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Chapter 11 Air Force Plant 4: General Dynamics to Lockheed Martin Continuous operations at the aircraft manufacturing facility west of Fort Worth that began as the “bomber plant” in 1942 meant stability and jobs for the area; however, the tenants leasing the Air Force’s Plant 4 changed several times. For the first twelve years it was Consolidated Aircraft Corporation, which became Consolidated Vultee and later Convair. Then the newly renamed General Dynamics acquired Convair in 1954. With $371 million in sales in 1953, the purchased company actually was a larger business than its purchaser, which acquired only $206 million in sales the previous year. Company officials decided that the name Convair would be retained, at least for a time.1 A year earlier, General Dynamics had been known as Electric Boat. Founder John Phillip Holland in 1900 sold the U.S. Navy its first workable submarine, an odd-looking vessel fifty-three feet long that became the world’s first successful submarine. Electric Boat then sold many submarines to the U.S. Navy through two world wars. Lawyer and financier John Jay Hopkins, head of Electric Boat in 1947, realized that a permanent defense industry could be profitable after World War II, and he convinced the board of directors to acquire Canadair Ltd., of Montreal, the largest aircraft manufacturer in Canada. The company changed its name to General Dynamics Corporation in April 1952 because Electric Boat no longer applied to a company that also built airplanes. In 1954 after the Convair purchase, General Dynamics consisted of the Electric Boat Division in Groton, Connecticut , with 6,500 employees; Canadair Ltd. of Montreal, with 11,000; Electro Dynamic Division of Bayonne, New Jersey, with 400; and Convair with 45,000 in San Diego and Fort Worth.2 With the acquisition of Convair, General Dynamics could do research and develop products for all the related fields of the U.S. defense program. Hopkins called it “Dynamics for Defense” and reorganized the company’s areas into hydrodynamics (submarines), aerodynamics (airplanes), and nu- arsenal of defense 182 cleodynamics (missiles.) General Dynamics even launched a program in 1955 to build the Nautilus—the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine. Even before General Dynamics (GD) bought Convair, the Fort Worth factory had won out over Lockheed to become the first aircraft plant in the nation to do research for a nuclear-powered bomber. One-third of Convair’s employees worked on the nuclear airplane program from 1951 to 1952, but they got nowhere. Then in the summer of 1955 Convair officials announced that a new special department would direct research and development of an atomic-powered aircraft. Two years later the company constructed a 578,000 square foot off-site engineering building on Montgomery Street on Fort Worth’s near west side.3 When Hopkins died in 1957 Frank Pace Jr., executive vice president and vice chairman of the board, and a former secretary of the army in the Truman Administration, took over as head of General Dynamics.4 The Air Force’s Air Materiel Command at Wright-Patterson AFB in Dayton, Ohio, announced in November 1958 that GD had won a $2.5 million contract for the ongoing nuclear-powered aircraft program. A fencedin area to the north of the actual plant building on the shore of Lake Worth became the new site for the program. Known as the Nuclear Aerospace Research Facility (NARF), the Air Force called it “the only facility of its kind.” The program used a B-36H as the test airplane for which it attempted to develop the ability for an airplane to operate with nuclear power and to become a command post able to stay aloft for two weeks or more. The first test flight was on September 17, 1955. In all, forty-seven test flights took place, but only twenty-one with the nuclear reactor critical, meaning that a chain reaction was occurring. The flight crew did not activate the nuclearpowered turbine engines until the B-36H was well away from populated areas. By the late 1950s officials determined that the program was both too dangerous and impractical, and President John F. Kennedy officially canceled it in 1961.5 The Fort Worth plant of Convair/GD became a full-fledged operating division of the General Dynamics Corporation in May 1961, and at that time officially dropped Convair as part of its name. By then GD had nine divisions, building everything from submarines to missiles, rockets, and military and commercial...

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