Kranz Hopes Local Airport Naming will Inspire Youth

May 16—Gene Kranz famously proclaimed failure is not an option — though not in those precise words — but as a high school senior he learned something about recovering from it.

Having dreamt of becoming a Navy pilot, the Central Catholic High School graduate secured a coveted appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., only to flunk the physical examination required for admission.

But with guidance from nuns at Central, where young Gene had written a now famous thesis about flying single-stage rockets to the moon, he landed a scholarship to Parks College, a pioneering aviation school in Cahokia, Ill., affiliated with Saint Louis University.

"They were the first ones to teach me that failure was not an option," Mr. Kranz said last week in a telephone interview from his home in Dickinson, Texas, where he retired in 1994 to close a celebrated 34-year career with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Mr. Kranz, 87, will travel to Toledo this week to participate in a ceremony Saturday rededicating the city's main airport as Eugene F. Kranz Toledo Express Airport. He also is scheduled to give a presentation the day before during an honors ceremony at Central Catholic, to which he has donated extensive memorabilia from his NASA career.

" Gene Kranz is a living legend and one of the icons of the American space program. Simply put, without Gene Kranz, there is no moon landing on July 20, 1969," Toledo Mayor Wade Kapszukiewicz said in announcing the Saturday ceremony at the airport, which will be invitation-only but streamed starting at 10 a.m. on the toledoexpress.com website.

The Toledo-Lucas County Port Authority, which operates the airport under a long-term city lease, "is honored that Eugene F. Kranz Toledo Express Airport is now named after such a world-renowned local icon known throughout the field of space and aeronautics throughout the globe," said Thomas Winston, the port authority's president. "We are looking forward to officially honoring Mr. Kranz on May 22."

Mr. Kranz has received the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his role in the American space program as well as four Presidential Ranking awards, the highest recognition a U.S. civil-service employee can receive.

City legislation and regulatory steps to rename the airport were undertaken in 2019 after Mr. Kapszukiewicz introduced the idea during a radio interview that summer, during the moon landing's 50th anniversary.

But the dedication ceremony initially planned for last year was pushed back because of coronavirus-related restrictions on public gatherings that are also why the event Saturday will be closed to the public.

"As Mr. Kranz returns to his hometown, I encourage all Toledoans to participate in the renaming ceremony and cheer our native son," the mayor said. "This will be our chance to welcome home a hero and thank him for the inspiring example he has set for generations to come."

Mr. Kranz said he too sees the airport's renaming primarily as an opportunity to inspire the next generation of young people who will see the name and learn about the man.

Mr. Kranz's father died when he was 7 and his family was of very modest means thereafter, yet he rose to flying fast airplanes and working on flight tests through hard work and dedication.

"I'm interested in the role model I provided to thousands and thousands of kids," Mr. Kranz said. "With toughness, competence, commitment, and teamwork, you can achieve great things."

He is best known as the lead flight director for the Apollo 11 and Apollo 13 moon missions, with the former featuring the first moon landing on July 20, 1969, and the latter requiring the space capsule's emergency return to Earth after an oxygen tank in its support module exploded.

While astronauts are more famously known, Mr. Kranz said an astronaut might only get a handful of missions in a career. But as a flight director, he worked on more than 100.

His career started with the first successful Mercury launch in 1960, when he was one of just three personnel in NASA's entire operating branch, then based at Langley Field in Virginia, and concluded after the 1993 Space Shuttle Endeavour mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope.

Mr. Kranz also worked on the Skylab project during the late 1970s after the last Apollo flights, and after the Three Mile Island nuclear accident near Harrisburg, Pa. in 1979 was part of a NASA team that toured the control rooms at nuclear power plants across the country for best-practices information exchange. Mr. Kranz's assignments during that tour include the Davis-Besse nuclear plant near Oak Harbor.

But while he had theorized about interstellar rocketry in high school, Mr. Kranz's original ambition was to be an aviator.

His widowed mother supplemented the family's income by taking in servicemen referred by the American Legion hall near their Berkeley Drive home as boarders.

Along with his frequent visits to Franklin Field, an airport on the site of what is now Franklin Park Mall, those military boarders "became inspirational," he said: "They created the dream to fly."

He attributed his failed Navy physical to all the chocolate milk he drank while working as a stockboy at an A&P grocery store, which, along with delivering The Blade, he did to bring money home.

"My teachers arranged my school schedule so I wouldn't get tardies" from before-school jobs, Mr. Kranz recalled.

While at Parks, Mr. Kranz joined the Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps, so when he graduated he also received his second lieutenant's commission.

He then went to work at McDonnell Aircraft Corp. in Saint Louis analyzing flight-test data from the company's developmental aircraft until his Air Force training slot became available. Mr. Kranz described his boss at McDonnell, a World War II bomber pilot named Harry Carroll, as "next to my mother, the most important person in my life."

To Mr. Carroll, he recalled, "every flight was a first flight" and merited careful analysis to identify problems and learn what could be improved. It was an approach that would serve Mr. Kranz well more than a decade later when each successive Apollo mission reached out a step farther into what had never been done before.

"He taught me a lot about using data," Mr. Kranz said. "At that point, I had no idea I was going to work in the space program because there wasn't a space program."

His Air Force training took Mr. Kranz to Georgia, Arizona, Texas, and finally the Fighter Weapons School at Nellis Air Force Base near Las Vegas, which to young pilots was "Valhalla" because Korean War ace pilots taught there.

Mr. Kranz then joined an F86 squadron in mid-1950s Korea, where besides flying he was also deployed as an air/ground coordinator with the Seventh Infantry. He also deployed twice to Taiwan, where the Air Force provided air cover for the Nationalist Chinese military against mainland China's Communists.

He returned to McDonnell while remaining in the Air Force Reserve during the late 1950s, flying tankers for the latter while working for 2 1/2 years in the former's flight-test program for the B-52 bomber. But while at Edwards Air Force Base in California in 1960, Mr. Kranz saw an advertisement for the NASA Space Task Group, and that October made the move to the fledgling space program.

Soon thereafter, director Christopher Kraft sent him to Cape Canaveral to write the countdown sequence for the second Mercury launch — after the first one had exploded.

"I'd been two weeks on the job, and I knew nothing about rockets or spacecraft," Mr. Kranz said. "But I was a quick study."

And the Mercury missions were as much about developing engineering and procedures as they were about getting a man into space. Mr. Kranz's team developed the manuals for all aspects of the program, with mission rules "probably the most important document" because that set parameters for managing risk.

"We had to be a very knowledgeable organization," Mr. Kranz said, later describing Project Mercury as "boot camp" and the Gemini program as building "capability to mature and perform as an organization."

With Apollo, each successive mission checked out different systems required to fly to and land on the moon, then expand the scope of operations once that initial goal had been accomplished. As it turned out, Apollo 13 proved to be the mission in which the crisis-management portion of the mission rules was put to the test.

"Failure is not an option," however, was a line created for the 1995 release of Ron Howard's feature film Apollo 13. It was based on utterances from another member of the mission-control team; Mr. Kranz later adopted it as the title for his memoir.

Mr. Kranz also was a flight director for the final three Apollo missions — 15, 16, and 17.

After the last, in December, 1972, Mr. Kranz's work proceeded to the Skylab project, which began with the space station's unmanned launch followed by three successive manned missions — one to repair damage that occurred during the initial launch and two for on-board scientific observations and experiments.

"We flew it from the ground for one week to maintain trajectory" after the initial-launch damage, Mr. Kranz said. "If we didn't save the spacecraft, we lose the mission."

While Skylab would later become the butt of jokes when its decaying orbit ended with an uncontrolled plunge to Earth — with debris landing mainly in the Indian Ocean but also on remote land in Australia — Mr. Kranz said Skylab was the most important space mission before the International Space Station because of the science it enabled.

"We did all kinds of [projects] on board. It was marvelous," he said.

Mr. Kranz became deputy director of operations for the Space Shuttle program, with 5,000 people working for him, and after the first mission with Columbia in 1981, had "total responsibility for the shuttles," which, among other things, required an "incredibly large" amount of computer software.

While Mr. Kranz left the Air Force Reserve and allowed his pilot's certifications to expire while working for NASA — "I couldn't maintain proficiency" — he returned to aviation after his space-program retirement, including flying B-17 bombers at air shows and building an aerobatic biplane of his own that Hurricane Ike destroyed in 2008.

After the movie Apollo 13, he also embarked on a speaking and writing career, including his 2002 memoir Failure is Not an Option: Mission Control from Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond.

"The real fun was speaking at air shows, because I would fly with the performers," Mr. Kranz said. At one show, that was with the Navy Blue Angels, at another it was an aerobatic troupe, and "it was really a blast."

Toledo's airport isn't the first place named in Mr. Kranz's honor: Dickinson named its junior high school after him.

"I asked them why, and they said, 'You're the only famous person who stayed here instead of moving away'," Mr. Kranz said.

He's now working on the third draft of another book.

And while he has now more than a quarter-century removed from NASA, he still tracks its projects. He said he spoke with one of the astronauts working on the Mars project, Artemis, just two weeks ago.

"Artemis is going to be a challenge," he said. "We can build rockets and systems. But the integration problem is more massive than anything we have tried."

His spoken fear is that the Chinese or the "Soviets" will win the interplanetary-flight race because of a lack of leadership and focus in the United States.

"It's going to take sacrifice, and I don't think we as a nation are willing to make the sacrifices necessary to achieve great things any more," Mr. Kranz said.

First Published May 16, 2021, 7:30am

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