Memoirs of an Aeronautical Engineer: Flight Tests at Ames Research Center, 1940-1970 (Seth B. Anderson, NASA SP-2002-4526)

Seth Anderson arrived at Ames on 4 July 1942, a Purdue-trained engineer with no flying experience, and chose the Flight Research Branch. The next day he was asked to ride along on a heat-exchanger test, took the controls on the approach to Moffett Field, and told the pilot afterward 'I've never flown an airplane before in my life.' He stayed sixty years at the NACA and NASA and finished these memoirs shortly before his death in 2001.

The chapters cover flight research at Ames from 1940 to 1970: wartime handling-qualities work, stall and diving problems, short takeoff and VTOL aircraft, boundary-layer control. Section titles include a dead-stick landing on sand, an orchard tree pruning episode and Flying Saucers Are for Real. Anderson separates flight testing from flight research. Testing finds how fast an aircraft will go, and research asks why it will not go faster.

He gives the hangar, building N-210, its date of August 1940, and recalls that returning aircraft had to wait for freight cars to clear the taxiway. The large-format photographs of the aircraft fill most of the pages after the text.