Eight Miles High

by James Philip

  Around the RAF’s Air Officer Commanding (Research, Development and Pre-Production), Boscombe Down, representatives from Pratt and Witney, Rolls-Royce’s partners in the ongoing upgrading and proving of the Kestrel’s remarkable power-plant, formerly the Bristol Siddeley Pegasus, and other senior engineers and executives from Grumman and Lockheed-Martin, the newly agglomerated British Aerospace Corporation’s airframe and avionics collaborators, mingled collegiately with Filton’s resident BAC contingent, men from Rolls-Royce’s huge works at Derby, miscellaneous RAF and USAF officers, and in the absence of Ambassador Brenckmann – who was at home in the United States - his deputy, fifty-four-year-old John Nichol Irwin II.

  Irwin was an Iowan who had been with MacArthur in the Second War, a lieutenant colonel by 1945, and an attorney by profession he had turned his hand to diplomacy in the years since. It was as yet unclear, whether Irwin would actually be Walter Brenckmann’s successor, if and when he laid down his ambassadorial sword; nevertheless, Dan French was not the only man in England keen to get the measure of Irwin before that eventuality came to pass, or not.

  The number two man at the US Embassy in Oxford was still something of an unknown quantity to him, a thing he hoped to remedy somewhat in the next day or two. In this quest he was, honestly, unsure if his wife’s present sojourn in North America was going to be a help or a hindrance.

  Rachel, for all her inestimable talents and charm, had an uncanny knack of unsettling some visitors to his official residence at Amesbury. Especially, those guests with a guilty conscience, a thing Tom Harding-Grayson had once suggested, rather too enigmatically for Dan French’s taste; possibly, because he could not help but appreciate the underlying truth of the observation.

  Dammit, he missed her…

  The scream of approaching turbofans snapped him out of his momentary introspection, reminding him of the truly astonishing technical-industrial muscle of his country’s refound US allies. Yes, everything to do with the subsonic Kestrel, and the supersonic Strike Eagle projects had been shared with the Americans but even so!

  As if it was not enough that the latest joint planning committee meeting now scheduled initial squadron deployment of the TSR-2 HASBV - High Altitude Supersonic Bomber Variant – of the Strike Eagle only fourteen months hence; factories in California were already rolling Kestrel IIAs, the ground attack version of the remarkable VTOL, vertical take-off and landing, version of the fighter off the production lines at Pasadena at a rate of a couple a day. US Marine Corps pilots, a handful trained in the United Kingdom but most on state-of-the-art simulators developed by Lockheed’s legendary ‘Skunk Works’, were queuing up to jump into the cockpits of the latest ‘top ticket’ weapon in the Anglo-US armoury.

  Which, all things considered, was extraordinarily good news because the RAF simply did not have the wherewithal to magic fast jet pilots out of the ether, nor was it ever likely to have that capability again any time soon, certainly, not on the scale its American cousins seemed to take for granted.

  The Kestrels had been ground and flight tested at Pasadena before being ferried to Galveston where after short ‘proving flights’ they had been flown on board the USS Bonhomme Richard, a much-modified Second War Essex class fleet carrier which had seen extensive service in the recent Korean conflict. Apparently, two aircraft and one pilot had been lost in training evolutions at sea in the Gulf of Mexico, prior to the carrier’s ultra-secret transatlantic crossing. While President Nixon might not yet be minded to send GIs back to European soil; in the meantime, the US Navy, and as quietly as possible, the US Air Force was starting to move back into its old stomping grounds.

  If the establishment of the Joint Nuclear (Deterrent) Strike Force based in Scottish waters was no secret; the basing of US Navy Polaris-armed SSBNs and hunter-killer SSNs, and the establishment of permanent support facilities at the Gare Loch on the Clyde, at Rosyth on the Forth, and the construction of sprawling Electric Boat Company and Westinghouse fabrication and production plants at Barrow in Furness, could hardly be hidden; the USAF’s return to the British Isles was, for the moment, a more sensitive exercise.

  The stationing of four EC-135 Looking Glass aircraft, two squadrons of F-4 Phantom IIs in Scotland, and KC-135 tankers at Fairford and Brize Norton had already largely relieved the RAF of the responsibility for guarding the northern approaches to its airspace, allowing the re-deployment of two of the three operational squadrons of English Electric Lightning interceptors to bases in the English Midlands, and lately facilitated the stationing of a quick response flight at RAF Manston in Kent.

  Moreover, the re-opening of RAF Lakenheath, closed since the October War and unrepaired until six months ago – sitting as it did in a designated post-October 1962 ‘restricted zone’ – for the mounting of U-2, Martin B-57 and occasionally, Blackbird SR-71 ELINT and photographic reconnaissance spy-in-the-sky missions deep into Central, Eastern and Western Russia, had thus far gone unremarked, unacknowledged by the British Government.

  Yesterday, Dan French had given John Irwin a guided tour, replete with expert briefings from selected test pilots and boffins, of his Boscombe Down fiefdom.

  Unsurprisingly, Irwin had been impressed.

  Most visitors were, in fact.

  And rightly so, because Boscombe Down, the place where British military aircraft had come to be tested, often to destruction, since the days of the Royal Flying Corps in 1917, these days hosted the re-formed RAF High Speed Flight, the Empire – now Commonwealth – Test Pilots’ School, and the Aeroplane and Armament Experimental Establishment (A&AEE).

  Boscombe Down was the visible tip of an ever-expanding technological iceberg, the beating heart of the re-shaped aerospace empire that oversaw, and increasingly controlled every single one of the previously disparate, company-owned, managed and financed independent planning, design, development and testing bureaus of the pre-1962 still grotesquely, and very expensively fragmented British military aviation industry. Everything from abstract university-based theoretical aerospace research to the test flying and operational proving of cutting edge, essentially experimental advanced airframes, engines and systems such as those embodied in the Kestrel and the TSR-2 Strike Eagle fell under Dan French’s bailiwick.

  Basically, he was God at Boscombe Down.

  Perhaps, that was why John Irwin had been moved to confide in him that: ‘All the Kestrels are flown by US Marine Corp and Air Force personnel who have volunteered for service in England in the new Eagle Wing that Prime Minister Thatcher and the President will announce ahead of the meeting of the United Nations in San Francisco.’

  The story would be that the two allies considered the creation of an ‘Eagle Wing’, reminiscent of the Eagle Squadrons flown by Americans in the Battle of Britain before the United States entered the Second War, the best way to cement the new ‘special relationship’ and to ‘prove’ the latest marvels of ‘western’ technology.

  Unfortunately, it would be several months - possibly not until the summer or autumn – that the three planned Eagle Wing squadrons would actually be operational, ruling it out of the plans afoot to take the initiative in France.

  The last thing the Nixon Administration needed was having to explain US casualties in a European war…

  Nonetheless, an unabashed celebration of US-Anglo rapprochement, a pill to soften the failure of the Camp David Summit of the last week, was going to make a big impression on Dan French’s countrymen and women.

  As to the Camp David Summit…

  Nobody on either side had really expected that conference to go well; and right now, neither the British or the American side really needed the complication of the re-inauguration of the United Nations. So, given their outstanding policy rifts over China and South East Asia, and the bellicose rumblings of Warsaw Concerto, the shining beacon of Anglo-American aerospace ‘co-operation’ was too good a gift horse to ignore. Nevertheless, to know that under a secret protocol signed at Camp David, that the current arrangements were, at least
for the foreseeable future – five years - to be set in concrete, was going to be a huge boost to the whole of the rapidly re-organising, rationalising British aerospace industry.

  All in all, Dan French would have had to have been a man with a soul and a heart set in stone not to be warmed, damned nearly exhilarated, by the news. In fact, had Rachel been to hand to celebrate with him, his world would have been just about perfect.

  The first section of four Kestrels whistled down the length of the single, great runway at Filton from west to east travelling at a speed in excess of well over four hundred knots.

  The aircraft were still in their silvery, naked factory livery but for the large alphabetical identity letter and three-digit production numbers on their fuselages, and the Eagle motifs on their tails. Their under-wing munitions hard points were empty, likewise the mounts for their drop tanks – their giant Pegasus engines were mightily thirsty beasts – and when they climbed, unladen, they were like four glistening arrowheads against the broken overcast.

  Idiotically, Dan French had started clapping before he knew it.

  Immediately, everybody else was clapping, and slapping backs.

  A few minutes later the first of the twenty-six Kestrel IIAs began to land; not as would normal aircraft but by approaching, one section from the east, another from the west, slowing, slowing until, nearly in the hover, each in turn dropped gently onto the tarmac, rolled a few yards and halted, prior to taxiing towards the entrance to the perimeter track leading to the hangar complex on the southern side of the airfield.

  With her ‘birds’ having flown the coop, the USS Bonhomme Richard was scheduled to steam for Pembroke Dock, there to offload the four hundred and thirty ground personnel, five ‘spare’ aircraft and some three hundred tons of equipment, ahead of transferring, via rail, to RAF Cheltenham, where initially, the Eagle Wing was to be stationed.

  Strictly speaking, the Bonhomme Richard’s Kestrels could have flown straight on to Cheltenham but without their ground crews they were simply ornaments; at Filton the new aircraft would receive the tender loving care they deserved.

  “My God,” John Irwin muttered, watching two Kestrels slow to a hover, and descend vertically as it they were helicopters not high-performance interceptors capable of breaking the sound barrier in a shallow dive.

  “It takes one’s breath away the first time one sees that particular party trick!” Dan French chuckled.

  The American looked to him, and then waved his arm around the sprawling Filton complex.

  “With these birds you don’t need any of this!”

  “The designers say any old field will do,” Dan French retorted cheerfully. “Practically speaking, a road or a concrete hardstand is preferable, so long as it is close enough to somewhere the kite can be moved under cover within a minute or so of landing. That’s the whole point,” he went on, “quite apart from the immense tactical advantage having aircraft that can take off and land vertically, and all that,” he guffawed, warming to his thesis, “not only does a Kestrel not need a conventional airfield; the bally thing can put down in a clearing and be rolled into the trees in seconds. It can knock down an enemy fighter at a range of several miles with a Sidewinder or Top Hat air-to-air missile, make four or five hundred mile-an-hour strafing runs with Aden cannon pods on its under-wing hard points, or shoot rockets or drop bombs, and then, hey presto, it can literally disappear into the landscape within a mile or two of the front line, re-fuel, re-arm and be back in the fight in half-an-hour!”

  Dan French left out the most implausible aspect of the Kestrel’s existence; that, anecdotally, it had been conceived in a shed by the same design team – some of whom had worked for Hawker-Siddeley in the days when it was just ‘Hawker Aircraft’ in 1935 – who, under the stewardship of chief designer, Sidney Cam, had designed the immortal Hawker Hurricane.

  Even over a quarter-of-a-century later the ‘Hawker men’ still proudly told anybody who would listen, that the Hurricane had shot down twice as many German aircraft in the Battle of Britain as that somewhat more famous, and certainly infinitely more glamorous ‘pretty little aeroplane that Supermarine had produced’.

  Prosaically, it was a little acknowledged ‘fact’, that notwithstanding the brutal rationalisation of the British aerospace industry – a process in which Dan French was, in effect, the Government’s axe man in chief – mergers, cutbacks and drastic switches in direction were hardly unknown, or, in any way a new phenomenon to the industry. For example, back in 1935 Hawker Aircraft had, itself, been subsumed into a conglomerate formed by JD Siddeley - one of the first manufacturers of motor cars in England, and by the 1930s an engine and airframe maker - another car maker and engine builder, Armstrong Siddeley, and Armstrong Whitworth Aircraft. Around the same time the new Hawker-Siddeley combine had swallowed up both AV Roe and Company – better known as Avro – and the Gloster Aircraft Company and several other smaller, ancillary training and engineering concerns. Moreover, while many of its acquisitions had continued to operate under their own brand names, even before the October War the process of commercial and technological rationalisation had seen Hawker-Siddeley – itself a shortened version of the 1948 renaming of a much re-vamped post-Second World War Hawker Siddeley Group – calve itself into a number of more manageable ‘divisions’: an aircraft division called Hawker Siddeley Aviation; a guided missiles company operating as Hawker Siddeley Dynamics; and an engine design and production business called Armstrong Siddeley. As recently as 1959, when ‘HS’ had bought the struggling Folland company, it had merged its engine operation with Bristol Aero Engines to form Bristol Siddeley, the progenitor of the extraordinary Pegasus power plant which powered the fast-growing Kestrel family of experimental, and now increasingly, near-operational family of VTOL fighters and fighter-bombers. Most recently, De Havilland Aircraft and Blackburn Aircraft had also come into the fold in 1960.

  Soon, Hawker Siddeley’s still stubbornly disparate wings would be clipped further when, under Dan French’s remit, it would formally go forward under the name of the British Aerospace Consortium (BAC), the management structure currently in charge of Filton. Wags on his staff at Boscombe Down had suggested the name British Aircraft Group but he had drawn the line at calling the new, slimmed down central component of the United Kingdom’s Post-War aerospace industry ‘BAG’!

  For all that Dan French might be the merciless executioner of the old aircraft industry; cruel he was not!

  The people at Filton had hoped to be the main movers and shakers of the ‘new age of the air’. However, the Air Officer Commanding (Research, Development and Pre-Production) and his political masters, had other plans. In future, Filton was to be the nexus of Anglo-American co-operation, no longer the manufacturer of completed airframes. Engine research and production was to be concentrated at two locations, here in Bristol and at Derby, Rolls-Royce’s base in the Midlands. The main airframe production and assembly plants would be at Kingston in Surrey and spread across existing facilities in Lancashire and Yorkshire. Radar and space development would be located in Edinburgh, co-located with the Royal Navy’s Guided Weapons Research and Evaluation Establishment, in the Ferranti-Marconi Science Complex at Crew Toll, and at Ferranti’s facility at Hollinwood in Lancashire, which would be developed as a discreet research wing of Manchester University commissioned to pursue ‘blue sky’, or speculative lines of ‘pure scientific discovery’, complementing research facilities hosted by Oxford and Cambridge Universities.

  It went without saying that none of these schemes would be possible, practical or in any way ‘wholly fundable’ without American money and generous technology transfers. His civilian ‘clients’ might not get the message, even now. They would, eventually. Dan French had no illusion what the United Kingdom brought to the party: it was innovation, a large cadre of experienced aerospace engineers and designers the equal of any on the planet, ideas and a capacity to take unreasonable risks and now, thank the Heavens, in the Kestrel, it had a ‘product’
which had not so much caught, as transfixed the imagination of his country’s refound transatlantic friends. If the United Kingdom wanted the ‘partnership’ to go on beyond the initial five-year term, it would need to bring a new Kestrel-type project to the table. Hopefully, when the TSR-2 Strike Eagle got into pre-production, it would be that first ‘future project’; if not, it was his job to identify and develop the next ‘big thing’.

  “Of course,” Dan French said mischievously, quirking an apologetic grimace at John Irwin, cautiously confident that the diplomat would catch his mood, “the other thing you get with VTOL aircraft like the Kestrel is that all of a sudden one doesn’t need half-a-dozen thousand-feet-long, multi-billion dollar floating airfields like the carriers your Navy, and mine too, given half-a-chance, wants to build in the next few years, to project air power anywhere in the world!”

  The American looked to him thoughtfully.

  “I wouldn’t tell the Admirals that,” he grinned conspiratorially.

  Chapter 4

  Sunday 29th January 1967

  CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia

  Lady Rachel French née Piotrowska had expected – when she got around to thinking about it, for no particular reason – to encounter Professor Caroline Constantis-Zabriski when she got back to Langley.

  ‘Before she got on her flight to Nebraska, Caro stopped off at the White House to have a ‘chat’ with the Commander-in-Chief,” Richard Helms, Director of Central Intelligence informed her, a faint, ironic smile playing across his handsome face. “She and the President really hit it off last year; I think he’s missed her the last few months.’

  It seemed that the remarkable former Assistant Dean of Psychiatric Medicine at the University of Chicago and ground-breaking FBI criminal profiler, was exercising her right to make regular marital visits to Offutt Air Force Base, where her husband, Nathan, was a navigator-communications officer serving with the 36th Strategic Reconnaissance Squadron, flying ‘Looking Glass’ ultra-top-secret Boeing EC-135 missions.