By Matt Schudel
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 15, 2006; B06
Robert B. Hotz, 91, an influential editor of Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine who went from being a fervent booster of NASA to one of its most vocal critics, died Feb. 9 at Frederick Memorial Hospital. Mr. Hotz, who lived on a farm near Myersville, had Parkinson's disease.
As the editor of the weekly aerospace journal from 1955 until 1979, Mr. Hotz made Aviation Week an indispensable source of information about military aircraft, space exploration and the airline industry. Called "the bulletin board for the military industrial community," the magazine had a steady readership in political and intelligence circles and among the military, academia and everyday airplane buffs.
"Aviation Week is to airplane and space people what Rolling Stone is to rock musicians," former astronaut Joseph P. Allen told The Washington Post in 1986.
Mr. Hotz (pronounced "Hoats") trumpeted the wonders of military hardware and technology -- sometimes to his regret -- and was an early advocate of the space program. With well-placed intelligence and scientific sources on both sides of the Iron Curtain, he sounded early alarms of Soviet air power that helped lead to U.S. military buildups and to the "Star Wars" defense plans of President Ronald Reagan.
In 1986, after he was named to the presidential commission investigating the crash of the space shuttle Challenger, Mr. Hotz went on the attack against the NASA hierarchy. In the bluntest of terms, he accused it of shoddy planning, a coverup and outright lying about the midair disaster, which took the lives of seven astronauts.
"Of course, there was a coverup," he said. "I believe they couldn't face the fact that they . . . put these guys in a situation where they did not have adequate equipment to survive."
Mr. Hotz was among the first to suggest that the astronauts might have survived the initial explosion and been alive, but not necessarily conscious, as their spacecraft plummeted toward the sea. When he raised the idea in 1986, it was denounced by NASA officials, but it has since gained wider acceptance.
A tough-talking, old-style editor who had faced down advertisers and government officials, Mr. Hotz would not tolerate what he saw as duplicity in an agency he believed had lost its way.
"This country needs a space program," he said in 1990, "but it can't afford to keep pouring money down the NASA rathole."
Robert Bergmann Hotz was born in Milwaukee on May 29, 1914. He went to work for the fabled Paris Herald-Tribune in 1936 immediately after graduating from Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. Two years later, he became the New York bureau chief of the Milwaukee Journal.
During World War II, he served in the Army Air Forces in China on the staff of Gen. Claire L. Chennault, with whom he wrote two books. Mr. Hotz piloted B-25 bombers and was once shot down behind Japanese lines, only to escape capture and make his way to safety.
In 1946, he joined Aviation News, which was renamed Aviation Week two years later. After working in public relations for the Pratt & Whitney aircraft company, Mr. Hotz rejoined Aviation Week in 1952 and moved to Washington. He became editor in 1955, later added "Space Technology" to its name and made his magazine one of the country's most influential specialty publications.
In the early 1960s, Mr. Hotz published photos from U-2 spy planes indicating the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba, as well as the first picture of the U-2 itself.
With the manner of "an old-fashioned city editor," Mr. Hotz became widely known, in the words of his successor, William H. Gregory, for "breathing fire at the nincompoops and snake-oil salesmen."
Over the years, Mr. Hotz rebuffed attempts by the CIA to place undercover agents on his staff, said his son, Robert Lee Hotz, a Los Angeles Times science writer.
"The Russians used to pick up copies of the magazine and send them to Moscow on an overnight plane," Gregory said.
Mr. Hotz had occasional missteps, such as a 1958 story claiming that the Soviet Union had perfected a nuclear-powered bomber -- which never existed. In the 1970s, he warned that the Soviets were about to develop laser or particle-beam weapons, which didn't come to pass.
When he retired in 1979, Mr. Hotz had doubled Aviation Week's worldwide circulation to 100,000. In later years, he occasionally wrote for the magazine and consulted on aerospace affairs. After the space shuttle Columbia crashed during reentry in 2003, Mr. Hotz said NASA had yet to learn the lessons of Challenger.
"There is a lot of deja vu here," he said. "They knew they had a problem, but they lived with it. It's an old issue in flight that if you get away with it once, and you get away with it twice, it can come back and bite you."
In retirement, he raised Angus cattle and peacocks on his farm.
In addition to his son, of New York City, survivors include his wife of 60 years, Joan Willison Hotz of Myersville; three other sons, George Hotz of Myersville, Michael Hotz of New York City and Harry Hotz of Boston; a sister; four grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.