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

by Walter J. Boyne

  Ed Wells interrupted, speaking gently. “Sit down, Cliff. It’s a good thing we all think you are right. Colonel Shannon, I take it we have your permission to proceed with this? Have you patented the idea?”

  Harry was nonplussed. “Patented it? No, sir, it’s just something that came to me on Air Force time, and my boss told me to tell you about it. From now on, it’s Boeing’s baby as far as I’m concerned.”

  Schairer smiled and said, “How about coming back in the morning? I’ve got an old friend of yours coming in from Wright-Pat, Pete Wharton. I think all three of you might be interested.”

  That night at the Windsor, after the flaming pupu tray of appetizers had been pulled away and they were waiting for their steaks, Vance said, “Harry, you probably gave away a few million dollars today.”

  “No, it would have been the Air Force’s money; I worked on it on Air Force time. And the Air Force doesn’t care about making money; as Al Boyd said, it’s just interested in getting one airplane to squirt a lot of fuel real fast into another.”

  The steaks were good, and they finished with cognac. Tom had told his tale of wifely woe, and so did Harry.

  “Well, it looks like the Shannons are a pretty sorry crew when it comes to women. My woman won’t marry me, Tom’s may be about to leave him, and the votes aren’t in on Harry’s. I guess I must have done something wrong when I raised you.”

  “There’s a lot of talent here tonight, Dad.” Tom ran his eyes around the room where some of the Windsor regulars as well as some new faces were seated.

  “Not on your life, Son, nor on mine.”

  They were back in Schairer’s outer office the next morning, where an old friend, Lieutenant Colonel Wilbur P. “Pete” Wharton, was waiting for them. Wharton ruled bomber development at Wright-Patterson with an iron hand, running it virtually by himself. He worked a three-way street—the Air Force budget, Congress, and the manufacturers—and he kept them all in line, turning out the airplanes, engines, and propellers needed for bombers.

  “Pete, how are you? What are you doing here?”

  “Going crazy, Harry, trying to keep up with Boeing.”

  Schairer’s secretary opened his door, smiled in the sincerely cordial way that was standard for Boeing office help, and motioned them inside. Schairer’s office was as neat as his appearance and his mind, with nothing out of place on his desk and two sets of bookcases totally filled with models of Boeing aircraft, including some interesting projects that had never been built. Vance had worked on many of them and had a fond spot in his heart for some of the most radical—a bulky jet fighter that had a ramjet for power at altitude, a wicked-looking interceptor, with a thin, straight wing and three engines, two jets and a rocket. There was also one that was being developed at the same time as the B-47, a smaller version with two jets and the same bicycle landing gear. It had been dropped because Boeing didn’t think there was a sufficient market for it. Shannon always thought it would have made a good aircraft for export sales, but there was no interest at Boeing despite all his work on it. Next to the model case, a huge walnut table was piled with drawings, wind tunnel models, and odd bits of hardware.

  Schairer stood like a country schoolmaster beside a large easel. “I know all of you are cleared at least for secret, but oddly enough, everything I’m going to show you except the last sheet is unclassified. I won’t show you the last one, although Pete is familiar with it.

  “As you gentlemen know, we desperately need to find a way to increase the range of our jet bombers. We need to be able to hit the Soviet Union hard and from high altitude, and the only thing the Air Force has for the job is a few Convair B-36s—basically a 1940s airplane, blown up in size. It’s no wonder the Navy is skeptical about spending so much money on it.”

  Harry had been at Convair the previous August, quite by chance, and seen the XB-36 fly. It was a tremendously impressive airplane, with a 230-foot wingspan and six pusher engines, but it had to be slow—there was no way six piston engines, even the big Pratt & Whitney R-4360s, could push that much metal through the air very fast.

  Schairer carefully covered the first chart, then opened the second. The drawings were of the XB-47; a series of photos, taken at every angle, were thumbtacked around the drawings.

  “It took a while to convince even me, but this is a terrific airplane, the best bomber in the world. But it is too short ranged of course, and until we get some kind of a tanker fleet, it will be a while before it is really useful. It’s fast, though, six hundred mph, and Guy Townsend will tell you that it is also very maneuverable.”

  Townsend was the Air Force test pilot who had sold the airplane to the Air Force at a time when all the emphasis was on building the B-50, an improved version of the B-29 but still a piston engine bomber.

  Schairer went on as if he were lecturing a class, going through the drill of covering the drawings again. It was habit; these drawings had been unclassified, but he couldn’t bring himself to leave them open. He opened up the third sheet. “Here’s where the problem is, though. I’ve been working on this devil for two years.” He showed a drawing of a huge aircraft with a straight wing, and four enormous turboprop engines. “This is the Boeing Model 464-17. We started out with six engines, but when Wright bumped up the power of their T-35 turboprops to about eighty-nine hundred horsepower we went to four. Less drag, less maintenance, less inventory.”

  Vance Shannon asked, “What’s its gross weight?”

  Schairer moaned, “Four hundred thousand pounds and growing. You know the old problem: you need fuel to carry fuel, so you scale up, and then you need extra fuel to carry the extra weight, and then you need extra fuel to carry the extra fuel. It’s a vicious circle. We project that the airplane would have a speed over target of about three hundred eighty mph and a combat radius of about three thousand miles. That’s way too short, obviously; it’s just a little better than the B-36.”

  Shannon turned to Wharton. “Pete, Pratt & Whitney have some terrific jet engines coming down the pike. You know how I feel about coupled engines and gearboxes—and I feel the same way about turboprops; I just cannot believe they are going have any advantage over a jet engine for a bomber or a fighter. A transport, maybe, but not a first-line combat aircraft.”

  Wharton responded, “Well, the Russkies wouldn’t agree with you. We don’t know a hell of a lot about what they are doing, but we do know they are developing some monster turboprop engines, probably based on some German designs. We also know that Tupelov, their big bomber guy, is designing a huge turboprop bomber. Probably looks just like this.” Wharton jabbed the drawing of the Boeing turboprop.

  The Soviet Union’s famed Andrei Tupelov had added another laurel to his crown just after the war, reverse-engineering impounded Boeing B-29s to create the Tupelov Tu-4. The Tu-4 represented a real threat to the United States, for it could reach most of its major cities on a oneway mission. Almost the entire USAF interceptor force was being concentrated to counter such an attack, but with the current primitive radar system, there was no doubt that many of the Soviet bombers could get through.

  Wharton flopped down in his seat. “The Soviets scare me. They inherited a whole mass of German technology, and the stupid Brits gave away the store by giving them Rolls-Royce engines. But those will just get them started. They’ll bring their own genius to play, and they’ll have airplanes that will be able to hit the U.S. and return. That’s why we’ll have to build up Air Defense Command and buy a whole bunch of interceptors, and build a radar system across the Arctic. And that’s why we have to have something to retaliate with.”

  The room rocked with the sound of a B-29 taking off on the factory runway, and they were quiet until the noise was gone.

  Schairer rapped gently on the easel and said, “I cannot show all of you the last chart—it’s still top secret, and we haven’t done what we need to do to check your clearances. But Pete here knows what’s there, and I’m going to leave it to Pete to decide how you can help the program
along.”

  Wharton turned to the Shannons, father and sons. “We have to do better than we are doing, or we are just going to have to abandon the heavy bomber program. That will make the Strategic Air Command very unhappy. There are some alternatives—we can base B-47s overseas and we can accelerate the tanker program—but none of that is really satisfactory. We need a big bomber we can send from the heartland of the United States to the heartland of Russia.”

  He paused for a moment and said, “Harry, I want you to go to Hartford, to work directly with Pratt & Whitney and get their big jet engine rolling. Right now they are making plenty of money with their smaller engines. I want you to convince them to risk a lot of experimental money to get me a new jet engine with at least eight thousand pounds of thrust, no matter what it takes. If you can do that, I’ll switch Boeing off turboprops and get them started on a big jet.”

  Harry stalled for time. He wasn’t ready to be shuffled off to Hartford, away from the great flying at Wright-Pat. “I don’t know much about engines, and certainly nothing about turboprops.”

  “I know that, Harry. No one really knows a great deal about jet engines yet, especially turboprops; they are an unknown quantity. But you know people, and I have faith that you can convince them that the Air Force is serious about the big jet engine.”

  Realizing that he was being reeled in, Harry came back with a fairly weak, not too pertinent question: “What have you learned from the B-47?”

  Wharton slapped the desk with his hand. “Good goddamn question! The biggest, most important thing we learned is that the wings don’t have to be as thin as they are on the B-47. All the drag calculations on the B-47 were too high, and Boeing’s decided it can build the next bomber with a thick wing. It makes for a lighter structure, and means that you can store fuel in the wings, and not have all the tanks in the fuselage like the 47.”

  “Who’ll I talk to up there?” The words were out of his mouth before he realized he’d agreed to accept the assignment without even talking it over with Anna.

  “I’ll introduce you to Luke Hobbs and Perry Pratt. Luke’s been in jet engines since they started, and Pratt is a genius. Good name to have working at Pratt & Whitney, huh? Don’t even know if he’s related, but he is a powerhouse!”

  Schairer looked at his watch again—he checked it about every five minutes—and said, “Come along, Vance; we’ve got to get down to Ed’s office to work the B-47 problem some more.”

  Tom and Harry left shortly thereafter, picked up Harry’s gear at the Windsor, and drove out the rainy highway to McChord.

  “Weather doesn’t look too bad. Just look out for Mount Rainier after you take off—guys have been known to run right into it.”

  “No, that’s the great thing about jets. I’ll be on top at about five thousand feet, and even I am not so dumb as to run into a rock in clear air.”

  At Base Operations, they shook hands and Harry asked, “Is there anything I can do to help with Marie, Tom? Would it help if Anna came out to visit?”

  “That might help, Harry. I’m willing to try anything, but I think time’s running out on me. Fly safe!”

  Harry carried his gear into the flight planning room, musing on the blistering pace of the last few days and deeply troubled by the red lipstick he had seen on Tom’s collar as he got out of the car. He looked vainly for a good explanation for it—maybe Marie had smudged it when Tom was packing. But given the atmosphere at the Windsor, probably not.

  July 2, 1948, Boeing Field, Seattle, Washington

  “Those are bright boys, Vance! I can see why you are proud of them.”

  “They’re good boys, too. Funny, how you always think of them as boys even though they are getting to be thirty!”

  Schairer got up and carefully closed his office door.

  “Vance, you’ve been invaluable on the B-47 program, and I have to say that Tom has helped a lot—I’m glad you finagled a way to bring him in on it. But we are making pretty good progress now, and I want to give you a parallel assignment. It will keep you here another six months or more, and I need to know if you have commitments that will prevent you from accepting.”

  Schairer’s tone was as warm and friendly as it got, but Shannon could tell that he was very serious indeed by the way he leaned forward over his desk, his hands grasping a pencil, almost bending it to the breaking point.

  “I told Dutch Kindelberger that I’d only be gone for four months. I do have some studies I need to clean up at North American, but I could do that if I commuted down there a couple of days every week or two. How would that work out?”

  Schairer stood up and paced back and forth. “I don’t know. It’s not the amount of time you’d be away; I know you’d work night and day while you were here. But it’s the commercial security I’m worried about. If even one word leaks out on what I want you to do, it could cost us millions of dollars, maybe even cost us the company.”

  Vance’s feelings were not hurt by Schairer’s concerns. Accidents happen; briefcases get left on trains, all sorts of things. He knew that his friend never exaggerated, nor did he ever understate—he was always clinically precise. This must be something crucially important for Boeing. But why would he want an outside contractor to handle it if it was?

  “Look, Vance, here are the facts. Boeing is in economic trouble. We’ve lost money the last three years, and the only thing that keeps us going is the tax-recovery program, which gives us back some of the wartime taxes we paid, just to help us through this transition process. You heard Leisy talk about the 377 program—he’s right; we’ll never break even there, not unless we can sell some tankers. And B-50 production will wind down soon. Boeing is coming to a fork in the road. If we pick the right one, we’ll survive; if we don’t, we’ll be out of business in two years, three at the most.”

  Shannon understood. Douglas had its DC-4s and DC-6 transports coming along, and Lockheed was pumping out Constellations—there was no room for the expensive 377. And both competitors had military contracts as well, with Lockheed producing jets and Douglas building attack planes.

  “Then we’ve got a labor problem. The way the contracts were written during the war, employees have seniority rights. We’re down from forty-five thousand people at the end of the war to about fifteen thousand, all senior people, all making good money. The labor force is about to strike for more wages—they want thirty-five cents an hour more across-the-board at a time when we need to slash costs.”

  “This is quite a buildup, George. You must be setting me up for something big, or something difficult. You never spend this amount of time getting to the point.”

  Schairer whirled, went to the easel, and tore the cover back. There, beautifully detailed, was a drawing of the most stunning airplane Vance had ever seen, a low-wing jet transport with four jet engines slung in pods as on the B-47.

  “This is our jet transport plane. It is based on the B-47, as you see, and it is absolutely top secret. The only chance Boeing has to survive in the future is to build the first jet transport and get it in operation. But we can’t get a decision to go ahead because there are too many risks. And here is the biggest one.”

  He turned the page and revealed another drawing, this one also of a stunningly beautiful jet transport, very different in concept, but with a tail design that told Shannon that it had to be a de Havilland product.

  “Wow—where did you get this?”

  “There’s a term for it, Vance; it’s called industrial espionage. I got a call from a man you might know from your Lockheed days, Fritz Obermyer. He’s in the United States now, but he passed through England, and a friend got him past de Havilland security and onto the factory floor. He took these pictures.” Schairer tossed Vance a packet of eight-by-ten photos, obviously blown up from smaller images, and went on. “Obermyer claimed he worked for Bob Gross before and during the war. I called Bob, and he was embarrassed but confirmed it. Gross said that although all of Obermyer’s information had not always been useful, i
t was almost always correct. Well, this is very useful to us.”

  Shannon had never heard of Obermyer but remembered Gross talking about foreign information sources that he had. He studied the photos carefully and compared them to the three-view drawing. “Not much sweepback, and broad-chord, thick wings. Good for short-field takeoffs. Putting the engines inside the wing looks good, but I think it would cause a lot of problems.”

  “So do we. And you can’t tell it from the photos, but the airplane is too small for the United States. It looks like about thirty-six passengers would be the maximum. But it could be stretched, or scaled up.”

  “What are you planning for your airplane to carry?”

  “Maybe eighty. We’re thrust limited now. We want to use the same engines we’re using in the B-47. J47s, they are reliable; we’re familiar with them.”

  “I cannot believe what you are saying, George! We just met yesterday on getting new Pratt & Whitney engines for the big bomber. If you use the same engine on the jet transport you can scale it up to carry maybe one hundred sixty passengers and have a trans-Atlantic range. This is your chance to think big.”

  Schairer, usually impassive, paled. “You’re telling me to go in to the board of directors and tell them that I want to spend twice as much money as we’ve ever talked about, on a new jet transport, at a time when they are already worried about going broke?”