Lawrence Mead Jr., the aerospace engineer who led the design team for the A-6 Intruder, the bulky twin-engine jet that served as the Navy’s primary attack bomber for more than three decades, died on Aug. 23 in New Haven. He was 94.
His son Lawrence Mead III confirmed his death.
Mr. Mead, a senior vice president of the Grumman Aerospace Corporation (nowNorthrop Grumman), was named design chief for the A-6 Intruder in the late 1950s. Five years after its introduction in 1960, the A-6 was flying bombing missions off aircraft carriers in the Gulf of Tonkin during the Vietnam War.
“Not sleek, never beautiful, the A-6 would soon prove itself to be a masterpiece of aeronautical engineering,” Grumman World, a company publication, wrote in 1992 when the last A-6 was delivered to the Navy. Equipped with a pioneering digital navigation system, it “became the Navy’s workhorse bomber and the Marines’ primary ground support aircraft in Vietnam.”
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Weighing approximately 25,000 pounds, with a wingspan of about 50 feet, the A-6 was capable of cruising at about 500 miles an hour while carrying up to 18,000 pounds of bombs.
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“That was a tremendous amount,” said Joshua Stoff, curator of the Cradle of Aviation Museum in Garden City, N.Y. “That’s why it was very successful in the Vietnam War.”
In part because of a wing-to-wing aluminum alloy beam, the bulky jet could bear that weight and its rugged fuselage while still being able to take considerable enemy fire. And with the attack-navigation system incorporated by Mr. Mead and his team, ground troops could be covered through cloudy skies and even at night.
The midwing jet detected and attacked enemy vehicles traveling at night along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, North Vietnam’s supply line to the south.
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