Boyd

by Robert Coram

  Some officers who knew Boyd during the Nellis years say he was obsessed. Others say he was “a little crazy.” Spradling might have agreed with both.

  Boyd had so much nervous energy that he began chewing his fingernails down to the quick, gnawing them until it looked as if he had stuck his fingertips into a blender. Someone told him he should take up smoking, that if he had something in his mouth he would not chew his fingernails. Boyd did not like the smell of cigarettes, so he began smoking cigars. He favored Dutch Masters and began smoking four or five a day. Now he presented a new danger to those he engaged in conversation. When he moved in close and began waving his arms with a lighted cigar in his hand, he trailed fire and ashes in big circles as he talked.

  To relieve his tension, Boyd began working out in the base gymnasium. His mother had been unable to afford that Charles Atlas course when he was eight years old, but the government provided everything he wanted for free. He lifted weights almost every day and soon developed large callouses on his palms. His tension unabated, he constantly spread the fingers of his hand, jammed the flap of skin between his thumb and forefinger into his mouth, and chewed off pieces of callus before spitting them out.

  It was about this time that Boyd’s affection for the telephone began to manifest itself. Three or four nights a week, always after midnight, Spradling’s phone rang. He reached over to the bedside table, picked up the phone, and the conversation went something like this.

  “Spradling residence.”

  “Sprad? John.”

  “Hey, John. What is it?”

  “Sprad, I’ve had a breakthrough.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Sprad, remember that equation I was telling you about this morning?”

  “John, tomorrow might be a better—”

  “Now I know what was missing. I figured it out.”

  And off he would go for an hour or two talking about a calculus equation, ignoring all Spradling’s efforts to postpone the conversation. Spradling’s contribution was an occasional grunt or noncommital “Uh huh.” Initially he thought that if he didn’t respond to Boyd’s conversation that Boyd would hang up. But after several months of these late-night calls, Spradling realized that Boyd did not want a conversation; Boyd simply wanted to talk. He talked to learn: as he went through his monologues, his thoughts bounced around, various theses were tried and rejected until finally he had gained a better understanding of whatever it was that was on his mind. After an hour or two, Boyd would say, “Thanks for helping me out, Sprad. You’ve been a big help.” And he would hang up.

  Spradling’s wife did not like these late-night calls. But Spradling tolerated them for two reasons. First, he had monitored so many lectures at the FWS that he had an excellent overall knowledge of the classes and could on occasion offer advice to Boyd. Second, Boyd not only was a close friend, he was the hottest pilot in the FWS and was developing radical new tactics and techniques for aerial combat. In fact, Captain John Boyd was becoming a legend in the fighter-pilot community. Spradling wanted to help. The early-morning calls were a small price to pay.

  Boyd’s fame as a fighter pilot came on the wings of one of the most quirky and treacherous fighter planes in the history of the Air Force, the F-100—the first operational aircraft to reach the speed of sound in level flight.

  The F-100 was built by North American and was the first of the most fabled series of aircraft ever to see service in the Air Force—the Century Series. Designed and built as a day air-superiority aircraft —a fighter—it was turned into an air-to-mud aircraft by the bomber generals.

  The F-100 was called the “Hun,” as in “hundred.” There would be other glorious aircraft in the Century Series: the F-101, an escort for SAC bombers; the F-102, an interceptor; the F-104 “Starfighter,” a fighter with such short wings it was called a “missile with a man in it;” the F-105 “Thud,” a tactical nuclear aircraft; and the F-106 all-weather interceptor. But they were all sequels. None had the cachet of the Hun.

  The Hun, particularly the A model, was a lieutenant-killer, a widow-maker with a fearsome reputation. One quarter of all the F-100s ever produced were lost in accidents. A forgiving aircraft tolerates mistakes by the pilot; it will not, as pilots say, “rise up and bite you in the ass.” The Hun was one of the most unforgiving airplanes ever built. It had to be flown every second; one wrong control move, one moment of inattention, and the F-100 would “depart flight”; that is, it quit flying and assumed the aeronautical attributes of a brick. The departure usually was violent—a sixty-degree pitch-up followed by a hard roll that quickly turned into an out-of-control spin.

  The Hun had a number of quirks that pilots found new and troublesome. The least serious problem was the gyroscopic effect of the engine. When the aircraft took off, or when it accelerated out of a slow-speed maneuver, the engine’s rotating mass caused a gyroscopic effect that pulled the nose of the aircraft to the side. It could be controlled with authoritative use of the rudders, but it was disconcerting.

  There were other annoyances. Hard maneuvering distorted the airflow to the engine. The airflow, rather than going smoothly into the snout of the aircraft, flowed turbulently across the intake and caused the compressor to stall. Fire and smoke belched from both the intake and the exhaust and the aircraft shuddered as an explosive BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! shook it with such force that the pilot’s feet often were knocked from the rudder pedals. Jets were still new enough that the full dimension of compressor stalls was unknown. For a while there was some apprehension that if the aircraft did not recover quickly enough, it might explode midair. Even after flight tests showed compressor stalls were relatively harmless, they still terrified new F-100 pilots. From the time a pilot taxied out on the runway and advanced the throttle—which caused the engine to begin “chugging”—until he landed, the F-100 was trouble waiting to happen.

  Another problem with the Hun was that many mechanical secrets were hidden in its bowels. It came into service when the Air Force was still slicing personnel. Ten tactical fighter wings were deactivated in the years after Korea. This meant some of the most skilled jet mechanics in the Air Force were being forced out of the service at a time when the most complicated fighter the Air Force had ever seen was coming into service. Maintenance problems with the F-100 were chronic.

  But the most serious problem with the Hun was adverse yaw. When the F-100 came along in the mid-50s, ailerons were used to increase or decrease the bank angle. But there was a point—and no one knew quite where it was—when an additional touch of aileron caused the F-100 to roll violently in the opposite direction, frequently into a uncontrollable and nonrecoverable spin. The traditional way to counter an unexpected roll was to apply opposite stick. In the F-100, this only aggravated an already-dangerous situation.

  Simply put, at low airspeeds and high angle of attack, the down aileron produced more drag than it did lift. As one F-100 pilot said, “If you wanted to go right and the aircraft wanted to go left, the aircraft always won.” Suddenly the pilot was out of altitude, airspeed, and ideas—all at the same time. At low altitude, where FWS pilots worked much of the time, there was no room to recover. It was adverse yaw that killed so many pilots and gave the F-100 its fearsome reputation.

  Boyd loved the airplane’s evil quirks. “It bites back,” he said. He thought the F-100 was a great aircraft for students; if they could fly the Hun, they could fly anything. And pilots fell in love with the airplane’s ability to reach the speed of sound in level flight. They liked to get out on the Nellis Range, ease the throttle forward until they jostled up through the sound barrier and a thunderous sonic boom trailed them, then stick the nose of the aircraft up over Sunrise Mountain and “boom” Las Vegas.

  “There I was, going severely supersonic” became the new phrase among Hun drivers. (No Hun pilot was happy simply announcing he had been going supersonic; it had to be “severely supersonic.”) The comment was delivered casually because Hun drivers knew no other pilots in the Air
Force could say the same thing and there was no need to remind those lesser mortals of where they fit into the cosmic scheme of things.

  In the months after the F-100 came to Nellis, it was not unusual for people in Las Vegas to be sitting quietly at home when suddenly the windows shattered and they were hammered by a sound wave that caused them to think it was the end of the world. One pilot—it was said he was traveling at 815 mph at an altitude of forty feet—boomed a small town out in the desert so vigorously that the main structural wall in the local hospital cracked and the base commander had to go out and apologize and the Air Force had to pay more than $20,000 in damages.

  As damage claims rolled in, senior officers cracked down. Supersonic flight was limited to the heart of the Nellis Range, far from civilization, and it became a serious offense to boom a populated area. But since the F-100 was so much faster than its predecessors and took so much room to maneuver, the Air Force also asked for and received air rights over another 750,000 acres of land in southern Nevada.

  The edict did not affect Sherrie’s—the brothel at the Green Spot—and F-100 drivers liked to point the nose of their aircraft at the whorehouse in the cottonwoods and go booming. For that, it seems, there were few complaints.

  The idea that an airplane could outrun its sound startled America. People stood on street corners and talked of how the airplane could fly over and be gone before people on the ground ever heard it. They shook their heads in amazement. And they knew that SAC notwithstanding, as long as America had the F-100, the Communists would think twice before attacking America.

  By now the Strategic Air Command was in its full glory. The B-47 Stratojet was the pride of SAC; its wings swept back thirty-six degrees and it could fly almost 600 mph. Curtis LeMay had boasted many times that no fighter could climb high enough or fast enough to reach his bombers. Then one day a B-47 pilot looked out the cockpit and watched a Hun driver do a barrel roll around his aircraft.

  The Hun ruled.

  And John Boyd was the best Hun driver in America.

  Boyd had demonstrated in primary flight training that he had no fear of aircraft. He muscled them around and showed he was in complete control. And the treacherous F-100 was no exception. Most fighter pilots consider the term “heavy-handed” to be a critical commentary about a pilot’s skills; it is very close to “ham-fisted,” which describes a pilot with no feel for the airplane. But Boyd was heavy-handed in another sense. He was not afraid to muscle the F-100 around. He pushed it to the published limit and then beyond. He had to find out what the airplane would really do, not what the book said it would do.

  North American was unable to find a cure for the deadly adverse yaw problem. And there are streets at Edwards named for golden arms who died trying to tame the F-100. The problem was so bad that the standard admonition for F-100 pilots at the end of a preflight briefing was “DBYA”— don’t bust your ass.

  F-100 pilots believed the safest way to fly the Hun was at high speed. But one of the many idiosyncrasies of the F-100 was, as Boyd said, “It will fly slower faster than any other airplane.” Not only would it decelerate at an amazing rate, it would keep flying even when the airspeed indicator was at zero. It might be falling at an extremely high rate, but a skillful pilot could pump the rudders and maintain control.

  Boyd is the only known Hun driver who liked to work in the dangerous low-speed end of the airplane’s envelope. And that was how he solved the adverse yaw problem. He found the solution from a maneuver he developed when teaching tactics to FWS students.

  In his article in the Fighter Weapons Newsletter Boyd preached that one of the first teaching tools is to have a student get on the six-o’clock position of the instructor and stay there as the instructor goes through every evasive maneuver known to aviators. And this is how he began his air-to-air training with new students. He was patient with most students, beginning slowly, sensing their level of skill and degree of confidence. If they wanted to learn, he taught them everything he knew. But occasionally there came a student with what Boyd called “an obstruction”—that is, one who thought he was a great pilot and needed no tutelage. Such a student needed to have the obstruction removed so he could fully understand the genius of the man teaching him.

  “The only way to get a fighter pilot’s attention is to whip his ass,” Boyd said.

  A student with an obstruction would be put on Boyd’s six and then, after one or two maneuvers (during which the student was lulled into a sense of overconfidence), Boyd would demonstrate with one abrupt move why he was considered the best Hun driver in the Air Force. He would seize the stick with both hands, jerk it full aft, and hold it there. This maneuver he called “flat-plating the bird.” The maneuver turned the bottom of the aircraft, the wings, and the bottom of the tail surfaces into one enormous speed brake and slowed the Hun from 400 knots to 150 knots in seconds. It was as if a manhole cover were sailing through the air and suddenly flipped ninety degrees to the airstream. Then Boyd, still holding the stick full aft and not moving it a quarter inch in either direction, would stomp hard on the rudder and corkscrew the aircraft violently around in a tight roll. The maneuver spit the student out in front and left Boyd on the student’s six. He had set the hook and there was no escape.

  It happened so fast that students never knew what happened. One minute they were in a perfect kill position, tight on Boyd’s tail, pipper locked on his cockpit, and about to shout, “Guns! Guns! Guns!” into the radio. All they needed was sixteen frames of guncamera film, the equivalent of a half-second burst, to have a kill. But, as one student remembered, “All at once he did a double outside rat’s ass and a two-tone trick fuck and I was a movie star. He had me in his gun camera.”

  Now it was Boyd behind the student, barking, “Guns! Guns! Guns!” Then there was raucous laughter and, “You just got hosed.”

  If the student thought this was a fluke and wanted to do it again, Boyd obliged. The outcome was always the same. “Boyd rode his students until they squealed like pigs, then took them home and made fun of them,” said one of his former students. When the student realized that continuing the engagement would only add to his humiliation, he signaled he had enough. After they landed Boyd walked up to the student and asked, “Now do you still think you’re a great pilot?”

  “No, Sir,” was the obvious answer.

  The elegantly violent slow-speed maneuver does not square with Boyd’s admonition to keep up the airspeed for follow-on maneuvers. He used it to prove to students that no matter how good they thought they were, they could always learn. And he taught it as the “desperation maneuver” every fighter pilot should know when he is about to get hosed and there is no other option. He did the maneuver both with wings level and in a turn. He did it over the top and out of the bottom. The maneuver taught Boyd that when the F-100 was at a high angle of attack and slow airspeed, the only way to control it was with rudders. Keeping the stick locked in the middle and controlling both rolls and turns with the rudder kept the Hun out of adverse yaw. Nevertheless, most students, even most experienced cadre instructors, were afraid to try it. It was another of the Hun’s “JC maneuvers”—one that caused the pilot involuntarily to explode over the radio with a “Jesus Christ.” If it was not done exactly right, it could pop rivets and even warp the wing. It also could cause the Hun to depart flight and go into a nonrecoverable spin. Boyd taught that the secret was bracing the elbows on the sides of the cockpit to avoid moving the ailerons and then pumping the rudders.

  Boyd sent word to Edwards he had solved the adverse yaw problem. When the golden arms laughed at the temerity of the young captain, he flew an F-100 over to Edwards and made believers out of them. Then he sent word to North American and they, too, laughed in disbelief. What could a fighter pilot, a mere captain, do that the dozens of engineers who designed the aircraft could not do? The senior test pilot at North American came to Nellis and Boyd put him in the front seat of an F-100F and took him up and proved his point. Thereafter it was writ
ten into the flight manuals and taught by every instructor pilot in the Air Force: when the Hun is at high angle of attack and low airspeed, don’t move the stick laterally. Use the rudders as the primary control for both roll and turn. Afterward, every time a pilot landed the Hun, he centered the stick and worked the rudders. It went against everything a pilot learned in flight training and in flying air-to-air combat, but it worked and became a way of life for Hun drivers. Almost overnight the number of crashes in the F-100 decreased.

  It was this quick and violent maneuver that began the legend of “Twenty-Second Boyd.” Boyd became so confident of his ability in the F-100 that he had a standing offer for every class that went through the FWS: “Meet me over the Green Spot at thirty grand. Get in trail. Get in close at about five hundred feet. I’ll reverse our positions in twenty seconds or pay you twenty bucks.”

  Wheels were heard grinding in the heads of young fighter pilots when Boyd made his claim: I’m tight on his six and he rolls right. I hang close. Five seconds. He pulls heavy Gs. I stay with him. Ten seconds. Even if he pulls more Gs and spits me out of a firing position, that’s fifteen seconds. He still has to get behind me. I break and go for separation. He can’t do it. No way in hell he can reverse our positions in twenty seconds.

  Boyd beat the pilots. But saying he could do it in twenty seconds was, to other pilots, an outrageous statement. Time was the friend of the pilot in the defensive position. The more time he had, the better his chance of throwing the offensive pilot out front. Boyd soon amended his wager to forty seconds and forty dollars. But “Forty-Second Boyd” still beat all challengers in about twenty seconds, a truly extraordinary feat that even today amazes other fighter pilots.