John Saunders

Although I got much more money working for the then United Aircraft Company in Windsor Locks, I had an unimpressive title of "Assistant Project Engineer" and was one of a hundred engineers in an open "Bull Pen". I was in the Electronics Department of the Hamilton Standard division. While that company is mainly known for aircraft propellers, by then its main business was jet engine fuel controls. Their production controls were hydro-mechanical, but the Electronics Department were making electronic ones for the F-14 and F-15, as well as engine inlet controls for supersonic aircraft. They bootstrapped this expertise by pirating key engineers from a pioneering English Company, Hawker Siddeley Dynamics.

Actually, in that company, titles below Vice President were meaningless, since it was a pure matrix organization. Design engineers competed for assignments, sometimes daily, from project engineers, who held the purse strings and were responsible for the profit or loss of their project. I was one of only three system engineers, so my assignments were frequent and brief, being mainly confined to the early stages of a project. A lot of my time was spent on proposals, and sales presentations. I did a lot of traveling since my boss did not like to fly. In particular, the vice president of the Electronics Department usually took me along on "Best and Final" sales trips, since he could rely on me to come up with some technical excuse for cutting the price, and securing the contract. Company policy needed this strategy, since he did not have authority to overrule the submitted budgets without some change in scope.

Actually, I was mainly employed on new avenues of business, comprising engine health monitoring, aircraft multiplexing, and area navigation. I was called on to deliver papers, and to represent the company on two standardization committees. One set the requirements for airliner flight recorders, erroneously called "black boxes" by the media, and the other for military aircraft multiplexing. I had significant input on both, and learnt politics since the company, and I, was simultaneously involved in designing the DC-10 flight recorder. The results of both committees are now widely employed.

I also made many trips to Seattle for two projects which came to naught for Boeing; the U.S. Super Sonic Transport, and Boeing's Space Shuttle bid.

In the early 70's there was a downturn in business and many engineers were laid off. I was spared because I had just spent $400 of my own money on the first scientific calculator, Hewlett-Packard's Model 35. Actually, it still works: I balance my check-book with it. I was seconded to United Aircraft's Space Systems department to verify the design of the strap-down inertial navigation system for the first Mars lander. This involved extremely high-precision calculations. While the company had an IBM mainframe, it could not compete in speed or precision with the revolutionary little calculator! I got several more patents from this work.

Eventually, I was solicited by Litton Systems, Amecom division, in College Park, Maryland, and accepted because Connecticut was boring, and I was blocked in advancement at Hamilton Standard. This weakened my marriage to Pauline, since she refused to move immediately with me, because she did not want to interrupt the children's schooling in mid-term. Pauline was not working, but did have a big volunteer job as chief of volunteers for Connecticut Public Television.