Boyd

by Robert Coram

  “Why don’t I come by your office Monday morning?” Boyd said. “We’ll see what we can do.”

  “Come on by.”

  Boyd stood up and pointed at Christie. He nodded and a smile beamed across his face. “Tiger, we’re gonna do some goddamn good work.”

  Rarely in the Air Force has an introduction resulted in such a productive, long-term, synergistic explosion of creative thought as when the Mad Major met the Finagler. The Air Force would never be the same. It was more than ambition and the desire to do good and significant work that bound these two men together. Neither man talked about personal or family matters, yet each must have sensed at some level the parallels in their childhoods: the embarrassing poverty, the dysfunctional families, the athletic prowess, the overpowering desire to get up and get out and to be somebody. Christie, though eight years younger than Boyd, would be more of an indulgent older brother.

  Boyd was a fighter pilot and operating with a fighter pilot’s passion and aggression and desire to do battle. His primary form of social intercourse was confrontation. He had not yet acquired subtlety and bureaucratic skills. He needed a protector, someone to—in Air Force parlance—fly top cover. Christie was that man. The friendship that began that night in the Officers Club lasted until the day Boyd died.

  It is impossible to separate the contributions of the two men to the work they were about to do—work that would, in the end, do just what Boyd predicted: change people’s fundamental understanding of aviation. The idea was Boyd’s. But Christie’s background in advanced math and his skill with computers, along with his skills in handling the bureaucracy, made possible Boyd’s great and lasting contribution to aviation. Boyd simply could not have done what he did had it not been for Christie—not at that time and not at that place.

  In the beginning they talked of pursuit curves. How many Gs would a pilot have to pull to get the correct angle to shoot an enemy aircraft and how much would aircraft performance be degraded by pulling those Gs? Christie listened to Boyd, asked questions, and began developing new equations. Boyd was a reasonably good mathematician, but he was not in the same league with Christie. Yet he insisted on understanding every equation. “I don’t understand,” he said. “Tell me one more time. I’m a dumb shit.” Christie patiently walked through the equation again. “Do it again,” Boyd said. It almost drove Christie mad. He believed time could be better spent simply by plowing the equations into the small Wang computer in his office, seeing where the equations led, developing new equations, and always moving ahead. But Boyd wanted to go over the math, dissect each equation, and explore the full range of every theorem until he was as familiar with it as was Christie. Hour after hour Christie stood at a blackboard with Boyd and walked him through the equations.

  Boyd’s ideas changed every day. “Let’s look at this,” he would say. Or “Let’s try it this way.” He was never satisfied. For months there was not even a name for what the two men were working on. Then one day Boyd walked in and said to Christie, “I’m calling it the Energy-Maneuverability Theory.’”

  Christie nodded. He didn’t care what Boyd called it, as long as he would move ahead. Christie wanted a pamphlet, a briefing, a book, something codified that he could hold in his hand, something that could be presented to the Air Force. But Boyd was such a perfectionist that he would not write anything. What was the use of writing it if it was going to be changed five minutes later?

  Over and over, day and night, Saturdays and Sundays, they pushed data through Christie’s computer until the Wang was overwhelmed and it became obvious a bigger computer was needed. If the Wang was overwhelmed, so was Christie. Because the E-M Theory had nothing to do with Boyd’s assigned job, all the work had to be done in the evenings and on the weekends. Christie lived forty miles away in Pensacola and came to work in a carpool. If he was driving, he had to go to Pensacola, then return to Eglin and work late into the evening. And chances are when he walked into his house at 2:00 A.M., the phone would be ringing. It was always Boyd.

  Christie was in effect working two jobs—his regular job and the Boyd job. Saturdays and Sundays he spent in his office with Boyd. His fiancée did not look with favor on this after-hours work.

  The biggest computer on base was an IBM 704. To use it, one had to come to the computer shop as a supplicant. The proper way to obtain computer time, the Air Force way, the only way, was first to have a project that met all the criteria for computer usage. Then whoever was in charge of the project delegated someone to take the data to the computer office. There a program was written and the information placed on punch cards, which then were fed to the computer. The printouts were returned to the supplicant. Boyd wrote letter after letter asking permission to test his E-M data. The civilian in charge refused each request. Boyd again went to see the civilian. “This thing I’m working on will benefit the Air Force,” he said. “It will enable fighter pilots to devise new tactics. It will enable America to dominate air combat.”

  The civilian reminded Boyd that he was only a major, a man being bounced from job to job, someone whose job description had nothing to do with computers. Computer time was too valuable to waste on some harebrained idea. Besides, Eglin was a weapons-testing base. Theories about energy-maneuverability, or whatever the hell Boyd’s idea was called, came from Wright-Patterson AFB.

  Again, Boyd was at an impasse.

  “I have an idea,” Christie said. “Let me see if I can work it out.”

  Almost half of the computer work done by the IBM 740 was done for Christie. He went to his boss and said he had some ideas he wanted to run through the base computer. He was somewhat vague about these ideas, but his boss did not press the issue. Whatever Christie wanted was okay. His work was important and it had the attention of Air Force generals. If he wanted to run some ideas through a computer, fine.

  Christie and Boyd worked out long lists of equations and then Christie took the equations to the computer shop. “These are my inputs,” he said. “This is what I want my outputs to look like.” He was asked for an authorization code. His office had dozens of such codes, one for each project. He picked a number. The computer technician checked a long list of approved project codes and, yes, there it was. He ran the equations and by the next day Christie had a stack of printouts a foot tall, row after row of data, pages and pages of nothing but numbers. (An E-M chart is a state condition, a snapshot of an aircraft state at a given moment.)

  When Boyd saw them, he reacted as if he had been handed the Ten Commandments. He sat down and reverently turned the pages. Christie realized that Boyd had the ability to look at pages of numbers and visualize their meaning. He could look at what to most people would be a confusing jumble of arcane math and see an airplane with the variables of altitude, airspeed, temperature, angle of bank, and G-load. As Boyd sat at the table, his head moved and his shoulders rolled and his fist pulled back on the stick and he mumbled as he flew the numbers. He said to Christie, “The charts sing to me. I hear music when I read them.”

  Boyd had begun working out at the gym again and had returned to his habit of chewing calluses on his hands. People in Christie’s office were horrified. They were working on what sort of blasts are generated by bombs of a given size, what sort of damage bomb fragments might do to given targets, how many bombs of a given weight must be dropped to destroy, say, a bridge, and over in the corner was Major Boyd, working on an unauthorized project that could get the entire office in trouble, mumbling and chewing on his hand and spitting skin across the office.

  Boyd scanned page after page of numbers and missed nothing. When a computer operator hit the wrong key and a printout had one wrong number, Boyd erupted. The slightest anomaly, the slightest perturbation on one of maybe five hundred pages, he instantly picked out. “Goddammit, Christie, they fucked up over there in the computer shop,” he yelled. “I’m going over there and kick that civilian’s ass.”

  “Now, John,” Christie said in his soft conciliatory voice. “Let me handle it.
” Above all else Christie had to keep Boyd out of the computer shop. Each new collection of data led to more iterations that were integrated with earlier work and then sent back to the computer shop. Now Boyd was making progress.

  Reduced to its basics, Boyd’s work hinged on thrust and drag ratios. An airplane at a given altitude, given G, and given speed has a defined drag. The engine has a maximum potential thrust at that altitude and that temperature. If the engine puts out enough energy to match the drag, the aircraft’s total energy is unchanging—the energy rate is zero. All is balanced. But Boyd wanted to know how fast a pilot could gain energy when he fire walled the throttle. At a given altitude, given speed, and pulling a given amount of Gs, how much ooomph did he have in reserve? And the answer he sought had to be normalized so every aircraft could be seen in an equal light, independent of its weight. That is why Boyd chose to look at how fast a fighter gained or lost specific energy, not total energy.

  A B-52 and a Piper Cub, both flying at the same speed and same altitude, have the same specific energy—that is, total energy divided by weight. How fast either aircraft gains or loses specific energy depends on the difference between the engine’s available thrust and the airplane’s drag. For example, an aircraft in level flight is pulling one G. Say the aircraft has 2,000 pounds of drag. If the pilot racks the aircraft up in a tight bank and pulls hard on the stick, he might pull six Gs. Now the aircraft is generating 12,000 pounds of drag. As the G-load increases, drag becomes enormous—much greater than thrust—and airspeed bleeds off rapidly. Tactically, the ability to quickly slow down is as important as the ability to quickly speed up.

  The E-M Theory, at its simplest, is a method to determine the specific energy rate of an aircraft. This is what every fighter pilot wants to know. If I am at 30,000 feet and 450 knots and pull six Gs, how fast am I gaining or losing energy? Can my adversary gain or lose energy faster than I can? In an equation, specific energy rate is denoted by “Ps” (pronounced “p sub s”). The state of any aircraft in any flight regime can be defined with Boyd’s simple equation: V, or thrust minus drag over weight, multiplied by velocity. This is the core of E-M.

  Elegance is one of the most important attributes of an equation. The briefer and simpler an equation is, the more elegant it is. E = mc2 is, of course, the ultimate example. Boyd’s theory is not only elegant, but it is simple, beautiful, and revolutionary. And it is so obvious. When people looked at it, they invariably had one of two reactions: they either slammed a hand to their forehead and said, “Why didn’t I think of that?” or said it had been done before—nothing so simple could have remained undiscovered for so long.

  Boyd now could do more than imagine and believe; he could actually see the potential impact of his work. In the beginning the entire thrust of his theory had been to understand the full performance envelope of American aircraft, with the goal of developing new tactics for aerial battles. Then he realized that if E-M could quantify the performance of American aircraft, it could—for the first time—do the same for “threat aircraft,” for the MiGs and Sukhois flown by the Soviets. Finally, if E-M could quantify aircraft performance, why couldn’t he back up the theory and use it to design fighter aircraft?

  Upon first learning of Boyd’s early work with E-M, people naturally ask if he had a “target Ps” or an “ideal Ps.” This is not only wrong, it is meaningless. More is usually better in a fighter, but “target” or “ideal” smacks of optimization and Boyd despised optimization. He wanted E-M to explore possibilities across the entire flight envelope. He then tweaked designs, made small variations, and saw how they compared, always keeping the improvements and discarding the degradations. He evolved his way to a design by trial and error. He did not know what he was looking for before the fact. He selected improvements as a basis for further variations and tests—very Darwinian, which by its nature put him on an unpredictable path. The end result emerged when variations no longer yielded improvements. The result was an artistic balance and compromise, not an optimization.

  Boyd’s E-M research had an unexpected result on his personal appearance. He no longer was the spit-and-polish officer he had been at Nellis. The creased shirts and trousers and the crisp military look were gone. Wearing civilian clothes for two years at Georgia Tech may have contributed to this; pouring all his energy into his research couldn’t have helped. Although Boyd was rumpled and disheveled and badly put together, he still saw himself as he was at Nellis. When he and Christie walked from one office to another, he oftentimes chewed out enlisted personnel for looking sloppy. He stood there, his own shirttail hanging over his belt and his trousers wrinkled, and lectured enlisted men about the importance of respecting the uniform and making a good appearance for the Air Force. Christie shook his head in disbelief.

  Boyd was developing a curious reputation at Eglin. In addition to the E-M and his slovenly appearance, his dining-room habits were following him. There was talk of submitting his name to the Guinness Book of World Records after he was clocked downing two eggs, a slice of ham, two pieces of toast, and a cup of coffee in twenty-two seconds. And for such a profane man he had a paradoxical streak of the puritan. He once attended a bachelor party, and the sexually suggestive language, the gag gifts, and the gyrations of a nude female dancer so embarrassed him that he left.

  Boyd was so focused on his research that very few things in the daily course of events registered with him. But after he saw the movie El Cid, he talked for weeks of the final scenes. El Cid is gravely ill, but if Spain is to be saved he must lead his troops in battle against the Moors. El Cid dies one evening and the next morning his body is dressed in armor and tied to his horse and sent out ahead of his troops, causing the Moors to flee in panic.

  The movie had two themes that must have resonated with Boyd: El Cid is a man of unbending principle and patriotism, and he sees duty as more important than family. Boyd lived by these same lights. But what Boyd could not know was that after he died, his friends remembered his great affection for the movie and talked of how he, like El Cid, was causing confusion among his enemies even after death.

  Boyd still had no mandate from the Air Force to work on the E-M Theory. Nevertheless, he was determined to have his work acknowledged. But he had two big problems. First, he had to have the weight, thrust, lift coefficients, and drag polars for every fighter aircraft. He had to have what engineers call “the numbers.” Second, he had to find a way to translate pages and pages of complex mathematics into something that was informative, persuasive, and interesting—something that, as he kept saying, “even a goddamn general can understand.”

  Getting the numbers was an almost insurmountable obstacle. The weight of an airplane is a good example. Obtaining the weight seems simple. But what weight? The ramp weight (what an aircraft weighs sitting on the ramp) is one of the most common measurements. But the ramp weight, depending upon the amount of fuel or the external racks and weapons, can vary by thousands of pounds. What is the fuel state of the aircraft when it fights a MiG? What missiles are aboard? The variables for the weight of an aircraft are endless. The manufacturer and the Air Force always offer stripped-down and misleading figures because the less an aircraft weighs, the better its performance—and they want the performance to look better than it really is. But the foundation of E-M is based on having correct numbers. To use spurious data would endanger pilots. Boyd had to have the correct numbers, and those numbers were at the Flight Dynamics Laboratory at Wright-Patterson AFB in Dayton, Ohio.

  At the time the Air Force was divided into three broad categories: the operational Air Force, the supply Air Force, and the acquisitions Air Force. Wright-Patterson was the heart of the acquisitions Air Force. Wright-Patterson actually is two bases: Wright Field and Patterson AFB. But usually this distinction is not made, and the facility is referred to simply as Wright-Pat. The base is the crown jewel of Air Force bases—what those in the Air Force call a “heartthrob base.” Named for the Wright brothers, it is one of the oldest bases in
the Air Force. The Air Force Museum is at Wright-Pat. And the base has the cachet of being the intellectual center of the Air Force, the home of the Propulsion Laboratory and the Flight Dynamics Laboratory, where the Air Force does basic research into aircraft and engines. Wright-Pat has a higher percentage of advanced degrees and a higher ratio of officers to enlisted men than any other base in the Air Force. Wright-Pat and Eglin both were in the Air Force Systems Command (AFSC). But the difference between the two bases was the difference between an Ivy League university and a trade school. People at Wright-Pat looked at Eglin as that place down in the Florida panhandle where pilots played with their airplanes and dropped bombs and tested guns; it was a hobby shop. The heavy lifting, the work of consequence, was done in the cloistered confines of Wright-Pat.

  While the denizens of Wright-Pat have always had a very high opinion of themselves, that opinion is not universally shared. A story is told of how a group of former high-ranking German officers was touring military facilities in America and was taken to Wright-Pat. The officers saw the labs and talked with professorial officers and experienced the lofty mustiness of the base, and then one of the German officers turned to his host and quietly said, “Now I know why we lost the war.”

  His host from Wright-Pat smiled and waited.

  “We had two bases like this.”

  It was this atmosphere that Boyd entered. He flew to Wright-Pat and was driven to the Flight Dynamics Lab, where he explained what he wanted. The officer with whom he talked must have been bemused by the intense major from Eglin who believed he was working on some revolutionary idea about aircraft performance. It was as if a first grader had gone to his father and asked for engineering data on the family auto. But the officer had been told to provide the data. Besides, no harm could be done by giving this major from Eglin the data. It would be amusing to see just how much he understood. After all, he was only a fighter pilot.