:33:24,265 --> 01:33:26,400 the whole effort would have been a bust. 1699 01:33:26,400 --> 01:33:31,472 And you know, I did get with [inaudible] early 1700 01:33:31,472 --> 01:33:34,809 on in the development of it, you know, designing the experiments 1701 01:33:34,809 --> 01:33:36,510 and went back several times. 1702 01:33:36,510 --> 01:33:39,780 And I will say that you can't -- 1703 01:33:39,780 --> 01:33:43,150 you know, it's hard to ever state how politically valuable 1704 01:33:43,150 --> 01:33:44,485 this project was. 1705 01:33:44,485 --> 01:33:47,421 When it started out, it was at the height of, you know, 1706 01:33:47,421 --> 01:33:50,057 trying to build technical relationships with Russia 1707 01:33:50,057 --> 01:33:53,761 after the Cold War and Space Station cooperation was big. 1708 01:33:53,761 --> 01:33:58,399 But this one was near term and it had a lot of quick payback. 1709 01:33:58,399 --> 01:34:02,003 And the high point politically for all 1710 01:34:02,003 --> 01:34:04,005 of this was the roll-out ceremony 1711 01:34:04,005 --> 01:34:06,140 which was a joke technically. 1712 01:34:06,140 --> 01:34:07,975 You know, the plane was badly painted. 1713 01:34:07,975 --> 01:34:10,745 It didn't have an engine in it. 1714 01:34:10,745 --> 01:34:14,615 But there were people from every one of those organizations. 1715 01:34:14,615 --> 01:34:19,220 They sent vice-presidents, big name managers out for this 1716 01:34:19,220 --> 01:34:22,556 and you know, watching it as an engineer, you're all jockeying 1717 01:34:22,556 --> 01:34:25,993 for position and you know, who's going to sit where. 1718 01:34:25,993 --> 01:34:28,562 And after that roll-out ceremony, they disappeared. 1719 01:34:28,562 --> 01:34:30,431 You never saw them again. 1720 01:34:30,431 --> 01:34:33,634 And truly at that point on, 1721 01:34:33,634 --> 01:34:36,170 the people who made the project work were Glenn 1722 01:34:36,170 --> 01:34:38,039 and one other name? 1723 01:34:38,039 --> 01:34:40,675 It was Ross Barber who was the other -- well, the person who, 1724 01:34:40,675 --> 01:34:42,943 you know, rolled up his sleeves. 1725 01:34:42,943 --> 01:34:46,981 You know, kind of an unsung hero and you know, 1726 01:34:46,981 --> 01:34:49,050 that's how the project really got to work. 1727 01:34:49,050 --> 01:34:53,587 And I thought -- you know, for all the organizations you show 1728 01:34:53,587 --> 01:34:56,791 up there, Dryden's the tiniest one but that's what -- 1729 01:34:56,791 --> 01:34:59,093 you know, that's what Dryden or Armstrong really does well. 1730 01:34:59,093 --> 01:35:00,494 They actually made it work. 1731 01:35:00,494 --> 01:35:03,197 And I think, you know, I think they really -- Glenn, you know, 1732 01:35:03,197 --> 01:35:05,433 really made the Center look good and really more than that, 1733 01:35:05,433 --> 01:35:07,935 probably made the whole national team look good. 1734 01:35:07,935 --> 01:35:10,337 People have thought of it -- a lot of high idealism going 1735 01:35:10,337 --> 01:35:14,375 into it and you know, a lot of it could have fallen apart 1736 01:35:14,375 --> 01:35:16,944 if we hadn't come through on it. 1737 01:35:16,944 --> 01:35:18,512 >> Well, thanks Bob. 1738 01:35:18,512 --> 01:35:20,815 I'll pay you later [laughter].