Originally Posted by
wiggy
There are reports that former NASA Flight Director Glynn Lunney passed away earlier today...
I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Lunney at a Seattle Museum of Flight event about 10 years ago (along with about four dozen other space dignitaries - the evening rapidly turned into a memory overload blur
- meeting so many of my boyhood hero's in a short period was just overwhelming).
Originally Posted by
wiggy
With regard to Apollo 13, he and his "Black flight" team replaced Gene Krantz and the White Team about an hour after the Oxygen tank explosion and in the main it was Lunney and his team, not Krantz's, that managed the power up and crew transition PDQ to the LM, juggling fast dwindling resources in the process.. a fact that unfortunately got glossed over/ignored in the Apollo 13 movie, probably for editorial or production reasons.
Probably editorial reasons - there were three teams of flight controllers with alternating eight hour shifts - it would have been too confusing to show all three in the movie.
I don't know about Glynn Lunney, but Gene Krantz had an extended meeting with the producer Ron Howard before they started production - so it's natural that he used Krantz's team for the movie.
Interesting trivia - Gene Krantz never actually said "Failure is not an option" - it was Ron Howard who came up with that phrase to summarize what Krantz had told him during that meeting and it found it's way into the movie. Krantz loved the phrase and adopted it as his catchphrase - even making it the title of his autobiography.