Family History with the Enola Cay

摘要

My father was stationed in Hawaii when the Enola Gay landed there en route to the island of Tinian. Dad was a B-29 crew chief, and he was assigned the duty of checking out the airplane before she made her next leg of the flight. I have a picture of him standing next to the airplane. Dad left the Air Force and went on to earn an aeronautical engineering degree at Purdue University, followed by a masters course at the Air Force Institute of Technology. He had an exciting career with numerous defense contractors in the burgeoning U.S. aerospace business. Among other things, he was involved in projects such as the B-36 machine-gun control system, the B-58 Hustler tail gun [he told them the gun was a bad idea on a supersonic airplane], various flight-test programs at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, the inertial guidance system for the Gemini missions, preliminary designs for the lunar rover, electronics for the Apollo Mission Control Center, and others.