I joined the Air Force in June of 1949. I completed the B-36 Aircraft and Engine Specialist school at Sheppard AFB, Instrument School at Chanute AFB, and the Autopilot School at the Minneapolis Honeywell factory. I was on flying status as an autopilot technician. I worked on the XC-99 for two weeks before going to instrument school.
I was discharged from the Air Force in July of 1955 and completed an electronics school in 1956. I then went to work at Convair (Ft. Worth, Tx.) in 1956 on the research and development of a nuclear aircraft. We were testing the airframe for the effects of radiation exposure.
The aircraft was damaged by a tornado that had destroyed several aircraft and was later reconfigured to be the nuclear test bed. Lead and raw rubber shielded the flight crew cabin from radiation. The cabin windows were constructed of glass and water for radiation protection. At the top of the crew compartment was a huge eyehook that would be used for the removal of the crew compartment in case of a crash.
A special recovery vehicle was constructed that had a large blade in front attached to a hydraulic boom that could be used to capture the eyehook and drag the crew compartment away from the accident. It had a radial B-25 aircraft engine for power of the tracks and boom. In the event of a crash the crew compartment was to be cut away from the fuselage and then pulled to a safe area. Then the 1-Megawatt reactor in bomb bay 4 would be extracted from the airframe. A hole in the form of an "X" would then be dug to put the reactor into below ground level to restrict radiation deployment to only the upward direction.
The crew was a Pilot, Co-pilot, Reactor Operator, Instrumentation Operator and a Flight Engineer.
Bomb bay 1 held the heating and air-conditioning system, bomb bay 2 held the instrumentation equipment, bomb bay 3 contained a water shielded cylinder constructed of boreal impregnated aluminium. This device provided additional shielding for the crew. Bomb bay 4 contained the 1-Megawatt reactor. The left and right aft scanner bubbles were removed and closed circuit cameras were installed to permit monitoring of the engines by the flight engineer. The tail guns were removed and an adjustable airflow eye was installed. A huge aluminium radiator was installed in the aft crew compartment for cooling the reactor moderator water. The instrument capsule in bomb bay 2 had electronics for 21 neutron detectors spaced throughout the aircraft for sensing radiation levels, and a 24-track recorder for recording binary counts from the binary count accumulators.
Ground-based experiments were conducted with a 3-Megawatt pool type reactor that had a dam mid-way in the pool. The pool container was 100 feet long, 27 feet deep and 50 feet wide. There were 3 escalators to transport equipment to be radiated by the reactor core that was in a closet of the dam.
We also irradiated equipment for NASA and the Sandia, NM test sites. A 500 KW pool type reactor was built to irradiate different natural and man made rock and ceramics used for the re-entry tile used on space vehicles. We radiated all types of gyros and monitored them for current draw and operational rigidity. Different types of wire insulation and all types of necessary hardware required for operation in space vehicles were irradiated.
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