Hypersonic Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age

by Boyne, Walter J.

  They laughed and O’Malley went on. “Dan said it took him about thirty seconds to realize what a great franchise the F-16 would be, and suddenly, almost fifty years after the F-104, Lockheed was back in the fighter business.”

  He looked around the room and said, “ ‘The Last Supper’ started a feeding frenzy. You remember that Martin acquired G.E. Aerospace in 1992, and Northrop swallowed up Grumman in March of this year. They call it Northrop Grumman, but it spells the end of Grumman except as a name. Tomorrow, they plan to announce the formal merger of Lockheed and Martin into the new Lockheed Martin Corporation. Norm Augustine calls it ‘a marriage of equals’ and the money boys on Wall Street are calling it a marriage made in heaven.”

  O’Malley was a good stage manager, and he let the idea sink in. There were some individual conversations and finally V. R. spoke up. “General, what effect is all this going to have on Vance Shannon, Incorporated?”

  Dennis Jenkins was usually quiet, just taking things in, but this time he said, “And how about SpaceVisions?”

  “These are exactly the questions I wanted you to ask, and I’ve got the answer in this videocassette. But you both know that your firms benefit every time there is a big merger or consolidation, for the first step is always to cut costs and reduce staff; this means they have to go outside for some contracting help. But the main thing is that this merger forces a change of focus on the whole industry. Just look at who is wrapped up in the F-22, the only fighter program the Air Force has—Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and two engine companies. That’s the ball game for the next few years, even if Boeing or McDonnell Douglas wins the joint strike fighter competition. Even though the field is dwindling down, we’ll see some more mergers in the near future—Northrop Grumman is already on the prowl, and you can look to some bidding wars between it and Lockheed Martin. Unless there’s a radical change we might see Northrop Grumman/McDonnell Douglas or McDonnell Douglas/Boeing or any combination of those famous names. It will just depend on the fit.”

  Harry spoke up for the first time. “None of them will fit like Lockheed Martin; that’s a perfect dovetail. Maybe McDonnell Douglas-Boeing might make it, because McDonnell is mostly military business and Boeing is mostly civilian. Its new 777 is a knockout, first airplane designed entirely using a computer.”

  O’Malley nodded. He had set them up perfectly for his purposes.

  “As strange as it seems, the success of the 777 is a paradigm for the stuff I’m talking about. The old process of building mock-ups, prototypes, and a series of test vehicles is over for commercial aircraft, and it has to be over for other projects, too. Let’s put this merger stuff aside for a minute. I mentioned the Lockheed Martin merger because it is a macro thing in the industry. We all know the players, and it looks like a good deal—for them and for the country. But where does it put the little guy? Out in left field.”

  There was a murmur of agreement.

  “Bob, you told me this room was perfectly secure. Any precautions we have to take?”

  “Not a one. This beats the Pentagon’s tank any day for security.”

  “And for ventilation, too! So let’s run the tape. There is no audio—they wouldn’t release the audio to me yet—but let’s watch it and I’ll try to answer your questions when it’s over.”

  Rodriquez selected a back-projection format, and they sat quietly as the screen darkened, ran through the grainy black and white flashes of unedited tapes, and suddenly flashed on “Top Secret,” “General Atomics Corporation,” “July 3, 1993.”

  No one besides O’Malley and the senior Rodriquez had ever heard of the firm before. Rodriquez had some contact with them in connection to his work for MacCready.

  The first image was of a long runway. It could have been any one of a dozen abandoned World War II auxiliary landing strips that studded the desert between Los Angeles and Edwards.

  O’Malley was virtually crooning as he said, “This is the airport at Adelanto—the name of the town means ‘progress’ and that’s what you’re about to see.”

  What looked like an updated version of the old Ugly Stick radio-controlled aircraft rolled uncertainly to the center of the runway and waited there, vibrating.

  It wasn’t a pretty aircraft by any stretch of the imagination. The long nose had a bulge at the very front where a real airplane would have had a canopy, then tapered back. The slender wings drooped slightly, and the skinny spring steel landing gear seemed as if it was made from piano wire. The undercarriage was barely able to keep the slab vertical surfaces, drooping with a forty-five-degree anhedral, from touching the concrete. In the rear, a high revving engine drove a pusher propeller.

  V. R. spoke up. “Looks like an anorexic VariEze!”

  O’Malley smiled, knowing that every modern design owed something to Burt Rutan even if he didn’t have a direct hand in it.

  They watched as the strange little aircraft accelerated, the camera taking in a worker, clad in T-shirt, shorts, and white baseball cap, giving it scale. Another man, obviously in Army uniform, was at the side of the runway, also filming the takeoff. The drone then lifted off, climbing swiftly as models do and quickly establishing a pattern for landing. It flew back to the runway, seemed to drift to the left, corrected, touched down on the left gear first, then slammed its nose wheel down. It was over in a few minutes.

  Jenkins spoke up, almost for the first time that day.

  “That’s it? We’ve been flying drones since Kettering’s Bug in World War I! Reginald Denny made them for target practice, and we used Ryan Firebees in combat. What makes this special, Steve? And how could it possibly be connected to space?”

  “Dennis, this is the future, pure and simple, for little firms who want to stay in the business. The Air Force is going to stop putting pilots in harm’s way and getting their ass shot off, like Tom Shannon did more than once. This one is going to be called the Predator—I’ve got dibs on naming it—and it is the start of a revolution. And it is related to space because it can be controlled via a satellite relay.”

  Harry could not conceal his incredulity. O’Malley was usually right, but this seemed to stretch the point.

  “Who was that guy in the Army uniform?”

  O’Malley came as close as he ever did to blushing.

  “I hate to say it, but this started out as an Army program. They don’t know it yet, but I’m going to steal it right out from under them. This project should belong to the Air Force!”

  Shaking his head, Harry went on. “You are going to steal this airplane to fight with MiGs?”

  “Not with this, no, that’s what the F-15s do now and the F-22s will do later. But when we’ve established air superiority, we’ll fly these unmanned aerial vehicles—UAV is the preferred acronym right now—over enemy territory, day and night, and we’ll pick off anything that moves. Just let a camel driver try to move across from one oasis to another and we’ll nail him cold. But later, ten years from now, twenty maybe, we’ll be ready to start building real combat vehicles that will take on the MiGs and whatever else they throw at us.”

  V. R., always a pilot at heart, asked, “Will you be using other airplanes to guide these? Who flies them?”

  “Pilots will fly them but from the ground. Here’s the thing to remember. I didn’t just show you an airplane. I showed you a system. Behind that little dude of an airplane is an amazing tapestry of technology that weaves in satellites, lasers, infrared, television, GPS, and everything else in the market today. And tomorrow we’ll be adding precision guided munitions to the mix. Pilots sitting in specially equipped trailers will fly them, maybe from a local site, maybe from thousands of miles away, it doesn’t matter. With satellite communications, everything is real time, no matter what the distance on earth.”

  “Steve, I don’t want to sound negative, but you are talking about fighting MiGs and bombing, when it seems to me that the best this thing could do would be to carry some electronic sensors and maybe do some photo reconnaissance.”

&n
bsp; “Harry, I know you think I get carried away and I do. But I know in my gut that this is the way to the future. It just makes sense: have an air force that establishes air dominance, then do your control and your fighting with unmanned vehicles.”

  “How does this thing perform?”

  “This is a prototype, Dennis, but let me give you what the specs are for the production version.”

  He pulled a yellow Post-it from his pocket and read, “Endurance: forty hours; cruises at about seventy knots; wingspan forty-nine feet; length twenty-nine feet, max takeoff weight just over a ton; the engine is a 101 horsepower four-cylinder Rotax, just like they are using in the ultralights.”

  The forty hours seemed to make an impression. If you can loiter over a battlefield for that long, you stifle the enemy’s ability to move. Yet there was doubt on everyone’s face, except for Bob Rodriquez, Sr.

  Young Bob Rodriquez, Jr. voiced their thoughts. “Come on, General, we’re sweating out the F-22, with supercruise and stealth, and you’re touting a throwback. It’s not even jet-powered, it probably can’t climb above fifteen thousand feet.”

  “Don’t you worry, Rod, there will be unmanned jets in the future, and stealthy ones, too. That’s why I’m saying this is the future for the little guy, the companies that cannot produce the F-22s. I’ll bet you that in a year’s time there will be firms all over the world producing things like this.”

  Bob Rodriquez, Sr., was not noted for his humor, but he stood up, assumed Al Pacino’s stance and voice, and said, “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.”

  As the room broke into laughter, Harry Shannon flashed a look of gratitude to O’Malley. The man had done much for his country and much for the Shannon family. Getting Rodriquez on board at Vance Shannon, Incorporated, would be the key to the firm’s future.

  April 5, 1995

  Duluth, Minnesota

  “WHAT’S THAT OLD joke about first prize being one week in Duluth and second prize being two weeks?”

  They were eating a huge breakfast at the “Original Original” Pancake House, preparing themselves for another day of meetings with the small but professional crew at the Cirrus Design Corporation plant at nearby Hermantown. Two days before they had witnessed the first flight of the revolutionary Cirrus CR20, a hot little four-place aircraft with a host of modern features.

  His mouth full, Dennis Jenkins chewed slowly, then said, “This is the first time I’ve ever had scrapple. And the last.”

  “I’m too old for traveling in cold country like this, Dennis, but I’m not too old to appreciate a real treat.” Harry Shannon helped himself to the rest of the scrapple, looked around, and then said, “You know there might not be a Cirrus or a lot of other airplanes if it hadn’t been for the way Ed Stimpson pushed the General Aviation Revitalization Act through Congress last year.”

  He paused, and Jenkins could see that he was troubled. Something was bothering him, and it was the lot of the aviation industry.

  Harry said, “I still feel uncomfortable about coming out here to see the first flight and pretending that we want to buy an airplane. We’ve never done anything like this before.”

  Jenkins laughed, saying, “Harry, if you want me to believe this is the first industrial espionage Vance Shannon, Incorporated, was ever involved in, I’d have to say I don’t believe you. It’s just that this is the first that you’ve been the lead man on it.”

  Shannon winced. His father’s company had been Simon pure when it came to avoiding even the appearance of industrial espionage. But in the later years, as the company grew bigger, he knew that it had gone on.

  Jenkins continued. “And it’s partly true. If this airplane is as good as it looks and as they say it is, we could add it to our combined fleet.”

  “That doesn’t make much sense, Dennis. Since we brought SpaceVisions in as part of Vance Shannon, Incorporated, we’ve had to get rid of a half-dozen planes. I don’t know what you were doing over there, but you had about twice as many airplanes as you needed.”

  “Yeah, but we don’t have any like the Cirrus. There aren’t any airplanes like the Cirrus.”

  It was true enough. Cirrus Design Corporation had started out building the VK-30, a radical pusher-engine kit plane. It had been pretty well received, but the company founders decided to make a play for the big time, moved their plant to the Duluth Airport, and brought out a clean, four-place light plane with some radical features. Of composite construction, the airplane featured a glass cockpit and, most intriguing of all, a ballistic parachute system designed to lower the entire aircraft to the ground in the case of in-flight difficulties.

  “Were you at Oshkosh last year?”

  Jenkins nodded, saying, “I never miss the EAA Fly-In if I can possibly help it. I shouldn’t have gone last year, but I’m glad I did, for as soon as I saw the Cirrus on display there, I knew we had to have one. And I knew we could profit from its technology.”

  “Do you think there’s any chance that we can buy them out? Everybody in my family has always itched to get into the aircraft manufacturing business, and somehow it never came about. This would be a good way to start.”

  “No chance. I’ve talked to the two principals, brothers, Alan and Dale Klapmeier. They are determined to beat out Cessna in sales in their field.”

  “That’s not ambition, that’s chutzpah! If and when Cessna sees them gaining on them, they’ll put out a new product and snuff them.”

  “I don’t think so, Harry. These are two determined guys, with a vision, and they know how to build a team. I think their slogan ‘Plane Genius’—that’s ‘p-l-a-n-e’—says it all.”

  “Well, what can we use from them? We’ve got Rutan’s outfit, Scaled Composites, if we want to contract out some composite construction work. We can license the Ballistic Recovery Systems from Boris Popov’s company, just like Cirrus does, if we want to use a parachute for one of the unmanned vehicles we’re doing.”

  “We don’t want anything from them but their business model. Combining our two companies made a lot of sense from a balance sheet standpoint, but it made us way too big. You don’t see it so much because you are not around as much as you used to be, and I’m glad for you that you are not. But making decisions is tough for us now. Despite everything we do, there are too many committees, too many design reviews, too many everything. I want us to blueprint how Cirrus operates, and set up a new company, small, to do the drones.”

  “Unmanned aerial vehicles. Not drones. Repeat: unmanned aerial vehicles.”

  Jenkins could tell from the tone in Harry’s voice that he had touched a nerve.

  “You are right about that, Dennis. We are too damn big. I hate going even to the annual stockholders meeting, a bunch of strange faces sitting around, pretending they know something about the industry.”

  As Harry grew older he thought more often about his father, and how he had run his still tiny business.

  “I know I sound like a broken record, but Dad would never have put up with the setup we have now. I think you are right. If we set this new company up along the lines of Cirrus, or whatever, who is going to run it? You?”

  “No, I’m locked in with more than I can handle at SpaceVisions. We’ve got stuff coming down the line that is fantastic, and you know I’ve always been smitten by the idea of manned spaceflight. I can’t shake my fascination with the Space Shuttle, even though it’s old hat to the public by now. No, I was thinking of making it a Rodriquez team project. Have Bob Sr. act as Chairman, and Bob Jr. run it as CEO and President. Leave Bob Sr. to do the thinking and the planning on unmanned vehicles, and not just air vehicles at that. We will need them on land, on and under the water, and out in space as well, for exploring Mars and wherever we can get to.”

  Harry didn’t speak for a moment.

  “Have you talked to them about it?”

  “No, but I know Rod feels like he’s a fifth wheel at AdvanceAir. Mae is running the leasing programs brilliantly, and I think he’
d jump at a new gig. And I think Bob would be gratified to be able to work with his son on a new project.”

  Harry shoved his almost-empty plate away and finished his fourth cup of coffee.

  “Tell you what let’s do. Let’s go over and talk to those folks at Cirrus and buy you an airplane. I know you are dying to get one, and we might as well save time by putting our order in now. Then let’s level with them, tell them we admire what they are doing, and would like to have our team Rodriquez come out for a visit to see how they work. We’d pay them a fee, of course—why should they take time to help us out pro bono? And if it turns out the Rodriquez boys don’t go along with our idea, I’ll hire some young whippersnapper and take over the project myself.”

  As Dennis was paying the check he considered Harry’s last comments. Everything was great until the line about hiring a whippersnapper and taking over himself. That was the last thing he should do at his age—it wasn’t going to be easy to set up the new firm and keep it as simple as the folks at Cirrus had done. He wasn’t even sure if Bob Rodriquez could handle it. But it had to be done, and Harry was not the man to do it.

  For his part, Harry walked outside into the welcome, if brisk, fresh air immensely satisfied with himself. He had worked with Steve O’Malley for months to bring Bob Rodriquez back within the Vance Shannon, Incorporated, fold, only to find that he was no longer the same man. It was difficult for Bob to work with others. So much had happened to him during his long lonely years as a covert agent that he no longer worked well within a big corporation. Harry had always respected Dennis immensely, the man had led ActOn successfully, made SpaceVisions into a real contender, and was now a tremendously valuable asset to Vance Shannon, Incorporated. Now this new track was going to be his biggest challenge. He was channeling Rodriquez’s talent into a new environment, one where he might be able to function as he did in the past, and he was adding Rod to the equation. Without having said a word, both men understood that as talented as the younger Rodriquez was, his real value would now be in allowing his father to put his extraordinary vision to use, unfettered by the bureaucracy inevitable in a big corporation. Stuffed with a big breakfast, looking forward to the prospect of a flight in the new Cirrus airplane, Harry felt uncommonly content with himself. When Jenkins came out through the door, Harry slapped him on the back and said, “Not bad for a couple of geezers, eh? Coming up with a new strategy! Let’s hope we can sell it to the Rodriquez boys.”