Boyd

by Robert Coram

  Then Boyd went to the Foreign Intelligence Division, commonly called Foreign Tech, and asked to see the highly classified performance data of Soviet aircraft—not how high a MiG-15 can fly or how fast a Sukhoi can go, but the same thing he had asked for in American aircraft: weight, thrust, lift, drag coefficients, and drag polars. This data was too sensitive for Boyd simply to throw it in the backseat of his T-33 and carry it to Eglin; it would be sent by special courier.

  Boyd was elated when he took off from Dayton the next morning. Rather than flying south to Florida, he flew northeast for about 350 miles—less than an hour in the air—and landed at Erie.

  After talking with his mother for a while, Boyd called his sister Marion and asked her to meet him at their father’s grave. He liked to visit the cemetery on West Lake Avenue when he was in town. The two met and stood near the grave in silence for a while. Marion sometimes wondered why her younger brother never asked about her memories of their father. But he was not the sort of person to whom Marion could say, “John, don’t you want to know about our father?” So they talked of other things, mostly Boyd’s work at Eglin.

  Then Boyd grabbed one of his old bathing suits and drove out to the Peninsula. He and Frank Pettinato walked the beach and he told Pettinato about the Energy-Maneuverability Theory he was working on and how the Air Force didn’t understand what he was trying to do and all the high-ranking people who were trying to stop his work. Frank Pettinato Jr. was there too, working as a lifeguard for his father, and remembers how Boyd then dove into Lake Erie, swam a few hundred yards offshore, turned and swam effortlessly down the beach for several miles, his long arms slicing deep into the water, legs kicking tirelessly. Boyd was in his midthirties—to Frank Jr., an old guy—but he never slowed his pace.

  Boyd talked more with Frank Pettinato and then was gone. A half-hour later a small silver jet appeared low over the bay and only a few yards offshore. It roared along in front of Pettinato’s lifeguard tower, then pulled into a steep climb and a wingover and the pilot came back, this time lower, skimming the surface of Lake Erie. Observers swore the jet was so low that the turbulence stirred the water. The aircraft climbed out toward the south.

  The little straight-wing plain-Jane T-33 was an old and under-powered training jet. There were so many of them they were used by many officers just to maintain their flying status. But to people in Erie it was a jet fighter. And it was flown by an Erie man who used to be a lifeguard out at the Peninsula and who had been a combat pilot in Korea. Frank Jr. remembers that his father was very excited and came over to him and grabbed his arm, pointed at the jet, and said, “See that fighter plane? That’s John. That’s John Boyd.”

  After buzzing the beach, Boyd climbed up to altitude, adjusted the throttle and the trim, and settled back for the flight down to Eglin. He must have been quite happy. The data from Wright-Pat would be along soon. Frank Pettinato was proud of him. He knew that Erie was talking about his buzzing the beach at the Peninsula. The poor boy in ragged clothes, the boy with no father, had grown up to be somebody. He was more than a salesman.

  Back at Eglin in the modest house on the corner lot at 11 Bens Lane, Mary waited. When they arrived at Eglin, he had said to her, “I want you to try and be more social here than you were at Nellis.” And she had promised. “I’ll change,” she said. “I’ll go to parties at the club with you and I’ll meet your friends.”

  And she did try. She went to a few parties at the club. She followed Boyd around, almost hiding behind him, trailing in his wake. She was very shy and her Presbyterianism weighed heavily on her. Boyd insisted on introducing her by saying, “This is my wife, Mary. I found her in an Iowa cornfield.” Everyone laughed but Mary. Once she turned away in tears, but an angry Boyd said, “Mary, you can’t be a big baby. You have to be tough. You have to face up to things. If you don’t want to do that, why don’t you just stay at home and feel sorry for yourself?”

  Mary frequently stared at Boyd with her big Ottumwa eyes and asked him questions about his childhood and not having a father and being poor. She reminded him that she had taken several psychology courses at Iowa and she knew about these things.

  “You’re are always trying to find out about my weaknesses,” he said.

  “I’m not looking for weaknesses. But children who grew up as you did almost always have scars. And you don’t. You just seem unreal to me.”

  “Mary, you are my wife and I want you to be on my side. Not against me.”

  But in their time at Eglin, Boyd and Mary did begin to drift apart. Boyd’s work became more important to him than his family. It is almost as if Boyd believed his family obligations were over once he had finished his job of fathering five children. Mary’s job was to raise the children while he went about his life’s work.

  Mary began spending two or three days each week at the fabled talcum-powder beach of the Florida panhandle. Stephen liked the beach. He climbed down from his wheelchair and rolled in the gentle surf and was free. He often became sunburned, but he had so much fun that Mary paid little attention.

  Chapter Eleven

  The Sugarplum Fairy Spreads the Gospel

  IN late 1962, Harry Hillaker was one of the most important men in the defense industry. He worked for General Dynamics and was project engineer for the F-111, the aircraft that Secretary of Defense McNamara decided to make the universal aircraft for the Navy and Air Force. In theory, the multipurpose aircraft exemplified the cost-effectiveness so beloved by McNamara. It was hyped as the aircraft that could perform close air support, air-to-air combat, air-to-ground, and nuclear-attack missions. It could do everything but dust crops.

  A combat aircraft is a peculiar combination of design, avionics, and power plant. Prudent designers usually make significant technological advances in only one of the three categories when they plan a new aircraft. But the F-111 was a high-tech wonder with two bold innovations, both of which were later to cause enormous problems. The F-111 was the first combat airplane to have an afterburning turbofan engine. Until then, combat aircraft used turbojet engines. The primary difference is that all of the air entering a turbojet engine goes through the engine core, while the airflow of a turbofan engine is split between the engine core and a duct that bypasses the engine and goes straight to the afterburner. The split airflow means back pressure from the afterburner affects the compressors at the front of the engine. The turbofan is very sensitive to airflow distortion.

  The second innovation was the wing. The F-111 was the first combat aircraft to have a variable-geometry wing, commonly called the “swing wing.” The small narrow wings extended straight out for takeoff and slow-speed flight, then folded back for high-speed runs.

  The F-111—Harry Hillaker’s baby—was the pride of the Air Force. More than five thousand people at General Dynamics worked on the airplane, and the Air Force had more than two hundred people monitoring development and construction. So Hillaker can be forgiven if he was a bit full of himself that night when he visited the Officers Club at Eglin. He and an Air Force officer were at a table having a quiet drink, talking of the wonders of the F-111, how the British had ordered a large number, how the Navy was going to cover its carrier decks with the airplane, and how the F-111 was on the way to becoming the greatest airplane in the history of the Air Force, the envy of the world. Hillaker found he was constantly being distracted by noise from the bar. A group of young fighter pilots clustered around an older guy who was holding court, talking in a voice heard all over the bar and waving a cigar as he described various fighter maneuvers. Occasionally the young pilots broke out in uproarious laughter.

  Hillaker tilted his head toward the bar and said, “Now there’s a man who thinks he’s the greatest fighter pilot in the world.”

  His host looked toward the bar, then turned back to Hillaker and smiled. “He might well be. That’s John Boyd.”

  Hillaker shrugged. “Never heard of him.”

  “I’ll introduce you.”

  “No thanks.
I don’t like loudmouths.”

  But the officer had already moved toward the bar and was talking to Boyd, telling him about the VIP, and asking Boyd to meet him. The two men were walking back to the table. Hillaker took a deep breath and hoped that after the introduction Boyd would return to his cronies. Before Hillaker could say a word, Boyd made a head-on attack. The first words out of his mouth were, “My name is John Boyd and I’m a fighter pilot and I understand you work on the F-111 and what I want to know is why you guys built a goddamn eighty-five-thousand-pound airplane and called it a fighter.”

  “It’s a fighter-bomber,” Hillaker said, somewhat taken aback. Boyd poked Hillaker in the chest three or four times, took a puff off his cigar, and said, “Yeah, well last time I looked, an F in front of an airplane meant it was a fighter. That thing is a piece of shit. It’s too big to be a fighter and that goddamn little wing it’s got, it must take two states to turn the thing around. I’ll tell you something else. The pilot can’t see behind and he can’t see out the right window. He has to depend on his copilot to tell him what’s out there.”

  Hillaker gritted his teeth. The project manager for the F-111 did not have to listen to this from a loudmouthed fighter pilot. Before he could reply, Boyd was off again.

  “It’s too goddamn big, too goddamn expensive, too goddamn underpowered. It’s just not worth a good goddamn.” He moved closer to Hillaker. His voice rose. “How much extra weight does that swing wing add to the airplane? Twenty percent?”

  Boyd didn’t wait for an answer. He poked Hillaker in the chest again. “The entire weight of the wing goes through that pivot pin and you hide it all in that big glove. You’ll be getting fatigue and stress cracks in that fucker before it’s got five hundred hours on it. And the amount of drag you’ve created is aerodynamic bullshit. That pivot adds weight and degrades performance, plus you can’t sweep the wing back fast enough in combat to make a difference. The low-speed performance is lousy, the high-speed performance is worse, and the goddamn thing won’t maneuver.”

  Hillaker stared at Boyd. Fighter pilots usually talk in generalities when they criticize an airplane; they say it is a “pig” or that it needs five miles of runway to get off the ground, but they don’t know enough to hone in on design specifics. An engineer trying to get hard information out of a fighter pilot is like a man trying to nail Jell-O to a tree. Thus, Hillaker was more than a little shocked to hear the loud-mouth pilot ask about the things that were only beginning to be whispered about in the back rooms of General Dynamics.

  Hillaker did not know he was looking at the only man in the world who knew more about the capabilities of the F-111 than he did. Boyd had done some preliminary E-M calculations on the F-111 and knew what a terrible mistake the Air Force was making. Boyd knew that, left to its own devices, the bureaucracy always came up with an aircraft such as the F-111. The Air Force looked at technology rather than the mission. And if they did consider the mission, it was always the fashionable mission of the day.

  Hillaker pulled out a chair. “Sit down, John.”

  Hillaker was supervising construction of what would turn out to be one of the most scandal-ridden aircraft in U.S. history. Boyd was the first to publicly say what in a few years everyone would know. The Air Force was seduced by swing-wing technology, a technology that ultimately would ruin two generations of airplanes. (The under-powered Navy F-14 Tomcat is a swing wing and the performance is so poor that pilots call it the “Tom Turkey.” The B-1 Bomber, one of the most trouble-plagued aircraft in the Air Force inventory, is a swing wing. And the U.S. version of the SST, which Boyd and his friends managed to have cancelled, would have been a swing wing.)

  After only a few minutes of a highly technical engineering discussion, Boyd and Hillaker had cleaned off the table and began writing on cocktail napkins and passing them back and forth, covering them with engineering data, formulae, drag polars, and lift coefficients. They exchanged ideas about fighter aircraft, about what each considered the ultimate fighter aircraft, a nimble little fighter such as the world had never seen, about the fighter that, if they had no restraints, they would build.

  Hillaker was a company man who hewed to the company line. But that did not mean he did not have a dream of his own. A few years later he and Boyd would have their chance to build the ideal fighter aircraft. They would join together in the most audacious plot ever conceived against the U.S. Air Force.

  The engineering data from Wright-Pat dribbled into Eglin. Boyd was not confident of the numbers, but at least he had something to work with. Now his second problem in developing E-M—how to present it to Air Force brass—was becoming paramount.

  About 4:30 P.M. each day he went to Christie’s office, sat down, and leaned back. He gripped a pencil between his thumb and forefinger, then held the pencil at arm’s length, staring at the eraser. As he stared at the eraser, it became a pipper. He twirled in his chair as if maneuvering to get a tracking solution on an enemy fighter. Then one day he stopped twirling and tossed the pencil on the desk. He had the answer; he knew how to translate the reams of charts and formulas and engineering data from Wright-Pat into a simple form. He would show graphs of the differences between each American fighter’s energy rate and the energy rate of its Soviet counterpart. Blue areas represented where the differences favored the American fighter, red where the Soviet fighter had the advantage.

  Blue is good.

  Red is bad.

  Even a goddamn general can understand that.

  It is a matter of delicious irony that one of Boyd’s duties at Eglin was supervising the graphics shop. The purpose of the graphics shop was to provide services for every harried officer who wanted briefing charts or lettering placed on photographic slides or a fancy graph. Managing the graphics shop was one of those menial and embarrassing jobs no pilot wanted, but for Boyd it would pay off.

  Boyd put two people to work doing nothing but E-M briefing charts. To say he was a perfectionist is an understatement of epic dimensions. Far into the night he pored over every detail on every slide. Each letter had to be exactly right. Every line in the cross-hatched performance chart had to be shaded correctly. Each slide had to be cropped precisely so. And if at 1:00 A.M. or 2:00 A.M. he found the slightest imperfection, something that no one else would have noticed, he called one of the technicians to come down and correct the slide. Not later during normal working hours. Now.

  After one such all-night session, he told the female technician he would approve the overtime on her time sheet. But the colonel who was the base comptroller not only denied the overtime, he chewed out the young woman in front of her coworkers and told her that whatever it was Major Boyd was working on was unauthorized and the Air Force had no money to pay overtime for unauthorized projects.

  When the young woman reported her humiliation to Boyd, he steamed over to the base commander’s office. The base commander was not only the comptroller’s boss, but unbeknownst to everyone he was a friend of Boyd’s from the Nellis years. Boyd told the base commander what happened and said, “I want this taken care of.”

  The base commander called in the comptroller. “If there is no money in the account, find it, even if you have to pay it out of your own pocket,” he ordered. He ordered the comptroller to apologize to the technician in front of the same people who had been present when he criticized her.

  “I hosed that son of a bitch,” Boyd gloated to Christie.

  But the price of his victory would be high. Boyd made an enemy not only of the comptroller but of the comptroller’s friends. And there would be a day of reckoning.

  When the Air Force believes enough in an officer’s potential to admit him to the AFIT program, it is an acknowledgment both that the officer intends to make a career of the military and that the officer is a bit special. The officer’s first ER after AFIT should reflect this. But Boyd’s first ER at Eglin was mediocre. He had bounced around too many jobs. There was a vague reference to Boyd’s E-M work, though it was not called that. T
he rating officer said Boyd had “developed a qualitative-quantitative analysis in which energy considerations can be effectively applied to fighter tactics…” that “… for the first time will provide a valid basis for designing tactics against hostile fighters.”

  Generals rarely become involved in ERs of majors. But, luckily for Boyd, Brigadier General A.T. Culbertson added an indorsement that contradicted the rating. Boyd, Culbertson said, “represents the sort of productive, creative thinker that is so critically needed in this Command and the Air Force. I rate him as truly outstanding and worthy of rapid promotion.” As had happened again and again in Boyd’s career, his immediate supervisor gave him a poor or mediocre rating, one that signaled it was time to get out of the Air Force, and again and again a general officer rescued him.

  By the summer of 1963, when Boyd received his first ER at Eglin, the E-M charts were beginning to come together. At the same time the Air Force was pressing for a report that went beyond briefings, a comprehensive document that told all there was to tell about E-M. Christie wanted Boyd to prepare the report, but Boyd wanted to begin briefing.

  Boyd’s briefing charts were things of beauty, pieces of art, clean and elegant and simple; they had enough data to inform but not enough to overwhelm, and were creative in appearance but not so creative as to detract from the information being presented. As Boyd honed and refined the charts, he realized something was wrong. The people at Wright-Pat had not given him the correct data.

  He went back to the general who had helped him with the overtime problem and told him he was going up to Wright-Pat and straighten them out. “You might get a phone call,” he said.