At 18, he graduated from high school and went to work at Boeing in the tooling department, where he entered training to be a jig builder. He scored high on the initial exams, so management chose him to be a model builder.
He left this job to join the Navy for four years, but when he got out of the military, he went back to Boeing and once again became a model builder.
Working with blueprints from Engineering, he built models of every new plane. Each model went through extensive wind tunnel tests, coming back for modification to optimize lift, yaw, drag, etc. With the perfect wind tunnel located in England, he traveled there more times than he can count.
The wind tunnel is approximately 15 meters in diameter, so they built each model at the maximum size to still fit into the wind tunnel. Not your typical model airplane - with a wing span of 9' or more, a weight of several hundred pounds, and a cost of over a million dollars apiece.
