Before I went to school for CS, I was actually an aircraft mechanic. I personally worked on this plane at the L3 center in Waco, TX. And now for the rest of the story:

From what I recall, the plans for an air-born telescope were conceived around 1992-93. The plane was located and purchased (don't know from who, but it was first operated by PanAm) sometime before 1995 and brought to the L3 airstrip in Waco, TX. I came on board with L3 for another project in 2005, and the plane still had a lot of work to be done. Sometimes we 'd hit a 'slow week' on my current project and my manager would send me over to the hanger where Sofia was to 'help'. Which was where a bulk of the problems came from.

I don't think there was a steady stream of money for the project, or at least the parts we needed. So people were constantly moved from other projects onto Sofia as needed and there was always lots of rework and spin up time. The core team with the plane was probably only 10 people or so. When I was there, most of the mounts and cutout for the telescope had already been completed. I can't remember if the telescope remained installed or not, but there were pictures around various buildings of the 'first light', so the telescope had at least been installed at one time.

Most of my jobs were repairing damages to the aluminum flooring and ceiling substructures (not sure why they were damaged). Most of the time I was handed a mixed bag of aluminum floor repair brackets with a warning of 'careful, the last 2 guys that worked this DR (discrepancy report) don't work here any more', so the jobs were always stressful.

I would spend a lot of time just trying to find the damaged areas, and normally they weren't fixed because some equipment was in the way, so you ended up burning a lot of time on already over timed tickets just looking (hence why these tickets were the 'widow makers'). There were many large .5”-1” iron plates mounted all over the floors for ballast, can't remember if they were going to stay installed or removed when all the computer equipment was installed, but they were normally always in the way.

I finally managed to pull some strings with another manager that ran a night shift on a completely different project (P3 wing restoration) with a story about how I wanted to take training classes during the day at a local tech school. It worked and they put me on his team and my Sofia days were over. Shortly after that, due to another project needing hanger space, they pushed Sofia out onto an unused taxiway to make room. They then hung/installed all four engines on the wings for 'visual progress' even though they knew they wouldn't even be testing them for another few years.

I worked the night shift for about a year and a half before I moved in with some relatives and went to University for CS. This was partly motived by the German engineering team (don't know why they were all German) that would visit Sofia from time to time and plug in their laptops to all the telescope equipment on the plane and hack on stuff (I guess) while they laughed and joked all day. This made me quite jealous, and as a Linux geek, I then knew I was in the wrong place for a career path :)

Extra note: if I ever have another daughter, I am pushing my wife to allow me to name her Sofia, upon which I will hang a picture of this plane in her room :)