Overview

The year was 1963. I had been working in Advanced Projects at Lynn for a while, and I was feeling rather overlooked. Then the golden opportunity Eddie Woll implied would occur surfaced in the form of the CF700. The CF700 was another proposed derivative of the J85 engine, one that had been conceived in the late 1950s when GE began a thrust toward more emphasis on the commercial engine business. The CF700 was essentially a J85 with a low-pressure turbine and fan on the aft end of the engine. (This was the same configuration we had used on the CJ805-23, GE's J79 derivative that powered the largely unsuccessful Convair 990 airliner.)

The CF700 was intended to power aircraft in what was expected to be a relatively small niche market, executive and business jets. Ralph Cordiner, the Chairman of GE at the time, and Juan Trippe, the CEO of Pan American Airlines, had decided that a great market awaited a business jet powered by a turbofan, and that the CF700 was the engine to do it. As the engineering design manager of the project, I was charged with making that dream a reality. Although this was a relatively small project with a relatively small team, the chairman's interest gave it a disproportionately high profile.

Initially, we planned to put the engine on a deHavilland 125, which was being powered by a Viper engine at the time. By comparison to the Viper, the CF700 would reduce fuel consumption by 30%, enough...