Reviving aerospace manufacturing in America’s Eden
Dave Hyatt had a classic mid-century Southern California childhood. Not in the Beach Boys sense of long days in the sand, though there were plenty of those. Rather, in that it mapped onto the region’s social and economic contours: booming, patriotic, sun-drenched suburbs spread out against a backdrop of flourishing industry.
Dave grew up in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley. His dad, Darwin, engineered aircraft for Lockheed in nearby Burbank and even logged time in the vaunted Skunk Works division that would develop the legendary SR-71 Blackbird. Hyatt the younger graduated in 1964 from Polytechnic High School, just off the Hollywood Freeway, and would go on to Cal Poly Pomona at L.A. County’s eastern edge. Following the family path, he went into the aerospace industry, starting at McDonnell Douglas right out of college.
In a career that would span more than four decades, Dave worked on some of the most iconic projects of the Cold War and post–Cold War eras. In the 1970s, he was based at McDonnell Douglas’s Santa Monica site working on the Spartan antiballistic missile. He then moved to TRW, a satellite maker, a bit south in Redondo Beach. He later returned to McDonnell Douglas at the company’s Huntington Beach space-systems facility, where it made the Delta II rockets that would launch the original GPS satellites. Dave’s career culminated in the 2000s, following McDonnell Douglas’s merger with Boeing, when he was a program manager handling components of the Cassini spacecraft that would fly to Saturn.
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Jordan McGillis is City Journal’s Economics Editor.
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