A little number I built to fly around the neighborhood.
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A little number I built to fly around the neighborhood.
Here are some pictures of a Spezio Tu-Holer I built back in the 60's and 70's. It'[s actually a two seater with the front cockpit closed. The front seat was home to a 24 gal aux tank which I normally carried. I learned in short order, while flying around the Houston area, the standard 18 gal tank was just enough fuel to get you so far away from home that you didn't have enough to get back on some of those unfriendly weather days.
I remember back in '85, I was preparing to fly it up to Oshkosh and had planned for a friend to fly with me in the front seat. Well it turned out he came down with a case of the kidney stones and had to decline. I just simply put my aux tank in the front seat and buttoned her up, and headed off to the big fly-in in the North. The weather was really crappy all the way it was a pretty tough trip, and was I glad that I had that extra fuel on board. When I got back, my friend was all apologetic for ruing my trip by having to cancel at the last minute. I told him, "Hey let me tell you something. There is no friendship as great as 24 gallons of gasoline!"
The airplane was designed back in the 50's by Tony Spezio, an A&P working for the FAA at the time. He scrounged all the materials anywhere he could. The tubing was cut of of an old Cessna UC-78 fuselage and is big. The wing spars were selected form the local lumber yard which met the grain count and direction criteria. The engine was a Lycoming O-290D, 125hp, ground power unit engine, he picked up for a song. Tony said he had a total of $500 in the airplane. He built it from notes and chalk marks or the hangar floor. He wanted to be a folding wing design that could fit in a 1-car garage. The criteria for the width of the horizontal stabilizer was that it had to fit through the doorway. The length of the wings were determined by their ability to fold against the fuselage within the confines of the horizontal stabilizer, 24 ft, total.
It turned out that about that time, the EAA had a contest to to see who could build a 2-place sport airplane, as most at that time were single seaters. Well Tony won the contest, however when besieged with request for plans, he stated there weren't any. Well he almost got linched right there and then. You see he had just won this prestigious award to further the building of 2-place aircraft, and there were no plans to be had. Well, tony said he would go home and work up a set of plans, which he did, but can you imagine drawing up a set of plans to an airplane that'[s already built and covered? How do you get all those intricate dimensions just right? Well he didn't, as I soon found out when I started building mine. But anyhow I got 'er done after 12 years in the process.
She stated out with an O-320, 160 hp with a constant speed prop, and flew for a couple hundred hours, before I decided to upgrade to an O-360 180 hp one. Well it turned out that that old 160 horse engine was only putting out about 125 horses due to an intake lobe on the cam shaft being almost completely rounded off. I finally got the fresh zero time 180 horse engine in and pulled out on the runway and away we went. HOLY BEGEBERS!!! She rocked me back in the seat and went straight up climbing at almost 2,000 fpm. What a rocket ship this was!
I flew it for around 20 years when a friend offered me more than I could refuse for it, so I sold it to him. He has subsequently sold it to a gentleman out in California, who is flying it now. I've talked to him on a number of occasions, and have secured first refusal rights should he decide to sell it again. I really miss it and would love to get her back.
The airplane was a lot of things. It's interesting to note that the reason you start a project like this is completely different than the reason you finally finish it. I worked at the Manned Spaceflight Center in Houston, Texas at the time, and for 12 years, I would meet someone in the hall way who would ask, "Hey have you started flying that airplane yet?" I mean, each and every day this occurred. I had one tormentor that asserted that we would finish the Gemini program before I ever flew that airplane. Well Gemini came and went, and he asserted that we would land a man on the moon before I finished it. Well, we did. And then he said we'd finish the Apollo program before it flew. Well we did that too. So as we began to gear up for the Space Shuttle program, he then predicted that we'd fly the first Space Shuttle before we flew my little airplane. He was right again ........, but shortly afterward on a cold January day I pulled out onto the runway and flew this bucket of bolts I had labored so on. What an experience. Maybe your first solo would compare, but all sorts of emotions were cascading by, pride, thrill, fear, you name it. I experienced them all at the same time.
There are a lot of stories, but that'll have to be another time.
Re: A little number I built to fly around the neighborhood.
You have already talked about the climb rate with the O-360. What cruise and stall were you seeing?
The profile of the vertical tail reminds me of a Fairchild...But maybe not. Will have to do some looking at old planes to see where the similarities are. In any regard, you build a very sweet plane!
Re: A little number I built to fly around the neighborhood.
Flat out, full throttle she'd indicate 160 mph. I felt that was too fast for the design, and felt uncomfortable. She cruised at around 135 mph and stalled around 57. She was a very honest airplane on the ground. Once down, she was as though it was on a railroad track. Never a tendency to ground loop or deviate from straight ahead.
The design came from the 1930's Howard Ike racer, Miss Los Angeles, which had an inline engine and was only 22" wide. Tony didn't widen the fuselage to accommodate the horizontally opposed 34"engine thus the reason for the apple cheek cowling.
Thanks for the accolades, I'll take all I can get. In Fact Tony came out to see the airplane one time when he was in Houston, and spent a long time carefully looking it over. I wasn't sure what his reaction would be as the cowling was a giant departure from his original design. After a thorough examination, he came up to me and quietly said, "I've looked at a lot of these airplane over the years and I'm here to tell you this is one of the best ones I've seen." Well, talk about the big head, I couldn't even get through the hangar door after that. It was really great coming from him.
Re: A little number I built to fly around the neighborhood.
Chuck,
I enjoyed your short narrative about your Spezio, and your journey to completing the build. However, I must admit that my interest in your story became divided when I read that you had worked on the Gemini, Apollo, and STS programs! As a boy who grew up with making sure I knew the crew and mission of every Apollo flight, building multiple models of the Saturn V and associated vehicles, and draining my Dad's wallet to buy and fuel Estes rockets, I would really enjoy hearing more about what your job was. I am sure that I am not alone among this group of men and women!
Re: A little number I built to fly around the neighborhood.
Mark, In response to your request for some of my background I'm attaching part of a speech I put together for some of the business clubs in the area which was in answer to the question, "Where were you on July 20, 1969?'.
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In a speech, on May 25, 1961 President John F. Kennedy said, “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before the decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and safely returning him to earth. No single space project in this period will be more exciting, or more impressive to mankind, or important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.”
Robert Gilruth, then director of the Space Task Group, (Prior to the formation of NASA) and chief operational officer of the American manned space program, listened to the president’s speech, and could think of only one word to describe what he had just heard – aghast !!!
The president had just committed United States to landing a man on the moon without consulting with NASA as whether or not it was even possible. There were a lot of theories, but no one knew how to do this ……….. There were two basic schemes to do this, one was you boost all the pieces into low earth orbit and assemble them in space. The second was to assemble it all on the earth’s surface and boost the entire stack into orbit.
The enormity of each of these is staggering. In the first case the crewmen would have to go EVA for many days to assemble all the hardware, then there was the question about reliability and checkout. There are literally thousands of experts dedicated to spacecraft assembly and check out, and we’re going to ask two astronauts to do it in a pressure suit???? Not a chance.
The second theory of building the entire assembly here on earth and checking it out before the mission seemed the only reasonable way to go. You have to realize, we had just barely achieved putting a man into orbit. We just barely had the capability to lift a few thousand pounds into orbit. The huge booster engines would have to be designed from scratch. And they would have to be able to produce 5 million pounds of thrust!!! We were starting out with a clean piece of paper. We had to develop the technology, and then built and test the hardware to do it.
Eight years, and eight weeks later, on July 20 1969, Neil Armstrong stepped off the ladder of the lunar module, Eagle, onto the Sea Of Tranquility.
The story of what happened in between is history. Stories have been written about a few people of Apollo. Some of them held high positions and some worked in the trenches. A few were in the public eye; the rest were not. They have in common that they remained on the ground, and that each played a part, large or small, in putting men on the moon and returning them safely to Earth. I had the honor to be a part of this great epic, Apollo.
This presentation is the part I played in the events which caused America to land the first man on the moon. A story appeared July 20, 2009 in the Hattiesburg American, entitled: Petal man recalls role in landing, written By Ben Piper.
My wife and I recently relocated to Petal after living in the Houston area for over 40 years. We moved to Houston in 1965 for me to begin working at the new NASA Manned Space Flight Center which had just recently been built there. I was a member of a group of people employed by the Philco Corporation on contract to the space agency. We were particularly experienced in space satellite tracking and operations from a long standing contract with the Air Force in the past. Whether they knew it or not, or that it even mattered to them, Armstrong and Aldrin had put their lives in the hands of a high school dropout during the historic moon landing. Now 80 years of age, I had only completed 10th-grade of high school. I earned a GED while in the U.S. Air Force, and then earned the equivalent of a bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical and aerospace engineering, while with NASA.
When I left the service, I was assigned as a civilian radar specialist technical representative (Tech Rep) to the Air Force, employed by the Philco Corp., and was assigned to Thule Greenland, tracking satellites for the Air Force. Due to my experience in spaceflight operations, NASA hired me, and many like me, in 1965 shortly after the launch of the Gemini 5 mission. There were very few people at the time who had any knowledge of satellites, or the techniques employed in tracking them. Gemini 5 was the first mission controlled from the new Houston facility.
The one thing that impressed me so much when I started working at NASA, was the number of times when in answer to a question, someone would say, “I don’t know, but I’ll find out and get back with you."
"Everyone knew the consequences of giving out incorrect data, and no one was ashamed to say, “I don't know.” Today, it seems everyone has an answer, regardless of the validity. I worked in some capacity with NASA until 1995.
Our function would be to form a core group of manned spacecraft flight control specialist to train the NASA engineers, and monitor and mange the spacecraft systems while they were on orbit. This task required an exhaustive amount of premission effort, i.e., learning all the spacecraft systems, developing the mission flight plan and mission rules.
The mission rules were pre-thought out failure scenarios in which we documented a course of action based on the remaining spacecraft capability, mission objectives, and crew safety, with crew safety being paramount. They were then simulated to test their validity.
Lunar landing simulations went on for many hours, preparing the crew and mission control to handle the worst-case scenarios. If a mission rule or a procedural work around did not achieve the desired results, it was taken back and reviewed by all elements responsible, and rewritten and simulated again.
I participated in all flights from Gemini 5 until the first shuttle flight. While I worked away at a labor of love, wondering why they paid us for what we were doing, my beautiful, young wife, the former Lucille Herring, of Petal, worked as a secretary at NASA during those years. She used to remark about the excitement of the up and coming landing on the moon all around the Houston area. "It was most exciting," she would say. Our son, who was 5 years old at the time, was always correcting his teachers when they would stray from the facts while giving a talk on space. He would tell them, “That’s not the way things happened, my dad works out there and comes home every night and tells me how things work."
My particular specialty, was Lunar Module Primary Guidance, Navigation, and Control System (PGNS) Flight Controller. It was my specific task to monitor the guidance system during the day of planned landing on the Moon, which included the time from crew awakening, the day of landing, to post Lunar surface touchdown.
Several critical activities were required of me. The most critical being to assess the amount of drift in the guidance system gyros and accelerometers just prior to the initiation of powered descent to the Lunar surface. Without this particular piece of information, safe flight down to the Lunar surface was not possible.
Re: A little number I built to fly around the neighborhood.
Continued from the previous post (right number of words)
Our Flight Director was Gene Kranz, most notable from the "Apollo 13" movie and the book he had written, "Failure Is Not An Option". Gene was my boss all the years I worked at NASA. There are a lot of great things that have been said of this man, and they only scratch the surface, but that is the subject of another story.
On Wednesday, July 16, 1969 – 2,974 days after John F. Kennedy asked the United States to commit itself to a Lunar landing, and 169 days before the deadline he had set – Apollo 11 was launched.
The Saturn V carrying Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins lifted off from Pad 39A at 9:39 A. M., Eastern Daylight Time, the precise moment selected months earlier.
As it had been in past Apollo missions, the Saturn V performed flawlessly. Then in a maneuver that had become almost routine, the S-IVB sent the command module “Columbia” carrying the lunar module “Eagle” into it’s translunar trajectory.
At eight o’clock on Sunday morning, Houston time, July 20, 1969 the LM disappeared behind the moon and Flight Director Gene Kranz’s White Team, on which I was a member, took over the Mission Operations Control Room (MOCR). While the LM was still behind the moon, Kranz directed that the door of the MOCR be locked. We jokingly said to one another that we didn’t know whether Kranz was trying to keep people out or trying to keep us from running off. In fact locking the doors was only the visible part of putting the MOCR on “Battle Short” status, in which the circuit breakers in the control room were physically prevented from tripping under an electrical overload. We were prepared to let a circuit burn up rather than risk a power transient that would cause a major Control Center system to drop off line.
Then Kranz switched from the Flight Director’s communication loop, to an Auxiliary loop, so it could only be heard in the control room, and said, “Hey gang, we’re gonna go and land on the moon today. This is no bs, we’re going to land on the moon. We’re about to do something that no one has ever done. Be aware that there’s a lot of stuff that we don’t know about the environment that we’re ready to walk into, but be aware that I trust you implicitly. But also I’m aware that we’re all human. So somewhere along the line if we have a problem, be aware that I’m here to take the heat for you. I know we’re working in an area of the unknown that has high risk, But we don’t even think of tying this game, we only think to win, and I know you guys, if you’ve even got a few seconds to work a problem, we’re gonna win. So let’s go have at it, gang and I’m gonna be taggin’ up to you just like we did in the training runs, and forget all the people out there. What we’re about to do now, it’s just like we did in training. And after we finish this sonofagun, we’re gonna go out and have a beer and we’ll say ”Dammit, we really did something.’ ”
It was the first time I had ever seen Kranz stumbling for the right words. He was always so prepared and polished, but this time, he was speaking from the heart and not from a choreographed speech on a piece of paper. And we all trusted him implicitly, the bond of trust between the flight controllers and the flight directors was unshakable.
Kranz went around the room, getting a “go” for powered descent to the lunar surface. After receiving a go, everything was silent for several seconds, and then he said, “Okay flight Controllers, thirty seconds to ignition.” And the descent to the moon had begun. The spacecraft pitched on schedule and the Landing Radar began to acquire data. The landing radar had found the lunar surface and had begun calculating the LEM’s altitude, position and velocity.
About this time, Buzz Aldrin’s voice came over the loop and said, “1202”. He was announcing that a Master Alarm light had illuminated on his computer console and displayed a 1202 alarm code. We had no idea what this alarm was. It had never been researched. Finally a bright young MIT engineer, Jack Garmin, came up with the answer, basically it was a computer CPU overload, caused by the extra work the computer was doing processing Landing RADAR data. If it didn’t reoccur, we were still “Go” to continue. The Flight Director was so advised, and the crew was told to continue.
At 3,000 feet, Kranz gave a “GO” for landing, when a 1201 alarm came on.
Again, Jack told us that we should ignore the alarm, and that we should continue. He said “It’s executive overflow: if it does not reoccur, we’re fine.”
A few seconds later we heard Aldrin say, “Forty feet, down two and a half. Picking up some dust.”
I was startled out of my trance. Everything else felt exactly like the simulations until then, but Aldrin had never said, “Picking up some dust” before. The image of the dust around the Lunar Module, made it real and the enormity of it all began to sink in. “Contact light. Okay, engines stop.” We copy you down, said the Capcom, Charlie Duke, whereupon Neil said, “Roger, Tranquility base here, the Eagle has landed.”
After having landed on the Moon, we were to have a shift change of Flight Control teams after giving a "Go" for stay. That is, we had an opportunity to lift off immediately and rerendezvous with the command module, should a problem be discovered that would prevent us from staying on the Lunar surface for protracted period of time. We gave our "Go" for stay and handed the consoles over to the next team and at four o’clock that afternoon, and exited the control center to go home and get some much needed sleep.
Later that evening, I walked out into my back yard and looked up at a brilliant half Moon, and for the first time, was awed by the events that had just transpired. It was almost inconceivable that up there was a spacecraft with Neil Armstrong and Buz Aldrin aboard. I was completely awed with what we had just done.
I went to work the next day, just like I had done so many times before, still not being able to comprehend the events that I had just been so much a part of. I still maintain that the success of the Apollo program was due to the excellent managers we had. They were people who gave you the tools and confidence in yourself to do the job and, fought your battles, so you could get it done.
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A little number I built to fly around the neighborhood.
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