Aircraft Pioneer, 83, Savors Bold Designs That Still Fly

Ed Heinemann’s hot rods still figure in the daily war games that Top Guns at Miramar Naval Air Station play. But now his most famous creation, the A-4 Skyhawk, takes the role of the enemy plane in the mock sky battles--a demotion from being the wings of the Navy’s Blue Angels.

“That is a fun aircraft,” Chief Petty Officer Bobbie Carleton said about the Skyhawk. Carleton, now public affairs officer at Miramar, flew second-seat in Heinemann’s hot rod 10 years ago, photographing missiles over Cuba. “That airplane,” she reminisced with a sigh, “has outlasted everybody.”

Heinemann, now 83 and wheelchair-bound by a stroke and other maladies, is much like his aircraft--still in the swim of things aeronautical. He has not been put on a shelf along with his medals and citations by who he calls the “boys who run things now.” He is still respected and consulted by the men who have flown his planes in three wars.

During the Miramar air show last month he was invited as a special guest of Air Force Maj. Doc Whitescarver, journeying from his Rancho Santa Fe home to Miramar to cast a critical eye on the F-117A, the Air Force’s stealth fighter that ruled the skies in the Persian Gulf War. He didn’t have a part in designing the ominous-looking aircraft and was not too pleased with what he had read and heard about it.

F-117A pilot Whitescarver and others that had flown the craft, talked at length with the lanky old man in his wheelchair. Like pupils and professor, they discussed the Air Force plane, and it appeared that Heinemann’s sharp eye and know-how were still valued by men who fly at supersonic speeds, although his self-taught expertise dates back to the days of the biplane.

Whitescarver told Heinemann he appreciated the designer’s talents because as a Navy pilot he had flown the A-4M Skyhawk from 1980 to 1984.

But Heinemann remained unimpressed with the heaviness and expense of the stealth fighter.

“I think I could have done a better job myself,” Heinemann said with a chuckle, “and cheaper.”

Navy Lt. Mark Jackson, a Top Gun instructor at Miramar, plays “the bad guy” daily in one of Heinemann’s Skyhawks, teaching youngsters in faster, more powerful F-14s and F-18s that there is more to sky combat than pushing buttons and checking dials.

“It’s a good little dogfighting machine,” Jackson said. “It’s an aircraft that requires pilot skill, but it will treat you right in a dogfight.”

The Skyhawk’s manual controls “require more finesse than muscle,” he said. And even though the Skyhawk is outdated by the newer jets, “in the hands of the right guy, it can give these kids a taste of what an older, less capable airplane can do.”

Jackson likens Heinemann’s Skyhawk to “a souped-up old car that will surprise you off a stoplight.”

Back in Heinemann’s heyday of the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s, a single designer often developed the concept for an aircraft, said Ray Wagner, archivist at the San Diego Aerospace Museum. Heinemann was one of those men.

Wagner said of Heinemann: “He was among the pioneers, a self-taught individualist who turned out a lot of aircraft designs, a lot of good ones.”

Today’s aerospace industry is no place for an individualist, Wagner said.

Long before Heinemann dropped out of Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles at 17 and found his first drafting job “designing ice wagons and firetrucks,” he knew what he wanted to do. He wanted to work for Douglas Aircraft Co., now a division of McDonnell Douglas. He wanted to design airplanes.

Against the odds and for no particular reason that Heinemann can recall, Douglas summoned the untrained draftsman six months later and offered him a job as a “tracer,” a lowly position of tracing other people’s designs that paid $16 a week for five full days’ work and half a day on Saturday.

That was in 1926, and within a year Heinemann and half the Douglas engineering staff were out on the street, some of the first victims of the Great Depression.

In the next decade, however, Heinemann’s work was recognized by several aircraft companies. He was named chief design engineer at Douglas’ El Segundo plant by 1936, beginning the career that made him a name in aeronautical history and one of the pioneers of flight.

Until his semiretirement (he says he has never retired) in 1973, he had designed and built more than 20 military aircraft and had improved and revamped dozens of other war machines and civilian necessities. In the 1950s, during the Korean War, 80% of the Navy’s carrier-based aircraft were of Heinemann’s design.

Heinemann said General Motors officials used to send him their latest automobile models to test and critique.

Heinemann would turn a jaundiced eye on all the non-essentials, the tail fins and gaudy grills, the spoilers and the chrome that had characterized Detroit’s 1950s offerings.

“What’s this for?” and “Why do you need that thing?” were death sentences for some of the 1960s flourishes added by less experienced and less practical designers.

“I remember once when I looked out and there were at least 10 cars parked out in the driveway all waiting for Ed to take a look at them,” Heinemann’s wife, Zell, recalled.

Heinemann remembers when the president of the Oldsmobile division “made me a damned fine offer” to leave the skies to design for Detroit, but Heinemann reluctantly turned it down. “I don’t know why,” he said. “It just didn’t seem right.”

At least one of Heinemann’s military gadgets, an inertia reel for which he holds a patent, has been adapted to civilian use. Almost every driver wears one. It’s the retraction device on a seat belt that allows a passenger to move around, but holds the body in place when the car is jolted by impact or a quick stop.

At home, he proves handy at solving common problems with simple designs and has produced a set of display shelves that line his study and hold the hundreds of honor citations he has received for his designs over the decades.

Among his honors is the Collier Trophy, the most prestigious award in American aviation. Heinemann received it from President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1954 for his role in developing the nation’s first serviceable supersonic fighter plane.

“I believe in the good old KISS theory,” Heinemann said.

“Keep It Simple, Stupid” has been his rule to live by in both his military and civilian endeavors. Nothing that is not needed. Everything designed as simply as possible, which endeared him to mechanics. Everything as lightweight as possible, which endeared him to military budget-watchers and pilots alike. Lightness means speed. Lightness means less cost.

“My people came in with an air conditioner that weighed 25 pounds when it was supposed to be 12 pounds and I said, ‘Out! Do it over!’ They brought it back in at 10 pounds.

“I was an S.O.B. in those days . . . but a good damn one.”

In his prolific design career, Heinemann made few headlines because military aircraft designs were considered classified data and even Zell, Heinemann’s wife of 32 years, knows few details of his aeronautical accomplishments.

“He has never talked about his work,” she said.

The Douglas Dauntless, one of his first designs, played a critical role in the Pacific during World War II. A carrier-based dive-bomber, the Dauntless was credited by military historians with turning the tide of the war in the air-sea battles of the Coral Sea and Midway, including sinking four Japanese aircraft carriers.

“It was the right plane at the right place for the right war,” Heinemann said in his autobiography, adding, “if there is any such an ignominious thing as the right war.”

Heinemann’s A-26 Invader, later redesignated as the B-26, was a low-level bomber that saw yeoman service in Europe during World War II and during the Korean and Vietnam wars. His prima donna Skyhawk, a light, efficient jet bomber, took its maiden flight on June 22, 1954, and is flying still.

Heinemann’s own favorite design is his largest aircraft--the A-3D Skywarrior. Nicknamed “the whale,” the Skywarrior was designed to carry bulky first-generation nuclear weapons for the Navy and yet be compact enough to operate off an aircraft carrier.

First flown in 1952, the Skywarrior is still in the Navy’s inventory and has been called to duty as an air refueling tanker, a radar trainer and as a “spy plane,” flying missions over Cuba to check out missile site development.

“She is my most complex,” Heinemann said in explaining his soft spot for the Skywarrior, the Navy’s most powerful carrier-based plane. “She was complicated but simple, a real flying machine.”

The designer later had his favorite turned down by none other than Charles Lindbergh. Lindbergh, then a Pan American Airways executive, was considering converting the Skywarrior into a cargo plane for Pan Am but rejected it, Heinemann said, “because it was too much plane for what he needed.” Heinemann took that as a compliment.

Heinemann led designers into the jet age with his designs: the Skystreak, which almost reached the speed of sound (Mach 0.99), and the Skyrocket, which more than doubled the speed of sound (Mach 2.2).

His continued efforts in designing aircraft that surpassed the speed of sound and probed the outer limits of flight brought him a host of new companions and admirers. The test pilots and military brass were joined by astronauts and space scientists.

Heinemann was a guest adviser and observer for the first U.S. manned space shots and still receives frequent visits from former astronauts, including Wally Schirra, and from famous flying ace Chuck Yeager as well as from fighter pilots who graduated from Miramar’s Top Gun school. They talk shop, of course, and when Heinemann talks, they listen.

Heinemann once volunteered to become one of those Navy flyboys himself during World War II but the brass turned him down.

“They said I was much more use to them designing the aircraft than up there flying them,” Heinemann said. Over the years, Heinemann has gained the title of “the Navy’s secret weapon.”