<Begin Segment 18>

HM: As it turned out, there was a guy reviewing my, my folder. And I was at home because I, I figured, well, no use staying at Boeing and they're putting me on leave without pay. So I says, "Well, that's what they're going to do, they're entitled to, to that action." And so I get a phone call, and I -- they said, "Come down to the SST program." That's down in the DC (development center) area. So I got hired on in that program. But they were looking for a guy that knew government specs and airworthiness criteria and flight characteristics. And they knew that I had some flight experience way back. So I got hired on to that group. And then I ended up the structures group. And this guy that, the manager of the group, says, "You're familiar with FARs, and we want you to go through that thing with a fine-tooth comb and tell us exactly what the structures organization has to meet." And that was the start of my being involved with the SST structures organization. And then he says, "Well, we got nobody going to this meeting, but we're supposed to send somebody." And this was two weeks after I get into the organization. "You go to this meeting." So I said, "Oh, sure." And that's where I met Mike Nakata. And Mike was involved with the fastening area, welding structures. And we were thinking of welding the whole air frame together. For the SST because it's titanium. But that's where I think Mike and I started talking to each other. And --

TI: At that point Mike was a Boeing engineer?

HM: Yeah.

TI: He had been with Boeing how long?

HM: At that time about twelve years, something like that. Longer than I had. And anyway, every week -- and they had a specialist team. And we were covering structures and landing gear. And this representative from the major areas -- air frame, systems, propulsion, all this, all these different groups, and we'd talk about the relative requirements that we have to meet. And I was part of that process. And Mike would talk about the structures problem in terms of fastening and the high temperature problems that we were going to be faced with. And every week somebody had an assignment and they had to make a presentation. And it was a kind of an interchange of information. And lot of the people had their own agenda. They had their particular own...

TI: Right.

HM: ...field. And some of the conversations used to get pretty hot. Anyway, Nakata made a presentation and everybody started yapping at him about welding. And he started talking about welding ships, which he had a lot of background on. He says, "If you didn't weld those ships, they'll leak all over the place." He, he used to give these guys a hard time. They used to tell him, "Well, hey, we're not building ships." He said, "Hell, we are. Renton, we're building a hydrofoil, and we're using a lot of materials." You know, this kind of crap. I remember some of these feedbacks were very pointed to these individuals. And anyway, I thought, this guy is different. He's outspoken. He's not like a Nisei. He shoves it right back in their face if they give him a hard time. And he and I were the only non-managers in the whole place, the whole committee. And I made a real cursory presentation on FARs because we didn't have nothing on supersonic commercial airplanes, except for the stuff that Concord had done, and provisionally that the FAA approved. And it was not a new fully certified-type system. It was not a full airworthiness criteria. It was based on the British aviation organization's evaluation of the airplane. And, so I just summarized all the stuff that they checked on for the Concord airplane. And then I made a summary from the FAR standpoint on the relative elements they covered.

TI: We should clarify FARs. Was it Federal Air Regulations?

HM: No, Airworthiness.

TI: Airworthiness Regulations.

HM: Yeah. Anyway, these guys started giving me a hard time. So I said, "This is an airplane that we haven't even built. We don't even know what the long-term criteria's gonna be. We don't even know if the Concord's going to be a successful type operation. Russians have their own supersonic airplane. It's got to be competitive, and it's got to be geared for that requirement." And they really started plowing into me. And so at the end of the session Mike comes up to me, and he says, "You give them hell, didn't you?" he says to me. And anyway, he says to me, "We're the only Nips around here that give these guys hell." [Laughs] But anyway, at, at that point I thought we had a kind of a joint mission in our lives.

And then we used to go out and eat together. And he used to tell me, "You know, we take too much crap from these guys. We're better than they are. We should hold our own." And a lot of these things that he talked about I agreed with. As things went on he says, "We got to do something. We got to be united." And I thought to myself, well, Koizumi had been talking about all this getting the Asian engineers together. So I told him what we were planning to do.

And as things turned out we started talking about why the hakujins were taking the viewpoints they were on Japanese engineers. We didn't speak out. We didn't stand for our positions. And the guys that Mike used to work with would say, "Well, you guys haven't even done anything about the time you guys were put into camps. What the hell have you guys done?" And Mike reiterated that to me. And he says, "We haven't done a damn thing." So I would say, "Well, you know, you can't do too much. We were -- it's constitutional, according to the Supreme Court, what the government did." And he says to me, "Ah, don't give me that crap." He was pretty cold-blooded with me. So I said, "Well, yeah, your friends are right. We should be doing something." And then after that he would say, "I hear you talking about it, but you're not telling me anything. What are you going to do about? What are you going to do about it?" And that kind of perturbed me. I thought, oh, God. Gee, he's right. But then what can we do?

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 1999 Densho. All Rights Reserved.