by Robert Coram
Boyd was in Atlanta to go to college and did little except study, while Mary handled all the traveling back and forth to Warm Springs. When Mary Ellen was born Boyd was at the hospital, but he was in the hall, bent over his books. He did not swim and he stopped working out. The Georgia Tech annual contains no class picture of Boyd during the two years he was there, nor was there any graduation photo. The single mention of Boyd in the Blueprint is when his name appears in agate type among the list of 1962 graduates.
In addition to his studies, Boyd always kept in mind his desire to expand the “Aerial Attack Study.” There had to be a way to reduce the 150-page narrative to the purity of a mathematical formula. Boyd often called Spradling or Catton and talked of the ideas swarming through his mind, about the breakthrough he hoped to find. Spradling and Catton listened for hours. It seemed as if each session took Boyd one step closer to a dim and distant goal. Spradling and Catton were proud that Boyd called them, even if it was in the middle of the night.
Spradling knew Boyd was walking a high-wire. While Boyd was obsessed with pushing the “Aerial Attack Study” to a higher level, his first priority had to be keeping his grades up. The Air Force would take a dim view of an officer who was sent to college at taxpayers’ expense and did not do well.
Spradling was right to be concerned. Boyd’s transcript from Georgia Tech shows his grades were erratic, ranging from A to D, with several dropped courses. But he doubled up enough in later quarters to receive his degree one quarter sooner than expected. His Air Force Training Report—the equivalent of an ER—said his academic performance was “above average” and that “he complied with Air Force Institute of Technology directives promptly.”
What his transcript cannot reveal is the profound and lasting contribution Boyd made to aviation during the winter of 1962. In one sense, all that happened in Boyd’s life up to this point was laying the groundwork; the real story of his life was about to begin. He was about to take the first faltering step in a process that would change aviation forever. What he discovered late one night in the second-floor classroom of an old building is today as fundamental and as significant to aviation as Newton was to physics.
One of several disciplines associated with mechanical engineering is the study of thermodynamics. Thermo, as the course at Georgia Tech is commonly called, was in 1962 and remains today near the top of the list of the toughest classes on campus. Thermo is a physical science that some define as the study of energy. Thermodynamics encompasses but then goes beyond Newtonian mechanics. A big part of thermo is the mathematical relationship between the amount of energy that goes into a substance and the resulting change in the properties of that substance.
Thermo can be peeled layer by layer, with new revelations at every level. The first law of thermodynamics is usually studied in physics and concerns the conservation of energy. The best layman’s explanation is a checkbook analogy: money goes into a bank account, money goes out of the account, but a balance must be maintained. Energy, like money, does not disappear; it must be accounted for.
The second law is unique to thermo and puts limits on what is physically possible in the conservation of energy. It is called the “law of entropy” and applies to all systems but is most easily introduced by its effects on a closed system—that is, one not acted on by outside forces. The second law postulates that the expenditure of energy does not ebb and flow like the bank account. It says that in a closed system, the transfer of heat goes only in one direction, from a high temperature to a low temperature. A good example is an ice cube and a small amount of water, both within a sealed enclosure. As heat is transferred from the surrounding water, the ice melts until all the water in the container is the same temperature. The transfer of energy ends. The system is closed, stable, homogenous, uniform. But it is considered to be in a greater state of disorder than before the ice melted.
The first law seems simple and obvious, when in fact it is extremely complex and one of the more difficult parts of thermodynamics to understand. The second law was the first nonreversible law in physics—something almost beyond the pale of science. It says the universe goes from order to disorder. Separate cold and warm bodies represent a higher state of order. When the warm body has heated the cold body to an equilibrium temperature, disorder has increased—a concept difficult for many to grasp.
The second law is one of the weirdest creatures in all of science. Interpreting and defining the second law, playing with its implications, can become one of those endless academic exercises for which there is no answer. For instance, what if the second law, this one-way system, this order-to-disorder, is the arrow of time that is reality? That means the world we think of as real is instead an aberration.
Some even use the second law to try and prove the existence of God. This argument has it that God established order (low entropy), and since then the universe has progressed and continues to progress to disorder (high entropy). Since this has been a one-way evolution, there had to be a God to establish the order in the first place, otherwise there would be nothing to decay into disorder.
In the winter of 1962, Boyd wrestled with thermo.
Charles E. Cooper was 19—a junior majoring in aeronautical engineering and fascinated, indeed, mesmerized, by anything and everything to do with aviation. He was from southwest Atlanta and had the southerner’s respect for all things military. Thermo was easy for him, just another course between the really great classes in aeronautical engineering, where he could work with lift and drag coefficients, structures, propulsion, and flight control systems, and spend long hours over a drafting table designing military aircraft. One day he might work for defense contractors and with aviators. All America was talking about the “Space Race” and there was even talk of going to the moon. As a graduate of Georgia Tech with a degree in aeronautical engineering, he could be involved in whatever course America took.
The student sitting next to him in the classroom on the second floor of the mechanical engineering building was an older guy who walked around the campus as if it was his personal property and who talked as if he learned the English language in a New Orleans whore-house. The older man introduced himself as John Boyd. He was having trouble understanding thermo in general and the second law in particular—especially the mysterious, bewildering idea of entropy, of unavailable energy. How in the hell can you have energy that is not available? Cooper and Boyd talked, and Cooper explained what the second law meant and how it was relevant.
For weeks the two talked after class, and Cooper’s tutoring kept Boyd abreast of classroom work. One afternoon the two men walked across Hemphill Street to the Yellow Jacket, a small restaurant named for the Tech mascot and a convenient place for Tech students to buy hamburgers and hot dogs. They nursed a couple of sodas and talked. Finally Cooper raised the subject that had been on his mind since he first met Boyd. “You’re older than most students. Why did you wait so long to go to college?”
Boyd said he already had a degree from Iowa and that he was an Air Force officer seeking an engineering degree.
“What do you do in the Air Force?”
Boyd beamed down at Cooper and said, “I’m a goddamn fighter pilot.”
From his tone of voice it was clear there was nothing better in the world to be, nothing higher to which one might aspire. It so happened that Cooper agreed. Forty years later he still remembered the gist of the conversation.
“What do you fly?”
“Fly ’em all. Been flying an F-100 for the past few years. Flew a fucking F-86 in Korea. I was in goddamn MiG Alley. We’d fly up to the Yalu and the Communist sons of bitches would be up forty-five or fifty thousand feet where we couldn’t climb, but when they came down we kicked their asses.”
Cooper was a nineteen-year-old college student talking to a thirty-four-year-old Air Force fighter pilot who had romped triumphantly down MiG Alley. He had no idea that Georgia Tech would expose him to such things. He put down his soda and stared. This was more exciting
than designing space vehicles. He was talking to a war hero.
Boyd must have sensed Cooper’s awe because suddenly he was off and running. He loved to talk and now he had an appreciative, even worshipful, audience. And it was okay, too, that everyone else in the restaurant could hear.
“I landed in Korea at a place called K-13. Came in there in a goddamn C-54 with a load of lieutenants, all F-86 pilots about to go into combat. We land and we hear sirens and we see the air police racing alongside the airplane and we wonder what the hell is going on. Then the door opens and this full colonel comes up the ramp. He’s got APs [Air policemen] in front of him and APs behind. They’re guarding him, making sure he gets on the damn airplane. They’re sending him home. Turns out he crossed the Yalu and shot up half of Manchuria. He told his flight, ‘Turn off your goddamn radios.’ And they went across the river and shot them up. It happened a few days later to another colonel. Then another one. In three days I had three full colonels gone. They went across the Yalu and hosed them down good.”
Cooper shook his head in amazement. And other students in the restaurant listened and nodded, apparently delighted to know the truth of what had taken place in Korea, and glad to know our boys had done what had to be done in fighting the Communist menace.
It is true that pilots sneaked across the Yalu and shot up Communist air fields in their Manchurian sanctuary. And it is true they were transferred if they were detected. But colonels did not do this, certainly not three colonels in three days at one base. This was a war story, an instance of Boyd laying it on thick when talking to civilians—but this does not mean it was a lie, as most people define the word. Cooper as a southerner understood this. Southerners and fighter pilots know the story is more important than the facts. If a story is not true it can become true in the telling. So even if Cooper had known Boyd was telling a war story, it wouldn’t have mattered. Cooper went on to work in the defense industry and would repeat the three-colonels story hundreds of times in later years when Boyd became famous.
Boyd and Cooper ordered hamburgers. Boyd wolfed his down in several bites and kept talking, telling stories of his Nellis days, his loud raucous laughter ringing out triumphantly across the restaurant. He told Cooper of this thing he was working on, this idea he first had back at Nellis when he wrote the “Aerial Attack Study.” It concerned the performance of fighter jets and it was something like driving along the expressway and deciding whether or not to pass the car ahead. At some speeds the driver knew he had the power to pull out and pass the car in front. At other speeds passing the car was far more difficult. The same idea could be applied to an aircraft in combat. The pilot with the most airspeed or the most power could put himself on the six of an enemy and be in position to win the dogfight. If he did not have the airspeed or power, he better not try to outmaneuver the enemy.
Finally it was time to get back to studying, and the two men returned to the John Saylor Coon Building. They found an empty classroom on the second floor and there, on one of the long desks that ran almost the width of the room, they opened the thermo textbook Engineering Thermodynamics by Jones and Hawkins. It was a relatively small book, but its equations had bested some very bright young men. Cooper began talking about the second law, explaining how more usable energy always goes into a system than comes out, because there is unavailable energy called entropy. Boyd nodded. After a while he stood up and began pacing. Cooper went on for several hours, but Boyd could not concentrate. Something was swirling through his mind, pushing at the edges of his consciousness—but what? Boyd continued pacing. He grimaced as if he were in pain.
All entropy means, Cooper said, is that no system is one hundred percent effective; if it were, you would have a perpetual-motion machine. The professors make it too complicated with all the talk of unavailable energy and states of energy and systems.
It was almost midnight when Boyd threw wide his hands in exasperation and said, “Goddammit, I understand about airplanes. Why can’t I get this?”
“Then think of it in terms of an airplane,” Cooper said. “It’s the same thing. Entropy is unavailable energy. Energy can increase and decrease. If you put ten units of energy into a system and only eight units are available to do work, the result is an increase in entropy.”
Cooper continued. He loved to talk about thermo. But Boyd wasn’t listening. He was hearing something else. In his Oral History interview he said that suddenly he found what he had searched for so long, that his hair stood on end and his skin tingled. All that he had been wrestling with for years suddenly made sense. The clean and simple and elegant majesty of the idea almost overwhelmed him. Thermo laws about the conservation and dissipation of energy are like the tactical give-and-take of air-to-air combat. In a dogfight it is not power or airspeed that enables a pilot to outmaneuver an enemy. It is energy.
Energy!
If he was at 200 knots at 30,000 feet, he was carrying little kinetic energy but a tremendous amount of potential energy. If he saw an enemy fighter at 20,000 feet and dived to engage, his airspeed rose, because he was trading potential energy for kinetic energy. He built up speed, like Richard Bong in a P-38, to slash through an enemy formation and be out of gun range before the enemy knew what was happening. Then he could use the kinetic energy (or speed) of the dive to climb back to altitude. But as he climbed he lost airspeed and converted kinetic energy back to potential. The only way to regain airspeed was performing a maneuver that might make him vulnerable, such as straight and level flight or diving again.
He had energy but it could be temporarily unavailable.
Boyd searched frantically through his books and found a yellow legal pad and began scribbling notes and ideas and equations and theories and questions. If he could look at air-to-air combat in terms of energy, he could devise equations for the performance of an aircraft.
The test was forgotten. Boyd wrote and mumbled and nodded and went into long periods of silence. Cooper tried a few times to talk to Boyd, but it was clear the older guy was in a different place. Cooper went home. Boyd went to the library—it was open until 1:00 A.M.—and continued working on equations. He made a list of what had to be done next, which equations had to be written and solved, what theories must be followed up and developed. He filled sheet after sheet of his yellow legal pad.
When the library closed he drove up Buford Highway, turned onto McClave Drive, entered his home and continued working. Then he called Spradling. It was about 4:00 A.M. in Atlanta, three hours earlier in Las Vegas.
When the phone rang, Spradling knew it was either Boyd or a family emergency.
“Spradling residence.”
“Sprad. John.”
“Hey, John. What time is it?”
“Sprad, I had the breakthrough.”
“What breakthrough?”
“The one I’ve been after ever since I got here. It happened tonight, Sprad.”
Boyd talked for more than an hour. He slept several hours, then drove back to Tech and took the thermo test. (He must have done well, as he made a “B” in the course.) After class he rushed home and pulled out his legal pad “to see if all I had done was a bunch of shit or whether it made sense.”
It still made sense.
He added more notes, more thoughts, more equations. And then he put it away and went into what he called his “draw-down period,” thinking, “Oh, hell. Somebody has already done this.” If what he had discovered was work done by someone else, he did not want to waste more time. What he had come up with was so simple, so obvious, that someone had to have discovered it before. He was casual when he mentioned his ideas about energy to Cooper and other students at Tech. He wondered if they had heard of similar work. They had not. His thermo professor knew of no work in this area. Boyd could find nothing in the library along the lines of what he was working on. Then it registered: if someone had reached the same conclusions he had reached and applied it to tactics, he would have known about it when he was at Nellis. Anything to do with fighter tact
ics wound up at Nellis. And since he had been the head of the Academic Section at the Fighter Weapons School, he would have seen the material. But he had never seen any papers, any research, any reports.
It had not been done before.
He became excited all over again. The enormity of what he was in the process of discovering would change aviation forever. He knew it.
But he had one more quarter at Tech before he graduated. And he had to do well. His attention had to be on his studies. Nevertheless, he always carried his legal pad for jotting down new ideas. He already had orders for his next assignment. He was going to Eglin AFB down in the Florida panhandle. At Eglin he could devote full time to these ideas about excess energy. But how could it be applied? What could he do with it? Would the Air Force be interested?
Boyd graduated from Georgia Tech after the summer quarter of 1962. Soon afterward he was promoted to major. All his promotions had been in or below the zone; that is, he had been promoted on schedule or faster. He was ahead of many of his contemporaries.
It was an exciting time to be in the Air Force. The country was enamored of its new president, who had declared that America was going to put a man on the moon. The Space Race was going strong and the Air Force had big plans for its engineers. A new general was in charge of the Tactical Air Command, a General Walter Campbell Sweeney who had been on Curtis LeMay’s staff—a real bomber general who probably would dismantle the FWS.
Boyd put the house on McClave Drive up for sale, but it was February 1963 before a buyer came along. The buyer made no down payment; he simply assumed the mortgage. This means that Boyd made payments on the house for twenty-two months and then unloaded with no return on his investment.
Mary looked at her husband, a man who had a degree in economics from the University of Iowa and a degree in industrial engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and demanded an explanation. “You said the house would be a good investment,” she charged.