Roaring Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age (Novels of the Jet Age)

by Walter J. Boyne

  Here is to Tom, who has found his Harry in Marie . . .”

  A wave of raucous laughter swept around the table with Lou yelling, “He’d better not find Harry in Marie!”

  When the laughter and the cascade of increasingly ribald remarks had subsided, Tom and Harry spoke briefly together, and Harry stood up.

  “It’s our turn now, Madeline.”

  Tom and Harry filled their glasses and said in unison, “Here’s to Vance and Madeline; may the next wedding be yours.”

  Smiling, Vance pulled Madeline to him. She backed away for an instant before kissing him. No one noticed her initial reticence but Vance. It troubled him. Something was wrong. Another man?

  August 1, 1947, Wichita, Kansas

  Sweating from his climb up the hangar stairs, Vance Shannon called his sons into the second-story office that the Massey Company had provided them at its factory building at its privately owned airport on the outskirts of Wichita. A whisper of wind blew the ninety-eight-degree heat through the open window, rearranging the dust on the ancient desks.

  “Boys, I’m proud of you! Just married and you get the first—and only—contract that we have. But I’ve looked the airplane over, and I say that we back out. I don’t want you flying it.”

  Tom raised his eyebrows at Harry. They had predicted as much. Their father had been concerned with their safety from the time they learned to ride two-wheel bicycles, and nothing would ever change him.

  “Come on, Dad; we’ve been all over this. You are just spooked because we’re going to be making the first test flight, which strikes us as funny, because that’s how you supported us all your life.”

  Harry chimed in. “You know yourself that Massey makes good aircraft—you used to fly us around the country in one.”

  Vance shook his head. “That was then, and they were building conventional steel tube, wood, and fabric biplanes. This is now and this thing is a monstrosity.”

  He went up to them; they were taller than he was now. He put his arms around them and guided them to the window that overlooked the factory floor. Below, ready to be rolled out for the test flight, was the Massey Double Quad airliner. Workers were still scrambling over it, checking to be sure that every panel was closed, every screw tight, and nothing was leaking.

  The unusual name for the twenty-passenger airliner came from its engines. Four 350-horsepower Lycoming engines were installed, two in pairs on each side, and buried in the high wing to reduce drag. The engines were coupled, and each pair drove a single propeller through a complex gearbox. Vance knew this was an interim arrangement. Massey planned to install a turboprop engine as soon as they were commercially available. Then he might have something. Vance knew intuitively that the gearbox would be trouble; they almost always were, no matter how good the engineering.

  Worse, the rest of the airplane just did not look right. Massey advertised that the portly fuselage was strong enough to resist a wheels-up landing. Vance considered this to be a stupid claim, a hangover from the early 1930s when a retractable landing gear was news. But, he reflected, Massey might know something, for the gear was unusually tall and slender looking, almost like the legs of a praying mantis. It looked inherently weak, susceptible to collapse in a crosswind. Maybe the bottom of the fuselage needed to be strong. Then there was the final anomaly. Instead of a conventional horizontal and vertical stabilizer setup, the Double Quad used a large V-tail that combined rudder and elevator functions like the Beech Bonanza. It probably saved a little weight, but it looked unusual, and Shannon had test flown the Beech Bonanza enough to know that it would impart unusual flying characteristics.

  “Did you boys ever see a Heinkel 177?”

  “Dad, we don’t have time for history lessons. The airplane is scheduled to take off in ninety minutes, and we are going to be in the cockpit. If we walk out on this one, we’ll never get another contract.”

  Vance went on. “Heinkel put exactly this sort of arrangement in the He 177. Sure, it cuts down on drag, but it’s not reliable. The German Air Force lost so many of them on practice flights that they called it the ‘Luftwaffe Cigarette Lighter.’ They never did get it to work.”

  Tom was stubborn. “Dad, that was a lot bigger aircraft, with much bigger twelve-cylinder engines. Massey has spent four years developing this; they have run these itty-bitty engines in test rigs forever. We’ve run them ourselves in the airplane, on taxi tests. They are as sweet as can be.”

  Vance acted as if he didn’t hear his son. “And you see that V-tail? That looks good, it cuts down on drag and weight, too, but I tell you that the airplane is going to hunt, it will oscillate back and forth, and it will make flying instruments tough. I don’t know what it will do if you lose an engine, ’cause you’re not losing one engine at a time; you’re losing two.”

  Bill Stephens stuck his head in the door. “Ready, boys? We’re going to roll it out in five minutes. You want to make the run-up?”

  Tom and Harry moved to the door. Vance knew he was beaten.

  It was a scene he had dreaded all his life. During the war there had never been a day that he had not felt guilty about inoculating his boys with the fever to fly. It had all been so perfectly natural, apart of raising them. Wartime was somehow different—they would have been in danger as infantry officers. But here his responsibility was obvious. He knew that today was just the first of many times that he would wish he’d encouraged them to choose another career. And if it was not this airplane, it would be another.

  “All right. But from now on, you both never fly the same airplane on a test flight. I cannot stand the thought of losing one of you; losing two of you at one time would be . . .” He couldn’t finish.

  Harry chimed in. “Dad, you’re not losing anybody! We’ll take this around the pattern a few times, and then check out a Massey pilot in it. The rest of the flights we’ll alternate.” They clapped him on the back and walked out to the field. He went to the window overlooking the runway to watch.

  The two young pilots, so remarkably alike in appearance, walked briskly around the aircraft with the chief mechanic and Stephens, the project engineer. They had studied the plane for weeks, run the taxi tests, and knew it as well as anyone in the Massey firm. Its president, Gerald Massey, had already offered them jobs as company pilots, even though he knew they would not accept.

  Inside the aircraft, as the entrance to the small flight deck, they flipped a coin to see who would be pilot-in-command for the flight. Harry won, said, “OK, I’ll be Orville and you be Wilbur,” and slipped into the left seat. Stephens sat in the temporary flight engineer’s station—when the aircraft entered airline service, there would be no engineer, and, the Massey brochures bragged, the airplane could be flown safely with just one pilot, a major saving in the cost of operation.

  They took their time going through the now-familiar checklist. Every cent that Gerry Massey had was poured into the project, along with some significant loans from the Wichita banks that had grown rich and powerful backing aviation projects. Tom and Harry were not going to make a mistake that killed the project.

  After a long and careful run-up, Tom called for permission to enter the six-thousand-foot-long Wichita runway. The temperature was ninety-eight degrees; the pressure altitude was just what they had predicted. The two pilots had done their takeoff calculations independently, and they agreed to the mile and to the foot.

  On the intercom, Tom said, “I’ll call, ‘Abort,’ if we don’t have seventy mph by the fifteen-hundred-foot marker. We’ll lift off at about one hundred fifteen mph, shouldn’t take more than thirty-five hundred feet. We’ll use twenty degrees of flaps for the takeoff.”

  Harry double-clicked his mike button, the equivalent of “Roger.”

  “You ready, Bill?”

  “All the gauges look OK, I’m ready.”

  “Massey Tower, Double Quad 001 is rolling.”

  The aircraft moved forward smoothly, Harry feeding in right rudder to keep it lined up, and at the 1,500-f
oot marker Tom said, “Seventy-two.” At 115 mph, the aircraft broke ground.

  Harry called, “Gear up,” and Tom flipped the gear lever to the up position. The nosewheel and the left gear indicated up with a green light, but the right gear indicator was red.

  Tom slid his window back and peered at the gear. “Right gear is partially up; it looks like it’s half-turned.”

  “Massey Tower, this is Double Quad; we are going to level off at a thousand feet. We’ve got a gear problem; right gear has not retracted.”

  “Roger, Double Quad. We can see that. I’ll get the emergency equipment out. Keep us posted.”

  “Thanks, I’m going to company frequency now; maybe they can talk us through the problem.”

  Bill Stephens came on the intercom. “They better be quick, Harry; the number one gearbox oil temperature is way too high. Can you cut the power back to a minimum to stay airborne? We need to get the airspeed down to work on the gear anyway.”

  Fear grabbing him by the throat, Vance Shannon hurtled out of his office and down the steps the instant he saw the right gear fail to retract. He made his way into the Massey operations office, where the entire engineering section was huddled behind Gerald Massey, who was on the radio with Harry and Bill.

  An engineer at the rear of the group saw Vance come in, motioned him forward, and slid him into position next to Massey, who looked at him, grimaced, and went back to his conversation with Harry.

  “What’s the gearbox oil temperature now, Bill?”

  “It’s past the redline, over two hundred seventy degrees. We better shut it down. I don’t want it to freeze and maybe tear the propeller off.”

  “Harry, what do you say?”

  “I’ll ease it back to minimum power and advance number two far enough to maintain about one hundred knots. That’s about twenty above the stall; we should be safe there.”

  Massey’s fingers drummed the desk as they waited.

  Harry came back on, his voice a little strained. “I can keep it airborne at one hundred knots all right, but with number one shut down, there’s not enough rudder authority to keep the airplane straight and level—it keeps turning to the left, even with full right rudder and aileron in.”

  Vance thought but didn’t say, “Goddamn V-tail bullshit.” If a big enough rudder had been hung on the airplane, there’d be no problem.

  Massey looked at him as if he knew what he was thinking, then asked, “Bill, how is the number two gearbox oil temperature? Holding steady?”

  “No, it’s climbing. Looks to me like we’ve got about ten minutes, maybe twenty, before it’s redlined, too.”

  Massey’s voice became very quiet and controlled. “Harry, we’re running out of time. Can you get a little more altitude and bail out?”

  “Stand by one. Go to intercom, Tom, Bill.”

  Harry knew his father would be standing by in the operations office and he did not want him in on this discussion.

  “What do you think, Bill?”

  “If you put climb power on number two, it will heat up before we get another thousand feet of altitude.”

  “That decides it. Tom, you and Bill bail out. I’ll see if I can follow; if not I’ll make a crash landing.”

  Tom spoke up for the first time. “You’d never make it back to the door, Harry, even if you shut both engines down and killed the turning. I say that Bill bails out, and we land it, one wheel down.”

  Bill spoke up. “Land the son of a bitch; I ain’t jumping out of no airplanes, not at my age.”

  Harry switched back to company frequency. “Massey Ops, we’ve talked it over. I’m going to pass over the field at about one thousand feet, and then do a three-sixty-degree left turn and put the airplane down into the wind at the south end of the field. I’ll put the rest of the gear down late in final approach; if the wheels come down, I’ll try to land on the left gear and keep the right wing up for as long as I can. If the left gear doesn’t come down, I’ll land on the right gear, and trust that the fuselage will hold up when it gives way.”

  Vance shook Massey by the shoulder. “Gerry, that’s the best plan they’ll get. Tell them you concur.”

  Massey picked up the microphone again. “Roger, Harry, we’ll have all the equipment in place.”

  Harry passed over the field, pulled both throttles back, and began a thirty-degree bank to the left, descending at about three hundred feet per minute. As he entered what would be his base leg, he added a little power, sustaining his altitude in the bank until he turned final.

  “Everybody cinched up?” Two quick “Rogers” came back. Harry reached up, wiped the sweat off his brow, and said, “Call off my airspeed, Tom.”

  “Roger, you have one hundred ten mph and I’d say you were a little high.”

  “Roger, gear down, full flaps.”

  There was a rumble and two green lights came on, the nose gear and the left gear had extended, the right showed a red light, and the flaps were full down.

  “Eighty-five.”

  “Roger.” Harry maintained 85 mph until he was over the end of the field, banking the airplane into the good gear, crabbing to keep a straight line. He touched down lightly on the left wheel, the aircraft rolling forward another thousand feet before the right wing began to drop. About halfway through the turn, the right gear contacted the ground and ripped away; the right wing dug in and spun the airplane to a halt. The aft door opened and all three men erupted from the Double Quad just as the fire trucks arrived, Vance Shannon riding the running board of the first one.

  There was no fire. Gerry Massey shook their hands, saying that they had saved the airplane and that saved the company.

  On the ride back, Vance did not even try to control himself, letting all the years of his parental anxiety spill out in an unbroken flow. “What did I tell you? What did I say about gearboxes? And V-tails? Huh, you won’t listen to your old man, will you? No, you guys had to go prove something. Thank God you didn’t bust your asses. If you had I would really have been ticked with you.”

  Tom and Harry, glad to be alive, glad to have such a father, let him rant for a bit, but finally Harry couldn’t resist.

  “Dad, you have to admit, the strengthened fuselage held up real well.”

  • THE PASSING SCENE •

  The Last Days of Hitler published; Gandhi assassinated; Princess Elizabeth marries Duke of Edinburgh; Communists take over Czechoslovakia; Israel comes into existence; Soviet Union blockades Berlin.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  January 10, 1948, Inglewood, California

  The only reason Vance hated to work on Saturdays was because it distressed Madeline, who liked him to be at home, doing the endless puttering required of their new house in the Malaga Cove section of Palos Verdes. She was amazingly inconsistent, behaving exactly like a wife in every way but the second-most fundamental: she would not get married. She stoutly refused to have her name on the mortgage papers, as if it were some sort of American stigma to be formally designated as a home owner. Vance had long since given up trying to understand her, knowing that he was lucky to have her and hoping to hold on to her for a few years more.

  Normally he wouldn’t have gone in, but the problems with the North American XP-86 were severe and the first two orders for P-86As were due to start being delivered to the eager young pilots in the Air Force during the summer. The biggest trouble was the General Electric J47 engine, which was not putting out its required thrust and was failing at faster intervals than specified. Then the three-thousand-pound-per-square-inch hydraulic system was giving trouble—the nose gear would just fold up on the ramp without any warning, and there were also problems with the aileron system. Vance knew he was getting old because he distrusted a powered aileron instinctively, even as a backup, although intellectually he knew it was the only solution at jet aircraft speeds.

  He had done his bit for the XP-86 three years before, sending word from Germany to use a thirty-five-degree swept wing. North American had acted on his input an
d changed the fairly sedate straight wing design they were working on into a tiger of an airplane. Then he had kept his hand in from time to time on special projects after its first flight on October 1, 1947, with George “Wheaties” Welch at the controls.

  Welch, who had gotten a Curtiss P-40 off the ground when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, was rumored to have taken the XP-86 supersonic soon after the first flight. The story was that the Air Force suppressed the news because it wanted the honor of breaking the sound barrier to go to its expensive new experimental rocket plane, the Bell XS-1. Chuck Yeager had duly exceeded Mach 1 on October 14, and although the flight was classified, industry insiders were aware of it. Welch, a good and trusted friend, never told Shannon personally that he broke the sound barrier, so Shannon was inclined to discount the rumors.

  Now Dutch Kindelberger, North American’s president, impatient with the progress at General Electric, had tasked him and a special so-called tiger team to come up with a solution to the engine problems. He excused himself with the task of increasing the thrust—he felt this would be solved with the later version of the engine that was due off the production line shortly. But he did think he could help with the reliability problem. To him an engine was an engine and it didn’t matter whether there were pistons or turbine wheels; they all rotated and they all depended upon adequate lubrication. He was convinced that somewhere in the GE engine’s system there was a weak link in the lubrication that was causing the early shutdowns. Then, too, he hated the fact that electronics had become such an integral part of engine design. He didn’t mind the old-fashioned temperature gauges, but now the engine thermocouples, whose purpose was to sense heat and register its degree on an instrument, were exposed to such extreme heat that they were almost certain to malfunction.

  The difficulty was that post-shutdown analysis reports were all over the waterfront, with blame being pinned on everything from turbine blade design to the shape of the engine inlet. He realized that it could be construed as arrogance on his part to believe that he could compete with General Electric, with all its tremendous talent, but he felt he knew intuitively where the problem must lie.