Boyd

by Robert Coram

  Everything a fighter pilot needed to know was in the “Aerial Attack Study.” The most prescient part was called “Basic Limitation of AIM-9 Against Maneuvering Targets.” Even though the Air Force had an unshakeable belief in the omnipotence of missiles, Boyd showed—and he was the first to do so—that missiles could be out-maneuvered by a maneuvering target (i.e., another fighter). His specific reasons for why they could be outmaneuvered was why the “Aerial Attack Study” was classified. The fact missiles could be defeated was of crucial importance; it meant the dogfight was not dead, as SAC generals believed.

  As soon as pilots saw the manual, they knew this was what they had always wanted. The first 600 copies disappeared almost overnight. Although classified “secret,” manuala were taken home by pilots who hid them and studied them and prepared for the inevitable day when war would come and they would be in an aerial gunfight.

  For the “Aerial Attack Study” Boyd received the Legion of Merit, an award usually given to senior officers. The commendation said the “Aerial Attack Study” was the “first instance in the history of fighter aviation in which tactics have been reduced to an objective state.” The commendation further stated that Boyd had demonstrated the maneuvers in a way that showed he was “undisputed master in the area of aerial combat.” Finally, the commendation said Boyd had assembled the manual “with a zeal seldom equaled” while performing his regular duties “in a superior manner.”

  Demand for the manuals was so great that several years later the Air Force removed the material on missiles, changed the language in a few sections, and printed a nonclassified version. Air Force squadrons rotating through Nellis took copies back to their home bases, where copy after copy was made and passed around until they became tattered.

  Hal Vincent of the Marine Corps, the pilot who fought Boyd to a dead heat in simulated aerial combat, used the manual to train Navy and Marine pilots. Foreign pilots training at Nellis as part of the Mutual Defense Assistance Pact took copies back to their countries, where it was studied as if it were Holy Writ. They agreed that the U.S. Air Force was truly an amazing organization if a mere captain could write such a document. Within ten years the “Aerial Attack Study” became the tactics manual for air forces around the world. It changed the way they flew and the way they fought. Forty years after it was written, even with the passage of the Vietnam War and the Gulf War, nothing substantial has been added to it.

  And it was written by a thirty-three-year-old captain who was not happy with it.

  Boyd believed the “Aerial Attack Study” could be formulated another way, that there had to be a better method of articulating the contents, maybe even something beyond the maneuver-countermaneuver strategy, something that went even beyond the mathematical formulae to the core, the very essence, of combat flying.

  “One day I’ll have a breakthrough on this,” he told Spradling.

  While most thought Boyd was a great pilot, others—including at least one of the pilots who checked his flying proficiency—thought he was so heavy-handed that he was dangerous to himself and to others.

  Harold Burke was a chief warrant officer and the man in charge of aircraft maintenance for the FWS in 1960. He was a passenger in the backseat of a Hun one day during a firepower demonstration for VIPs visiting Nellis. Boyd was flying off the right wing in a second F-100. Both aircraft were loaded with bombs and rockets.

  As the two aircraft flew out to the bombing range, the element leader decided he wanted Boyd on his left wing. Rather than easing off on the power, sliding backwards, then moving into position on the other wing, Boyd simply rolled inverted across the top of the lead F-100 and settled into position on the left wing. Burke looked up through the canopy at Boyd’s head, about twenty feet away. The element leader was angry at the proximity of two fast-moving aircraft loaded with enough bombs and rockets to blow a big hole in southern Nevada. This was the most stupid and dangerous thing he had ever seen a pilot do.

  “Dammit, Boyd. Don’t be horsing around,” he radioed angrily.

  “One G is one G,” Boyd said. “It doesn’t matter what position I’m in.”

  The point was that he flew the Hun as smoothly in the roll as he could have flown in level flight. It was a casual demonstration of extraordinary flying ability—a maneuver only a highly skilled and supremely confident fighter pilot would perform. Others believe it is one of the dumbest things they ever heard of a fighter pilot doing.

  On June 1, 1960, Boyd was flying an F-100D, serial number 56-2931A, at 25,000 feet in a remote part of the Nellis Range. The aircraft entered an unusual series of maneuvers. Boyd jerked the stick full aft and performed a maneuver called “wiping out the cockpit.” He moved the stick full right forward, full left forward, full left rear, full right rear. The Hun lost airspeed and wallowed and lurched about the sky. Boyd selected afterburner. The Hun shook as it was racked with one compressor stall after another. It stood on its exhaust flame and indicated zero airspeed but was still flying. Then Boyd jammed the stick full forward and dumped the nose. The extreme maneuver blew out the pressure seals on the primary and then the backup flight-control systems. The Hun was no longer an aerodynamic object, simply a fourteen-ton collection of metal and electronics falling rapidly toward the desert. Boyd had no options. He ejected.

  He led off his accident report by saying he had discovered a design deficiency in the F-100, and that deficiency was the reason he lost the airplane. General Ewbank was almost apoplectic. He planned to court-martial Boyd for gross negligence, for performing an illegal and dangerous maneuver that resulted in the loss of an airplane.

  Boyd said he could duplicate the hydraulic failure and prove there was a design flaw. What he had learned would make the F-100 a safer aircraft. Boyd thought he should get a medal rather than a court-martial.

  Spradling was hearing talk that Boyd didn’t hear. The long knives were out.

  “Sprad, don’t worry,” Boyd said. “They can’t touch me. I do my homework.”

  A board of inquiry was convened. If the board said the loss of the aircraft was Boyd’s fault, it would be the end of his career.

  The general ordered a static test that would replicate the conditions Boyd experienced. He went to the flight line and personally chose the F-100D that was to be tested. He thought if Boyd selected the aircraft, he would pick one with weakened seals.

  Harold Burke set up the test. The F-100 was lifted on jacks and a hydraulic line attached. “We had an inert aircraft but active hydraulics,” he said. Boyd crawled into the cockpit. Many of the FWS cadre and a group of students were on the ramp watching the test. It was Forty-Second Boyd against the Air Force and this time the betting favored the Air Force. When Burke said the F-100 had hydraulic pressure, Boyd wiped out the cockpit, held the stick full aft, then shoved it forward. Hydraulic fluid gushed from the belly of the F-100 and pooled on the ramp.

  Boyd had won the first round, but now the general said the maneuvers that caused the hydraulic failure were reckless and negligent.

  Boyd pulled out the aircraft manual compiled by engineers at North American and showed there was nothing in the manual that proscribed the maneuvers he had performed. Then he pulled out the Air Force Technical Orders (T/O) on the F-100. Every aircraft in the Air Force has a T/O. This is where pilots learn what the aircraft will do and not do. There was nothing in the T/O prohibiting the maneuvers. Nor were there squadron or wing prohibitions. Boyd won. The Air Force decided that he had, after all, discovered a design deficiency in the F-100.

  Boyd’s last ER at Nellis, dated July 22, 1960, began with “Capt. Boyd has done an outstanding job as the Academic Supervisor for the USAF Fighter Weapons School.…” Of the “Aerial Attack Study” his rating officer wrote, “This is the first manual of its type in existence. TAC has accepted the manual in its entirety and will issue the manual as an accepted doctrine for all TAC F-100 equipped units.” He ended by saying, “I recommend that he be promoted to the temporary grade of Major ahead of his contem
poraries.”

  The astonishing thing about this last ER is that it was indorsed by General Ewbank. The general said Boyd “enjoys an outstanding reputation with respect to his speciality within tactical aviation circles. I consider Captain Boyd to have an exceptionally high potential in the Air Force, and one who should go far in his career. I know him to be fully qualified for promotion and recommend that every consideration be given to his early advancement to the next highest rank.”

  It was extraordinary, especially for someone with Boyd’s reputation for impatience and outspoken nature.

  Now it was time for the next step in his career, the beginning of his evolution from a warrior to a warrior-engineer. Early in August he packed the station wagon, and he and Mary and their four children prepared for the long drive to Atlanta and Georgia Tech. Mary was pregnant again, and early next year there would be a fifth child. Lashed to the top of the station wagon were clothes and personal items the family would need until the household goods arrived in Atlanta. It was a hot day and the wind off the desert was blowing hard. Spradling helped Boyd tie down the last items atop the overloaded station wagon and made sure all was secure.

  “Sprad, I’ll call you when I have that breakthrough,” Boyd said.

  “Anytime, John.”

  A flight of Huns took off and Boyd watched as they slipped the reins of Earth, tucked in close, and climbed for what the poet called the “long delirious burning blue” of 30,000 feet and a game of grabass over the Green Spot. The maneuvers they used would be maneuvers Boyd taught them. They had read his manual. There were only a few FWS-trained fighter pilots, but if war came, they would be ready.

  Boyd shook hands with Spradling and looked around the dusty expanse of the spartan base and shook his head. “It will never be this good again.”

  Part Two

  ENGINEER

  Chapter Nine

  Thermo, Entropy, and the Breakthrough

  ON September 14, 1960, Boyd began classes at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He was almost thirty-four years old, had four children and a pregnant wife, had served in two wars, and had spent the past five years or so teaching men the business of aerial assassination. All in all, not the background of the typical undergraduate.

  But Boyd shared a surprising number of similarities with many students at Georgia Tech. To appreciate those similarities, one must first know what the school was like in 1960. Some 6,488 students were enrolled. Tech was considered a men’s school, a place where men studied hard during the week and partied hard on weekends. Most students wore tee shirts and shorts and flip-flops to class, while some fraternity boys, particularly the SAEs, ATOs and Kappa Sigs, dressed as they thought students at Ivy League colleges dressed: Weejun loafers and Gant shirts during the week and three-button suits when attending Saturday football games at Grant Field.

  About half the students at Tech were from Georgia, with the remainder from all over the world. (One of the largest contingents of foreign students, until the Bay of Pigs debacle, was from Cuba.) The first female students—both of them—were admitted to Tech in 1952. Two more enrolled in 1953. By 1960 Tech had twenty. A male student could go through four years at Tech and never have a class with a woman. The Rambling Wrecks of Georgia Tech called female students “co-odds” or “co-techs.”

  Tech was ranked one of the top state engineering schools in America and was said to accept only one of eight applicants. The academic program was the intellectual version of advanced jet training and with an even greater bust-out rate. At freshmen orientation, students were told to shake hands with the person on either side and say “good-bye,” because half of those present would flunk out their first year. “You are too dumb to graduate from Georgia Tech” was a frequent comment of professors. Students who survived their four years did not talk of graduating, but rather of “getting out.”

  The 1960s were years of protests and demonstrations on college campuses across America. But not at Georgia Tech. In 1961 the president of Tech called a mandatory all-student meeting and announced that the first black students had been accepted, that all students would welcome them in friendship and cordiality, and any student who behaved otherwise would be dismissed and there would be no appeal. Thus, Tech became the first major state university in the South to desegregate peacefully and without being forced to do so by court order. Tech and its students were too serious about academics to become sidetracked by such issues. During the 1960s the most avant-garde activity at Tech was the English professor who sometimes held classes at Harry’s Steak House on Spring Street. This professor’s “liberalism” was the talk of the campus.

  All in all, Georgia Tech was a place of high standards, a place for serious students to obtain a first-rate engineering education, a place where the 1960s did not arrive until about 1975. It was a place where competition was tough and where only the dedicated and committed survived. Like Boyd, the school was intolerant of the slothful or the second-rate.

  Boyd wore civilian clothes to class and no one knew he was an Air Force officer; he was simply an older guy, someone else to compete with in class. The biggest difference between Boyd and other students was one of attitude. Many Tech students were impressed with the fact they had been admitted to Tech. The school’s demanding academic standards and its willingness to kick out those who did not perform made them walk around campus as if on hallowed ground. Not Boyd. He walked as if he owned the campus. His voice could be heard a block away and his language could peel the paint off the old buildings. One man who was in a thermodynamics class with Boyd said, “I’d love to have introduced him to my brother or my daddy, but not to my mama. That was the cussingest man I ever met.”

  The new year brought in a series of events that later would have a profound impact on Boyd’s career and personal life.

  President John F. Kennedy took office on January 20, 1961. His secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, was hardly in office when he ordered the Navy and Air Force to coordinate plans to build a new tactical aircraft. General Curtis LeMay became the Air Force chief of staff in 1961, a promotion that led to SAC virtually taking over the Air Force and causing even greater damage to the Tactical Air Command. And in a curious twist of history, it also laid the foundation for one of Boyd’s greatest achievements.

  On the personal side, the Boyd family welcomed another child, a daughter named Mary Ellen, born February 12, 1961, at Piedmont Hospital on Peachtree Road. She was the fifth and last Boyd child. Those who were close to Boyd later in his life see only coincidence in the fact that Boyd came from a family of five children—three boys and two girls; that Mary was one of five children—three boys and two girls; and that Boyd stopped when he had five children—three boys and two girls. They say he never talked of such things, that he was too pragmatic and too fixated on his work and too devoid of the emotion surrounding family to plan for five children.

  Nevertheless, he impregnated his wife twice after the doctor said having more children would endanger her health. And after Mary Ellen was born, he did two things that indicate he knew his family was complete: he had a vasectomy, and he began looking for a house.

  Two months later, in April 1961, he bought a house in Doraville, a lower-middle-class industrial suburb in northeast Atlanta about a half-hour drive from Georgia Tech. The three-bedroom ranch house at 2860 McClave Drive cost $16,400, the loan being repayable in monthly installments of $105.67. The house cost $100 less than his father paid for the property on Lincoln Avenue more than thirty-five years earlier.

  Mary liked the idea of having a house of her own. But she did not understand why Boyd bought a house when he would have a new assignment in little more than a year. Boyd replied that the house was a good investment.

  Living on McClave Drive was similar to living in the home where Boyd grew up. The ranch house was on a quiet, tree-shaded street and was so small and so filled with children that it always seemed crowded. Mary and Boyd had one bedroom, the two girls had another, and the three boys shared a
third. The dining-room table was used as an exercise table for Stephen.

  Stephen entered the first grade that year. The curvature of his spine made it too painful for him to sit up all day, so the school supplied a chaise longue for him. He had a difficult time in class and it appeared he might have a learning disability. Then the teacher realized Stephen could not see what she was writing on the blackboard. In addition to having polio, Stephen was almost blind. Glasses brought an immediate improvement in his vision but not in his classroom work. He missed much of the first year of school because he was in the hospital at Warm Springs. Stephen swam in the warm waters and had his braces adjusted and his young body pulled and stretched and examined by the doctors. But he did not improve. And Mary, who was never quite sure about any decision she made, began to wonder if she should have picked some other place for treatment.