This is an edited transcript of an oral history interview of Alvin Stacey conducted by Peter J. Westwick. Topics covered in the interview include: Aero ITI; foreign military sales; maintainability and aircraft design; staff demographics; and labor unions. Alvin (Al) Stacey was born December 30, 1918, in London, Kentucky. He attended the University of Kentucky for four years but left before graduating. He moved to California in 1940 and got an engineering degree at Aero Industries Technical Institute in Glendale, and then got a job at Lockheed Aircraft in Burbank starting February 1942. He soon entered the field service department, working as a tech rep for the P-38 aircraft in British Guiana. He got drafted into the Navy during the war, working in electronics, and then returned to Lockheed. He wrote technical manuals for the Constitution, F-94, and F-104, and was involved with foreign military sales to South Korea and Taiwan. He then worked on the AH-56 (Apache) helicopter proposal, on maintainability, and then was head of maintainability on the P-3, and then head of international sales for the P-3 in the 1970s, including sales and support to Iran, Portugal, Pakistan, Canada, Norway, and the Netherlands. As part of this product support he made a number of visits to the Iranian air force base at Bandar Abbas, and helped evacuate a couple hundred Lockheed employees during the Iranian revolution in 1979. He retired from Lockheed in about 1986. [Object file name], Aerospace Oral History Project, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
If you're wondering about permissions and what you can do with this item, a good starting point is the "rights information" on this page. See our terms of use for more tips.
Share your story
Has Calisphere helped you advance your research, complete a project, or find something meaningful? We'd love to hear about it; please send us a message.
