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It is Jones who has done most to bring economy and simplicity to the intricate and expensive field of aerospace. "That's not only good business, but it is good science," he says. "We must make our new technology the liberator of our resources rather than a ravenous consumer. We must recognize the power and value of technical simplicity as distinguished from the complexity that we too often regard as sophistication. We have tended to ignore something that the best Paris dress designers—and Sir Isaac Newton—never forgot: the ultimate of sophistication is simplicity itself."
Fascination in Failure. Tom Jones's father, a California accountant, gave him a practical guide early in life. "Always try," he said, "to understand what is behind this, what is at the bottom of that—always look for the key, and then build detail around it." Jones was an honor student at Stanford University, where he studied aeronautical engineering on a scholarship and stretched out his slender savings by waiting on tables at a sorority house.
After Stanford (B.A., '42), he worked as a wartime plane engineer for Douglas Aircraft Co., and there he came to the conclusion that the U.S. was misapplying the basic resources of time and brainpower. "The military men," Jones recalls, "wanted the highest possible performance —more speed, more altitude, more pay-load—and the manufacturer thought that delivering anything short of that was unpatriotic. This not only made for sizable technical risks, but it stretched out the lead time to three years. For slightly less speed and slightly less range, we could have cut it down to one year. And what would have been the result if we had pushed the state of the art less hard and had thereby tripled our Pacific Fleet bomb load about two years earlier? Somehow, there wasn't any equation between what was needed and the cost—not just in dollars but in time."
By war's end. Jones had made such a reputation as a champion of cutting costs and stretching resources that aeronautical experts recommended him to the Brazilian government, which was seeking a handful of U.S. advisers to help build up Brazil's then primitive civil and military air fleets. Says Jones: "When they began asking me how to get a better use of their resource in order to accomplish their total national objective, I knew that I wanted the job." With his new bride, Ruth—the daughter of onetime Screen Idol Conrad Nagel—Jones flew down to Rio. where, at 27, he helped to write budgets and civil air codes, chose airport locations, taught pilots, and primed local industries to supply spare parts. After four exhilarating years, fearful of becoming an expatriate, Jones returned to California and signed on with Rand Corp., the Air Force's private brain factory. There he wrote a classic study which demonstrated that jet power would make massive military airlift economically feasible.