LOCATIONS:

North American Aviation

POSITIONS:

Aeronautical Engineer

COMMENTS:

Bob Diggles (my father) was an Aeronautical Engineer at North American Aviation.  He started there on the P-51 Mustang and retired after Apollo 18.  He worked on the B-45, F-86, X-15, and XB-70 between those two flying machines.  His specialty was emergency escape equipment.  He worked on the ejection seats on the X-15 and XB-70 and, for the Apollo Project, he worked on the launch escape tower. After the Apollo fire, he was working on the mock-up and they needed a new hatch because of changes caused by the design of the launch escape tower.  Since they didn’t have a new hatch yet, there was the problem of training the astronauts, who used the mock-up as a teaching tool, to remove and stow the new unit.  In the absence of a new design yet, Dad mocked up what he thought one ought to look like and they got back to training.  One of the engineers from the group designing the new hatch came down, saw Dad’s mock-up, thought it looked good, took the thing away from Dad, and went back to his drafting board with it.  Dad also worked on launch-support equipment — the big steel stuff that stays on the ground.  He proudly told us kids that he did design something that actually went into space: It was a big “tin can” that escorted the exhaust gases away from the gravitational field of the space vehicle so the gases wouldn’t concentrate around the spacecraft.

After Apollo, he got laid off and hired right on with Lockheed and worked on emergency escape for the L-1011 Tristar.  When that was over, he finally retired to do some mountaineering and fly fishing with me.