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The Downey division pioneered advances in missile technology that became the cornerstone of America's rocket industry.  The Downey plant  produced the GAM-77 (AGM-28 Hound Dog Missile) Hound-Dog, an air-to-surface nuclear missile carried under the wings of B-52 bombers.

The Downey U.S. Air Force Plant 16/North American Aviation, Inc., occupied the same Downey land that E.M. Smith had bought in the 1920s to found an air field and aviation company, and which Vultee made great during the World War II years.

The project, the Hound Dog Air-to-Ground Missile Program, was to aid the mighty U.S. fleet of B-52s hit targets while remaining at a relatively safe distance. It used much of the tracking technology already developed for the Navaho Missile.

July 1957: Proposal for GAM-77 Hound Dog is submitted to Air Force.  The contract was awarded North American in Oct 1958, two and a half years after the Strategic Air Command had realized its need. 

The Hound Dog was the mainstay of the company through the early 1960s, turning out
missiles to arm SAC's 29 B-52 squadrons. Production ceased in 1963.

A Brief Account of the Beginning of the Hounddog (GAM 77) Program
By: Ellis Katz

I joined the Missile Division of North American Aviation at Downy in May of 55 assigned to the Preliminary Design Section under Bill Parker.  Reporting to Bill was Bob Wilson for Design and Bernie Chew for Operations.  My background at the time was aerodynamics and missile design. I was identified as a “Responsible Engineerâ€? under Gordon Olson and George Jeffs.  As an RE, I was to lead project teams on projects to which I was assigned. 

The following is my best recollection of the events of late summer and fall of ’57, which culminated in the Hounddog program.

 In the summer of ’57, the North American Navaho program was abruptly canceled.  The cancellation was a result of the successes of the Atlas ballistic missile program; the Navaho 3000 mile ramjet cruise missile was not deemed competitive for the mission.

Shortly after the cancellation (within weeks), the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force, (I think his name was Ford), invited North American to come up with a design for a ”lightweight air-to-surface missile”.  It was to be carried by the B-52 with a weight of not more than 12,500 lb. fully armed and fueled.  We were told it was a ”hurry-up” project and that the concept had to be back in Washington within a week.

I was assigned the project under Jeffs and recall working the weekend with a team (including Lou Walkover.....best layout designer ever, Norm Ryker for structures, Bobby Crawford [later Johnson] for aerodynamics, Fred Ethridge for propulsion and others) to evolve a design that might be acceptable.  We based the configuration on the X-10/G-38 canard type to carry over as much data as had been complied on the Navaho program. 

As I recall, Bob Wilson and Bill Parker carried the concept back to the Pentagon and later returned with smiles.

By that time we came to know we were in a competition with Chance Vought who had an air-to-surface adaptation of their Regulus Navy ship-board launched missile.  Of course, we didn’t know then that the ”dice were loaded” for us as consolation for our loss of the Navaho program [this view was shared by many of us but not officially noted].

Although the general configuration of the first design was pretty much a scaled-down X-10, there were some significant configuration issues.  Lou Walkover resolved the first issue: how to arrange the internal components (guidance & control, APU, etc) of the bird so that it could be readily maintained while slung under the 52’s wing.   Lou immediately came up with the design that used a cantilevered ”I-beam” projected from a forward bulkhead; all components would be mounted on both sides of the beam and easily accessible once the nose ”cowling” was removed.  Although there was some issue about the guidance system (pure inertial vs a star-tracker system), we had no trouble settling on Autonetics inertial system. 

The major issue was the choice of the turbojet engine.  General Electric had come up with the small J-85 engine (I think it had been developed to power small commercial jets), which, in a two-engine configuration would be just sufficient to drive the bird to Mach 2.0 with the engines placed on either side of the after-body.  GE had the test data to prove its case and we quickly (too quickly as it turned out) focused on that configuration.  In fact, we had models made for publicity, which featured that configuration.  However, Pratt & Whitney came to us proposing that we use their recently developed J-52 engine.  The advantage of the non-afterburning J-52 was that a single engine might do the job.....but the test data did not prove that it  would be adequate.  So…we sent P&W back to the showers.  They came back with more data but still we were unconvinced.  By late September, the competition was nearing a close and, as the project leader, I (and others) did not want any ”changes” made at that time.  How naive I was.....P&W went to the Air Force and the Air Force came to us and with test data still wet on the paper, the J-52 became the power plant.  Of course, as it turns out, that was the right choice.

I recall Joe Berrer (Joe was president of the Missile Division at the time; not sure of the spelling of his last name) retuning from Inglewood where he had met with Dutch Kindleberger and Lee Atwood regarding the contract award and telling us that it had been decided to name the GAM-77 as "Hounddog".  At the time Elvis was "King" and his musical fame carried over to our bird.

With the award of the contract and the beginning of the production program, Martin Boe was named Chief Engineer and Sandy Falbaum as Assistant Chief Engineer.  I think that Dale Myers may have been named Program Manager.  Being an advanced concept/preliminary-design type, I retuned to Preliminary Design.

Hounddog was a highly successful program and an important revenue source for North American in the post-Navaho period.  Most important, it kept a very talented cadre of engineers together for the eventual competition and development of the Apollo/Saturn programs.

The Downy Plant and Beyond

Excerpts from a Book By: Mike Pickett
Email: g_gruff@yahoo.com

The Hound-Dog missiles were built in the HUGE (1 million square foot) building next door to mine...formerly the Chance Vultee aircraft building where they built WWII fighter aircraft. Quite often I would go over and wander about to see the missiles being put together. We had a missile test facility on the old runway, behind security locks, and I'd spend countless hours running my programs on the system and checking to make them perfect.

I became an expert on programming the electronic check of the Hound-Dog missile and the B-52 G&N system. My programs would check out the Bomb-Nav package, missile-tie in converter, astro-tracker (yes, the Hound Dog missile had access to a star tracker mounted in the B-52 pylon..the Kollsman star tracker was so sensitive it could track a star 10 degrees from the sun in daylight...) navigator panels with all their position servo displays, all the relays in the Hound-Dog, right to the spooky "Arm Warhead" and "Fuse" relays, and all the diodes, analog to digital and digital to analog devices in the systems. I also worked on programs to check the astro-tracker in the missile pylon, and a first-time-ever program that checked the the commutator contacts in an PIGA (accelerometer) for lead and lag failures.

At one point, I worked with my friends Dick Mueller and Phil Williams on a program called CEL (Combat Evaluation Launch). We ran flight tests on our various programs out of bases across the nation...the B-52 would fly, and the missile would pretend to launch, all the while gathering telemetry on its ability to do its job. There were something like
1300 launches a month going on during that period.

    Some of the launches were live, down the AMR (Atlantic Missile Range). I liked to use one of those launches in my Math classes to exemplify the problems with a lost sign in an arithmetic process. I won't mention his name but Ray ______ accidentally changed a sign in the Cross Track equations and a Hound Dog turned around and went the wrong direction. It created some problems for us. It occurred the week I was getting married and we had to work over 100 hours to find all the problems.........

Flight Test Team No. 2

Members of Flight Test Team No. 2 and others in front of R & D Missile No. 007 at Eglin AFB, November 1959. John McHaffie is shown standing in the second row, third from left. Other test team members include R. Burkhart, J. McKenna, and C. Hannon.  Sal Spina and company aircrew personnel Al Coutret and Ben Boykin in flight suits are kneeling in front row.

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