Originally Posted by
ZERACER
I worked for McDonnell Douglas, St. Louis, in the 60s as a repair mechanic on the F4 Phantoms in final assembly. I then moved to Torrance California and worked in fabrication for the DC-10. After that I moved back to St. Louis and became a tool design engineer working in the space program as well as the MD11 and other programs. In those days you had to go where the work went. I finally moved back to California and decided to try something else because I was tired of moving. I went into retail and was able to work myself up to managing a major retail store. After 17 years they decided to close so here I go again. I took a mechanics position in Long Beach working on spare parts. Very humbling after being an upper level manager but honestly I enjoyed not having all of that pressure. As luck would have it I applied for and was able to get an entry level management position in the transportation and logistics sector. I transferred to the C-17 Transport plane Division as it was just starting the (T1) test aircraft. I was able to stay with that program for 26 years and finally retired with about 13 production aircraft to go. I wound up managing their entire Transportation organization, in Long Beach. including trucking, rail, all loading, unloading equipment and air transport including the Guppy and Antenov. McDonnell Douglas and Boeing were very good to me. Lots of opportunity and education if you worked hard. I do miss it sometimes, it gets in your blood like automobiles.
I started working for Douglas Canada in Malton in 1968 in tool design when I started there were about eight of us, it was reasonable to assume that we would be doing the DC-10 wings and some other parts as well. We got the contract and I worked on the handling of the parts mostly, floor stands for the wing, floor stands for the workers, lifting equipment, and brackets to mount the wing to the various handling equipment. The largest parts I designed were the air and rail shipping fixtures.
Originally the wings were to be shipped using the Super Guppy and all the shipping brackets were made to suit the air shipping fixture. Almost at the last moment, it was decided that air shipping was too dangerous and a rough landing would send the wing through the floor of the plane. The air shipping fixtures were then just used to store the wings. Rapid design was immediately required to design and make rail shipping fixtures using modified 89' railcars, one for the left wing and one for the right wing. an idler car was run between the two wing cars to allow for the overhang. The wing overhang both ends of the 89' rail car.
As the brackets mounted to the wing were designed to be square to the ground in the X, Y and Z planes for the air shipping fixture the brackets were now not square at all, this involved a lot of calculations. Remember we did not have fancy computers in those days just Fridens and some punched card calculators, and books with the Sine, Cosine and Tangents figures for degrees, minutes and seconds. Around 1975 a manager came up from Long Beach to look things over, basically he was sent to report on the managers who were wary of him, he took a liking to me a simple designer and we got along well. One day he comes up to me with a big grin and shows me a programable HP pocket calculator, I was stunned to see it spit out figures in the blink of an eye. He told me if I was wise I would get out of the aircraft industry as it was too up and down employment wise. The following year I left it for good and got into plastics when it was just about to boom, I retired from that industry when it was already in the doldrums.
We converted air shipping co-ordinates to rail shipping coordinates using so-called rotation boxes, using these tables we converted each X, Y and Z figure from air to rail coordinate.
The rail fixtures were designed on time and a dummy wing was designed to go in the rail car, fitted with instruments to measure g forces, vibrations etc encountered on the way.
We had been given an outline of the shape that would pass from Malton to Long Beach without striking platforms, bridges etc that were beside and above the rails. On an idler car, a wood structure duplicated this shape, called the shipping envelope the outer six inches or so made of polystyrene foam to show if it hit something. With great fanfare, the dummy wing was to leave the plant after all the photos of the managers were taken beside it the train left a bit late so everyone not directly involved got bored and went home. This was probably a good thing as the shipping envelope did not take into consideration the size of the plant gates where the rail lines exited the plant, lumps of foam were knocked off as the idler car went through the gates. Unable to repair the broken polystyrene the rail cars started the trip to Long Beach. I had assumed that the gates were included, I am glad to say I was one of those that left when things got boring.
Attached to the idler car was a caboose in which some engineers were to watch the dummy wing and the instruments attached to it. Somewhere in the midwest, they realized that the track was rising as they entered a railyard, panic hit when a bridge appeared that seemed to low to the rails, unable to stop the train they watched in horror as the supporting arms for the wing hit the bridge, and the dummy wing fell into the railcar with the support arms sheared off and laying on top. As I recall the whole lot was shipped back to Malton, repaired and the whole trip repeated with few incidents.
I could not find a photo of the railcar just a OO model of one. The four main supports pivoted in and out to allow for loading of the wing. The outer end of the wing was supported with large bungee chords to dampen any horizontal movement, the wing itself basically sat on brackets on the rear spar. After fifty years it all seems a bit vague now but proves that the best laid plans often go astray.
