When you hear the foreboding "thump-thump-thump" of a helicopter somewhere around your house, you can go outside and generally see it.

Imagine a faster, softer, similar sound -- a low-pitched stutter, and you can hear, or feel while in the house, and when you go outside, all you know is that it is coming from "up there." Because of its height and frequency of the sound, you could sense little movement of the source because it seems to come from everywhere above.

It could be heard but it was way, way up there, sometimes well out of sight.

And it sounded big. 

You only knew it was leaving because the sound level was growing less.  (What an airplane!)

A lot of the engine components could be serviced from inside the wing in flight. The wing thickness at the root was half the diameter of the cylindrical fuselage.

The jets were particularly useful on take-off, climb, flying at high altitude, and maximum speed, consequently, a lot of the time during cruise, the baffle mechanism in the nose of each turbine would be closed and with no air going through the turbine it would spin-down to limit drag and wear.

It was common, as well, on long cruises to change the pitch of two engines and take the rpm down to idle. This was more fuel efficient.

There are some amazing stories of this aircraft -- such as the RB-36 that out-ran a P-51 in level flight at 20,000', or the B-36 that on a return test flight from Alaska came back so fast no one could believe it.

Then it was learned that just past the southern Alaskan border, the pilot had climbed to near 55,000' and caught a different jet stream. The service ceiling was supposed to be 41,000' but the big wings worked really well, and as I said before, it had a tremendous range of operational prop-pitches and the dual super-chargers had some incredible speeds.

I know for a fact that the last B-36 altimeters were calibrated to 80,000'. Would it fly that high? No. But some flew incredible altitudes for the day.

When the B-36 production was being phased out, each B-36 came back to Convair for refurbishing and to have the most recent modifications. When each B-36 was completed, the company "sold" it back to the Air Force by making a "short" test flight. Each one flew from Ft. Worth to the northern part of Alaska and back non-stop.

During standardization on the NTA, we would plug headsets into the side of the aircraft to talk to the data engineer so he could tell us when he had taken data on a particular sensor. We could then start adjusting the gain and dark-current and that technical stuff on another sensor.

There were times when the engines would be run up for engine tests. At some pitch settings and rpms, the beat-frequency would get so low and powerful that an acoustical wave-front would start hitting us.

I might be well-out of the prop blast but I would start feeling nauseous. I could look down the neck of my shirt and see my chest and stomach vibrating to the beat. We learned to lean against a tire, cart, or something to stop this -- or if standing free of the aircraft, we would cross our arms over our chests and hold them tight against us.

During some standardizations and calibrations, the data operator on the flight deck couldn’t leave and we would sit there so long we might eat a meal without leaving the seat. This meal was whatever we brought that day. There was a day I ate a can of sardines and spilled some of the oil down my shirt. And it must have also been spilled some other place.

Though the can, oily shirt, and I were way back in Ft. Worth, the aroma lingered on in the aircraft to New Mexico and back. I was told in no uncertain terms "not to do that no more!"

I didn't.

All this research was to learn what happened to aircraft systems in a radiation environment. We learned that what semiconductors we did have then, didn't work reliably, and we even had to use vacuum-tube diodes for low signal-strength coupling.

It was Convair's hope and expectation that General Electric would have the nuclear turbines ready about the time our test program was over, and we would get the coveted W-125A contract for the world's first nuclear-powered bomber. Among its many amazing specs was a routine 120-day mission...airborne and unrefueled the whole time. The bomb bays would be carrying an air-to-ground missile...basically it was a Thor...ICBM.

We continued to use the other two big reactors for electronic component testing (in radiation fields) and a lot of things had to be designed, fabricated, tested, installed, and operated just to support the other day-to-day testing. The Nuclear Engineering Department existed outside of just the NTA project.

GE was having trouble with the turbine, furthermore, the 120-day mission requirement was starting to be questioned by higher-ups.

Those of us who had worked the program for a couple of years had a good idea what was going to happen in the end.

It had nothing to do with turbine turn-around time on the ground, getting new fuel rods, disposing of old, nor did it involve potential radiation threats to the populace; it was that damned B-50 that was the problem!

We were seeing the W-125A project running out of applications week by week and, as one of the engineering managers said, "We are losing the justification to continue this program – but, Damned, isn't it a FUN one!"

The long flights and long missions had a lot of interest early on and the idea of having a fleet of nuclear warheads in flight at all hours flying the northern periphery of the Soviet Union would be a very strong deterrent, but that B-50 kept demonstrating a new and very practical solution to super-long-range bombers.

It was being REFUELED in MID-air.

After 47 missions, the NTA program wound down, the airborne radiation shielding and contamination contract had been completed.

And what of the coveted W-125A contract?

We got it!

Yes, we got the contract!

Dollar value?

$0.

This was necessary to complete some kind of legal procedures that had been started years before with the first letter of intent from the Air Force. It was nothing but a paperwork process.

The last NTA flight was March 28, 1957. Shortly thereafter, I had my wrinkled diploma and my now-sufficient resume in hand and I was going East -- all the way to Cape Canaveral!

I was going to be in the space race!

Ken Cashion