"Grindintosecond" (Grindintosecond)
11/15/2014 at 10:10 • Filed to: planelopnik
8
0|
"Grindintosecond" (Grindintosecond)
11/15/2014 at 10:10 • Filed to: planelopnik | 8
| 0 |
(Look in the background) Jack Conroy enabled NASA to build their massive rocket program. He founded Aero Spacelines and with his business partner at dinner one night, conceived the notion of converting a Boeing 377, one of the prettiest planes ever built, into some cargo planes. His target was selling NASA on it. Hooked em. We could call him the master of the niche market.
The Pregnant Guppy (1962):
The Super Guppy (1965):
The Mini Guppy (1967):
The Pregnant Guppy shipped the first and second stages of the NASA Gemini program's Titan booster from the manufacturer in Maryland down to the Cape for assembly. The Super Guppy carried the Apollo parts where Wernher von Braun, the ex-german inventor of the V-1 ballistic rocket, who was then in charge of our manned space program, stated that "The Guppy was the single most important piece of equipment to put a man on the moon in the decade of the 1960s." Over the course of the space program NASA paid out $11.5 million in contracts to fly the over-sized cargo.
The company hit financial problems nearing the end of the Apollo program and sold to another investor, but the man who started it all kept going and started Conroy Aircraft, building even more oversized cargo planes as well as conversions of older airframes for future use by replacing their old roundy round radial engines with turboprops.
Conroy Sky Monster: Canadair CL-44 conversion.
Conroy Turbo albotross: Rolls Royce turboprop conversion
Tri-Turbo-Three: A three-engined DC-3 that the FAA rejected but flew on elsewhere.
Jack died in the late seventies but his contraptions went on to influence future cargo inventions. Take a look at his idea to carry the Space Shuttle around that NASA did reject, but I wonder who took up this idea for another purpose...
Airbus started on it's airliner project in the late seventies and when they began to build air frames, they were trucking its large bulky bodies over the road to other manufacturing facilities. They found the Super Guppy and used that and decided by 1991 to design and build their own replacement. Have an Airbus Beluga:
Boeing needed it's own outsized lifter to carry dreamliner parts to it's South Carolina plant, and designed their dream lifter off of a 747.
All of these ideas proved possible because of one guy, a former pre-war actor who turned B-17 crew member who turned post-war reserve jet pilot, who had dinner one night and acted on an idea.
Makes me think of what ideas i haven't acted on yet.