“Walt, we had a launch.”— Wade Palmore, Chairman, University at Buffalo AIAA Student Branch, calling from a bar several hours after an explosion ripped a sixty-pound steel cylinder from its test stand and lofted it into the adjacent parking lot
In a ground test at the University at Buffalo, an explosion within the boilerplate combustion chamber of a rocket engine ripped it from its stand and blew out seventeen windows in the Parker Engineering building. SUBSTAR (State University at Buffalo Student Amateur Rocket) was a liquid monopropellant sounding rocket project advised by Bell rocket engineer Dr. Philip Ramsden. After the explosion the project was terminated. When the author discussed this with Bell rocket engineers at the next Niagara Frontier Section meeting, they were genuinely surprised it was stopped, noting that “hard starts” happen.
Dr. Donald Kessler, who first proposed the eponymous Kessler Syndrome of a chain reaction of collisions between space debris, speaks at the Niagara Hilton. The event is co-sponsored by the local sections of AIAA, the Society of Reliability Engineers, and ASME.
Calspan engineer John L. “Jack” Beilman, program manager of the X-22 variable-stability ducted tilt-rotor aircraft and inventor of the LORAS low-airspeed sensor, receives the Outstanding Aerospace Achievement Award — the successor to the Aerospace Pioneer Award, renamed when it was felt contemporary achievements might not be considered pioneering.
The AIAA Northeast Student Conference is held at SUNY Buffalo. Keynote speakers are Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager, who discuss their planned attempt to fly the Voyager aircraft unrefueled around the world — an achievement they would accomplish the following year, earning the Collier Trophy.
The 75th anniversary of the Aero Club of Buffalo is marked by the inaugural induction ceremony of the Niagara Frontier Aviation Hall of Fame at the Amherst Museum. Fourteen historical figures are recognized, including Glenn Curtiss, Reuben Fleet, Larry Bell, and Tex Johnston. The lone contemporary inductee is Robert Harper of Calspan, co-developer of the Cooper-Harper aircraft handling qualities rating scale.
The Aero Club of Buffalo and Niagara Frontier Section participate in the second Hall of Fame induction ceremony, also commemorating the 40th anniversary of the first flight of the Bell X-1. A panel of Bell test pilots — Richard Frost, Chalmers “Slick” Goodlin, and Joseph Cannon — discusses the program. Goodlin flew the X-1 to Mach .88 before handing it to Yeager and the Air Force.
A. Scott Crossfield, first person to achieve Mach 2 and key figure in the design and initial flights of the X-15, speaks to the AIAA Niagara Frontier Section at the Marriott Hotel in Amherst.
John Roncz, one of the designers of the Scaled Composites Voyager, speaks at the section’s annual student meeting — a long-standing tradition in which the UB AIAA Student Branch plans and executes a section dinner. Note that in this pre-email, pre-web era, reservations could only be made through assigned ticket representatives at participating organizations.
Three AIAA conferences — the 24th Thermophysics, Ninth Computational Fluid Dynamics, and 20th Fluid Dynamics, Plasma Dynamics and Lasers — are held at the Hyatt Regency Buffalo. Nine papers are presented by local researchers at Calspan and UB.