<Begin Segment 14>

TI: Okay, before we do that, I want to just finish up one thing. Going back to Boeing, something that happened in '71. This was when the SST program was canceled at Boeing. And that caused an upheaval at Boeing with a lot of engineers being laid off and a lot of different changes. Can you go back and talk about that time period and how it affected you?

HM: Okay. The SST program, the Super Sonic Transport program was a commercial transport endeavor. It was funded by a quasi group of government agencies with Boeing money. And one was Department of Transportation, and one was Department of Energy and NASA was supporting the program because they were helping us with a lot of the aeronautical stuff. And it became an issue because of the requirement for congressional support and appropriations on a yearly basis. The group in the East Coast that was composed of thirty-one different environmental-type groups, waged a lobbying effort against the SST saying that the SST was going to be too noisy, it was going to be polluting the atmosphere, it would change the balance of the upper atmosphere, a whole bunch of things that totally were technologically not supported. But it was a grouping of thirty-one different organizations. And it was run by a woman that was a specialist in communications. And she was the coordinator of this thing and she was writing letters to these different organizations, and they in turn would write letters to the congressmen. And they were flooding Congress with a whole bunch of this anti-SST information. And it ended up that they had enough congressional support to vote down the appropriations for the SST program. And this was in the beginning part of 1971. And in the area that we worked in, we were trying to get support from people in Washington State and the West Coast and all the supporting contractors that we had on the research programs to provide letters to our congressmen supporting the SST. Well, unfortunately this woman that did the coordination for the anti area did a better job than we did by the weight. The congressman wrote us a letter one time saying they weighed the pros and the cons and they put it into these big baskets and the ones with the anti-SST was three times the weight of the ones that were pro-SST, so the congressmen decided to vote against the SST program. And I thought (this was) crazy. Man, this is a technological and economic venture for the government and I thought man, this is something different.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 1999 Densho. All Rights Reserved.