One of my closest friends through the years was a gentleman named Sam Smyth who lived in La Canada Calif (near Pasadena). Sam was born in 1924 in Los Angeles and he lived his entire life in the LA area. As was the case with most young Americans of his vintage, Sam wanted to join the military but bad lungs caused by a childhood ailment made him ineligible, so he did the next best thing and entered the defense industry. Sam became an engineering draughtsman at Lockheed in Burbank in 1942 (age 18). The design team was led by the famous Clarence L. (Kelly) Johnson and the local products were Hudson, Ventura and Harpoon patrol bombers and of course, the P38 Lightning. Sam worked at Lockheed while taking engineering courses at night at LA City College.
At the end of the war, he left Lockheed to complete his degree in Mechanical Engineering at the Univ. of Colorado. Once he was past that milestone, Sam returned to Lockheed as a full-fledged engineer in 1946 and remained there until he retired in about 1990. He started out as a stress analysis engineer and one assignment he talked about was leading the design team on the wing skins for the P3 Orion ASW/patrol bomber (a variant of the L188 Electra turboprop airliner). The Electra didn’t do too well in commercial service as Douglas and Boeing took over the long range market with their slightly later, but faster turbojet DC-8 and B707 models. Also, the Electra had a whirl-mode engine mount vibration issue which resulted in several fatal crashes and ruining its reputation as a safe airplane. If you’ve ever watched “Ice Pilots” on the History Channel - Buffalo Airways has one or two operational Electra’s in the fleet. The P3 however was a resounding success and has been, and remains, in service for decades with air forces around the Free World.
The period from the late 1940s through to the early 1990s was sort of a “golden age” of aviation in the world and few places made more gold than Southern California with Lockheed, Douglas, North American, Consolidated and all of their suppliers (and I’ve likely forgotten some) all located within a few miles of each other in the LA-SD areas. The number of new military acquisition programs and the pace of R&D and simple performance progress leading to new model introductions in the 1950s-60s was nothing short of astounding. Think of size and scope of the US Century Series, the number of different US Navy fighters and attack aircraft from Vought, Grumman and Douglas and the amazing 5000 plane run of McDonnell F4 Phantom and later F15 programs, the multiple large bomber programs in the US (B36, B45, B47, B52, B70) and UK (Valiant, Victor and Vulcan plus the groundbreaking TSR2) and the unique (and highly successful) Hawker Kestrel/Harrier VTOL fighter, also in the UK. Moving forward, there were a large number of military and civil transport aircraft projects ranging from the 1950s piston-engined variants of Boeing bombers, Lockheed Constellations, Douglas DC4-7 series piston transports in the US through to the European contributions like the DeHavilland Comet, BAC One-Eleven, Fokker F-series, French Caravelle and the elegant Vickers VC10 aircraft to the enormous success of the DeHavilland Canada bush planes and later Dash DHC7 & DHC8 regional transports built near me in Toronto which were powered by the incredibly prolific Montreal-based Pratt & Whitney Canada PT6/PWC100 small turboshaft engine lines.
There were exciting and fun projects everywhere and everyone (including several Forum members like Fred Hill, as well as my buddy Sam Smyth at Lockheed) were in the thick of it.
Sam had a particularly exciting career because when he returned from Colorado in 1946, Kelly Johnson was recruiting the best and brightest for the new Advanced Development Projects or ADP division of Lockheed California. Sam was one of the earliest recruits to what would become the “Skunk Works” division. It started in Burbank, but eventually moved out to the desert town of Palmdale near Edwards AFB - where it still operates. Sam commuted from La Canada to Palmdale every day for many years and for a time, he was in a car-pool with Ben Rich who succeeded Kelly Johnson as head of the Skunk Works. Sam was very well-connected.
Sam’s specialty was
configuration design which basically meant taking all of the stuff that had to go
inside the airplane (as determined by the structures, hydraulics, electronics, weapons and other systems people), the engines and fuel (as specified by the powerplant and performance types) and fitting it into the aerodynamic shape of the
outside of the aircraft (as designed by the aerodynamics people). This
configuration design task was foundational to bringing a design successfully from the concept stage to the production floor and eventually onto the flight line. It required a very deep understanding of nearly every other field of aeronautical engineering plus a whole other set of skills in project management and handling people.
He wasn’t able to tell me about all of the projects on which he had worked, but Sam did note several which included the:
- S3 Viking ASW aircraft for the USN
- F104 Starfighter
- U2 surveillance airplane (Sam met and knew Frank Powers quite well). Did you know that the U2 fuselage was basically similar to that of the F104?
- SR71 Blackbird series of M3.0 reconnaissance aircraft (incl. the YF12 interceptor variant that was slated to carry the remarkable Hughes AIM54 Phoenix missile that eventually was deployed on the F14 Tomcat)
- experimental Lockheed Sea Shadow low-observable “stealth” ship (look it up - fascinating)
- the F117 Nighthawk “stealth” fighter including the earlier Have Blue tech demonstrator precursor a/c (again, check it out)
He told me that there was a whole laundry-list of other projects to which he had contributed that he could not describe because he’d never been given a release to do so (even though a number of them were being blabbed about by others). Sam took security and his obligations as an American very seriously - and yet he and I formed a tremendously close bond that I will always treasure. We attended every single Open House Day at Edwards AFB from 1994 through to 2011 when his health began to fail - and ya wanna talk air shows....yeah baby!
One aspect of Sam’s career that I’ll close with is the use of advanced design technologies like computer graphics, computer aided design (CAD) and computer aided manufacturing (CAM). He told me that some of the new shapes on which Lockheed was working in the early 1960s were too complex for manual drafting and so they began to employ computers which required mathematical descriptions of the curved shapes - and Sam was good at math. That early CAD system was called CADAM and Lockheed basically invented most of the technologies associated with it - in-house. Sam was part of that small group of experts (I think around 8-15 people, but that might not be correct). The Lockheed CADAM system was eventually sold to Dassault of France and renamed CATIA. Later versions of CATIA are still widely employed throughout the aerospace and automotive industries to this day.
I met Sam at the SAE Aerospace Congress in Long Beach in 1993. He gave a talk on the history of the aircraft industry in Southern California and ended his talk with a trivia contest. He posed about 5 questions of the audience and promised to buy lunch for anyone who could answer all 5 questions. The rest is history (and lunch was delicious). Sam and I continued to pose aviation trivia questions to each other till he died in May 2012 - what a blast. Examples included:
- what was the formal designation of the V1 buzz-bomb and which German aircraft company built it?
- who was Wing Commander Malcolm and what did he develop?
- what was the first turboprop aircraft engine, what company built it and on which aircraft did it fly?
- how many bolts were used to secured the supercharger casing to the engine block of an RR Merlin engine?
What a cool guy and what a tremendous American patriot. Sam was, IMO, the ultimate aircraft guy.
Pete