Welcome!

Twisted from the Sprue is my little corner of the internet. This site started as a simple web presence for the Three Rivers IPMS model club - as in middle-aged guys who never quite out-grew gluing together miniature cars and planes (and not a club of really good looking people who have their pictures taken for underwear ads and the like). The club now has a real web-site, and this blog is a place for me to post stuff I find interesting or just want to ramble on about.

Its reassuring to know you're not the only guy with an obsession for trivia - if you happen across something interesting here, or have a question or something to contribute, please leave a comment or drop me an email at dnschmtz@gmail.com

Don
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Tuesday, June 19, 2012

The Right Stuff Story You Haven't Heard

If you read Tom Wolfe's book, The Right Stuff, or watch the movie version, there is a scene right at the beginning where Chuck Yeager is given the job of flying the X1, replacing greedy civilian test pilot and playboy "Slick" Goodlin, who is holding the project hostage by demanding lots of money to attempt to break the sound barrier. Its a great scene that set Yeager on the path to fame and fortune, and it might even bring a patriotic tear of pride to your eye.

A great scene - except it never really happened!

I had my first doubts about Wolfe's account when I discovered that Chalmers "Slick" Goodlin was a Pittsburgh area native, born in nearby Greensburg on January 2nd, 1923 and raised just down the road in New Alexandria, where he learned to fly as a teen (and legend has it he would sometimes deliver newspapers from the open cockpit of a plane). A real Pittsburgher wouldn't think twice about squeezing their employer for every nickel they could get, but something didn't ring true about the rest of the story: Goodlin had already agreed to make the flight - a  Pittsburgher would sooner root for the Browns than back out of a deal!

So I started digging a bit more. On the Internet there are lots of stories about Goodlin's demand for $150,000 to make the flight, but most of those seem to be re-tellings of bits and pieces of Wolfe's book. Goodlin's story is harder to piece together, but I think this is pretty close.

In late 1940 with WWII well underway in Europe and the U.S. still on the sidelines, a very young Chalmers Goodlin headed north to join the Royal Canadian Air Force in hopes of making it into combat over England. Goodlin joined the RCAF on his 18th birthday, picked up the nickname "Slick" for his flying skills and made his way to England as a pilot instructor. In late 1942, well after Pearl Harbor, the Navy somehow discovered a U.S. citizen flying for the Canadians in England, and asked him to return to the U.S. to train as a test pilot. Goodlin ended up in Florida flight testing most every plane the Navy flew - and thinking being away from the action wasn't as much fun as he had thought.

And then in December of 1943, in the middle of the biggest war ever, with less than 1 year of service, Goodlin was somehow released from the Navy to become a test pilot for Bell Aircraft.  Exactly how that happened is open to speculation, but it probably had a lot to do with Larry Bell.

Bell had worked his way up through the Martin and Consolidated aircraft companies, eventually becoming a vice president.  In 1935 Consolidated decided to relocate from Buffalo, New York to California, and Bell took the opportunity to start his own company in New York.  Bell knew lots of rich and powerful people, including General Hap Arnold - commander of the US Army Air Force (USAAF) during WWII.  Arnold had seen the Gloster Meteor flying in Britian and was convinced that jets were the future of air warfare; he  gave Larry Bell the job of building the first US jet and by late 1942 it was flying out of a tiny airfield in the California desert - a place that would someday be Edwards Air Force Base.  Which is a long way of saying that if Larry Bell needed a test pilot in 1943, he would have no problem springing one from the Navy.

Fast forward to 1946 and Goodlin was one of a very few test pilots at Bell Aircraft, second only to Jack Woolams.  Bell had a contract to build the XS-1 - a rocket powered research plane designed to break the sound barrier - in a joint project between the civilian National Advisory Council for Aeronautics  (NACA) and the US Army Air Force.

The project quickly become a den of infighting. The NACA saw it as a giant science experiment; they had the planes wired with sensors and planned to generate mountains of incremental data over dozens of flights. Bell Aircraft was expecting to earn a pile of money for performing the test flights. And the USAAF, facing massive post-war budget cuts, just wanted to take over the flying as quickly as possible.

Then while the project was just starting, Jack Woolams crashed his P-39 air racer into Lake Ontario at 400+ mph while preparing for the Cleveland Air Races.  Overnight, 24 year old Chalmers Goodlin became the lead test pilot for the XS-1,  making a handshake deal with Larry Bell to take over Woolams contract, which included a hefty bonus for breaking the sound barrier. Its not clear how much the bonus actually was; the often quoted $150,000 figure may have included other flying Woolams was to perform - and of course there was a chance Goodlin might not live to collect it.  But still it was a lot of money for 1947.

Over the next 8 months, Goodlin would make 26 flights in the two XS-1s, including the first powered flights, eventually pushing out to mach 0.8 in the spring of 1947. And then things got really interesting.  In the midst of the constant wrangling over how many test flights Bell would perform, in July of 1947 the USAAF became the US Air Force.  By August, Goodlin was out and Yeager was making his first flight in the XS-1.  You can draw your own conclusions, but here are mine: having Air Force personnel break the sound barrier became an obvious way to give a bit of credibility to the fledgling service, and help establish the careers of the senior officers running the project.  Hap Arnold had retired in 1946, greatly reducing Larry Bell's ability to pull strings, and the hefty bonus promised to Goodlin became a handy excuse for canceling Bell's contract.  Even if Goodlin had offered to fly for free he wasn't getting the flight.

So if you see an X-1 on a contest table without the "Glamorous Glennis" decal take a closer look; it might not be a mistake!

Sunday, June 3, 2012

Go Big or Go Home

In the good old days - when my hair still had less salt than pepper -  it was pretty easy to put on a model show.  Back then there was still a strong tradition that weddings were held on Saturdays, so fire halls and hotel ballrooms were happy to make a good deal for a Sunday event.  A nice letter to Revell, Monogram and AMT would bring several boxes of new kits in the mail to stock the raffle table.  Awards were a big expense, but with the typical model contest requiring 100+ plaques, the local trophy shop was usually willing to give a volume discount.  And there were always vendors lining up to buy table space.

Today hosting a model show is like jumping out of a perfectly working airplane with little more than a bed sheet tied to your back - it is not a rational act. Full service hotels have been replaced with business hotels with minimal meeting space, leading to brides who are just as happy to get married on Friday or Sunday.  Venues with enough space for a contest are fast becoming too expensive for the average model show to afford.  And the small-time vendors who were the lifeblood of many local shows have been squeezed hard by Ebay and other internet shops.

Even a simple one day show requires 100s of man-hours to plan, promote and actually put on.  The cost for the venue and awards is typically a few $1000 - payable in advance - months before any money comes in from vendors and entrants. And at the end of the day, most shows are lucky to turn a profit of a few $100.

So why do we do it?  For some its repaying a debt to the hobby.  We have a lot of  fun traveling to other clubs' shows, so its only fair that we host a show for them to come to as our guests.  For some its a competitive thing: can we put more models on the tables than the year before?  And for others its a chance to do something different than our work-a-day jobs. At the Three Rivers show, you'll find an audiologist designing awards, a financial planner running the judging teams, a software engineer hawking vendor tables and a high school teacher straw bossing the whole bunch.  OK - maybe having the teacher in charge makes sense...

Whatever the reasons, it has become clear that if you're going to have a contest, it can no longer be just a simple little neighborhood show.  Higher prices for everything means a show has to bring in lots of modelers to pay the bills, and successful shows have to continually adjust and grow to keep modelers coming back every year.

For the Three Rivers contest crew, planning for next year's show starts about a month after this year's show wraps up. We've already set the date - March 23rd, 2013 - and booked the location. Soon there will be a meeting in someone's backyard - with chips and a cooler of cold drinks - to kick around what worked, what didn't and what we should do next year.  I'll be posting the news here as soon as its all nailed down.  In the meantime, feel free to leave a comment here to let us know what you think we're doing right or could do better.

Don Schmitz