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Oral History Interview Use Restrictions

This transcript is based on a tape-recorded interview conducted by Erik M. Conway on 12 April 2001. Copies of the tape and transcript are deposited indefinitely at the NASA History Office in Washington, DC and the History Office at the NASA Langley Research Center. I have read the transcript and have made minor corrections and emendations. The reader is asked to bear in mind that this transcript is a record of a spoken conversation rather than a literary product, and that it may contain unintentional faults, lapses, or inaccuracies.

The NASA History Office may use this transcript for its own purposes as it deems appropriate. However, I wish to place the following conditions upon the use of this interview transcript by outsiders. I understand that the NASA History Office will make reasonable efforts to enforce the conditions to the extent possible.

___,;:j;......__·PUBLIC. THE MATERIAL MAY BE MADE AVAILABLE TO AND MAY BE USED BY ANY PERSON FOR ANY LAWFUL PURPOSE.

____ OPEN. This manuscript may be read and the tape heard by persons approved by the NASA History Office. The user must agree not to quote from, cite or reproduce by any means this material except with the written permission of the NASA History Office.

___ MY PERMISSION REQUIRED TO QUOTE, CITE OR REPRODUCE. This transcript and the tape are open to examination as above. The user must agree not to quote from, cite or reproduce by any means this material except with the written permission of the NASA History Office, in which permission I must join. Upon my death this interview becomes open.

___ .MY PERMISSION REQUIRED FOR ACCESS. I must give written permission before the manuscript or tape can be utilized other than by NASA History Office staff for official purposes. Also, my perm iss ion is required to quote from, cite, or reproduce by any means. Upon my death the interview becomes open.

Larry Fishbach

April 12, 2001

Erik M. Conway, Interviewer

Conway: I always start out with a biographical question. Who are you? Where were

you born, educated, etc.?

Fishbach: My name is Larry Fishbach, born Brooklyn, New York, 1940. Went to high

school at Erasmus Hall [~] High School with Barbra Streisand, Neil Diamond,

Gabe Kaplan, Bobby Fischer. Little bit of interesting background.

Conway: Yes.

Fishbach: Then I went to undergraduate school at Rensselaer Poly Tech in Troy, New

York. Graduated in '62 with a degree in chemical engineering and got a master's

while working for NASA at Case Western Reserve, which at that time was the last year

it was Case Institute of Technology. I had a choice of what my degree read, so it

reads, Case Western Reserve University, in '67, with a master's in mechanical \l'l

engineering~ aerospace fluid and thermal sciences.

Conway: By '62, you were working for NASA?

Fishbach: NASA, right.

Conway: When did you come to work for them?

1

Fishbach: In '62, June of '62.

Conway: Specialized in fluids and thermal?

Fishbach: I started off in electric propulsion on spacecraft.

Conway: So you were part of the electric propulsion program that didn't--

Fishbach: I was in the Mission Analysis Branch, and we supplied all the mission

analysis for all the programs at the lab. So my section did electric propulsion. There

was another section that did chemical propulsion and there was another section that

did nuclear propulsion. We had another section which did aircraft. So we were the

first Mission Analysis Group that did the whole system, modeling the individual parts -S'/5T-em s

ofthe~s.

Conway: So essentially a disciplinary research group.

Fishbach: Yes.

Conway: Supporting the rest of the programs. So then your involvement with the

variable cycle engine program was?

Fishbach: I was pretty good on the computer, and in 1967, I believe it was, yes, '67,

NASA decided they wanted to develop a computer model of engines as opposed to

doing hand-matching of engines, which is what they used to do.

2

So, Bob Koenig [~of the section that did the aircraft support, they

teamed me up with him to develop an engine cycle model, and we went to the Air

Force, which had a program called GENCOM, generalized engines, which only did . turbofan engines. We took that program and we modified it to do turbofans, ·i'-"rb c .. L. d¥-f~ - . 'cr'~) 7

turboprops~d that became the first engine cycle program in NASA. We called it

GENENG when we did it.

Then when the supersonic transport came along and they needed variable

cycle engines , we went around looking to see what was available. We found that the

Navy, with Mik~~4] at Naval Air Development Center in Warministettad

developed a program called NEPCOM, for Navy Engine Program. That was based

upon a program developed by a guy named Hutchison, which was called SYNTHA,

and he had SYNTHA Corporation, which thay-.b(old~t program.

The Navy bought the rights from SYNTHA to the Fortran code, and Mike took the tl-lmosl

logic that was in SYNTHA, which was very good, it enabled you to synthesize"any

engine you could dream up, and replaced all the thermodynamic models with more

accurate models, as his master's thesis, while working for the Navy.

So then we looked at that, and I saw that starting from that program we could

change then to a code which could do variable cycle engines, which could operate in

multiple modes, so it could operate as a turbo fan, a turbo jet, and switch flow

streams, keeping components common from one mode to the other. So I went down

to the Navy, and in two weeks we turned that program into a variable cycle engine

code.

That program continued development, adding stuff over the years where we put

in dissociation and all this kind of stuff, so we could do even hypersonic engines.

That program is still being used. It's being replaced finally now, a joint program with, I

think, GE and Pratt and NASA are working on developing a new code. When I left,

3

there was like 150 users, companies using that code in the country.

Conway: Good grief. When did you leave?

Fishbach: '95.

Conway: Through 1995. It's an impressive lifetime for a computer program:

Fishbach: Yes. Twenty-one years basically it was the standard and it's still being

used. Some people still like it better than the other one. But they developed a GUI

version of it, and that was being used a lot. As I say, they were getting to a new one,

which was built so that it was like a supervisory code that anybody could take their

own module and replace it if they wrote it the right way, so you could change the

models in the code. That's the code that's being developed jointly now.

That's still being worked on out at NASA Lewis. The Aero Propulsion Analysis

Office, I think, is their name now, they're still doing it. A contact, if you want to talk

about that, would be Tim Wickenheiser. He's the division chief. Wickenheiser is W-1-

C-K-E-N-H-E-1-S-E-R. They're the Lewis focal point on that code, along with ·the

computer version. They had support over there.

Conway: You mentioned a guy named Garry Klees at Boeing. Is he the originator of

the variable cycle engine idea?

Fishbach: No, he's the originator of a lot of variable cycle engine concepts. The

variable cycle engine isn't an engine. It's a class of engines which can convert from

one mode to another, so that maybe during takeoff it operates as a high-bypass ratio

4

turbo fan for low noise, but by moving pieces around you can convert it into a turbo jet

for efficient cruise operation. He was the inventor of the annular inverting valve.

You've heard about that?

Conway: Yes.

Fishbach: Okay. He also was the inventor of-oh, what the heck was that called? It

was the injector nozzle which sucked in air to slow the flow down during takeoff. He

had a few other ones. I can't remember them off the top of my head. But basically he

was Boeing's propulsion man. As I'd mentioned to you on the phone, Boeing had

more people working propulsion than Pratt and GE put together.

Conway: Why was that? You wouldn't expect that from an airframer.

Fishbach: What's interesting is that very few people realize that Boeing used to be

part of United Aircraft, which is Pratt & Whitney.

Conway: Right, but it was a very long time ago.

Fishbach: Right. Well, they kept their propulsion group.

Conway: That's interesting.

Fishbach: So they had guys working inlets, nozzles, engines, and everything.

Conway: Yes, nozzles and inlets for supersonic aircraft certainly makes sense, but

:·1

5

the actual propulsion cycle--but I suppose it's interesting. Now, there's an engine

mentioned in some of the documents, a Boeing cycle known as the 701. Do you

remember that? There seems to have been some controversy over it during· the VCE

program.

Fishbach: 701, I remember the number. That might have been the annular inverting

valve engine, I'm not sure.

An interesting sidelight to this is when that program, which was NNEP, Navy­

NASA Engine Program, the one that went on to become like the standard, we went out

with a proposal for a contract to develop a method of estimati~the weight of these

engines, and the winning bid was Boeing. Garry Klee:;? thJ guy that developed the

weight model for that.

When Pratt came up with their first variable cycle engine under the program, as

each component came in, they gave us the characteristics of that component in terms

of hub-to-tip ratio, solidity, chords, and all the pieces and parts that would go into

building up an engine. We kept on putting that in the model of the WA ~ode, which is

W-A-T-,1or weigfil8nalysis of turbine engines, which was hooked to NNEP so that you

would tell it what the components were and it would fly the engine through the flight

envelope and find the maximum sizing criteria in terms of airflow pressures and stuff

like that to calculate the stresses, to size the component for its wo~st conditions. So

the compressor might be sized for takeoff.~"· ..nv..-~(b ~~ ~ ~' When Pratt came up with their first engine on a component by component

basis, we came up with weight of the engine, which we sealed in an envelope, and

we missed the engine weight by fifty pounds.

Conway: Not too shabby.

6

Fishbach: Which could have been pure luck, but it was just that it was damn good that

we can evaluate a heck of a lot of engines now, because we didn't have to go through

a complete design team to do them. We could compare one cycle versus the other, or

what happened when you change bypass ratio and stuff like that.

Conway: So you could experiment with engines without having to build them.

Fishbach: Or sending it to a complete design team that would do a complete layout of

the engine and weigh the nuts and bolts and stuff like that. We could get within 5

percent. We wrote a number of papers on this stuff, presented them in Europe and

iYI~:'f~~t copies of them at home somewhere in a box. But there's a whole bunch

of reports written. I was author or co-author on most of them. They compared the

weights of the engines and the methodology.

Conway: This is all in the seventies?

Fishbach: No, the variable cycle engine was the eighties.

Conway: The VCE program starts out around '76 and dies in '82.

Fishbach: It didn't die in '82. We kept working on that thing up through-

Conway: Because HSR restarts the effort in-

Fishbach: Well, HSR. HSR is where the VCE engine was at. That was part of the

7

HSR program.

Conway: But it's picked up again.

Fishbach: Yes.

Conway: But the variable cycle engine program· belonged to SCAR, to Supersonic

Cruise Aircraft Research Program. That one ran '72 to '82, it's killed, and then there's

about a five-year gap before the High Speed Research program starts up in 1989.

~ .$, - w1 C\~ e:iec-t r1 C--

Fishbach: Most of the work by Klees and t~~ere we got Bc;ai:a§l and Pratt to

team together, which I had suggested that we were paying them, basically getting half

the effort because we were duplicating effort, and they agreed to work together. That's

the first time they ever--it was like Macy's and Gimbel's, but they really worked well

together on it, and they worked with Boeing on it. That was the HSR program.

Conway: That's HSR?

Fishbach: Yes.

Conway: I haven't started digging into HSR that much yet. I'm primarily trying to get a

handle on the variable cycle engine effort in the seventies, which was real small.

mean, it was like five million a year.

Fishbach: That was peanuts. All the major work on all these new cycles and nozzles

and inlets and stuff was done under HSR.

8

Conway: There were, what, five engines in VCE you guys were working on ..

Fishbach: I'll tell you, if you look up, I wrote a paper, I think I gave it in California, and it

was written by Jack Whitlow, who was doing the cycles back then, and Len Stitt,

myself, and I think Jim Stone. It traced the whole program, giving every year, what was

done, the engines, what they went to, what they decreased to, and all that kind of stuff.

It's all documented in an AIAA paper. If you look in there, I think that was one of the

best papers I ever wrote. I was the main author on it, and it gives the whole history. If

you look at that, you'll get most of the information you're looking for in regards to the

engine program.

Conway: As far as the technical stuff?

~w~ Fishbach: No, it talks about the engine cycles, how many t~ey 'ftJent, how they got

eliminated, stuff like that, and goes into the engine, the inlet, the nozzle and the noise.

That's why the four different parts are there.

Conway: Do you remember anything about how the VCE program in the early eighties

came to an end?

Fishbach: In the early eighties?

Conway: Yes. It may have just been invisible to you if you were working on so many

other things.

9

Fishbach: I worked the program. How it came to an end? There's a difference

between ends and ends. The contractor efforts may have gone to an end, but we

continued to work the stuff in-house, I think, at least in the cycle analysis area,

because we kept on supporting it. As the systems group, we kept on looking at

everything. The engines I worked on in electric propulsion was the Kau~an Mercury

~ bombardment engine, which the cesium version of that is what they're

using now, and we did electric propulsions to Mars, which they're talking about doing

now. We did these forty years ago. So we kept on working twenty years in the future.

So to me, it didn't end.

In fact, as I say, in '74, around there is when we developed that NNEP code.

Navy NASA Engine Program, which was the cycle program. It was to support that

effort, and we never stopped using that. We just never stopped studying it.

Conway: So then the development of this software package is part of what you were

doing in VCE?

Fishbach: That's what encouraged the development of that, was to be able to

simulate these variable cycle engines.

Conway: Okay. Because there's so many different possible ways of constructing a

variable cycle engine.

Fishbach: Yes.

Conway: Different cycles. That's interesting. What sort of a computer was available

to you then to do this stuff on?

10

Fishbach: IBM 360.

Conway: Did you do the coding yourself or did you have programmers?

Fishbach: Developed the equationj then keypunched them in ourselves. It used to be

keypunch and then it became just putting it into a terminal. But we started with

punching out Fortran cards.

Conway: Manny Boxer told me a little bit about the first efforts at Langley in computing

the late fifties and the card decks and so forth. He was involved in inlet work there for

a while.

. Cht\~S

Fishbach: Manny Boxe~ from the past.

Conway: I had talked to him last year.

Fishbach: Neil Driver, is he still around?

Conway: Yes. Just barely. He's had serious health problems, but he's still a rabble­

rouser when he decides he wants to talk.

Fishbach: Did you ever see his license plate on his car?

Conway: No.

11

Fishbach: SST-1 or SST -4, I can't remember which it is. [Laughter]

Conway: That's not surprising. He and Roy Harris and a few others are still out

promoting it, Roy Harris just a couple of weeks ago up on Capitol Hill.

Fishbach: I'll tell you what killed the program, the last program: when Boeing bought

McDonnell Douglas. The only reason Boeing was in that thing was because they

were afraid McDonnell Douglas would build an airplane if they dropped out. When

they bought them, there went the competition.

Conway: That's interesting. Lots of people have told me Boeing wasn't really very

interested in it, which I suspected, but that's the first time anyone has linked it to

McDonnell Douglas.

Fishbach: They had to stay in it if McDonnell Douglas was in it. I mean, how could

Boeing not be in it if McDonnell Douglas was interested in building the airplane?

Conway: So they acquired McDonnell Douglas just to get out from under this--

Fishbach: No, no, I didn't say that. I'm saying that once they acquired McDonnell

Douglas, it gave them an easy way out.

Conway: An easy way out. That's interesting. I'll certainly have to talk to Alan Wilhite

and some others about that. Because one of the things I haven't figured out is who

exactly was it that was really very interested in SST in the late eighties or early

nineties. Because this Dick Fitzsimmons guy who was at McDonnell Douglas for a

12

long time, he's a big enthusiast.

Fishbach: Right. You may be lucky. I've still got my Franklin planner from NASA.

Douglas, the guys that were interested in the SST at Douglas was Bruce Bunin.

Gordon Hamilton was their engine guy. Alan Mortlock was noise, I believe. Bill

Regnier. Bob Welge.

Conway: Him I met.

Fishbach: Jim Wechsler. Those were the main people. I've got some other names,

but they could tell you more on that. I have their phone numbers from back in 1980,

1990.

Conway: Chances are pretty good I can find them. lnfospace.com has an excellent

white pages. These are all McDonnell Douglas Long Beach?

JUvf!;tfl-f Fishbach·: Yes. And Chantelle ~ [v"s" •e:lc], she got taken off the program. She

was gorgeous. [Laughter] That's a she.

Conway: And she's an engineer?

Fishbach: Yes.

Conway: Oh, that's interesting. That doesn't happen very often.

~~.,0...0~ Fishbach: Oh, I know a lot of good-looking womenX!ngineers.

13

Conway: Oh, yeah?

Fishbach: I hired~m~

Conway: Well, that's why.

Fishbach: Not for that reason.

Conway: No. Let's see, so these are all McDonnell Douglas Long Beach.

Fishbach: Yes.

Conway: Interesting. Somehow I would think that the St. Louis guys would be

interested, but they were militaries.

Fishbach: Right. I got all the Boeing names, too, if you need those.

Conway: Sure.

Fishbach: Let's see, I got controls, the overall was John Gerstle. Install performance

was Steve Happenny. Inlet guy was Joe Kancsek. The guy did the most on the valves

and the exhaust system was Gary Lidstone. Malcolm MacKinnon was the lead guy.

Conway: Yes, his is the only name I've got.

14

Fishbach: Interested in noise?

Conway: Yes.

Fishbach: Gene Nihart. Ron Pera was cycles. Phil Sweetland~ was like

Malcolm's deputy, if I remember. John Vishal, can't remember what he did, but he

was somewhere important in that. As I told you, Wf~ees.

Conway: Right, who's probably still around then.

GM4-'{ Fishbach: Gary may not be still around. I'm not sure. He was always thinking of

retiring. His wife is an architect, and they built a house into the side of a hill pn Mercer

Island, which is Seattle. Oh, God, those are names from the past.

Conway: We've talked quite a bit about the use of computers and engine design.

VCE gave you the opportunity to work on that software, which is interesting.

Fishbach: What happened was the VCE got killed, if I remember, and as I say, if you

go get that document it will give you a whole history. But if I remember correctly, the

VCEs could not get to the noise levels that were required, no matter what they did. All

of these annular inverting valves and all this stuff was designed to move the high­

speed flow to the outside and the low speed flow to the inside. That couldn't get there

from there. So then they had to go to suppressors. So they came up with al.l these

suppressor designs, and once they put a suppressor on the engine, it was not

necessary to invert the flow anymore, because they were using the suppressdll, for

the noise suppression. So you lost the benefit of the inverted velocity profile. So that's

15

what killed the VCE program.

Conway: That's why this goes away. That's interesting, because for HSR they settle

on this mixed flow turbo fan.

Fish bach: You can use this or not, but the mixed flow turbo fan came out of Lewis.

We showed them that the mixed flow turbo fan would do it, as long as they got the

suppression that they were talking about. That's how they settled on the mixed flow

turbo fan as the cycle. It was Lewis that came up with the mixed flow turbo fan as the

cycle.

Conway: Now, isn't the mixed flow turbo fan a fairly conventional military fighter-type

engine?

Fishbach: Oh, absolutely. It's absolutely conventional, but the point was, was that all

this complexity they were working on, and all these pieces and parts were

unnecessary, because the mixed flow turbo fan, as long as you had to go to a

suppressor, performed as well as any of the others and eliminated all the complexity.

So we showed that to GE and Pratt, and that's when they settled on it as the cycle.

Conway: They must have fought over that for a while.

Fishbach: No, once they realized they couldn't get there with a VCE, then they started

working on how could we quiet the thing. They came up with it had to be a

suppressor, and that wiped out the inverted velocity profile.

16

Conway: That's interesting. So the inverted velocity profile could get you down to

about Stage Two, but not Stage Three noise?

Fishbach: Right. That's what killed the VCE program. Now, I'm remembering that

they went from Stage Two to Stage Three.

Conway: Yes, Stage Three they know about in the late seventies, but it's

implemented, I think, finally in '86.

Fishbach: Once they knew, it was because they couldn't get there from there.

Conway: That makes a lot of sense. So then the whole variable cycle idea just goes

away simply because of the reduction in noise standards?

Fishbach: Well, no.

Conway: There were other problems?

Fishbach: No, the variable cycle engine did not go away.

Conway: It's a concept, I understand.

Fishbach: No. See, variable cycle engine just means variable cycle engine, an

engine which can operate as a high bypass ratio turbo fan during takeoff, and then go

to a mixed flow turbo fan during cruise for cruise efficiency, was still a viable concept,

once you have the suppressor. But you don't want to have that high bypass ratio

17

during cruise. So you still have a cycle which changes, but not in terms of

complications like inverting velocity profiles and stuff like that. So, yes, it's still a

variable cycle engine, but not what you picture as a variable cycle engine, which is

changing from the turbo jet to this, that, and the other thing.

Conway: Okay. I'm confusing myself out of thinking that the mixed flow turbo fan is a

variable cycle to some degree.

Fishbach: Definitely it is if you operate it at an unmixed flow during takeoff and a

mixed flow during cruise. That's a variable cycle engine. As I say, this stuff is all done

in that paper. It's all discussed in there, if you can get a hold of that. I have a copy of it

at home.

Conway: I'm sure if it was an AIAA paper--what year was it? That's the other question

I should ask you. Was it '82 or '83?

Fishbach: Early eighties, something like that. It was at the Joint Propulsion

Conference, I think, in Los Angeles, somewhere around there. Just look if you do a

search, Fishbach, Whitlow, Stitt.

Conway: You'll come with a list?

Fishbach: You'll come up with it. It's also a NASA TMX, because we published

everything that was an AIAA paper also as a NASA TMX.

Conway: Then I probably do have it. See, I have the technical details, I'm just trying to

18

understand the program.

Fishbach: But as I say, a lot of the questions you're asking were addressed to that

paper.

Conway: Military programs, you've actually already mentioned that part of your code

came from a Navy effort.

Fishbach: Right.

Conway: What other crossflow between military programs and yours went on during

the VCE effort in the seventies?

Fishbach: From them to us, very little. They may have had some experimental

programs and stuff which there was cross-feed, but we wrote in our group, the

Mission Analysis Group at that time at NASA Lewis, having these codes we applied

those engines to VSTOL fighters, to fighters, regular fighters, and everything else. We

did studies of all the military vehicles using variable cycle engines, and published

results on that. But I don't think anything from them flowed to us, except for some

experimental stuff.

Conway: You've already told me part of my answer. What applications came out of

your part of VCE effort? As I said, you just answered part of the question, but I'm trying

to get it more utility. What did you see as the biggest success? Maybe that's a better

way of asking.

19

Fishbach: Nothing ever got built from what we studied.

Conway: I understand that.

Fishbach: So measuring success is difficult. I think that the biggest success was a

steering program to what turned out to be the final engine, the mixed flow turbo fan.

The guys are still at Lewis that did those studies, by the way.

Conway: Certainly for the HSR stuff.

Fishbach: Yes. They did a lot of the other ones, too, and they took over the

development of the code after I retired. Actually, when I was made branch chief, I was

more or less out of the development to the code, except in an advisory capacity.

You're not interested in that stuff, I'm sure. But we did look at a number of different

applications, but nothing ever came of any of them. In fact, nothing I ever worked on

ever came out. As I say now, electric propulsion, we're talking about going to Mars

now using electric propulsion eventually and stuff like that. I said, yes, forty years after

I worked on it.

Conway: They'll dust off your publications from then, assuming they can find them

and not wind up redoing all of them.

Fishbach: I've got copies of all of them.

Conway: The libraries do, too. I'm just not sure that anyone will think to look for them.

You never know.

20

You retired in '95, is that what you said?

Fishbach: Yes.

Conway: So you were in the H SR program essentially until the program expansion is

well underway. It expands in '94 from the Phase One and the Phase Two.

Fishbach: I was there through my retirement.

Conway: Right, through '95.

Fishbach: Yes. It was killed after I left. A piece of interesting information is why I got

back into the program.

Conway: Okay. How did you get back into it?

Fishbach: I left the program and was the NASA lead on the engines for the hypersonic

transport.

Conway: So you were at NASP for a while.

Fishbach: I was in NASP. I was in NASP when it was Copper Canyon.

Conway: There's a story that hasn't shown up in anything I've seen published yet.

Fishbach: What happened there, just for your edification, not for your publication, was

21

we did the studies of all the cycles, and GE and Pratt and Rocketdyne did the same

studies. We all evaluated all the concepts, one of which was Tony DuPont's concept.

Are you familiar with that?

Conway: That one, yes.

Fishbach: Which was the one that he was a buddy of Williams. What was Williams'

first name? There are so many Williamses. The guy from DARPA. Anyhow, General

Bartholomew, I think was the head of the program at that time, if that was his name.

can't remember Williams' first name. Anyway, it's immaterial.

We all evaluated the engines and in those concepts the Tony DuPont cycle

came in seventh, it came in fifth, it came in whatever the hell it was, and the best

engine turned out to be, lo and behold, a turbo fan for low-speed concept, zero to

three. Very similar to the supersonic transport engine.

We had the meeting where they were going to do the down-select. General

Electric recommended the turbo fan, we recommended the turbo fan, the Air Force

recommended the turbo fan. Rocketdyne recommended a variation on the DuPont

engine and Pratt & Whitney recommended the DuPont engine.

I went to the guy who made the studies for Pratt and I said, "Why would you

choose that engine? You know it came in like fifth in your studies." He says,

"Because that's what management wanted us to recommend."

And they choose the DuPont engine as the engine to be worked on. They gave

a contract to Pratt. They gave a contract to Rocketdyne. They made GE a sub to

Rocketdyne. I said, "We just spent a year and a half evaluating all these cycles, and

the two people that got the contract are the ones that gave the politically correct

answer, not the right technical answer." I said, "I want off this program." They put me

22

back o~~T. I said, "I won't work on a program where decisions are being made

f:/~J;:is~ly({That's why I left in '95, by the way, also, was that everything in NASA

became a political decision, nothing was technical anymore.

Conway: That includes HSR?

Fishbach: HSR was the only program that was technically being run correctty, and

that's because GE and Pratt were working together. They weren't in competition.

Boeing and Douglas were working together, so there was nothing political to do.

Conway: So no one could buy off their pet congressman and have DARPA pressured

or NASA pressured in this case.

Fishbach: Right, because we were all working as a team. But other things were

happeningFgetto blow all II 1is st1:1U: ol'f my chest lii(O we Aad a eefl'tpetitioA~ , the .. 9i1 ector Of Ae1 eAel::tties at bsvJis Qne aLtbe4tAe~ts-ts feF=that was 8e1'1 6aFAfC)b~

.9eFI Oa1 1 1pbell wo1 ked eft ttate Cgppet: CaR;teFF,'i:l=le-~t lit ah eraft at tl 1e Aifi lierse.

"'II &) efe'~' Flsfibacfi. VVflat tile tJell ovas l1e1 118Jiie9 A•,yl9evv, iJ~~J9etiWeA'Siile WQR<sel fop

*t&ei1 ectal ef-AeFeAae~tte&.--·S·omth'ey=f>~CFVVt:J~·fSt~rat tudfreel:eliuft.a

rtad at P~ASA)as4fiite lslea&ae~eronatttfts.=w.fif'lert"'tt1e~-eaM<fJafr;e¥e6 ttJ~

23

lost te her ~or Direetor ef Ae1 01 •atttics tu--Be everall direeter o~ tf1e-lee. And Q&:Jess \¥Rat'?

+t::lefirst=elael< eireeter of a NASA eeRt~. Every promotion, every competition was

being made on the politically correct choice of candidates ... ~ite males eould go=-::..

:-po• 11161 salt, eRel-1 wouldn't go along with it. And we all quit.

We had four supervisors in my group and three of us retired when they offered

the early out. That's why Coltrin quit the same time. We all quit. Everybody walked out

on that thing. That was March 25th, '95. Last day for all of us.

So I was first exposed to things going political with hypersonic, and then it

became not only technical, but politically correct, but in terms of who they were

choosing to head what group based upon what they were, not who they were. I wasn't

going to prostitute myself.

Conway: That's too bad.

Fishbach: It's still that way [;;st iA u [~antel] GOidtn got Itt "there.

Caowa~· He ee11'L be long for NASA.

~ch· lzie's a pelitieal a1 1iffiel. 'JVhen tl9ey ovanted to cut M~A's "bt:Jd§et, he wants

tQ£ut it more t1::1an the¥ asked him Tt:lat's just a little aslde for you.-\ _ _____.

Conway: The Copper Canyon stuff is interesting, since I have waiting for me at the

Reagan Presidential Library 700 pages of NASP material on--

Fishbach: Have they declassified that stuff?

24

Conway: Apparently. They answered my FOIA request and said, "Yes, we've got 700

pages of stuff we'll release to you." So I'm going out there the middle of May:

Fishbach: See how much black Magic Marker is on it. [Laughter]

Conway: Yes. I'm rather curious about that myself. There's obviously some

relationship between HSR and NASP as several people have told me. Partly, it's that

a bunch of you guys went from one program to the other, so there's that connection.

Fishbach: Once they made the down-select, we were no longer involved.

Conway: Down-select for the engine?

Fishbach: For the engine.

Conway: So NASA ceased to be involved?

Fishbach: No, I'm just saying that we just--we were just the support then, we didn't go

into this big study of alternatives or continue looking at various cycles. As I say, my

group was the Mission Analysis Group, which they've changed names, but basically

did the same thing since they formed it in 1961, doing all these cycle analyses. Once

they've made a decision, there's no need for us anymore. We go on to the next thing.

So that's why we all went into the SST. But we were doing both at the same time,

actually, but we just stopped working on NASP, because that had been selected.

25

. .

Conway: Once that debacle had been decided. The other relationship seemed to be,

again, codes, computer codes, that went from NASP to the HSR program for airframe

structural development. Bob Welge was telling me that they essentially started codes

at the beginning of NASP, that they ran straight through. So essentially under

development for almost fifteen years for computer-assisted design, which is

interesting.

Fishbach: Boeing was big into that stuff, into CATIA.

Conway: In fact, they just had another release on how they were going to use it to

save lots of money on their Sonic Cruiser design, assuming they actually do anything

with that.

Fishbach: It's nice talking about technical stuff instead of customers complaining how

they're out of water. [Laughter]

Conway: Why did you come here and start this?

Fishbach: Well, another interesting story. Originally, lonics, which is our parent

company, was going to open up a--we have lots of subdivisions,~ gool [~ being one of them, bottled water. One of the other divisions is Elite Chemicals

[~. Elite Chemicals makes bleach and windshield washer fluid and cleaning

solutions and stuff, which they then market. They make it for other people to market

under their name. They wanted to open up a plant in Ohio. They knew that I was

available, because I had retired, and so they wanted me to consider building that

plant, but it was three years off in the future.

26

I >

So instead, they said, "Well, look, it's going to be about three years, so why

don't you open up an Aqua Cool [p~c] office here. Then when we decide to build

the Elite Chemical plant, you'll go over to there," because I've got a bachelor's degree

in chemical and a master's degree in mechanical engineering, and they knew me. So

I said okay. Then they decided not to build the plant.

Conway: So here you are.

Fishbach: So here I am five years selling bottled water.

Conway: Okay. Everyone's got to do something.

Fishbach: My wife is from Cleveland and there's no way we could move out of the

area, and basically if you don't work for NASA, there's no technical jobs in this area.

Conway: Right. Right. No, I understand, otherwise you'd be moving out to California

probably, one or the airframe engine manufacturers. I suppose you can only go as far

as Cincinnati in that game, though.

For HSR you had Pratt and Whitney and McDonnell Douglas and Boeing in

rather bizarre partnerships, since usually doing this sort of thing is a violation of anti­

trust law. How did you get them to agree to do that? I mean, it may well have been

beyond your pay grade, but it sounds bizarre.

Fishbach: Let's put it this way, I will take credit for pointing out to Pratt & Whitney and

GE, because they would show these things and we would show our studies, we had

stuff which was better than theirs and stuff like that. We were saying, "But the problem

27

I •,

is we have duplication of effort. Let's face it, if we actually build this thing, there's

enough for everybody."

[Begin Tape 1, Side 8]

Fishbach: By us duplicating cycle studies with GE and Pratt, half the time they're

studying the same things, and developing inlets, you're paying two people to do the

same job and stuff like that. We're halving the effort. You're getting half the results we

could get. I said, "It's kind of ridiculous. We're not going to get anywhere." I just

dropped that at a meeting one day.

About six months later, they came back and said they were going to team up.

Now, I suggested it, but I had nothing to do with it happening. Maybe they went back

and they talked to their management and said, "You know something, there's probably

enough. The only application for this stuff is going to be supersonic transport. So we

want to be the country that builds that supersonic transport. We can both make

money if we work together on this." So they traded information on those types of

cycles, which were not applicable to a DC-8 or a 7 47 and stuff like that. So they

realized that they could both do well, and the program might advance a lot further if we

pool the effort rather than duplicating the effort. Now, I suggested that, as to whether

or not that was the cause, I like to think so, but I can't prove it.

Conway: Sure. I'll certainly ask around, because it is an interesting question how that

came about. It's not normal for NASA and it's certainly not normal for any of the

manufacturers to operate that way, although it's become, because now there's this

GE-Pratt engine alliance for the A380 engine. So they paired up on that, too.

28

Fishbach: Well, both companies had a lot to offer in expertise in various aspects. So "ti.l ~ w(,..J,) ~

it might end up that~ Vfl1iJ' a GE turbine with a Pratt compressor.

Conway: That's an interesting thought. It's fantastic. What haven't I asked you that I

should have?

Fishbach: I'll just point out that, I've pointed it out before, which is a lot of this stuff that

you're looking for is documented. The history, too, in history papers. I don't know if

anything was ever written down on it, though, we ran a panel discussion where we AJ'"W'CJ.no\ s~

had-what the hell was on there? A man from Boeing. Who '"as teeftJnszL A big-wig "\crrl1 ~

from GE was~ Donohue [plg;;zte] . .Qat DeReMHO? I-I is lest tlatP\6 voas 8et ;elclue.

He was the head of the program from GE.

Conway: The Pratt guy was named Hines, right? Was it Dick Hines?

Fishbach: Dick Hines. It might have been Dick Hines that was on from Pratt, but

anyhow we had the head guy from Boeing, McDonnell Douglas, GE, and Pratt serving

on a panel discussing the program.· I don't know if that was like a panel discussion,

so I don't know if we ever had anything written on that or not. I doubt it.

Conway: What was the general gist of it? If you can remember.

Fishbach: I really don't. That's beyond my memory span. Let's see. What other

background material? Neil Driver gave a number of papers on it.

Conway: Yes, I've got a bunch of Neil's papers.

29

• J •• "'

Fishbach: His are from the historical perspective, as opposed to the technical, I think.

Conway: Yes. Yes, largely, that's about right.

Fishbach: So looking through those things you'll probably pick up a lot more

information. I don't know if Jack Morris is still down at Langley. Shelby J. Morris.

Conway: The interesting thing for me, for what I'm going to wind up writing i~ that

Lewis, because you guys just went back to your disciplinary work once the VCE

program was canceled, provided the continuity over--there's this gap between that and

the beginning of HSR. So that fills a big hole for me. So that's very nice.

Fishbach: As I said, in '74 or '75 is when we developed that cycle code for that and we

continued to use that up until--it's still being used.

Conway: Up until now, yes. Okay. Let's see, I really have run out of questions for you

and actually I'd like to ask you more about Copper Canyon, but I probably shouldn't.

Fishbach: I have no idea now if it's declassified or classified on that.

Conway: You can get far by asking--probably if I went to the Air Force they'd laugh at

me, but like 1--

[End of interview]

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