Major General Joe Engle (USAF – ret.), astronaut. He passed away on July 10th, but the obituary didn’t run until yesterday (and if it was reported elsewhere previously, I missed it). He was 91.
He flew 16 X-15 missions.
He was selected for Apollo, and scheduled to fly on Apollo 17. But he was replaced on that mission by Harrison Schmitt, and moved to Apollo 18. Apollo 18, of course, was cancelled.
In 1981, Mr. Engle, by then an Air Force colonel, went back to space as the commander of the second flight of the shuttle Columbia with the pilot Richard Truly. They demonstrated that the Columbia could be reused, but they had to return three days early because of a fuel cell failure. (Mr. Truly died in February.)
Four years later, Mr. Engle was the commander of the shuttle Discovery, which deployed three communications satellites and fixed an existing one.
He retired from the Air Force in 1986 and was promoted to major general, having flown more than 180 types of aircraft and logged more than 14,000 flight hours.
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There were, and still are, some very brave men, and now women, who have flown for the United States both in the military and as civilians. And some pretty good minds behind the design of airplanes.
I was involved in making super alloy steels for the aerospace industry. Pratt Whitney, GE, and especially Rolls Royce engines all used our alloy. The super alloys were used in the hot part of the engines, specifically the fan blades and vanes.
Jet engines are most efficient the hotter they are operated at. The special thing about super alloys is that they hold their strength much closer to the point of failure than ordinary alloys.
The way that they are made is to tightly control tramp or trace elements, which can cause fractures. Oxygen and Nitrogen are considered trace elements and so the alloys are melted under very high vacuum, in a furnace under a dome. There are portholes just like a ship with thick glass to watch and run the furnace.
A metallurgist at our shop came up with a design that allowed for casting parts that had no grain boundaries which could be fail points. We made an alloy called single crystal. The castings were composed of a single crystal with no boundaries which could cause failure.
I once melted an 8,000 lb. heat of Single Xtal IV, as it is called, which had a value of over 10 million dollars. We made it for Rolls Royce. It went into the Airbus 380. It is also used in the Boeing 777.
The amount of attention to detail when melting under high vacuum is hard to believe. From the charge weigh up, to the melting, to the lab which ran samples during the heat and made corrective adds, to the actual chemistry and final ok, are all first rate.
Chemistry is confirmed with both X-Ray and Spectrograph, as well as separate Carbon and Sulfur and also Nitrogen and Oxygen testing on different types of machines. Polishing samples must be done on a water flow aluminum oxide disc to match the standard used exactly, to ensure the X-Ray worked correctly.
I actually did every single job in the entire plant, from running both air and vacuum furnaces to processing finished product, to dealing with the molten steel in the air melt shop. Right now, it is probably about 150 degrees ambient temperature on the air melt floor. Add the metal suits, and you can be pretty hot.
Back around the year 2000, we did not have to wear the metal suits. We would usually wear the jackets, when we had to stand in front of the furnace or vessel with the 3100 degree alloy. But one day there was an explosion, and a young man that I had helped train was killed on the opposite shift that I was on. The resulting MIOSHA investigation forced the company to make us wear full suits, spats, hoods and face shields.
Before I go I want to congratulate you on your blogs anniversary. I hope that you continue for years to come. And of course I must once again apologize for long rambling posts that are only tangently related to your original post.
Wishing you a fantastic August.
Thank you for your comments, pigpen51. You need to come down this way one of these days so we can talk about steel production.
Working not just hot metal, but hot metal under vacuum, fascinates me. I’m trying to imagine the infrastructure involved with that, and I can’t quite wrap my mind around it.