Aeronautics engineer reflects on his innovations that helped win WWII
Bruce Bauer has gotten over Howard Hughes stealing his girlfriend, but he can’t shake another passion from 70 years ago.
A retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel, age 94, Bauer still has a gleam in his eye when he sees a P-38 Lightning fighter plane, which he helped design at age 24. …
The sight of their 52-foot wingspans side-by-side on the tarmac takes Bauer back to 1937, when his engineering skills earned him a job at Lockheed Aircraft in Burbank. There, for five years, he worked with Lockheed colleagues as the team turned the P-38 into a 400-mph fighter with a 1,300-mile-plus range. In 1943, that made the P-38 the plane of choice for a mission to shoot down Japan’s top admiral.(MORE of the article)
