Jetrader - March/April 2010 - 9

Award Recipient I worked there for two years and realized that there wasn’t anywhere to go—I was working directly for the vice president. I would have to move to Miami to the maintenance engineering department, and I wasn’t too enthusiastic about that. So, I applied to Pan Am, which was in the process of consolidating their Paciﬁc and Atlantic divisional-engineering operations at Idlewild. I worked there from 1959 until 1965, and I ended up working for John Borger, the vice president of engineering, back in Manhattan in the Pan Am building. J: What was that opportunity like? GS: I really had a fantastic opportunity at Pan Am; I worked on the 707 and the DC-8—the ﬁrst entry into service for those airplanes. I was a structures engineer and there were plenty of structural problems on both airplanes in the ﬁrst years of service—and then I became supervisor of the interior engineering group. I helped establish an airline in the Mariana Islands for Pan Am using Grumman SA-16 amphibians. I became a project engineer on new aircraft development, working on the Falcon 20 with Dassault Aviation, the 727-100 and the 707-321C, which Pan Am purchased. I also spent time working on the Concorde, which Pan Am decided not to purchase. I reported directly to John Borger at Pan Am and probably was inﬂuenced more by him than anyone else in my life. My six years at Pan Am were the most interesting time ever. J: And you were on the move again? GS: In 1965, I was offered a job to go back to England to set up the European operations for a Californian company called Tridair Industries. So, Ann and I went back to England for two-and-a-half years, during which time I set up a plant in England and one in Frankfurt to build the equipment that they were manufacturing, which was mainly cargo-restraint hardware and aircraft cargo-handling equipment. I came back to the U.S. in 1968 as vice president of marketing for [Tridair] and was made vice president/general manager of their international operations in 1969. In 1970, I quit and started my own company called Transequip and set up plants in London, New York, Los Angeles, Seattle and Long Beach to build ﬁberglass cargo and baggage containers. We also developed cargo systems for use by airlines who couldn’t ﬁll up the DC-10s and the 747s that they were buying at that time. We created cargo systems that could put cargo in the passenger compartment of the aircraft in 9g aluminum containers loaded through the rear passenger doors. It was called the Main-Deck Baggage Cargo System and was quite popular for a short time—at least until the airlines were able to increase the passenger load factors In 1978, I sold my stock to my German investors. I had acquired a manufacturing facility from Northrop, which took more cash than I anticipated, and I lost control of the company, so I decided to get out. Transequip is now part of Telair International. Now I’m wondering what I’m going to do, so I got involved with McDonnell Douglas and Shanghai Aircraft working on setting up procurement programs so that the Chinese could offset the purchase of MD-80s. Offsets are still being used extensively, but Douglas started it with the Chinese. Douglas was responsible for setting up a lot of the consumer goods we look at now that say “made in China.” Gil Speed (center) and fellow ISTAT members Bill Bath (second from left) and Fred Bearden (third from left) along with a group of fellow Pan Am employees at an ISTAT Annual Conference in Long Beach, Calif. Jetrader 9

Jetrader - March/April 2010

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