Crafting History – B-2: Engineering the Future transcript

so when I was 15 years old I was a bus point in a Dinner House a restaurant and um there was a gentleman there who was the program manager of the space shuttle program Ed Smith and and he and I became friends he was Learning to Fly and I was Learning to Fly ultimately he offered me a job I said well what do you do there and he says well we're building the space shuttle does it pay more than 225 an hour he said yeah it probably does so I was at the space shuttle program maybe 10 years at the time the Northrup had bought the Ford plant in Pico Rivera to to do work that at the time nobody knew what it is they were doing so they went after Ed they got Ed to come to northr and as soon as he got there and saw what was going on he said Chris you need to come over and I said you're asking me to go into the unknown and he says you won't regret it you won't regret it so I quit my job and I signed on at Northrup I went there was a wooden mockup of the B2 bomber and I saw her and I thought oh my God she's so beautiful and she exuded power she just you just look at her and you knew Game Changer the basic B2 design was known and understood by the time I got there there was a lot of work to do but the concept was there and the air force needed us to make the airplane as stealthy as humanly possible in a broad range of frequency the folklore was that the government knew that we could not achieve those levels but they wanted us to try as hard as we could and do the absolute best that we could because it was critical to the nation and as it turns out in 1999 when the B2 made its combat debut those Pilots came back got out of the airplane and said this is a great jet Redemption so throughout my career I've been presented with lots of different technical problems and some are small and some are huge and some you have no idea how big they are so when you're faced with complex problems like that best approach is to get the smartest people around all of the pieces and have them look at the problem as a set I found that was something that I I enjoyed I enjoyed bringing diverse groups of people together and um the people become family so a lot of the procedures didn't exist we had to create them there were Data Systems the cad system the 3D modeling system that we created what what that told me is that the B2 was a learning ground uh to tackle these Monumental problems and and with a group of people and you're learning you're doing things nobody's ever done before and it makes you feel good inside that you work alongside of people that are that committed to the mission