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AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF THE PROFESSIONAL CAREER OF HAROLD (HAL) ERDLEY

WRITTEN IN 2012

PREFACE

THE FOLLOWING HISTORY OF MY PROFESSIONAL CAREER IS LIMITED TO JUST THAT. THERE IS NO REFERENCE

TO MY FAMILY LIFE, INCLUDING MY MARRIAGE AND MY PARTICIPATION IN THE RAISING OF OUR CHILDREN. TO

HAVE INCLUDED ALL OF THESE EVEN MORE IMPORTANT FACTORS IN MY LIFE WOULD HAVE BEEN A MUCH

MORE AMBITIOUS TASK.

The description of my professional career is as how I remember it, and I have no doubt omitted important references to people who greatly helped accomplish the achievements that I participated in. In every stage of my career I was only one of many who worked hard and helped in a group effort to complete important technical advances. The greatest privilege I enjoyed in my career was the opportunity to work with highly capable people that I was able to communicate with and to help achieve our mutual goals.

In reading the following material, it can be observed over and over again that I always enjoyed the technical aspects of these group efforts, and eschewed the management aspects, except insofar as to require enough management authority to carry out the necessary technical work. This straddling the line between technical and management responsibility was never easy and often impossible.

Throughout my professional career I considered myself fortunate (and quite often surprised) in being able to hire truly qualified people, and to enjoy the respect of the technical community at large.

Perhaps the peak gratification in my career was to significantly participate in the process of creating a conceptual design and bringing this Litton concept of an inertial system to a full manufacturing status within a very few years. Naturally, a great many people other than myself were involved in this process. The Guidance and Control Systems activity lives on today as part of the Northrop Grumman Corporation and has resulted in the accumulated sales of inertial systems and components totaling many billions of dollars over the years.

About a year ago, 2011, the Guidance and Control Systems Division of the Northrop Grumman Corporation held a 50th year anniversary breakfast celebration of the history of their inertial business starting with the Litton ownership of this activity, apparently under the mistaken assumption that this business somehow magically and suddenly sprung into existence in 1960 or 1961. The truly hard work at Litton in the bringing of the inertial business from zero to being a real contender in this activity (in the face of stiff opposition and of strong political enemies) was carried out between 1954 and 1959. This appears to be another case of history being written by the current generation, and not by the generation who lived it.

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MY PROFESSIONAL CAREER, HAROLD (HAL) ERDLEY

CONTENTS Chapter 1 -- The U.S. Navy, 1944-1946.......................................................................................................................... 2

Chapter 2 -- Starting out as an engineer at North American Aviation, Inc. and Inertial System Testing ...................... 3

Chapter 3 -- Career continuation at North American Aviation .................................................................................... 10

Chapter 4 -- Entry of Henry Singleton into North American Aviation ......................................................................... 11

Chapter 5 -- Working at Litton, Early Days .................................................................................................................. 13

Chapter 6 -- Litton gets into the inertial systems business. ........................................................................................ 15

Chapter 7 -- Litton gets into the Aircraft Inertial Systems business ............................................................................ 16

Chapter 8 -- Post Singleton Litton Inertial Systems ..................................................................................................... 22

Chapter 9 -- A new gyro technology comes to life ...................................................................................................... 38

Chapter 10 -- Management issues and my resignation at Litton ................................................................................ 40

Chapter 11 -- Aftermath of my leaving Litton .............................................................................................................. 41

Chapter 12 -- Starting out at Teledyne Systems Company, 1968 ................................................................................ 42

Chapter 13 -- The development of new Teledyne inertial systems ............................................................................. 45

Chapter 14 -- Working at Teledyne Controls, 1980 - 1990 .......................................................................................... 50

Chapter 15 -- Retirement ............................................................................................................................................. 54

CHAPTER 1 -- THE U.S. NAVY, 1944-1946

In joining the U.S. Navy as an enlisted man I was most fortunate in being able to participate in the Navy electronic

technician training program, which extended over a period of about nine months. This was a unique opportunity

to have both classroom and hands-on training in the operation and maintenance of military classified electronic

equipment such as the then mysterious radar, sonar, and loran navigation systems, as well as the specialized radio

communication equipment and fire control systems used by the Navy. This was a fascinating experience and

served me well when I ended up being the only electronic technician on a gasoline tanker ship (the USS

Susquehanna) in the Philippines. I replaced an electronic technician who had been on the ship for several years

and we had only one day for him to brief me on all of the ship's electronic equipment. At first I felt uncomfortably

overwhelmed by this responsibility, but soon developed confidence in my ability to troubleshoot and maintain all

of this equipment in good working order as, fortunately, this is exactly what my training was all about. Covering all

of these interesting details would take a volume in itself. After leaving the Navy in June, 1946, I worked at Gilfillan

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as an electronic technician during the rest of the summer before going back to UCLA to continue my engineering

education. Gilfillan was working on Moving Target Indicator (MTI) radar equipment at the time, so I was getting a

bit of exposure to the world of electronic research and development.

CHAPTER 2 -- STARTING OUT AS AN ENGINEER AT NORTH AMERICAN AVIATION,

INC. AND INERTIAL SYSTEM TESTING

After obtaining both a bachelor's and a master's degree in electrical engineering from UC Berkeley I accepted a job

at North American Aviation, Inc. in Downey, California. I really would have preferred to work at Hughes Aircraft in

Culver City, but their job offer came in too late, and as a totally inexperienced young engineer I believed it would

be unethical to cancel my acceptance of the North American job and then accept the Hughes job instead. This

really turned out later on, unbeknownst to me at the time, to be to my great advantage, I believe, because my

subsequent employer change four years later presented a wonderful opportunity.

My first day at North American, in July, 1950, consisted of an introduction to my boss as well as to "Inertial

Navigation," a government classified technology that at the time I didn't know even existed. Inertial navigation

uses gyroscopes (gyros) and accelerometers to sense and compute the location of moving vehicles into which such

self-contained navigation systems are installed with no need for any other information.

My boss sat me down at a desk in a large "bullpen" area that must have been the home to at least 100 other

engineers. This area was not only without air conditioning and consequentially uncomfortably hot, but was near

the Red Star Fertilizer Company, which provided a constant unpleasant odor and plentiful flies, to say the least. I

didn't know anyone at North American and was really starting from scratch there.

My boss gave me copies of several technical proposals to read to get up to speed on inertial navigation and to the

fact that all of this was for a military classified system to be used for the Navaho missile program, which North

American was under contract to supply to the U.S. Air Force.

After about two weeks of reading and re-reading all of this material, as well as some internal technical memos I

was getting quite bored, interesting as it was to me at first. I went to my boss and told him that I really would

prefer doing some useful work rather than being forgotten in some corner of the organization doing nothing.

Almost immediately after this conversation I found myself out on the flight line, assigned to assist in the flight

testing of North American Aviation's first pure inertial system. This was far more to my liking, even though the

flight line was immediately adjacent to the aforementioned Red Star Fertilizer Company with its mountains of

fertilizer being processed clearly visible in sickening detail.

I quickly realized that the real "name of the game" in inertial system development was to develop gyros with

almost unbelievably low drift rates, on the order of 0.01 degrees per hour (36 arc seconds per hour, equivalent to a

pointing accuracy of about one foot at a distance of one mile for one hour) under the environmental conditions of

an aircraft or cruise missile. Ballistic missile applications, with their inherent higher acceleration and vibration

environments, however, relied more on the highest possible accuracy of the accelerometers, since the gyros had

to hold their accuracy primarily only during the launch phase of the missile operation.

North American's first system was an all analog mechanized inertial system made up of a "stable platform" and

ten relay racks of associated vacuum tube support electronics, as well as a gasoline operated Auxiliary Power Unit

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(APU), and several "bottles" of compressed nitrogen gas needed for the support of the platform, gyro, and

accelerometer air bearings. This equipment took up the entire interior of the C-47 aircraft we were using as the

test vehicle. I can only assume that this air bearing support technology was inspired by captured German

equipment and technology at the end of WWII, but this is just a guess.

We used a cylindrically shaped coordinate system, the diameter of which was equal to the diameter of an assumed

spherical earth. The flight path was along the circle of this diameter tangent to the earth, a great circle course.

Since the earth is not exactly spherical, small corrections were needed for any relatively long flight, but our flight

tests extended only over about 80 miles maximum, so the major error sources were those from gyro drift rates and

accelerometer errors, the gyros usually contributing the major errors. The analog electronics also had severe

performance specifications, but, for our purposes at the time this was carried out adequately by the vacuum tube

technology electronics we were using.

I soon found out that one of our major competitors was the Draper Labs at MIT, which used a completely different

and essentially more practical design by having their precision gyros and accelerometers supported by a dense

liquid known as Fluorolube, with a specific gravity of about two. In this way the precision instruments were

neutrally buoyant, and, except for the small error torques due to the jewel and pivot location bearings (similar to

watch bearings) and the small wires needed for gyro power, would not be subject to significant error torques,

independent of the environmental acceleration. They used no air bearings and thus required no heavy nitrogen

containers to supply the nitrogen for our "air" bearings. We also had another competitor, Northrop, who was

developing the star tracker guidance system for their Snark missile, a competitor to our Navaho missile, but I only

discovered this later.

Figure 2-1 Functional View of a Single Degree of Freedom Gyro

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Figure 2-1 Shows the basic design of a single degree of freedom gyro. For a precision floated gyro the bottom

plate is fixed to the interior of a hollow case, which also contains low friction bearings for the output axis shown in

the figure. This hollow case is floated in a dense fluid in order to obtain neutral buoyancy and minimum error

torques on this floated assembly, even under a high acceleration environment. Any external angular input about

the input axis, as shown, results in an angular motion about the output axis due to gyro precession, also as shown.

This angular motion about the output axis is measured and used to drive the gimbals of a containing gimbal

mounted platform assembly in order to minimize the angular motion about the output axis, which is ideally

maintained at zero. In this way the (minimum of three) platform gimbals maintain a fixed angular orientation of

the innermost assembly, assuming the use of three mutually orthogonal oriented gyros. This allows the

accelerometers mounted thereon to measure the acceleration along all three axes. These accelerometer sensor

measurements are then used for analog or digital computation of the vehicle velocity and position in a defined

coordinate system.

A word need be said here about the MIT Draper Labs. The Draper Labs is a building on the MIT campus and was

named after its leader, Dr. C.S. Draper (while he was very much alive and active). Dr. Draper was a master

promoter and fund raiser for his Draper Labs empire. He offered special classified courses in inertial systems and

components for young military USAF, Navy and Army officers, and was sure to treat these students kindly,

becoming a kind of father figure to them. When these officers graduated from his courses and went on to take

positions in their various armed services organizations that were instrumental in selecting inertial systems for key

programs, the Draper Labs designs were typically given first choice. Draper Labs did not undertake any production

of these designs, but helped select the companies that did. Dr. Draper became a real cult figure for all of his

former students, and there was, and no doubt still is, a large bust statue of him (again when he was still very much

alive and active) facing all visitors to his building at MIT. One of these former USAF officers who, a number of years

later rose to the rank of a general, and eventually took over leadership of Draper Labs, informed me that the Lab

was considered a "national resource" and was continuously funded by a series of sole source, non-competitive

contracts, I believe primarily from the USAF (so much for competitive free enterprise!).

Thus, at this early time at North American, our need for literally large racks of heavy nitrogen bottles needed for

the long periods of time needed for aircraft flight testing, ground testing and preparing for flight was a real

embarrassment. John Moore, who headed all of the inertial navigation work at North American Aviation, only

visited the flight test operation rarely, but he would admonish us to hide the racks of nitrogen bottles somewhere,

saying "what would Dr. Draper say to our mutual Air Force customers if he were to visit this test site and see all of

those heavy nitrogen bottles?"

Our usual flight test procedure was to first power up the system and then troubleshoot the inevitable long list of

equipment problems that would occur. Since this was a development type system and we were shooting for ultra

high accuracy, the design of almost everything was marginal at best. Looking back at our experience here I now

estimate the "Mean Time Before Failure" (MTBF) of that system to be on the order of one or two hours. We had

both mechanical failures of the platform mechanical parts and electronic failures, as we had on the order of

several hundred or more vacuum tubes with all of the interconnecting electronics with little, if any, cooling as an

essential part of the overall system.

After we finally got the system up and running and warmed up to a reasonably well stabilization temperature we

would then proceed with an angular alignment procedure using a ground based theodolite observing a mirror

affixed to the platform proper through an open window on the side of the C-47. We would then trim the gyro bias

torques for minimum angular drift rates. When everything was ready we would then initialize the system, switch

over to APU power, close all doors and windows, taxi to the end of the runway and take off. Our flight path was

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always a non-stop round trip from our Downey field to a point near San Bernardino and then return to Downey.

We provided the pilot with a meter on the C-74 cockpit display, so that if our equipment was working properly he

could "fly the needle" to coincide with our pre-planned flight path. This amazed the pilots, because they could not

understand how our inertial system could provide this kind of information without some external radio aid.

We constantly recorded the ground position by means of a commercially available gyro-stabilized ground facing

camera, as well as the output of our inertial system so that during post-flight data reduction we could obtain a

quite accurate plot of our inertial system navigation performance. We also took manual readings of the output

coordinates of the inertial system whenever we flew over an easily identifiable landmark, such as major road

crossing or railway point, but these results were rarely looked at after the flight.

On one flight the ground camera unit failed to operate, although we were unaware of this failure until after the

flight. This led to an unhappy group of engineers and managers sitting around one of the desks in our bullpen

"wringing their hands" and bemoaning this unhappy state of affairs. I immediately sat down at my desk and

painfully plotted our approximate errors as a function of time using the manual checkpoint data, as well as

knowing the typical smoothing characteristics of the natural 84 minute oscillation of a pure inertial system. After

completing this task I took the resulting sheets of graph paper and placed them down in the midst of the still

grieving group of engineers and managers. They were simply delighted to have this data because we were all

under the gun to produce positive results. This incident, I believe, was a small, but significant, turning point in my

career, as shortly thereafter I was promoted to be the engineering supervisor in charge of the continuing flight

testing.

At this point North American Aviation had hired a nuclear physicist new Ph.D. just out of CalTech, and he had

studied the theory of what we were doing just enough to be dangerous. He came up with a block diagram of how

our system could be modified to include damping of the 84 minute period Schuler Loop error oscillations inherent

in all pure inertial navigation systems. The first I knew of this was when, during one of our flight test preparations

for takeoff, when the propellers were running, the system was on APU power, and we were just about to close the

C-47 door and take off , this man came running up to the C-47 door, handed me the pieces of paper with his block

diagrams on it and instructed me to "mechanize these equations for this flight!" I was dumbfounded by his lack of

understanding of the real world and looked at my boss, who was standing on the ground just outside the C-47

door. He simply shook his head, so I muttered an apology and closed the door; we took off leaving the new

physicist with his hair being blown back by the prop wash, obviously highly pissed off by my shutting the door in

his face with his new idea.

It turned out later, that in further detailed technical examination of his inertial system error damping proposal,

that it would not work, even in theory. I relate this sequence of events only to illustrate how making an enemy at

one point in time, even inadvertently, can have truly significant effects in years to come. As it turns out this young

physicist some 15 or so years later became my boss at Litton Systems, Inc. with unhappy consequences for both of

us.

After completion of our first flight test program the company embarked on the next step of the Navaho Missile

guidance system development, namely, the integration of a star tracker with the stable platform assembly in order

to achieve the needed accuracy -- even the most accurate gyros practically available were not sufficiently accurate

to achieve this. This is because the Navaho missile was designed to be a jet propelled air breathing vehicle which

would take hours to complete a mission as compared to rocket powered missile flight times of only minutes to

reach distant targets.

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So we designed and integrated a star tracker on top of the platform in order for the angular accuracy of the

platform to be constantly updated by means of astronomic observations from a telescope which could be

accurately pointed to various star locations, and, if not

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Figure 2-1 North American Autonavigator Systems Engineering Organization Listing, March, 1951

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pointing accurately at the star, to correct the angular orientation of the platform accordingly. This, of course,

required a constant knowledge of the angular position of the stars being used as a function of time, and,

consequentially the use of a digital computer with the requisite amount of memory and accuracy to accomplish

this.

So we added this star tracking device to our platform, as well as a relatively compact digital computer to our set of

analog electronics, still all operated by vacuum tubes. This resulted in an increased size of our system to include

11 relay racks of vacuum tube electronics as well as a platform crowned with a precision star tracker including

both stepper motor actuated gear trains and electro-optical telescope.

All of this equipment was installed in a relatively large van towing an APU for road testing prior to the planned

flight testing. Since much of the equipment was new we had to install all new cabling to properly connect all of the

power and signal functions between the rack mounted electronics and the star tracker platform.

This took several weeks to complete, but we did not have time to complete all of the cabling and testing at

Downey because, in spite of my insistence that the equipment be functionally checked out in Downey before a

planned move, we were ordered by John Moore to move the van and accompanying equipment to Wrightwood

prematurely. This is a location in the Big Pines area, where we could get out of the smog and have better visibility

of the stars we planned to use for our star tracker.

This unfortunate decision by Moore was apparently in order to keep our Air Force customer satisfied as to our

progress. Moore, however, appeared to be misinformed as to the real world situation, because on the instant that

the van arrived at the Wrightwood location in the Big Pines area he phoned and enquired as to how many test runs

had been completed! What this premature move really did was to slow us down by a matter of weeks because at

the remote location of Wrightwood we had to not only complete the cabling task, but call for considerable help

from the Downey engineers and technicians to resolve a multitude of integration and functional problems. Not all

of this help was useful because in many cases the Downey engineering organizations would not send up qualified

people, and there was not much we could do about this. Had we remained at Downey I would have been able to

simply walk over to the right engineer and get immediate results.

Because of these problems it took us several weeks to get the system barely operable at night, but never able to

achieve any actual meaningful tests, basically because we constantly needed the essentially unavailable Downey

engineers and technicians to resolve the many remaining functional problems, mainly concerned with the star

tracker.

The decision was finally made to return the van to Downey for the needed technical support unavailable at

Wrightwood. We went into a three shift operation where the integration and technical support was carried out on

the day shift and the system testing was carried out at night on the second shift. The third shift was used for any

needed repair. The star tracker only worked at night, and then only barely with the constant smog environment. I

assigned myself to the second shift, and after several more weeks we were finally able to actually test the entire

system on the road at night.

The primary problem we faced was one of reliability. The MTBF of the system was on the order of 45 minutes, and

we used to make bets with one another on how far the van would go without a serious malfunction. We always

hoped that we would get far enough before a failure occurred that we would at least be able to stop at a decent

restaurant and have a good meal at company expense.

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John Moore was a great promoter of the North American Aviation inertial systems. During all of this system

experience I had the opportunity to meet a number of visitors, including Jimmy Doolittle and Charles Lindbergh.

Most of these visitors had no idea of what we were really doing, but Moore really put on a good show.

During the van testing of our stellar-inertial system we experienced quite a number of failures and difficult to

explain errors. One such error was an unexpected erratic and high drift rate of one of the three gyros. One of the

analytical "genius's" in the engineering organization did an elaborate study of the characteristics of this drift rate

and came up with a highly theoretical explanation that involved a number of vaguely defined assumptions. While

this study was being carefully pored over by management, one of our system test technicians discovered a loose

screw in the gyro. Once repaired the problem, as well as the theoretical explanation, went away.

It finally came time to transfer all of the system equipment for extended distance flight testing to a YC-97 aircraft

that had been specially modified by a window on top of the fuselage to enable visibility for our star tracker. This

work was carried out in a North American hangar near LAX. After this transfer was completed and everything was

checked out and ready to go we were nearly ready to commence flight testing. At this point, however, I was pretty

well saturated with system testing and really wanted to get some real basic design experience under my belt.

I discussed this desire with my boss and he agreed to transfer me back to the Downey engineering organization.

They replaced me at the LAX hangar with an engineer whose ambition was far greater than his capability and had

no experience in system testing. When I turned the responsibility over to him I noticed that three ammeters on

the front panel of one of the racks were all showing a malfunction in the system, probably related to the platform

gyros. I reported this problem to this new system test manager as I was leaving, and the last thing I heard from

him was the first command he made to the crew to replace all three ammeters! This is basically a "shoot the

messenger" approach to problem solution, but I was so relieved for the opportunity to get into basic engineering

that I ignored this ridiculous order and simply walked out.

CHAPTER 3 -- CAREER CONTINUATION AT NORTH AMERICAN AVIATION I was then given some system engineering assignments which, although somewhat boring, gave me a good chance

to really see what was going on in the basic inertial instrument and platform design world at North American, as I

had gotten to know just about every engineer during my system test work. One of my system engineering

assignments was to do a preliminary analysis and design for the use of the North American inertial system as a

Snark guidance system, then being developed by Northrop. I believed this assignment as ludicrous because, to the

best of my knowledge, the Northrop engineers were significantly more advanced in the design, not only of their

guidance system, but of the entire Snark missile.

I observed that a new gyro was under design that was floated in Fluorolube and held into place with Jewel and

pivot watch type bearings about its single axis of freedom. This was essentially what the Draper Labs at MIT had

been working on for a number of years. The Navaho missile guidance system platform required three such gyros

as well as two accelerometers in addition to the star tracker. I noted that this new North American gyro was doing

superbly well in drift testing on our standard gyro test stand that could only test one gyro at a time. Shortly

thereafter the gyros were integrated into a stable platform, which statically also showed exceptionally low drift

rates. However, when one of our better mechanical engineers externally grabbed the shock mounted platform

and proceeded to shake it moderately the gyro draft rates increased by almost three orders of magnitude which

was at least 100 times greater than our required drift rate level.

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This disappointing and little understood experiment resulted in an immediate decision by John Slater, the head of

all inertial instrument design, to direct his engineers to replace the gyro jewel and pivot bearings with a pumped

fluid set of bearings. He believed (incorrectly as we later determined) that the gyro performance degradation

under vibration to be due to the friction torques caused by the jewel and pivot bearings.

This major design change took one year to get back to the level of a working three-gyro platform in the lab, again

showing low platform drift rates in a quiescent environment. The same mechanical engineer as before then again

manually shook the platform at a moderate amplitude, and lo and behold, precisely the same three orders of

magnitude increase in platform angular drift rates were observed to take place during this vibration environment!

This result was not only deeply disappointing but indicative of a basic lack of understanding of what was causing

this high level of sensitivity to vibration.

This mystery problem was then examined carefully by Dr. Norm Parker, the most capable analytical engineer we

had at the time, at least in my opinion. What he discovered was the fundamental fact that, when subject to a

dynamic input environment, such as a platform shake, the gyros needed to precess in order to generate a

sufficient error signal for the platform gimbal torquers servo system to maintain the desired stability of the

platform under this vibratory input. The angular amplitude of this gyro precession was a direct function of the gain

of the closed loop control system that continuously attempted to minimize this gyro precession at a null condition.

What we did not realize until Norm Parker analyzed this process in some detail was that whenever a gyro

precessed through even some small angle its effective sensitive axis was changed by this same angular deviation

from the null. This dynamic sensitive axis change caused the gyro to respond to the input angular vibration from

an orthogonal axis proportional to the sine of the precession angle (approximately equal to the angular amplitude

in radians for the small angles we were dealing with here). In a vibratory environment this results in an effective

rectification proportional to the product of angle of precession and the input angular rate of the platform about an

orthogonal axis. This rectification occurs because the precession angle and the orthogonal platform angular have

a large in-phase relationship. This became known locally as the "phi dot theta" effective angular drift rate, where

"phi dot" is the amplitude of the orthogonal angular rotational velocity of the platform and "theta" is the

amplitude of the gyro precession around its single axis of freedom.

Once being identified, it was readily apparent that this large angular drift rate error source needed to be controlled

by significantly increasing the gain of the control system (known as the "platform servo") that was attempting to

keep the gyro precession angle at a null, and, at this time, not sufficiently succeeding in doing so. Being able to

increase this gain by a factor of 10, would result in decreasing the undesired rectification effect by a factor of 100

because of the multiplication nature of the "phi dot theta" effect. This was not at all a happy state of affairs

because our senior control systems expert, Walt Evans, had previously completed an analysis that concluded that

this control system gain was fundamentally limited by the angular momentum of the gyro spinning wheel. Walt

Evans was the author of a well known published book that showed how his "root locus" methodology could be

used to advantage in analyzing the stability and optimizing the design of feedback control systems.

Although I was only superficially involved in all of this development activity I was learning a great deal about the

mechanical as well as the electrical and electronic disciplines associated with inertial navigation platforms, as well

as the importance of using a system approach to the design of complex systems where there is any degree of

inter-component coupling.

CHAPTER 4 -- ENTRY OF HENRY SINGLETON INTO NORTH AMERICAN AVIATION

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About this time I discovered that Dr. Henry Singleton, who had been employed by Hughes Aircraft, had just been

hired by John Moore in some senior, but unspecified, position. This excited me, because I had attended a highly

technical lecture by Singleton at a downtown Los Angeles location sponsored by the Institute of Radio Engineers

(IRE) several years earlier. I believe his lecture related to information theory and control systems, and I was greatly

impressed with his obvious deep knowledge of these technologies, even though I didn't really fully understand

what he was trying to convey to the audience. Further, a college classmate and good friend of mine at the time

was also working at Hughes and informed me of the high regard in which Singleton was held at Hughes.

I immediately introduced myself to Singleton and expressed a desire to work under his direction. I was then

successfully transferred to an organization he was heading up involved with a new development for an aircraft

inertial system for the Air Force, known as the "Fighter Autonavigator."

This was to be a physically much smaller system than for the Navaho missile, and use floated gyros with jewel and

pivot bearings. Singleton ignored the Walt Evans theoretical limit on control system gain and came up with a

relatively simple different concept, using a lead circuit for this control system that was in no significant way limited

by the gyro angular momentum. This was a terrible blow to Walt Evans's reputation in the organization as a

control systems expert, and there was never any love lost between Singleton and Evans as a result. In retrospect

this shows the danger of imposing a limit on the capability of any technical device or process, as there is usually

some method by which the limit can be overcome.

Singleton beefed up his organization by hiring three electrical engineer Ph.D.'s as well as a few other engineers.

This project type organization turned out to be much more efficient than the functional organization that was in

place at the time, and we were making good progress.

During the summer of 1954 North American was developing the beginnings of an inertial system that could be

used for submarine navigation, and I was tagged as the engineer to accompany and maintain this system on board

the first nuclear powered submarine, the Nautilus, on a voyage under the polar ice cap. I frankly had mixed

feelings about this assignment, because I had little faith in the reliability of the inertial system to function over

such a long voyage, as well as the potential personal danger of going under the ice cap.

As it turned out I had little to be concerned about, because Singleton turned in his resignation from North

American in the August,1954, time frame to work at Litton Industries in Beverly Hills (a company that I didn't even

know existed at the time) and I expressed an interest to Singleton to join him if he were to have an opening for me

at his new location. Several weeks later I got a phone call from Singleton with a job offer which I immediately

accepted.

Turning my two-week notice of resignation into North American proved somewhat painful. My then boss, who

was afraid of an exodus of engineers to Litton, informed me that If I left on such short notice I would be classified

as "ineligible for rehire." I asked him to determine, based upon North American personnel policy, how long a

notice I would have to give in order to remain eligible for rehire. I had no intention of ever returning to North

American, but I didn't want any black marks on my record. He returned within a few hours and sheepishly

admitted that a two-week notice was sufficient to remain eligible for rehire. Two weeks later I was driving into

Beverly Hills as a new hire at Litton. I discovered some years later that a North American senior engineer, whom I

knew and respected, by the name of Tom Curtis, had actually accompanied the submarine inertial system on its

long voyage, which I believe didn't take place until a few years after I left North American. I never had the

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opportunity to find out how well the system performed in this environment, but I do know that North American

Inertial Organization, then renamed Autonetics, did eventually develop a successful submarine navigation system.

CHAPTER 5 -- WORKING AT LITTON, EARLY DAYS

The contrast between working in a large organization and the early environment at Litton was immediately

apparent. Our startup organization at Litton in Beverly Hills consisted basically of Singleton, Harold Bell, Joe Smead

and myself plus a junior engineer. All five of us had come from North American. Bell and Smead were recent

Ph.D.'s, and Singleton also held a doctoral degree. Our immediate job was to scratch for any new business we

could find --be it inertial systems, or otherwise. We were housed in a small area on the second floor of what had

just previously been the White Sewing Machine Company. A long driveway in back with limited parking separated

our building from the then vacated sewing machine factory area in back. The first floor of our building housed the

company top executives including Tex Thornton and Roy Ash, the numbers 1 and 2 top corporation executives.

Singleton reported to Roy Ash.

Immediately across the street, Foothill Blvd., was a Wonder Bread bakery, which gave off the pleasant odor of

freshly baked bread, and immediately next door was the Beverly Hills water works, which gave off a continuous

chlorine odor and was visually similar to a large swimming pool. We sensed whatever odor the prevailing wind

happened to be carrying in our direction.

Figure 5-1, Harold Bell, Joe Smead, Hal Erdley, and Henry Singleton, 1955

Litton Industries was originally formed as a company called Electrodynamics about a year before my arrival and

had almost immediately acquired Litton Industries and taken over that name. The original Litton Industries was

owned and managed by a man named Charles (Charlie) Litton, who had sold out his traveling wave tube company

to Electrodynamics in an all cash transaction. For tax minimization purposes Charlie Litton was paid off on a yearly

basis over a number of years and carried on the books as a "consultant."

I didn't know this until much later in time, but Singleton had left North American on a Friday, only to board a flight

to Dayton, Ohio, over the ensuing weekend in order to visit the USAF Guidance Lab at Wright-Patterson AFB on

14

Monday. The purpose of this visit was to inform the Guidance Lab that Singleton was now at Litton Industries, and

it would be to the advantage of the Guidance Lab to cancel their contract with North American for the Fighter

Autonavigator and switch this work to Litton Industries.

Apparently Singleton did not at that time understand the nature of the political dynamite of his bold proposal. The

Guidance Lab was heavily committed to supporting North American's inertial developments, as well as those of

Draper at MIT. Any radical departure from this support, especially to a new and unknown company, would be a

sign of gross management incompetence to the higher up USAF executives. The Guidance Lab's reaction to

Singleton's brash proposal was not only "no, but hell no!" and a forever lasting complete boycotting of any

business with Litton and even in later years by Teledyne. A high level Air Force executive was said to have indicated

that there were more than enough inertial system suppliers at that time and he wished that Litton would "go away

and die." This USAF blackballing of Singleton even spread in later years to the ballistic missile inertial development

projects.

As the unfortunate result of this initial political blunder we were considered "persona non grata" at the Guidance

Lab and had to look elsewhere for financial support for any proposed development contracts.

Figure 5.2 Harold Bell and Henry Singleton at Litton, 1955

This was at the time (1954) that transistors were first becoming available, and our small group of engineers

decided that we would we would use exclusively transistors in any or all of our electronic circuit development

activities.

Our first attempt at this was in response to a Request for Proposal (RFP) for a portable microphone that required

an absolute minimum size for the built-in electronic package required to perform the necessary amplification,

modulation, and wireless transmission of the microphone audio input signal. This proposal was written by Harold

Bell and Joe Smead, who also worked out the estimated cost for this small system. We all participated in our cost

estimate for this job as well as the price proposal we should submit to the customer. Singleton decided that we

15

should price our proposal pretty much as based upon our estimated cost with a reasonable profit. It subsequently

turned out that one of our competitors, Texas Instruments, an early manufacturer of transistors, won the

competition by a bid of about half of ours. This really stung Singleton, and this lesson was one of the bases for his

subsequent pricing decisions.

This lesson was instrumental in swinging Singleton's next pricing decision for a proposal to the Jet Propulsion

Laboratory for a "Tank Servo." I wrote the proposal for this small system which consisted of being able to control,

in two horizontal axes, the position of some unspecified device, in a large tank of water, about the size of a

moderate swimming pool. I visited the customer and worked out the analysis and design of this Litton proposed

system, as well as our estimated cost. It was, as I remember it, on the order of $40,000, a relatively small job.

Singleton, having just been stung by our recent experience with the portable microphone proposal, cut the bidding

price to less than half of our estimated cost, to approximately $15,000. We subsequently were informed by JPL

that our proposal was deemed unacceptable and again we were out of the running. Some months later and by

coincidence I came across one of the JPL engineers in a men's room at LAX; I had previously visited him with some

questions during my preparation of our proposal. During this brief meeting at LAX he informed me that Litton had

submitted the best technical proposal, but our price was so unrealistically low that JPL did not wish to award this

job to us because of the inevitable large contract cost overruns that would occur.

I informed Singleton of this reason for being unsuccessful in the Tank Servo proposal. This experience with

submitting a price level on these two small competitions (one price too high and the other too low) provided a

valuable lesson for him and all of us in calibrating how future price proposals should be carried out, but Singleton

nevertheless always biased future price proposals on the low side.

CHAPTER 6 -- LITTON GETS INTO THE INERTIAL SYSTEMS BUSINESS.

Fortunately, Singleton had some useful contacts at Bell Labs in New Jersey and The Applied Physics Lab in

Maryland and we were able to get a couple of study type contacts from each of these organizations. Eventually,

one of them was converted into a hardware contract for a gyro-stabilized platform.

Since I was the only member of our small group of all electrical engineers who even had the vaguest idea of how

gyros and all of the other mechanical elements of such a platform worked, if fell upon me to head up this design,

with Bell and Smead designing the analog transistorized electronic elements. Since we were starting from scratch

we had no restrictions upon the design configuration, this being one of the basic advantages of a startup

organization. Such an advantage is crucial to the success of any startup and must necessarily be used to the utmost

to compensate for a startup company's lack of staff and proven experience. This situation, although fraught with

many obvious problems and limitations, was absolutely ideal for me, as I was young, eager, and had just the right

amount of experience and knowledge of our competitors committed design technical limitations. It was also ideal

for Harold Bell and Joe Smead who were now free to utilize completely transistorized electronic circuitry.

In this respect I decided that instead of the three single-degree-of freedom gyros used by all of our known

competitors' stabilized platforms we would use a platform design consisting of two two-degrees-freedom gyros.

The state of the art at that time was to use single-degree-of freedom gyros consisting of a spinning wheel at a high

speed to maximize the angular momentum enclosed in a sealed chamber which was supported so as to be

neutrally buoyant in a dense liquid known as Fluorolube. The angular amplitude of this floated chamber about the

single fixed axis of rotation was limited to only a few degrees. This limitation was imposed upon the floated

16

chamber in order for the angular pickoff and gyro torquer elements of the gyro to be able to operate properly, as

well as to minimize error torques due to axis bearing friction and fluid viscous drag. The minimization of the

angular amplitude was accomplished by a feedback control system acting upon the platform gimbal torquers so as

to continuously rotate the outer gyro case to keep the internal gyro pickoff angle nulled. This platform servo

system needed to operate at high gain over a wide frequency bandwidth so as to reduce the "phi dot theta" drift

rate effect described earlier.

Based upon all of these considerations I decided to add a gimbal internal to the gyro in order to allow the gyro

floated chamber to have a small angular freedom about two orthogonal axes instead of just one. This required

two low friction jewel and pivot bearings instead of one as well as two sets of internal gyro pickoffs and torquers

instead of one, but resulted in two fundamental advantages as follows:

a) The "phi dot theta" dynamic rectification effect was totally eliminated because the internal floated gyro

spinning wheel element did not have to precess in order to generate an error signal for the platform gimbal

torquers servo control system, and

b) Only two (only slightly more complex) gyros were required instead of the usual three for complete

platform stabilization, resulting in a significant cost reduction. In addition, redundant gyro information was

automatically available about one of the axes. As it turned out Litton continued to use two-degrees-of freedom

gyros stabilized platforms for at least the next 30 years.

Figure 6-1 Floated Two Degrees of Freedom Gyro Cutaway Schematic Diagram.

17

The above diagram was taken from:

MODERN INERTIAL TECHNOLOGY: NAVIGATION, GUIDANCE, AND CONTROL

By Anthony Lawrence.

The diagram shows that the two degrees of freedom gyro contains an inner gimbal, allowing external rotation

about any axis without precessing the spinning wheel element. To the best of my knowledge Litton was the first to

use floated two degrees of freedom gyros for inertial navigation and guidance systems.

Chapter 7 -- Litton gets into the Aircraft Inertial Systems business

Much of my time was taken up by the need for obtaining new contracts to keep our activity alive. We started to

hire a few more engineers to initiate the design work on our one existing hardware contract, but this contract was

unfortunately cancelled by the customer. In the meantime, however, we had written a proposal in response to a

Request for Proposal (RFP) from the Wright Patterson Air Force Base Flight Controls Lab (as distinguished from our

nemesis, the Guidance Lab), for a "No-Gimbal-Lock" attitude control system, primarily for aircraft use, including

fighter type aircraft, which implied use under any or all vehicle attitude conditions. Fortunately for us, the Flight

Controls Lab was organizationally completely separated from the Guidance Lab.

This "No-Gimbal-Lock" requirement necessitating our adding a fourth gimbal to our ongoing platform design, in

order to be able to keep the platform stable even under a purely vertical climb or dive aircraft orientation. Please

refer to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimbal_lock#Solutions for a more complete description of this design

concept, and what happened to one of the NASA Apollo missions because of their limited design of just three

gimbals. An excerpt from this wikipedia article follows:

18

"GIMBAL LOCK ON APOLLO 11

A well-known gimbal lock incident happened in the Apollo 11 Moon mission. On this spacecraft, a set of gimbals was used on an inertial

measurement unit (IMU). The engineers were aware of the gimbal lock problem but had declined to use a fourth gimbal.[5] Some of the

reasoning behind this decision is apparent from the following quote:

"The advantages of the redundant gimbal seem to be outweighed by the equipment simplicity, size advantages, and corresponding implied

reliability of the direct three degree of freedom unit."

—David Hoag, Apollo Lunar Surface Journal

They preferred an alternate solution using an indicator that would be triggered when near to 85 degrees pitch.

"Near that point, in a closed stabilization loop, the torque motors could theoretically be commanded to flip the gimbal 180 degrees

instantaneously. Instead, in the LM, the computer flashed a 'gimbal lock' warning at 70 degrees and froze the IMU at 85 degrees"

—Paul Fjeld, Apollo Lunar Surface Journal

Rather than try to drive the gimbals faster than they could go, the system simply gave up and froze the platform. From this point, the

spacecraft would have to be manually moved away from the gimbal lock position, and the platform would have to be manually realigned

using the stars as a reference.[6]

After the Lunar Module had landed, Mike Collins aboard the Command Module joked "How about sending me a fourth gimbal for

Christmas?"

*******************************************************************************

We spent a good deal of time and effort in writing this proposal to the Flight Control Lab, including the description

of the need to dynamically change the gain of one or more of the platform gimbal servos as a function of the

platform gimbal orientation in order to maintain platform stability even under a pure vertical climb or dive of the

using aircraft. Such an extreme condition, even with four gimbals resulted in a theoretical singularity of the servo

system control system, but in actual use it would be almost impossible for any practical aircraft to maintain this

extreme condition for any appreciable time.

Most fortunately for us, although we were only vaguely aware of the importance of this at the time, we were

successful in winning this No-Gimbal-Lock Attitude Control System contract. Although the drift rate requirements

for this system were about two orders of magnitude less stringent than those for an aircraft inertial navigation

system we decided to design for this higher accuracy to be able to increase our future market share of the aircraft

inertial business. Also, a real bonus, was that this system was unclassified in terms of national security, which also

increased our available market possibilities. Our principal technical Air Force overseer of this contract, a Max

Lipscomb, had no objection to our meeting his specified accuracy with some margin of improvement, so that we

effectively entered the high end of the inertial systems market "through the back door" of the Air Force. When we

were ultimately successful in accomplishing this it only served to embarrass the Air Force Guidance Lab, as well as

North American (now called Autonetics), because, over the years, all of the big procurements by the airframe

companies went to Litton, as we had by far the smallest and best performing pure inertial system available for a

long time.

Upon first receiving this No-Gimbal-Lock (NGL) contract we were visited by Max Lipscomb, who, sitting down with

me, went over the specs in great detail, wanting to make sure we met every requirement. I remember this as

perhaps the most emotionally draining day of my working career as I had to agree to meet all of these

requirements on a face-to-face meeting with the customer, and knew that this was going to be far from easy.

Little did I know at the time that our meeting of all these specs in the detail which Lipscomb insisted upon would

be the beginning of many significant opportunities.

19

We worked hard on this program hiring more engineers as all of all of our needs increased. At this time we were

also talking to the U.S. Navy and Grumman Aircraft about an attitude control system for a Navy radar surveillance

aircraft, the WF-2, being developed by Grumman. We were successful in winning this contract, initially for the

development of the attitude reference system, and ultimately for a production run of about 100 systems. We

developed a good relationship with Grumman, and eventually received orders for the W2F system and the A2F

inertial system.

*************************************************************

The following is an excerpt from a Litton Technical Staff Listing of 1958:

"HAROLD F. ERDLEY

University of California, B.S., electrical engineering, 1948 University of California,

M.S., electrical engineering, 1950

Eight years experience. Teaching assistant, Department of Engineering, University of California ... systems

engineer, North American Aviation, Inc.

Areas of activity or specialty: automatic inertial navigation equipment. .. high performance servo systems

.. precision gyros and accelerometers . . aircraft and missile stable platforms.

Papers: co-author of paper on electronic analogs.

Patents: four patents pending on inertial instruments and platforms.

Member, Eta Kappa Nu .. . Tau Beta Pi . . . Sigma Xi ... Institute of Radio Engineers"

******************************************************************************

Singleton had a good relationship with the chief engineer at Lockheed Burbank, and this eventually enabled us to

receive both development and production orders for the F-104G fighter aircraft program, a large multi-national

program, with the production of the aircraft as well as our inertial system and other avionics to take place in

Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy. The terms and conditions of this contract required Litton to

establish inertial system production capabilities in Canada, Germany, and Italy. We bought out two plants in

Germany and established plants in Canada and Italy.

All of this rapid expansion of our inertial business resulted in a promotion of Singleton as general manager of all of

Litton's airborne and ground data systems, as well as of the inertial activities. I became in charge of the inertial

activities, about 400 plus people, which were expanding at a rapid rate, far too fast for us to keep up with the

demand. Having started in late 1954 with nothing, by 1960 we were shipping more inertial systems per month

than the rest of the "free world" companies combined.

20

Our lack of capability to keep up with all of this led to my being the focus of all of our problems, both technical and

production, getting hit both by customers and internal pressures. This unbearably high level of personal pressure

actually led me to have what amounted to a "nervous breakdown" which happened suddenly on an airplane flight

to Canada which ran into bad weather and associated high turbulence. I was forced to recuperate at home for

about a three week period around 1959 and became unable to take airplane trips for about two to three years.

George Kozmetsky, who became Singleton's second in command when Singleton was made general manager over

Kozmetsky's computer avionics organization, was especially difficult for me to deal with, as he had no

understanding of our real problems and continued to attempt to micromanage my organization and hold a number

of time wasting meetings.

21

Figure 7-1 Organization Announcement by Henry Singleton, 1959

22

In the first part of 1960 it became increasingly evident that we were going to have a big overrun on our F104G

program with Lockheed, and I and others were putting some pressure on Singleton to have a meeting with the

Lockheed procurement people to announce this impending overrun. Singleton kept putting this necessary

announcement off, as he was secretly planning to leave Litton sometime in mid to late 1960. Singleton confided in

me of his intention to form his own company at some point before he left, so I was aware of this long before he

formally resigned. He announced this formal resignation to all of the people who were directly reporting to him in

a meeting about two weeks before he left, and I was surprised to see tears in the eyes of a number of these

people. There is no question that Singleton was a most exceptionally intelligent and capable, as well as ambitious,

individual. We would go to lunch together quite often when he was my boss at Litton, and I remember him asking

me once if I ever saw a cover page photo of an engineer on Time magazine. Although I don't believe he ever made

it to Time, his picture made it to the front page of one or more of the business oriented magazines over the

ensuing years. I ended up working directly for Singleton over about a seven year period, and although he was

sometimes quite demanding, I always understood and respected his logical reasons for these demands.

CHAPTER 8 -- POST SINGLETON LITTON INERTIAL SYSTEMS

Shortly after Singleton left, George Scharffenberger, who reported to Roy Ash, the Executive Vice President of

Litton Industries, took over Singleton's job as well as what Scharffenberger was doing previously. Scharffenberger

was a capable manager and had a personal expectation of all of his employees to fly coach rather than first class

and for all of his employees to answer their own phones rather than having their secretary do this.

Scharffenberger's first task was to fight off a serious attempt by one of the large unions to organize all of Litton's

production employees. This turned out to be quite a bitter fight, but Scharffenberger eventually was capable of

our production employees voting against the union.

Starting in 1960 Singleton and Kozmetsky started up a company in Hawthorne by first buying up a small company,

Amelco, and then scratching around for any business they could drum up. Singleton called me up shortly after he

left Litton and offered me a job in his new enterprise. I politely declined, letting Singleton know the principal

reason for this was my inability to get along with Kozmetsky. I also get a call from Tex Thornton, the very top dog

of Litton, encouraging me to remain at Litton, and letting me know that the stock options being offered by

Singleton were worth just "green stamps." I listened to what he was saying, but believed this to be nothing but

"sour grapes." Perhaps the most important reason for my not wanting to join Singleton at this time was the fact

that I had already started the initial development of the next generation, dry tuned suspension systems, and I was

confident that I could continue this work at Litton, but not at all sure that Singleton and company would have been

able to financially support this relatively long term effort.

Singleton, nevertheless, was capable of hiring some of the capable Litton people, eventually including Joe Smead,

one of our original crew at Litton, as well as Allen Orbuch, Teck Wilson, and a number of others. Indeed, the Litton

employees who did join Singleton and Kozmetsky at that time received generous stock options that no doubt

ultimately became astronomically more valuable than the "green stamps" described by Tex Thornton. Allen

Orbuch was a great asset, heading up, while he was at Litton the marketing and contracts administration

organizations. Joe Smead became head of Teledyne Systems Company, and eventually moved on to form a

company of his own. He most unfortunately died in 2003 as a result of a heart attack while on a ski trip to

Colorado. Teck Wilson was a master marketeer, enjoying great respect from the customer community. Allen

Orbuch went on to become head of Teledyne Systems Company and a Teledyne Group Executive and really should

23

have eventually become President of all of Teledyne. Why he was not so selected was no doubt due to some

combination of political and possibly other factors.

Roy Ash, the #2 man to Tex Thornton at Litton, offered to give me the job of general manager of all of the Litton

Inertial work, but I politely turned this offer down as I told Ash that I thought I could contribute more by remaining

in the technical end of the business. I actually had another deep reservation about taking on this job because I

knew it was common, although strictly illegal, practice to not necessarily charge employee time cards to what they

were actually working on, not to mention commonly used pricing and other tactics which were open to serious

question both ethically and legally. This practice, common in the industry, went on at North American as well as

Litton, and I received a real scare in this regard a few years back when I was called as a witness in a court trial

regarding an ex Litton employee who was claiming that Litton owed him some additional stock to an initial stock

option that he had previously received. This ex Litton employee brought in as a witness an administrator that I had

let go a couple of years back because I did not believe him to be competent at his job. The reason for calling in this

disgruntled administrator was for him to accuse me of directing him as to how to charge different contracts not in

accordance with the work being done for each of these contracts. When this disgruntled administrator took the

stand he had with him records which he claimed were proof of this mis-charging of time cards as directed by me.

Fortunately for me, the judge informed the plaintiff that if he were to continue with this matter it would be cause

for a mistrial, so I gratefully breathed a great sigh of relief. When I was called to the stand the plaintiff's lawyer

asked me just one question -- "what is your salary at Litton?" I answered the question and was excused from any

further questions.

24

October 17, 1960

Ash Names Four New VP's

Four new Vice-Presidents of Litton Systems, Inc., have been announced by Roy L. Ash,

President.

Those named were Bruce A. Worcester, Director of Product Support, and Harold F. Erdley, Director of the Guidance Systems Laboratory, both of the Guidance and Control Systems Division of the company; Dr. Norman Enenstein, Director of the company’s Tactical Systems Laboratory, and Dr. Thomas P. Cheatham Jr., Director of the Advanced Development Laboratory.

' ' Under Erdley’s direction the Guidance Systems Laboratory has made Litton Industries a

leader in the field of inertial guidance systems. Previously he was on the staff of the University of California Department of Engineering. He holds a number of patents on inertial instruments and platforms and is the author of several papers.

In addition to being named Vice-President of Litton Systems, Worcester also has been

appointed to fill the new post of Director of Product Support. He formerly was Director of advanced program Development.

Dr. Enenstein, as Director of the Tactical Systems Laboratory since April 1958, is responsible

for the direction and management of the company’s engineering organization engaged in the development of advanced data processing systems.

Dr. Cheatham was appointed Director of the Advanced Development Laboratory last May. As

such he heads an Advanced Planning and Development Staff for Litton Systems’ expansion activities in addition to managing the research and development laboratories in Waltham, Mass., and in Beverly Hills. *****************************************************************************************************************************************

So Roy Ash ended up appointed Bill Jacobi as general manager of all of the inertial systems activities in 1960. Ash

asked me for a name for this division, and I suggested the "Guidance and Control Systems" division. This name

stuck even to the present, I believe.

25

Figure 8-1 Roy Ash Announcement and Institute of Radio Engineers news item, 1960

At this time we were still having terrible difficulties in meeting our committed delivery schedules of inertial

systems, and so I was temporarily assigned the job of head of inertial systems manufacturing. After analyzing the

problem and some detail I came to the conclusion that our real "bottle neck" was the poor yield we were

experiencing in the assembly and test of gyros that would meet our required performance levels. This came as no

surprise because we were attempting to achieve almost impossibly highly accurate, low drift rate, gyros in a

production line staffed with a mixed level of experience in this delicate area.

The only way I could see to solve this problem in the short run was to increase our production rate of gyros by the

brute force method of assembling three times the rate we were obliged to meet in order to meet our production

schedules. I immediately directed the gyro production management to order three times the quantity of parts

needed and to staff up the production line to be able to assemble and test gyros at this greatly expanded rate.

Since the lead time for the procurement of the necessary purchased parts, especially the long lead items, was

about nine months, I notified Jacobi that the solution to this problem would only be seen after approximately a

nine month period. Jacobi and other higher ups didn't want to accept this delay, and they knew I wouldn't want to

keep doing this kind of work indefinitely, so they searched for a new head of all manufacturing, including inertial

gyros.

They brought in an outside new hire (by coincidence a high school classmate of mine, although we were only

vaguely aware of each other in school) to take on this responsibility. This took place about seven or eight months

after I had initiated the trebling the procurement of gyro parts. When the new manager arrived on the scene I

attempted to explain to him the low yield we were achieving in gyro production and the need to continue with

this apparently unreasonable high rate of gyro parts procurement.

He chose to ignore my advice, however, but about a month or two later the new high influx of gyro parts were

available, having been initiated by me nine months earlier, resulted in the almost immediate increase in the gyro

production rate. My old high school classmate was given the credit for this, because this miraculous cure occurred

"on his watch" only a month or two after he took over gyro production. Jacobi and the other higher ups

congratulated one another and the new man for their assumed management smarts in this situation.

Since the new production manager chose to ignore my advice he reduced the procurement rate for gyro parts back

to an assumed relatively high yield in manufacturing, so that after a very few months we were back to an

unacceptably low rate of gyros suitable for system integration. This naturally was cause for a management

meeting (meetings being the inevitable management response to problems which they have no idea of how to

solve).

26

Figure 8-2 Bruce Sawyer, George Northway, and Hal Erdley inspecting a gimballed Platform

27

Figure 8-3 Hal Erdley and Harold Bell, 1962

Both the new production manager and I, among others, were invited to this meeting and happened to be sitting

directly across the table from one another. When it was my turn to speak I related the ugly truth (that no one

really wanted to accept) that we needed the brute force method of ordering three times the amount of parts that

would normally be required for this critical gyro because our yield of acceptable units through manufacturing was

only about 1/3. I further related that this reduction in the number of gyro parts being ordered took place shortly

after my gyro manufacturing responsibility ceased, and urged that we must immediately go back to the reality of

accepting this low gyro yield and plan our parts ordering accordingly.

At this point in the meeting the new manufacturing manager was so angry with me that he reached across the

table and grabbed my coat lapels before regaining his composure and sitting back down. But he learned this

lesson well. Ever after this unfortunate incident he would describe the gyro production process to any available

audience, emphasizing how he was keeping the low yield problem under good management control by ordering

sufficient quantities of parts.

A comprehensive description of the Litton LN3 Inertial System is available at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LN-3_Inertial_Navigation_System

28

Also, The following is an article from the Litton Link Newsletter of 1963:

Litton's Fine LN3 Inertial

Guidance System Heart of

Company’s Unparalled Success

“What sticks out all over the company is not just

diversification—everybody does that—but a superb sense of

timing. Litton’s secret is that it has made a practice of doing

what other companies are not doing and of not doing what

everyone else is doing.

“From its very beginning, when almost all industry was

scrambling after contracts for whole military systems, Litton

walked the other way and concentrated on electronic

components, the profitable hardware of the advanced

sciences.

“When other makers of inertial navigation and guidance

equipment went after the glamorous missile market, Litton

shot for manned military planes, which turned out to be a far

bigger market than anybody supposed.”

THE PRECEDING quotation, from Fortune Magazine’s recent

article about Litton Industries, points out the fact that G/CS’

products—mainly inertial navigation and guidance equipment

for manned aircraft—have enjoyed a timely marketing

success.

This success was developed thanks to the ingenious minds and

29

determination of several G/CS pioneers who developed our

LN3 inertial navigation system which made its formal debut in

the late ’50’s.

What is the LN3? What is it designed to do?

SIMPLY STATED, the LN3 is a lightweight inertial navigation

system which is used in Lockheed’s F104G supersonic fighter.

This fighter is being flown by several foreign nations. The LN3

pinpoints the pilot’s position wth utmost accuracy.

Litton’s LN3 is believed to be the first production inertial

system to be employed in operational fighters.

“In early 1957 we successfully tested the P200 gyro. At that

time we had about 80 people who worked in the guidance and

control department of the old Electronics Equipment Division,”

recalled Hal Erdley, who joined Litton in 1954. He now is our

Director of Electromechanical Engineering.

E

R

D

L

E

Y

T

R

A

C

E

S

t

h

e

30

early history of the LN3 by describing the start of production:

“In 1958 we built and tested a complete inertial platform; in

April of the same year we received an inertial system

production contract from Grumman for its WF2 aircraft. We

also received a development contract for the inertial platform

and electronics for Grumman's A2F and W2F.

“All of these components then were wrapped up in a single

sophisticated inertial guidance package which we dubbed the

LN3.

“IN EARLY 1959, in the face of stiff competition, we received a

go ahead from Lockheed for the development and production

of the LN3 for the F104G. This order represented a major

milestone in the state of the art because we were able to

produce an inertial system weighing less than 80 pounds,

selling at a low price.”

The Lockheed order also meant that Litton had accomplished

a technological breakthrough. The LN3 was specifically designed

for an extremely small space in the electronics-laden F104G.

Our system incorporated the most advanced packaging design

and was one of the most sophisticated electronics packages in

the aircraft, thanks to another Litton pioneer, Dr. Harold Bell,

and the engineering organization under his direction.

The LN3 inertial navigation system is a self-contained, fully

automatic, lightweight inertial system that continuously and

instantaneously supplies basic information on the F104’s veloc-

ity, position and attitude during flight.

31

THE SYSTEM wasn’t always a lightweight product.

“We first built four units for Grumman’s WF2,” said Joel Farm,

Supervisor, Electro-mechanical Labs, another Company

veteran. Lockheed looked at the Grumman system and said it

was too heavy for the FI04. We had to cut five pounds off the

weight of the platform alone.

“So, our design people went to work and cut the weight down

by the required amount.”

Lockheed liked the system and ordered three prototypes and

66 production systems in April of 1959.

THE LN3 THEN was on its way!

In 1960, we received several LN3 add-on orders from

Lockheed including ground support equipment and spares.

Our employment people got busy as we hired hundreds of

new employees to build systems.

32

Also in 1960 Litton Systems, Ltd., in Canada and our Salt Lake

City facility started producing the LN3 systems, and in 1961

our European program got underway. Our LN3 systems now

are being used in F104’s flown by pilots of the Royal Canadian

Air Force, and pilots of NATO countries including Germany,

Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands.

THE CANADIAN product is used in the RCAF by its Canadian-

built CF-104s. The United States Air Force, through the MAP

(Mutual Aid Program) is prime contractor for the NATO

countries in Europe which are flying the F104G and using our

LN3.

33

FI04 pilots and media representatives who are passengers

testify to the accuracy and reliability of Litton’s LN3. Los

Angeles Times aerospace editor Marvin Miles wrote:

“Key to this Super Starfighter is an advanced and integrated

electronics system that makes her a versatile performer

capable of delivering nuclear and conventional bombs,

rockets, missiles, streams of cannon shells or fiery napalm on a

wide variety of operations.”

34

G E O R G E VAN VALKENBURG,

writer-producer of the “Adventure Tomorrow” TV show said:

“I had no trouble in aligning the F-104 with the aid of its

inertial navigator and flying to x point and putting the needle

on the dial . . . it's ridiculously easy to fly.", a final check on the

inertial system showed no noticeable error in the readout.”

35

THE LN3 at this moment serves faithfully in skies and bases

throughout the world, but what was it like at Litton back in

the “old days” before the LN3 was a tried and true system?

Hal Erdley remembers 1954: “When I arrived in the Beverly

Hills facility, we had about 50 employees and many sewing

machines which were left by the building’s former tenant.

There was no space problem back in those days.”

Joel Farm joined the Company seven years ago. He remembers

using the kitchen next to the Beverly Hills facility auditorium for

a lab. But that didn’t diminish the enthusiasm and devotion of

the people who built the original LN3.

“OUR DIVISION developed around the LN3 system” he said.

“We built up from scratch. We had a few people working

together with an idea, determined to make it work.”

And work it did ... to the tune of nearly 1,000 LN3 systems

produced in the United States, Canada and Europe. Over two-

thirds of these systems have been shipped from California,

according to Claude Boynton, LN3 program manager.

“We owe much of our success to the LN3,” said Boynton. “It

has been the leader in sales dollars earned by our division. And

the experience we’ve gained by manufacturing the LN3 will hold

us in good stead when we devote more and more production

time to follow-on systems such as the LN12.

“Yes, the LN3 is the vigorous old pro, the veteran,” said

Boynton.

36

BUT IN OUR business we’re constantly looking for ways to

develop new products which will be used in even swifter, more

sophisticated aircraft. We’re now looking forward to new

contracts, new systems which will replace the veteran LN3.

It’s a matter of replacing the present with the new. Future

emphasis will be on systems which will be used in aircraft such

as the F110 manufactured by McDonnell Aircraft.

There's much to look forward to in our business,” said Erdley.

“We’re involved in development and proposals for missile and

space type inertial navigation equipment which will use our

next-generation P300 inertial platform. These systems will be

half the weight of our present equipment. There are many

exciting things coming up.”

HERE’S A BRIEF summary of these exciting things which will

keep our thousands of employees busy for many years, as

outlined by Allen Orbuch, Director of Marketing. Our LN12

program with McDonnell will mean many systems; we’ll

continue to work on our Lockheed P3A contract which utilizes

the LN2C system; and then there’s the Grumman A6A and

E2A contracts for which we manufacture the LN2A and

LN2B, respectively.

“Our evaluation contract with the FAA on overseas flights

using our inertial navigation systems could mean added

business in the commercial field,”

said Orbuch, “We’re looking forward to formal word on the

TFX proposal which could be one of the largest contracts we’ve

37

ever received.”

HOW WILL eventual completion of our LN3 contract affect

employees?“It simply means that our employees will be

assigned to work on other projects we now have, and which

we’ll receive in the future,” said N. W. Gibson, Director of

Industrial Relations.

“Some may be asked to change assignments or even shifts

during the transition into our follow-on system work.

“It should be kept in mind that our business future looks

even better than it has been during the past several years.”

AFTER THE LAST LN3 is shipped, we’ll still be active in the

program. There are definite requirements for spare parts and

support work. We’ll be servicing the LN3 several years after

the last system is manufactured and shipped.

Our LN3 has provided a jet assisted takeoff for our business

success. The aforementioned Fortune article states: “the

biggest and fastest-growing group (in Litton) of all, however, is

called electronic systems, which at a conservative estimate will

have sales of some $200 million this year, about 37 per cent of

Litton’s total . . . the group’s sales were $127 million last year,

which means that the $200 million or so sales this year

represent a gain of at least 60 per cent in a year’s time.

“THE STEAM behind this increase comes mainly from

inertial-guidance systems, which are being sold to NATO

members as well as to the U. S. Air Force. Sales here have been

growing at such a rate that Litton figures in four or five years

they could rise by several hundred million.”LN3 started that

steam engine.

Figure 8.4 Litton Link Article on LN-3, 1963 (above)

38

Figure 8-5 The famous Dr. Draper visits Litton and is shown our instrument designs by Hal Erdley, 1965

Dr. C.S. Draper visits Litton, possibly at the urging of some of his military business contacts. He approved of our

accelerometer design, but not of our two-degrees-of-freedom gyro, a natural "Not Invented here" attitude

amongst technical people.

CHAPTER 9 -- A NEW GYRO TECHNOLOGY COMES TO LIFE

39

At this point I again took over as basically the manager of inertial systems engineering, which assignment

eventually was restricted to the development of our next generation smaller platform. I became aware of a gyro

configuration experiment by the American Bosch-Arma company in which, instead of using a floated and sealed

spinning wheel single-degree-of-freedom gyro, the spinning wheel was supported by a single gimbal with two

rotational torsion mechanical spring elements along two orthogonal axes. The American Bosch-Arm engineer was

apparently trying this out using different gyro motor spin speeds, and much to his amazement, he discovered that

at a certain spin speed of the gyro, he could rotate the outer supporting structure through a small angle without

imposing any torque on the spinning wheel! I never was informed of any further work done by American Bosch-

Arma to take advantage of this discovery (although they may have well done so), but I considered it a potentially

powerful and exciting new technology, as it would obviate the need for the gyro flotation configuration, an

inherently expensive design

Figure 9-1 Dynamically Tuned Gyro Schematic Diagram -- This diagram shows the inertial rotor and torsional

spring elements connecting the rotor to the gimbal and the gimbal to the driven shaft. The angular stiffness of

the rotor about the shaft contains two components, the torsional spring constant which is independent of the

gyro spin speed, and the dynamic effective spring, dependent upon the various moments of inertia of the

spinning assembly. At a particular speed, as shown, the torsional spring constant and the dynamic torques

exactly cancel, and the inertial rotor is essentially free for small angular motions of the shaft normal to the spin

axis. The above diagram is taken from:

http://www.abcm.org.br/symposiumseries/ssm_vol1/section_iii_machine_design_and_cad/ssm_iii_05.pdf

I immediately set to work analyzing the dynamic equations of motion of both a single torsion bar suspension and a

double torsion bar (this being the American Bosch-Arma configuration). and came up with the necessary relations

between the spin speed, the gimbal moments of inertia and the torsional spring rate of the mechanical support in

order for the dynamic torques generated by the gimbal inertias to exactly cancel out the torsional spring

restraining torque, leaving only a damping torque due to the residual damping of the spring and any other

mechanical damping, such as from the viscous friction caused by the gas of the entire sealed enclosure. We built

experimental models of each of these configurations. I named the first configuration the "Vibra-rotor" gyro and

the second and superior configuration (basically the American Bosch-Arma configuration) the "Vibra-gimbal" gyro.

I was reasonably sure that our potential competitors in the inertial platform market were also jumping on this

dynamically tuned gyro bandwagon, and Litton had to work hard and fast to keep ahead of the field.

Fortunately for us we had just hired an excellent mechanical engineer from Teledyne (which had also started up a

small inertial activity) named Jerzy Craig, and he was able to work both the analytical and practical details of the

design. We were further helped by another most talented engineer we had hired from Autonetics named Stan

Ausman who held a Ph.D. degree in mechanical engineering. Stan did a thorough error analysis of this "Vibra-

gimbal" configuration and, among other results, discovered that any vibrational inputs to the gyro at precisely the

40

spin speed of the rotor would result in a rectification type error torque. This error torque would cause a significant

drift rate result if sufficiently large. We discovered that such error torques did actually appear to exist, probably as

a result of imperfections in the spin ball bearings which we were supporting a spin speed of 24,000 rpm of the

whole rotating assembly. Looking back now, it is quite possible that these errors could have been minimized by a

lower gyro spin speed and possibly other parameters as well.

In order to cancel out the effects of any such twice spin frequency vibrations I came up with the idea of using two

sets of gimbal supports for the gyro one at an orthogonal orientation to the other, and this is the configuration we

were going with in the design of a new, even smaller, platform to the then current No-Gimbal-Lock floated gyro

design. This gimbal arrangement design was no doubt improved and modified later.

At some point in the mid 1960's Litton decided to form an inertial systems commercial aviation operation. This

was headed up by Charlie Bridge, an excellent system engineer, and this operation continued to grow and, to the

best of my knowledge, continues to this day to be active in supplying inertial systems to commercial airliners.

CHAPTER 10 -- MANAGEMENT ISSUES AND MY RESIGNATION AT LITTON

The upper management at Litton was, to the best of my knowledge, now paying "Management Consultants,"

better known to many of us as "Flesh Peddlers," to recruit needed high level managers. I recruited many of our

engineers and other needed personnel at every company I worked for, and never used this kind of help at any time

during my career, although I believe for specific requirements this may work well. Much to my surprise Pete

Retzinger, who was in charge of the avionics computer organization at Litton, resigned at some point to become

such a "Management Consultant." Retzinger had a capable digital computer design organization under his

direction at Litton, including Jerry Mendelson and Sy Schoen. Each of these most capable engineers resigned to

take positions in strictly computer development companies, and I was sorry to see them go.

The first of this new breed of managers was Fred O'Green, who was hired away from Lockheed. I had first met him

a few years earlier when Singleton and I visited Lockheed on a marketing trip. O'Green became my boss and we

always enjoyed a good relationship. Most of the managers that he hired with the help of "Management

Consultants," however, were a total loss in my opinion.

This change in the culture of Litton was not at all to my liking. It was brought about by Litton top management

that believed that the inertial business was now in full production and needed professional managers to direct all

of our activities. The first general manager of all inertial system work was an engineer that I worked with at North

American Aviation. At that time he was a competent mathematical analyst, but now, at Litton, he was touted as

an accomplished professional manager. I had always liked the man at North American, but now, that he was my

boss, I had serious reservations about his understanding of the full gamut of our operation, although we were

always on good personal terms.

He didn't last long as O'Green apparently felt he was lacking in the ability to manage the organizations under his

leadership. The next general manager that O'Green brought in with great fanfare was another former North

American employee that I had worked with. As a matter of fact, he was the same man that had come running up

to our North American C-47 just before we were ready to take off with a new algorithm he wanted us to use for

that flight test, and I had no choice but to shut the door in his face and taxi for takeoff. Our relationship at Litton

was quite cold; apparently he had not forgotten that incident, which was all the more painful for him because his

proposed algorithm for that old flight test turned out to be basically flawed. He was a theoretical physicist and had

41

not the slightest understanding of the practical and hardware problems we were attempting to overcome. He

once asked me for my analysis of the basic theory supporting the dynamically tuned gyro that I was working on for

use in our next smaller platform. I gave him a one or two page analysis containing a sketch of the basic gimbal and

torsion bar support system, together with the basic analysis based upon Euler's equations of the relationship

between angular momenta about three axes, torque, and angular motion. He took a look at this, and solemnly

shook his head as if he did not believe the analysis, and returned the paper to me with a disapproving look. This

gyro design, of course, was the heart of Litton's future success in the inertial business over many, many years.

He then reorganized the engineering operation so as to constrain my responsibility to less and less. As far as I was

concerned this was the "last straw," and I called up Joe Smead, who then headed a major part of Teledyne, called

Teledyne Systems Company, and suggested that we get together to see if I could be of any use to his organization.

Also, at this time, Kozmetsky had been eased out of Teledyne, and was replaced by George Roberts, an old

classmate of Singleton, whose specialty steel company had been recently acquired by Teledyne.

After receiving a suitable offer from Teledyne, I turned in my resignation to my disliked boss. The next thing I knew

was that I was in O'Green's office with O'Green attempting to change my mind and urge me to stay with Litton. He

confided in me that my disliked boss was on his way out and would be leaving Litton within a few weeks. I

considered this situation for a short while, but came to the conclusion that if my next boss would be anything like

the past two that O'Green had hired for that job, there was no future for me at Litton, and politely turned down

O'Green's plea to remain at Litton.

CHAPTER 11 -- AFTERMATH OF MY LEAVING LITTON

In retrospect, although it was personally most painful for me, it was probably a good thing for Litton at that point

in their inertial business maturing process that I should depart. Although I had started up the basic architectural

design for the Litton instrument and system design, I certainly could not have done it without the most capable

group of engineers of all types of talents that we had accumulated. I cannot even begin to list all of these hard

working and loyal people. Some of these people included Myron Kayton, a young Ph.D. from MIT who could solve

any problem and answer any question, Jerzy Craig, mentioned previously, Jerry Lipman, who developed

sophisticated complex Laplace transforms for analyzing dynamically tuned gyros, Stan Ausman, who did a truly

rigorous error analysis of these gyros, and the list goes on and on.

One of the new hires I was impressed with, although he was in the manufacturing and procurement organization

and outside my engineering activity, was Bob Goodell, a young and good looking Harvard Business School

graduate. Bob eventually joined Teledyne and successfully served in a number of general management roles at

various Teledyne companies. He started up and grew the Teledyne hybrid electronics company that sold these

hybrid electronic packages to many customers both internal and external to Teledyne, accumulating significant

sales and profits for Teledyne.

I believe we all shared a high level of mutual respect. Indeed, so much so, that when the Litton upper

management discovered that I was really leaving, they took great pains to notify all of our important customers

that this would not affect Litton's ability to continue to operate effectively and not lose any further important

talent, which I considered more humorous than flattering. I knew that Teledyne was not in any strong financial

condition to undertake the extra significant effort to compete effectively with Litton, and Litton had built up such a

strong head start that Teledyne would always have been trying to play "catch up."

42

Harold Bell was made general manager of Litton Guidance and Control Systems, which was a good choice, as he

almost immediately was able to recruit an expert tuned gyro engineer from Kearfott, a serious contender in the

inertial systems field. The resulting technical cross-pollenization was no doubt quite useful for Litton in the

continuation and refinement of their tuned gyro development.

Bell, a very hard working and conscientious individual, had a known heart condition and was a smoker. He, most

unfortunately, died from a heart attack within two years or so after taking on this responsibility. I have always

wondered why O'Green, who knew the health situation here, saddled Bell with this responsibility, even though I

believe Bell was more than capable and certainly willing to take on this personal risk.

This Litton inertial systems general manager's job was taken over by a succession of individuals, at least one as an

internal promotion, and others by outside hires.

The Litton Guidance and Control Systems Division continued to grow and prosper. The two-degrees-of freedom

tuned suspension system gyro was used in well over 10,000 inertial systems resulting in sales of many billions of

dollars over the years. The basic gyro design is still being produced, although mostly in an ultra miniature version

for lower accuracy missile systems. See http://www.es.northropgrumman.com/solutions/g2000/assets/G-

2000_Dynamically_Tuned_Gyro_.pdf

which states that 20,000 of these small gyros have been built.

Teledyne owned 24 percent of Litton by 1980 or thereabouts, and Northrop Grumman later purchased that part of

Litton that included the Guidance and Control Systems Division.

Gyro technologies have evolved over the years as new devices and materials have become available. The newer

technology gyros include ring laser gyros, fiber optic gyros, and a current effort to use chip level micro machining

technology, primarily for low cost, lower accuracy gyros. The latter are already in use in modern passenger

automobiles, as an example.

CHAPTER 12 -- STARTING OUT AT TELEDYNE SYSTEMS COMPANY, 1968

When I first arrived at Teledyne Systems Company in Northridge I was struck by the difference in the maturity

between Litton and Teledyne. I noted privately that Teledyne needed a few more years to reach even the basic

level of organization and discipline that existed at Litton at the time that I left. This was not all bad, because Joe

Smead knew what was going on at all times and maintained his control over all of the activities in the necessary

order of priority.

My initial assignment was as program manager of two programs -- one was a study program that Teledyne had

received a contract for from Thompson-Ramo-Wooldrich (TRW) for the user equipment for an Air Force program

know at that time as 624-B. This was quite an interesting program, at least to me, as I had the opportunity to

interface with one or two brilliant TRW scientists, who were experts in the pseudo-random noise communications

systems proposed for satellite-to-ground communication for what was really the direct forerunner of the current

GPS navigation system used today. Ultimately, TRW lost out to Magnavox who carried out most of the

development of at least the user equipment, namely the equipment used initially by military vehicles for precise

navigations and later by both military and commercial users. The system was designed for maximum accuracy for

military users on a classified basis, and somewhat less accuracy for commercial users.

43

As it turned out, many years later, after I had left Teledyne Systems, two of my former and quite talented

analytical people went to Magnavox, learned how the GPS user equipment worked, and left Magnavox to form

their own company along with another man. One of these analytical people was Dr. Min Kao who, along with this

other man started up the company now know as Garmin, after a combination of both their names. Garmin is

currently one of the leaders in the commercial GPS business. The other former Teledyne Systems analytical

engineer was an extremely talented man by the name of Dr. Don Eller, who worked with Min on the development

of the Garmin GPS design; Don is still a senior member of Garmin to the best of my knowledge.

In nosing around I discovered that Teledyne Systems Company was actively working on Loran navigation systems,

and that Howard Cohen had designed the digital logic needed for navigational computation in these Loran

systems. I noted that these systems were all based upon the Loran C technology as opposed to the Loran A

technology which was used on my ship when I was in the Navy, many years prior to this.

Eventually Teledyne Systems Company lost interest in the Loran business, but one of the really talented Ph.D.

engineers and one of our best logic designers left the company to form a small company to supply commercial,

relatively low cost, Loran systems. I believe they were quite successful in this endeavor until low cost GPS arrived

on the scene.

The other program responsibility assigned to me was known as The Heading and Attitude Reference System

(HARS). This basically inertial system was based upon a development program sponsored by our old friend, Max

Lipscomb, of the Wright Patterson Air Force Flight Controls Lab. Teledyne Systems was attempting another "back

door" coup similar to Litton's NGL system, which launched Litton firmly into the inertial business some years back.

The HARS was, unfortunately for Teledyne, based upon the then outdated floated gyro technology, but did have

the advantage of being relatively small. This miniaturization, however, resulted in great difficulties in assembly

and test and experienced severe reliability problems. Teledyne, however, had succeeded in selling this system to

an airframe company for both a development and production program. The airframe's government contract was

eventually cancelled, so that we never got the HARS into production.

This relatively small inertial development engineering activity at Teledyne was managed by a former employee of

mine at Litton, who, I believe, did a great job at Teledyne in going as far as he did with the HARS with the small

organization under his management responsibility.

Shortly after I joined Teledyne I discovered that we were about to compete with Litton for the Air Force F-15

fighter inertial system. By that time Litton had proceeded far enough with the new tuned suspension system gyro

and Litton was already under contract with the airframe company, McDonnell, for at least one other program so

that it was really no contest. Litton won hands down, in spite of a close personal relationship that Allen Orbuch

enjoyed with the McDonnell engineering manager, and Litton proceeded to supply the new technology inertial

system for all of the F-15 aircraft produced, a most sizable quantity, to say the least.

Teledyne Systems Co. main effort at this time was to get into the airborne computer systems business. They had

already won one major development program called IHAS, an integrated avionics system for military helicopters.

The IHAS program spawned a new helicopter avionics system, resulting in both a development program and a

production program with Lockheed, which was to supply the entire rigid rotor helicopter system to the U.S. Army

for what was called the "Cheyenne" helicopter. Most unfortunately for Teledyne, The Army cancelled their

Lockheed contract in 1969, resulting in massive layoffs at Teledyne.

44

Teledyne was developing the technology for shrinking the package size of the then commonly used circuit boards

to a postage stamp size by means of integrating the necessary raw chips into this small package and

interconnecting them with quite small wires. These sealed devices, know at that time as MEMAs, could then be

interconnected, resulting in much smaller overall electronics size than our competition. These MEMAs were

supplied by the Teledyne hybrid company.

Although this technology was initially fraught with terrible problems, it became, over the years, a most reliable

methodology, and Teledyne ultimately formed a whole new highly successful division to supply these hybrid

devices to both military and commercial users in significant quantities, as described previously. One such

commercial application was for use in heart pace makers, where the reliability requirements were extremely high,

as can be imagined.

Approximately six months after I joined Teledyne Systems, the man who was heading their inertial systems activity

resigned from his job, and Joe Smead asked me to take over this responsibility. I was not at all anxious to do this,

because I didn't believe Teledyne had much to offer at the time. Smead insisted, so I ended up doing this with a

substantial degree of reluctance.

I then immediately found myself in a somewhat unique position of being both the program manager and the

engineering manager for the HARS system which was then being supplied in small quantities to an airframe

company. The basic unreliability of this design and the need for constant engineering and technician support

forced me to make a number of trips to Alamagordo, New Mexico, where the flight testing was taking place in

order to help support this testing.

After a reasonable number of flight tests had taken place, and we were starting to gear up to go into production,

the airframe contractor's contract was cancelled by the government, and, consequentially, our HARS contract.

We had another potential customer for the HARS -- the British Aircraft Corporation (BAC), now known as BAE. Our

chief supporter at BAC was an engineering manager named Jock Muirhead. We soon became good friends, and he

insisted that I make a number of trips to the UK to support BAC's proposal efforts for new business. Although we

provided good support for these efforts, it soon became obvious that the UK Ministry of Defense was not going to

allow any business with non-UK suppliers, because the UK wanted to keep all defense business possible in-country.

At least one such company, Ferranti by name, existed and was active in the inertial systems area, so all of our UK

marketing time and effort was really wasted.

At some point in all of this activity I was made the head of all engineering activities at Teledyne Systems. I

remember the very first day of this new responsibility being shown around by the previous head of engineering,

who assured me, among other activities, that the Loran navigation system engineering development was in good

shape. By the late afternoon of that very same day, however, I became aware of a significant immediate cost

overrun on one of our Loran contracts.

Contract cost overruns were quite common in our industry because the only way of successfully competing with

other suppliers was to "buy in" by submitting as low a cost estimate as could be substantiated as credible and

hopefully the lowest of any of the competition. Once having secured an initial contract for a specific system or

subsystem the strategy was to hold off the need to inform the customer of the need for additional funding until it

was too late for the customer to select a different supplier, as well as to charge the customer as much as possible

for any contract changes.. These customer relations at this point were invariably painful for both parties.

45

CHAPTER 13 -- THE DEVELOPMENT OF NEW TELEDYNE INERTIAL SYSTEMS

At this point, since it was known that the HARS really had no future business potential, I decided that was a good

time to design a new dynamically tuned gyro optimized as a "strapdown" system as opposed to a gimbal system.

Before we got going on this tack, Joe Smead suggested that I take a look at the Ring Laser Gyro technology as a

more advanced option, a technology that was really in its infancy stage at this time, around 1970. So one of my

engineers and I visited a professor at UC Santa Barbara who was doing some research in this area, and had an

actual working ring laser working as a crude model, which was strung all around a lab room. This professor offered

his opinion that, although the construction of a ring laser gyro was feasible, as he had demonstrated, he sincerely

doubted that the technology would ever become practically usable. Although subsequent work in this area,

primarily by Honeywell, and later by Litton, demonstrated that practical ring laser gyros could be produced, they

were inherently expensive, and, I believe, ultimately superseded by fiber optic gyro technology for practical

systems.

At this time, 1970, the fiber optic technology was known to exist, but it took many, many years to perfect the

design techniques and for the needed size and quality of fiber optic cable to become available.

Had we known then what we know now, Teledyne might well have embarked on a fiber optic cable gyro

development, but it would been a long and expensive road to travel before anything useful would be available, and

I doubt if Teledyne would have been willing to go down such a long and uncertain road without significant

customer support along the way. Further, we had no knowledge of where we could find the right kind of physicist

to be the technical lead for this kind of fiber optic work, although we certainly could have done this with some

effort.

So, because of these uncertainties with optical type gyros, we decided to stay with the tuned suspension system

gyro technology. I hired a few capable engineers from Litton, including Jerzy Craig, who probably had the best in

the world overall knowledge of the workings of this gyro type, including an excellent basic analytical capability.

"Strapdown" inertial systems used no gimbals and kept the gyro output angular excursion at a null value by

feeding back measured torque signals to the gyros. These signals, effectively a three axis measure of the angular

rate of the vehicle being navigated or guided, were used as inputs to a digital computer in order to continuously

measure the vehicle attitude to a high degree of accuracy.

Having decided upon a strapdown inertial system configuration Jerzy Craig did some good analytical work in

coming up with the important parameters that would best meet our requirements. The results of his optimization

indicated that we should all we could do to maximize the diameter of the spinning wheel, minimize the width of

the wheel, and run the wheel at half the speed (12,000 rpm) we were consistently using at Litton. I decided that

with this choice of parameters we would need three parallel internal properly tuned gimbals, each such system

oriented at 120 degrees around the circumference of the gyro to be able for the gyro to withstand the necessary

high g shock and vibration aircraft and missile environments, as well as any twice spin frequency vibration inputs.

As I remember it, the diameter of the spinning wheel was approximately four inches, which made our Inertial

Measurement Unit (IMU) larger than I would have preferred, but since only two such gyros were required, along

with three quite small purchased precision accelerometers, the overall IMU package was still reasonably small

enough for most envisioned applications. Looking back now, with hindsight, I would have selected a smaller size,

however, even though the performance would not have been as good as this initial design, the performance of

46

which turned out to be excellent. Such a smaller size would have made us more competitive for a number of

possible uses.

Strapdown systems need a high performance real time computation capability in order to continuously compute

the three dimensional vehicle attitude. Fortunately, we had recently re-hired George Napjus, an extremely

capable system engineer and mathematical analyst, who previously worked at Teledyne, but had taken two or

three years off to complete the academic work necessary for his Ph.D. degree. George later held other important

positions at Teledyne Systems, including Director of Engineering. George lost no time in coming up with a

quaternion based algorithm for a computer being able to accept the three axis angular rate information from the

gyros and their associated servo feedback electronics and output three axis vehicle attitude. George was aided in

this work by another very capable inertial system engineer and analyst, Pat Donoghue, as well as an extremely

good computer programmer, George Brower.

At this point in time Teledyne Systems was continuing to develop a relatively compact airborne digital computer,

using the MEMA packaging for the necessary chips and a proprietary instruction set. This work was headed by

Emil Malevolti and a group of most capable computer engineers. Emil named this computer the TDY-43,

apparently after the NYSE symbol for Teledyne, and his target price for the stock. This TDY-43 became the basis for

Teledyne Systems avionics systems being sold for both aircraft and helicopter applications over a number of years.

We used the TDY-43 for our strapdown system computer and were able to integrate it with our IMU quite

successfully, but somewhere around this time I made what was no doubt the worst technical error in my career,

and I certainly made my share of such errors. Always trying for the lowest possible cost I decided to make use of

the new almost trivial cost single chip analog-to-digital 12 bit converters in order to convert the gyro analog

electrical signal to a digital format needed by the digital computer. This provided disastrous errors in the final

determination of angular information because of the inherent non-linearity of these converters. Once having

determined the source of this error we redesigned the gyro feedback electronics to provide a pulse torque

feedback to the gyros, a fairly standard method in the industry, resulting in most accurate results and a high

performance inertial system.

We put in a lot of effort in marketing this system, and although we were able to demonstrate good performance,

these efforts yielded only mediocre results. Much of this marketing effort was carried out by Drew Frohlich, as well

as significant efforts by myself and others, including Don Doty, George Napjus, Bob Irvine (a particularly good and

hard working engineer) and John Dowell.

At one point, around the mid 1970's, it appeared that this business was really going to take off, as Boeing selected

our system as part of a major Air Force space program which Boeing was the prime contractor for. Boeing

preferred our system to one major competitor, but was being constantly pressured by the Air Force to replace our

system with that of our competitor. In fact, Harry Halamandaris, the head of Program Management at the time,

kept getting these messages from Boeing, urging us to work on the Air Force to reverse this situation. I did all I

could at the time with respect to working with the Air Force technical people involved with this program, but my

efforts were obviously unsuccessful. Even though we were running late, we eventually demonstrated

extraordinarily good van test results to Boeing. However, the Air Force pressure finally forced Boeing to select our

competitor for this procurement. Although I cannot prove it, this negative Air Force attitude toward Teledyne still

persisted as a result of Singleton's early premature marketing efforts at Wright Field, as well as the Draper Lab

influence on the Air Force and Navy officers involved in inertial systems procurement.

Harry Halamandaris went on to become the President of the Litton Systems Northridge activity, and later joined

Joe Smead's company, Kaiser Electronics.

47

Although we were obtaining several other contracts in the 1970's, this loss of the Boeing selectee for the USAF

program was a deadly blow to our Teledyne strapdown system efforts, and personally very disappointing. It

effectively destroyed the long term future of the Teledyne inertial business, even though the Air Force

procurement of the Boeing space program was cancelled over the next year or two. Cancellations were a part of

life in the government contracting business throughout my career, and probably remain that way today.

We supplied our strapdown systems to McDonnell-Douglas for an extended and trouble-free series of ballistic

missile launches, as well as to a German airframe company, Messerschmidt-Boelkow-Blom (MBB) for a most

ambitious engineering test and evaluation program. MBB was testing a fly-by-wire fighter control system,

including an aircraft attitude reference and navigation system. The latter system, supplied by Teledyne, consisted

of a redundant set of four strapdown inertial systems and four TDY-43 computers.

Although I was somewhat leery of getting all of this hardware up and running satisfactorily at the same time, the

program was a resounding success, and enabled our key technical supporter, a Dr. Kubbat of MBB, to obtain a

position as professor at one of Germany's prestigious universities. In Germany, a university professor is looked

upon with more honor and respect than an official in industry. Unfortunately for Teledyne, this was basically a

one-off procurement, and was used only to demonstrate capability. John Dowell, who was the program manager

and overall project manager of this program, as well as constant supporter of our Teledyne-MBB good relations,

was, a number of years later invited to Germany to help celebrate the success of this program.

Spearheaded by Don Doty, we were competitively selected by NASA to supply a redundant attitude reference

system for a number of spacecraft. This system, known as DRIRU, consisted of three of our strapdown gyros, each

of which had its own separate sets of electronics. In this way no single failure point would cause an inability of the

system to provide the necessary three axes of angular information to the satellite. The Teledyne strapdown gyro

was an excellent choice by NASA for this application because the gyro was designed for a very low output noise

level, and this is precisely what the satellites needed for many of their missions.

The DRIRU turned out to be a program that went on for many years, but the low quantities required by NASA were

unable to support any kind of engineering and assembly organization at Teledyne. Teledyne kept raising the price

until it reached such a high level that NASA eventually selected a different supplier.

48

Figure 13-1 Don Eller and John Dowell, 1970's. Dr. Don Eller headed a small group of extremely bright analytical

engineers and scientists. Years later Eller and Dr. Min Kao, who worked for Dr. Eller at Teledyne, started up a

commercial GPS company, Garmin. Min Kao (source of the "min" in "Garmin") and Eller did the basic design and

an associate by the name of Garvey (or similar) is the source of the "Gar" in "Garmin." John Dowell, shown

talking to Dr. Eller, was the program manager of several of our most important strapdown systems programs.

At some point in the mid 1970's the Boeing Commercial Aviation organization came out with a procurement for an

inertial navigation system for a new aircraft they were developing know then as the Boeing 7X7. There were three

major contenders for this procurement, namely Litton, Honeywell, and Teledyne Systems. Our Teledyne Systems

management people were most reluctant to get involved in this procurement because of the onerous terms and

conditions involved in commercial aviation procurement of subsystems, and I could understand this reluctance.

Henry Singleton, much to my surprise, however, was eager for us to bid on this job, so we proceeded to do so. We

prepared our technical and fixed price proposal. Our per system selling price bid was about $75,000. Litton's

comparable bid came in at about this same level, but Honeywell's bid price was about $35,000 per system.

Honeywell's technical proposal included the use of their relatively new ring laser gyros.

Boeing awarded the program to Honeywell, but Honeywell had absolutely no chance of even breaking even with

their spectacularly low bid and lost considerable money as a consequence, not to mention the Honeywell

management heads that rolled as the losses continued to mount.

49

Figure 13-1 DRIRU Returns to earth, 1984, from NASA Solar Max mission. The system worked flawlessly

throughout the mission. Don Doty was the principal market and program manager of this system, aided by the

50

personnel shown. John Ritter was the real driver of the strapdown instruments and their integration into the

system.

In the last few years of the 1970's I was put in charge of our advanced systems organization at Teledyne Systems.

This consisted of several efforts including some special Loran navigation system work, a small effort in attempting

to develop a GPS receiver, and the development of a new avionics computer. The latter was interesting but

complicated by the unknown and uncertain Air Force intention of developing a standard instruction set and a

standard high level language. Such standardization would have been advantageous to the military as then they

could procure avionics computers from competing suppliers, as opposed to the sole source procurements then

common. How successful this standardization turned out to be I really never found out because in 1980 I left

Teledyne Systems for Teledyne Controls, then located in West Los Angeles, but still reporting to Allen Orbuch.

Teledyne Systems was reorganized to some extent in this general time frame, with Allen Orbuch becoming a

Group Executive, managing a number of different Teledyne companies, including Teledyne Controls. The

leadership of the Northridge portion of Teledyne Systems became under Larry Kaufman and Harry Halamandaris.

CHAPTER 14 -- WORKING AT TELEDYNE CONTROLS, 1980 - 1990

I arrived at Teledyne Controls as head of Advanced Systems, a small organization responsible for acquiring new

business and writing the necessary proposals. At this point in time Teledyne Controls main line of business was

split between military and commercial avionics products. One of the people in my organization was quite capable

of handling the commercial aircraft side of the new business, which was basically the sales of our current products

51

for both follow-on and new commercial airline customers. He used several engineering organizations to help him,

as required.

We also had a production military program which involved the engine control system for the Air Force F-15 fighter

aircraft.

At the time of my arrival at Teledyne Controls we were in the process of bidding on a quite complex hydroelectric

power plant control system, which included about five or six hydroelectric power generators at various points

along the whole Missouri river. I remember, shortly after arriving at Teledyne Controls, attending the pricing

meeting for this comprehensive power plant control system and noted that the our internal software cost estimate

was extremely optimistic, to say the least. Being a "new boy on the block" at this time I made no comment here,

thinking wishfully the software engineers at Teledyne Controls were more capable and efficient than those at

Teledyne Systems Company.

Shortly after submitting this proposal we bid on a similar, although smaller, hydroelectric control system for use in

Arkansas. These hydroelectric power plant control systems resulted in two fixed price contracts for Teledyne

Controls, both from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Knowing that our company had zero experience in this area, I worked hard to find and hire an engineer with

applicable experience. Luckily, I had an acquaintance engineer who had come from Romania some years ago, and

continued to try to help new Romanian immigrants to find suitable jobs. He let me know of a Stefan Dondoe, who

had just arrived from Romania, but who had already accepted a job with some other company. I called Dondoe

and managed to get him to come in for an interview. I discovered that he had directly applicable experience,

having designed such control systems for Romanian hydroelectric power plants. I made him a suitable job offer

and, fortunately, he accepted. Although he was basically "just off the boat" from Romania his English was fairly

good, so he dived right into the Missouri river and Arkansas necessary work to define the hydroelectric power

plant control system algorithms that needed to be programmed for proper operation of these plants.

As it turned out over the next few years, however, our internal cost estimates for these two hydroelectric were far

too optimistic, as I originally feared, and although we completed both jobs we ended up both behind schedule and

suffered significant cost overruns that we had to absorb.

Not only that, there were almost no opportunities for follow-on business here, at least in the U.S. because of the

limited number of hydroelectric power plants in the country that needed similar systems.

We were also bidding on two extremely large control systems for TVA and Oak Ridge customers. These systems

were so large that we needed to propose to have Teledyne Systems be the prime with Teledyne Controls being a

subcontractor here. In the end of this extended exercise, however, the customers decided to go down a

completely different technical path, and so no business was secured for Teledyne.

Going through all these exercises, however, gave Teledyne Controls some idea of how to design Supervisory

Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems and we continued to propose on many such systems for a period of

several years with basically no success until finally we successfully bid on and won a contract from the FAA for a

runway lighting system. This proposal was initially carried out without management approval, but as soon as

management realized that there was genuine customer interest here, they jumped in and, as usual, put in an

unreasonably and, in this case, an unnecessarily low bid. We won the competition and received the contract.

52

Because of the clear danger of a significant cost overrun on this newly received contract, management wisely set

up this program as a separate project with one of the engineers that I had hired as the project engineer. He and

his team did an exemplarily good job here and we continued to receive additional business with the FAA, a

notoriously difficult customer, at least at that time. This project engineer eventually became general manager of

the company a few years after I retired.

Teledyne Controls also bid on and won two military programs for data acquisition systems for McDonnell-Douglas

Long Beach and another airframe contractor.

About the latter part of the 1980's there were several general manager changes at Teledyne Controls, resulting in a

management decision to split off the military programs, transfer them to Teledyne Systems, and restrict our

business to the commercial side. This had the advantage of not being saddled with all the mil spec. requirements

for quality assurance and the necessary inspection and paper work involved with military programs.

At this time I became aware of a Teledyne Controls commercial program which involved the inclusion of

proprietary special algorithms supplied by a U.K. company designed to detect incipient mechanical failures in

helicopter rotor drive systems. This was considered an urgent need by U.K. oil companies that used helicopters to

service deep sea oil rigs in the North Sea; this was because some helicopters had developed fatal mechanical

failures while performing this function.

This led me to the possibility of using artificial neural network algorithms to be able to detect such incipient

failures. I discovered that the U.S. Navy was working on this problem, but had not considered the use of such

neural network algorithms to detect such incipient failures in Navy helicopters. I telephoned the Navy civil servant

who was doing this work, and he offered to send me analog taped data of vibration measurements of about five or

six different purposely induced gear train and associated data as well as normal drive data to see if Teledyne could

show any promise in detecting these faults.

I received copies of these analog taped data within a few days and got a technician to help me convert all of this

analog data to digital files. We used a purchased a low cost commercial 12 bit analog-to-digital card that plugs into

a PC and were able to accumulate more than enough digital file data for each specified fault condition within a few

hours.

I transferred all of this disk file digital information to floppy disks so that I could take them home for the necessary

analysis. I spent a good deal of time at home learning enough about the use of artificial neural networks to be

trained to recognize different input patterns so as to be able to not only detect the helicopter mechanical drive

system faults, but to be able to specifically determine the particular fault being detected. This is the real strength

of artificial neural networks -- no programming, other than the setting up of the neural network and the specific

training of a sufficient sample of the data. After this the trained neural network does the necessary work, at least

under reasonably good assumptions.

So I went to work (all being done at home during nights and weekends) using a portion of each of the faults for

training a single neural network to be able to discern and specify which fault, if any, was being detected. I then

tested the trained neural network on completely different portions of the input data than the ones I used for

training. I was happily surprised that this neural network actually did the job! I wrote up in some detail what I had

done and sent this report to my contact in the Navy (he was located in some Navy establishment on the east

coast).

53

After reading my report my Navy contact called me and disclosed that although a number of possible suppliers had

been sent copies of these same tapes, none of them had been successful; my methodology was the only one that

did the job. Naturally, I was most gratified to learn this and to hear that my contact intended to support further

work by Teledyne in this area of artificial neural networks. He called back in a few more days, however, stating

that when he tried to get the authorization to go ahead with this kind of support for Teledyne, someone up the

Navy line of management decided that the funding for this work be given to a Navy lab in San Diego which

apparently had considerable experience in the area of artificial neural networks for other applications, but had

never been involved with helicopter drive system fault detection.

So, in the final analysis, all that Teledyne controls got out of this effort was the sale of one of our production data

acquisition systems to this Navy lab.

I also did some exploratory work with respect to the possible use of artificial neural networks for an intrusion

detection system that Teledyne Controls was delivering in small quantities, as well as a commercial aircraft runway

aircraft detection system using buried electrical cable loops (similar to what are widely used for automobile vehicle

detection systems at traffic intersections). Teledyne Controls received a small demonstration FAA contract for this

possible usage at airport aprons and runways to detect the location of aircraft in bad weather conditions, which

demo program proved excellent test results on an American Airlines aircraft that we were able to obtain raw data

from. The Munich, Germany, airport was actually built with complete coverage by such electrical loop circuits.

The FAA, however, was heavily invested in radar systems for this purpose and stuck with this methodology.

While this was a disappointing end to my work in this area, it occurred simultaneously with my retirement from

employment at age 65, in 1990.

Just prior to my retirement I had lunch with Henry Singleton. We chatted about old times and other things as well.

At this point he was, to use his words, "no longer on Teledyne's payroll," the major corporate management activity

having been taken over by George Roberts. Singleton described his vast holdings in cattle ranches, both in New

Mexico and California. He said he was just "playing cowboy," but I could only conclude, knowing him, that his

cattle ranch management activities were handled in a much more serious vein. His hearing ability was continuing

to deteriorate, similar to my present experience. Henry, who was an original investor in Apple, told me the story

of how he was the first person in Southern California to receive delivery of an Apple computer. Since the

computer came with no instructions (they still don't!), he took a trip up to Cupertino to visit the headquarters of

the company and receive some instructions on how to use this computer. He finally found Steve Wozniak, Apple's

original computer designer, who at that moment was immersed in the activity of using his Apple computer to

calculate the mathematical constant π to several hundred decimal places! Singleton died in the late 1990's as a

result of brain tumors at the age of 82. For a New York Times obituary of Henry Singleton see:

http://www.nytimes.com/1999/09/03/business/henry-e-singleton-a-founder-of-teledyne-is-dead-at-82.html

54

Figure 14-1 Letter from Hudson Drake upon my retirement, 1990

CHAPTER 15 -- RETIREMENT

For the first few years of my retirement from employment I did some consulting work for several different

companies, including Teledyne Controls, Teledyne Inet, and Condor Pacific.

For Teledyne Controls I finished up some work I was doing with respect to the airport runway detection system

and the helicopter gear train fault monitoring. With respect to the latter, I joined two Teledyne Controls engineers

on a one day trip to the location of a Navy neural network lab in San Diego. They were still in the process of

55

procuring a standard production Teledyne Controls Data Monitoring System, which presumably they were going to

use to monitor actual Navy helicopter gear trains. This was to be done in order to investigate the use of artificial

neural networks for gear train fault detection. I have no idea how all of this ended up, but it certainly gave the San

Diego Navy lab additional financial support.

for Teledyne Inet I was asked to compile a large wall-sized diagram of one of their complete power supply systems,

which were made up of perhaps 20 or so separate modules, showing the interconnection between all of these

modules down to the individual connector wire level. I knew they were having some stability problems in

controlling the voltage output level (Teledyne Inet was a Teledyne company producing large power supplies and

being managed by Bob Goodell).

This was tedious work, involving the use of my home PC to create about 20 or 30 separate drawings with all of the

connector wired connections and inputs and outputs shown -- all done by examining the individual source

drawings from Inet. After several weeks at this, I finally completed the task, delivered the individual drawings for

mounting on a large wall at Inet. During the completion of this work I saw an error in one of the principal feedback

circuits used to maintain the output voltage stability and reported this to the Chief Engineer, a young and bright

Israeli. The problem was easily fixed.

56

THE INSTITUTE OF NAVIGATION 1 80 0 Di ag o na l R oad , S u i t e 48 0 Al e x and r i a , V A 2 2 31 4 P hone ( 7 0 3) 6 8 3 - 7 1 0 1 • F a x ( 7 0 3) 6 8 3 - 7 10 5

April 27, 1993

Mr. Harold F. Erdley 1210 El Medio Avenue Pacific Palisades, California 90272

I have been asked by the ION Awards Committee Chairman to inform you that you have

been chosen as the recipient of the 1992 Thurlow Award.

This award is made to recognize an outstanding contribution to the science of navigation and will be presented at the ION Annual Awards Luncheon, to be held Monday, 12 Noon, June 21, 1993 at the Sonesta Hotel in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The award is recognized by a handsome, bronze casting.

It is with great pleasure that I make this notification and I look forward to seeing you at the Annual Meeting. If you are unable to attend, you may have someone accept the award for you. If no one attends the Luncheon to accept the award, we will need your mailing address so that we can ship the award directly to you.

Sincerely,

David C. Scull,

Executive Director

Figure 15-1 Notification Letter for the Thurlow Award for 1992. This award, although prestigious, was mostly the result of a good friend of mine who is an active ION member.

57

Condor Pacific is a gyro company owned by Sid Meltzner that has been in business for many years. They have produced and serviced countless rate gyros for military vehicles, as well as tuned suspension system gyros and associated systems as well as a line of extremely small gyros and gyro-accelerometers, also for military vehicles. Condor Pacific had active operations in New England, New Jersey, Israel, and is locally headquartered in the San Fernando valley, having recently just established a new factory there. My consulting for Condor Pacific consisted of performing various analysis tasks associated with these instruments. Sid Meltzner generously threw at least two quite large parties on the 1990's for all the southern California past and present inertial instrument engineers After a few years of performing these consulting jobs my activity became less and less required, so I, in effect, gave up most of this work. Not being content in doing little or no work I became interested in the concept of developing a small (one inch cube) three-axis gyro of medium accuracy (about 1 degree per hour). This gyro was to have a single proof mass supported along all three axes by small piezoelectric beams that could be excited near the natural resonant frequencies by external electrical driving signals, a slightly different frequency along each axis. In the presence of angular rates about any or all axes the coriolis force would cause specific cross-coupling of these frequencies. Since the behavior of piezoelectric materials, such as quartz crystals, can best be described by a tensor relationship, the mathematical formulation of this gyro became somewhat complex. I simulated this three axis behavior with my PC and included a Kalman filter to result in estimates of the angular rate and all of the expected gyro errors in order to achieve a self-calibrating three axis gyro, the latter being a real advantage. I wrote all this up in a patent application complete with equations, drawings and in the required format and submitted it myself to the U.S. Patent Office. I actually received the patent in the latter part of the 1990's, and made presentations to both Condor Pacific and Litton in order to discover any possible interest. Litton was impressed enough to send my analysis and simulation to their analytical organization near Santa Barbara. This organization verified my somewhat complex analytical methodology, but suggested that what was really needed at that point was a "finite element analysis" of the mechanical elements of the design. At this point I believed that they were simply "hitting the ball into my court," and I decided to drop the whole project. One of the reasons for my giving up here was that the whole industry was working on chip level micro-machining techniques to achieve practical gyros, and that my concept was no doubt considered a throwback to older methodologies. I believe that the self-calibration feature of my proposed instrument was a strong selling point, but no doubt this can also be accomplished by chip level devices as well, along with a suitable Kalman filter.

58

APPENDIX: U.S. PATENT LISTING: 2,981,113

PRECISION DIRECTIONAL REFERENCE

Harold F. Erdley, Los Angeles, Calif., assignor, by mesne assignments, to Litton Systems, Inc., Beverly Hills, Calif., a

corporation of Maryland

Filed Nor. 19, 1958, Ser. No. 774,935

13 Claims. (Cl. 74—5.4)

2,909,930 TEMPERATURE COMPENSATED FLOATATION GYROSCOPE Ilarold F. Erdley, Los Angeles, and Joseph S. Acterman, Pacific Palisades, Calif., assignors to Litton Industries of

California, Beverly Hills, Calif.

Application January 10, 1958, Serial No. 708,276

11 Claims. (Cl. 74—5.4)

3,559,492 TWO-AXES ANGULAR RATE AND LINEAR ACCELERATION MULTISENSOR Harold F. Erdley, Pacific Palisades, Calif., assignor to Litton Systems, Inc., Beverly Hills, Calif., a corporation of Maryland Filed Jan. 30,1967, Scr. No. 612,401 Int. CL GO Ip 15/02 U.S. CL 73—505 19 Claims

5,531,115 SELF-CALIBRATING THREE AXIS ANGULAR RATE SENSOR BACKGROUND—FIELD OF INVENTION Harold F. Erdley This invention relates to a vibrating coriolis force type angular rate sensor, specifically to a self-calibrating. three axis implementation thereof.

3,062,059 ACCELERATION MEASURING SYSTEM Henry B» Singleton, Downey, Calif., assignor, by mesne assignments, to Litton Industries, Inc., Beverly Hills, Calif., a corporation of Delaware Filed Feb. 4, 1957, Ser. No. 638,023 11 Claims. (Cl. 73—517) Harold Erdley

59

4126046 Filing Date: Dec 8, 1977 Issue date: Nov 21, 1978 [54] TWICE SPIN FREQUENCY ROTATING FILTER [75] Inventor: Harold F. Erdley, Pacific Palisades, Calif. [73] Assignee: Teledyne Industries, Inc., Los Angeles, Calif. [21] Appl. No.: 858,711 [22] Filed: Dec. 8,1977

2,933,925 PRECISION GYROSCOPE Henry E. Singleton, Downey, and Harold F. Erdley, Les Angeles, Calif., assignors, by mesne assignments, to Litton Industries, Inc., Beverly Hills, Calif., a corporation of Delaware Application March 14,1956, Serial No. 572,175 3 Claims. (Cl. 74—5.4)United States Patent (i9j

4,082,005 Erdley [54] SPIN COUPLED, ANGULAR RATE

SENSITIVE INERTIAL SENSORS WITH MOUNTING STRUCTURE AND METHOD OF FABRICATING AND MOUNTING

SAME

[75] Inventor: Harold F, Erdley, Los Angeles, Calif.

[73] Assignee: Teledyne Industries, Inc., Los Angeles, Calif.

[21] Appl. No.: 710,693

[22] Filed: Feb. 8, 1976

3,678,7264

Erdley et al.

[54J GYROSCOPE HAVING VIBRATING GIMBALS

(72] Inventors: Harold F. Erdley; Stanley F. Wyse, both of

Los Angeles, Calif. (73] Assignee: Litton Systems, Inc., Beverly Hills, Calif. (22] Filed: Nov. 20, 1967

(21] Appl.No.: 684,270

[ 52] U.S. CL.......................................................74/S, 74/5.6 (51] Int. CL.................................................,..>....G0lc 19/22

(58] Field of Search........................74/5.5.5,5.6; 308/2.2 A

60

3,382,726

VIBRATING ROTOR GYROSCOPE Harold F. Erdley, Pacific Palisades, Calif., assignor to Litton Systems, Inc,, Beverly

Hills, Calif.

Filed May 21, 1965, Ser. No. 457,740 21 Claims. (Cl. 74—5.6

3,238,789 VIBRATING BAR TRANSDUCER Harold F. Erdley, Pacific Palisades, Calif., assignor to Litton Systems, Inc., Beverly Hills Calif. Filed July 14,1961, Ser. No. 124,173 15 Claims. (Cl. 73—517)