by Robert Coram
The general looked at Boyd and shook his head. “Try to be diplomatic, John.”
But Boyd rarely was diplomatic. And when he arrived at WrightPat, his arm waving and profanity and accusations of incompetence quickly broke up the meeting. The colonel who chaired the meeting stalked off in a huff to call Boyd’s superiors at Eglin.
The colonel did not get a sympathetic ear. The general told him to give Boyd the correct data or he—the Eglin general—would call the general who commanded the Flight Dynamics Lab and ask why he was not getting any cooperation. After all, they were all in the same Air Force.
The colonel knew not to give reason to one general to call another and complain. The fraternity of generals is tight and closed. A colonel who wants to be promoted does not fare well by confronting a general.
Boyd got the data, and this time it was correct. He also created another enemy in the colonel at Wright-Pat.
Boyd flew his T-33 back to Eglin. As he approached, he heard a B-52 pilot talking to the control tower. Fighter pilots called the B-52 the “BUFF”—big ugly fat fucker. Boyd knew the BUFF pilot was returning from a lengthy mission and that the crew was doubtless exhausted. He decided to show the B-52 pilot what to expect in a real shooting war. He swung wide, eased forward on the stick, and lined up on the nose of the huge bomber—it was the size of a barn door—then pushed the throttle forward.
The B-52 pilot was cleared for the final approach. He knew his aircraft could be seen for miles and probably was thinking of landing, plodding through the debrief, and having a good meal and ten or twelve hours of blessed sleep. What he got was a window filled with a T-33 and a fiendish voice on the radio shouting, “Guns, guns, guns!” and the blur of the T-33 rolling inverted and passing under him so closely he could count rivets on the belly. Then a raucous cackle on the radio and a triumphant voice saying, “I hosed you.”
A man driving a B-52 loaded with enough nuclear bombs to destroy several large cities has to be a cool customer. But a B-52 pilot also knows how dangerous a head-on pass is. There is no room for error. The slightest miscalculation in judgment and there is a collision that scatters the remains of two aircraft and their crews over a wide section of countryside. The BUFF crew erupted into near panic as the pilot got on the radio and complained to the tower. Then the B-52 pilot began shouting at Boyd and telling him he would be reported for this safety violation.
Boyd circled around and pulled into the B-52’s ten-o’clock position about a half-mile away, while the B-52 driver continued to bluster and complain and threaten. Boyd decided the SAC pilot had an obstruction. He needed to realize he had just lost a battle with the best fighter pilot in the Air Force and that it was no accident. Boyd kicked in right rudder and pulled hard on the stick, racking the T-33 into a slashing high-G turn toward the B-52. “Guns, guns, guns!” he brayed over the radio as he zoomed across the cockpit. The B-52 crew involuntarily ducked and then they heard that cackling, nerve-jangling laughter.
When the B-52 pilot landed, he was so spiked with anger that he forgot his fatigue. He registered a complaint against the T-33 pilot and was backed up by the crew in the control tower. The guys in the control tower rather liked the little air show, but they had to report what they had seen.
Boyd was grounded.
But he knew that the BUFF driver had a new and altogether different understanding of the hell, death, and destruction that could be wreaked by a fighter pilot. And for that, it was worth it.
A military briefing is a slow, antiquated, and terribly inefficient way to present information. Nevertheless, it is an art form upon which an officer’s career can rise or fall. Many men have risen to high rank on their ability to, as the military says, “give a good brief.” A certain charm school manner surrounds a good briefer. He almost always is junior in rank to those being briefed, but not too junior. Generals, for instance, usually are briefed by a lower-ranking general or by a full colonel. A brief is wrapped in unwritten rules. The briefer has a pointer, which he should not use too often. He stands on a stage but should not move about too much. He has a lectern upon which he should not lean. He has slides or charts but is expected to know the material far beyond what is displayed. He tells the higher-ranking officers what he is going to tell them, then he tells them, then he tells them what he has told them, and finally, if he hasn’t been ripped to shreds by adversarial questions, he closes. One of the most rigid of the unwritten rules is that the briefer be prepared to answer every question quickly and confidently. A man who cannot answer a question asked by a superior officer has a mental picture of his career going down in flames. It is obvious that most people can read and assimilate information faster than they can learn something by listening to a dog and pony show. But the U.S. military culture is an oral culture and the bedrock of that culture is the briefing. Many very smart officers learn most of what they know through briefings. But no matter the type of briefing, the briefer rarely presents information that contradicts the beliefs or the position of the person being briefed.
With his new information from Wright-Pat and with his elegant briefing charts, Boyd put together two E-M briefs—one for Air Force officers and one for defense contractors. Dazzling is the only way to describe the briefs. Boyd’s years as an instructor at the FWS gave him unusual confidence as a speaker. With the exception of Tom Christie, he knew the material better than any other person. When he delivered an E-M brief, he was spreading the gospel. His voice began very low and controlled as his eyes roamed over every person being briefed. He had an actor’s ability to know when he had seized their interest, and once that happened he let loose the full repertoire of his oratorical gifts. His voice ranged from conversational to bombastic. When he made a point, he jutted his chin, paused, and stared. For a man who could be crude and coarse among his friends, he could, when giving a brief, be as smooth and professional as any officer in the Air Force. He spoke with fire and enthusiasm; he even spoke over the heads of those he was briefing. But he had such far-ranging knowledge of the new and fascinating subject that he could do this without antagonizing those in the audience. Serious questions he entertained in a serious manner. The truth is that no one knew enough about E-M to go head-to-head with Boyd, but it is the nature of the military that some tried. Boyd loved hostile questions. He treated hostile questioners as if they were pilots who had just bounced him over the Green Spot. He reverted to Forty-Second Boyd and began running up the score. Later he would sidle up to Christie and say, “Did you see that, Tiger? I carved him a new asshole.”
Christie had great admiration for Boyd’s briefing technique, except for one thing: Boyd roamed the stage and bounced on his toes and waved his arms about with such passion that he reminded Christie of a ballet dancer. “Stand still, John,” he said again and again. But Boyd could not. Christie began calling him the “Sugarplum Fairy,” a nickname soon shortened to the “Plum,” which is how Boyd was thereafter known to his friends at Eglin.
Pilots from throughout the Air Force passed through Eglin on temporary duty. Boyd hunted them down and briefed every one he could pack into a room. He went to Nellis and briefed. He even briefed Chuck Yeager.
As more people listened, more began to sense that Boyd’s E-M Theory was a new way of thinking about aviation. In the past, when pilots thought of maneuvering, they thought strictly in terms of airspeed. Good pilots intuitively understood energy, though they could not articulate it. In World War II, for instance, they knew never to get into a turning fight with a Japanese Zero; in Korea, never turn with a MiG. Now, thanks to E-M, they could look at a chart and know at what altitude they could best fight. They knew how many Gs they could pull at a given altitude and still maintain not airspeed but excess energy. And they sensed that if Boyd was right, he had developed a theory that would change aviation.
As word continued to spread about this new Energy-Maneuverability Theory, the rank of those wanting to hear the brief increased. Now majors and lieutenant colonels and colonels asked for a session.
If a superior officer congratulated Boyd on his brief, Boyd’s response was always the same: “Sir, I do my homework.”
Boyd had regained his flying status and often flew a T-33 to Nellis, where his former student Everett Raspberry had developed a new maneuver to emerge victorious in a canopy-to-canopy vertical rolling scissors. It was called the “Raspberry Roll” and used what Boyd had taught about slow-speed control of the aircraft. Raspberry began flying E-M profiles for Boyd, proving in the air what the E-M charts said was the performance of various aircraft, and he often assisted Boyd in the E-M briefings, handling the projector and flipping charts while the Plum roamed the stage.
Boyd and Christie began making trips all around the country to brief defense contractors. Heretofore, a fighter aircraft had been the result of a point design: that is, a group of generals got together and decided they wanted an aircraft that would do, say, 400 knots at 30,000 feet and have a combat radius of 500 miles. E-M changed that. Boyd told the defense contractors, “One day soon, the Air Force will come to you and say that in this airplane when we pull four Gs at twenty thousand feet, we want this excess energy rate. Or the Air Force will tell you we want to have a sustained five-G capability up to thirty-five thousand feet. Or if we are doing point nine Mach at ten thousand feet, we want enough excess power to climb at five hundred feet per second.”
It was a revolutionary, not evolutionary, way to design aircraft. But defense contractors, especially those interested in the F-X—the new fighter aircraft the Air Force was talking about building—saw the simplicity of E-M and knew that what Boyd said was true. To help them reach that conclusion, Boyd and Christie told the defense executives about the computer program they had developed to fold E-M into the design process and even gave them copies of the program. The executives could also come to Eglin and use the computer there. And when modifications were added, they could have those modifications. Defense contractors adapted E-M with such alacrity that Boyd and Christie had a never-ending stream of them pouring into Eglin.
Air Force generals who worshiped at the shrine of high technology believed if an American pilot saw a blip on his radar, he pressed a button, launched a missile, and the blip disappeared. Poof! It was that simple. Push-button warfare was the thing of the future, and the probability of kill (Pk) was near 100 percent. Boyd and Christie used E-M data to run computer simulations and discovered that the reality was far different. Performance of U.S. missiles was nowhere near what it was advertised to be, and Boyd and Christie became the first two men in the defense industry to talk about the limitations of missiles. When Boyd briefed fighter pilots, he taught techniques to defeat enemy missiles and to raise the Pk of U.S. missiles. And he told the pilots the best way to defeat surface-to-air missiles as well.
As Boyd probed deeper into the comparisons between American and Soviet aircraft, he began to notice a disturbing trend in the chart overlays. Blue was good and red was bad and there was entirely too much red in many of the charts. This meant that in a big part of the performance envelope, Soviet aircraft were superior to U.S. aircraft. This could not be true. U.S. fighter aircraft were the best in the world. If Boyd briefed this—if he showed, for instance, that the F-4 Phantom was too heavy and did not have enough wing to win a turning fight with a MiG-21 at high altitude—and he was wrong, it would be the end of E-M. If he said, as the E-M charts showed, that the only place for an F-4 to successfully fight the MiG-21 was at low altitude and high speed, he had better be right. And the F-111 chart was one that would cause serious heartburn to any general who saw it—the chart was solid red: Soviet aircraft could defeat the F-111 at any altitude, at any airspeed, in any part of the flight envelope.
Boyd and Christie went over the calculations again and again and the numbers came out the same. Perhaps the data from Foreign Tech was wrong. U.S. aircraft could not be inferior to Soviet aircraft in so many areas. Boyd returned to Wright-Pat and went over the data with intelligence specialists. A few corrections were made, but Soviet aircraft were still superior.
“If I brief this and someone calls you to check it out, will you stand by this data?” Boyd asked.
“Of course,” the officer said.
Boyd and Christie rewrote the computer program at Eglin and recomputed the data. Still the Soviet aircraft were superior. They brought in an outsider, a mathematician who had no connection to E-M, and said, “Find where we made mistakes.” The outsider crunched the numbers, checked them, recrunched them, and announced he could find no mistakes.
Now the E-M Theory had ecclesiastical weight.
Boyd was too busy tuning the brief to work on the official energy-maneuverability report the Air Force wanted, so Christie did almost all the writing. Boyd asked that Christie make sure to give credit to three articles he used in his research. The first was published in 1954 by E. S. Rutowski and was titled “Energy Approach to the General Aircraft Performance Problem.” The article expounded an optimization theory about the quickest way for an aircraft to climb to a given altitude. It had nothing to do with the maneuverability of an aircraft, with combat flying, or with the design of an aircraft. The second article was written by H. J. Kelley and published in the October 1960 issue of the Journal of American Rocket Society and titled “Gradient Theory of Optimal Flight Paths.” It was, in essence, a mathematical way to find the most effective flight paths. The third article was a Raytheon study by A. E. Bryson and W. F. Denham titled “Steepest Ascent Method,” which explained a method to optimize aircraft performance. In the “secret” E-M report published in May 1964, all three of these reports are cited.
Boyd’s second ER at Eglin is dated September 7, 1964, and is nothing short of phenomenal. This is one of the few times in Air Force history, perhaps the only time, when an officer has created a radical new theory and then been told his job was to develop that theory. Under “Recommended Improvement Areas,” the rating officer calls for “improvement of his manners and skills in human relations. He often shows open disdain for persons who have not gained his respect professionally.” But the rating officer ends by saying of Boyd: “He is the most dedicated officer that I have known.”
Boyd no longer was a maintenance officer. He did as he had said; he had worked himself out of every job except developing E-M.
In early 1965, shortly before the Air Force began the longest bombing campaign in its history, Boyd went to Vietnam and briefed F-105 pilots, telling them if a MiG got on their tail and they could not outrun it, they should dump energy immediately by flat-plating the bird. F-105 pilots were highly skeptical. The Thud—the pilots’ name for the F-105—was not a bird that took kindly to such maneuvers.
Boyd returned through Europe, where he briefed E-M to a group of wing commanders. Boyd said the outstanding safety records of the European wings showed they were not training hard enough; they were not preparing pilots for combat.
But safety was becoming paramount in the Air Force. A commander was more concerned with maintaining a good safety record than with improving the air-to-air skills of fighter pilots. Few commanders wanted to risk their careers over a little rat-racing. Dogfighting was becoming an arcane and almost lost art in the Air Force.
The effectiveness tests conducted by Boyd proved to be the last step before he began briefing top generals on E-M. The tests were flown by a group of young pilots, several of whom would go on to extraordinary achievements. Tom McInerney was the primary pilot. He eventually became a three-star general. Douglas “Pete” Peterson, later to be shot down in Vietnam and still later to return to Vietnam as America’s ambassador, also flew E-M profiles. Perhaps the most colorful member of the group was Bobby Kan, a Korean who signed documents as “WGOFP”—World’s Greatest Oriental Fighter Pilot. Kan was shot down in Vietnam, and when the rescue helicopter came to pick him up, the crew saw his Asian features and thought a North Vietnamese was trying to get aboard. The helicopter quickly departed. Kan released such a stream of creative profanity over the radio that the helicopter crew knew the man o
n the ground had to be an American and returned to pick him up.
McInerney had heard a great deal about Boyd when he arrived at Eglin. Boyd took McInerney to his office, showed him stacks and stacks of mathematical computations, laughed and said he had stolen hundreds of hours of computer time to prepare the charts. He then told McInerney in great detail how the tests would be flown. The purpose of each flight was to verify Boyd’s theoretical computations, to see if an airplane would do in flight what the E-M charts said it would do.
Each day at 6:00 A.M. one of the pilots took off from Eglin in an F-100, F-105, or F-4 and flew over the Gulf of Mexico to the “start box.” A computer was bolted to the rear seat. Each mission had a precise profile. If the pilot were flying an F-4, he would climb to about thirty thousand feet (the exact altitude depended on the temperature), light the afterburner, point the nose down at a certain pitch angle (usually about five degrees), and descend until he was indicating six hundred knots. This usually happened at about twenty-six thousand feet. Then he pulled the nose up to about fifteen degrees and held it until he was indicating Mach 2.
Boyd called the slight dive followed by a climb the “dipsy doodle.” It was derived by Boyd and Christie’s computer-optimized flight paths and was the quickest way for an F-4 to reach Mach 2. After the pilot reached Mach 2, he came out of burner, noted his fuel weights, and did another dipsy doodle. Another mission was to verify the optimum airspeed and G-load necessary to sustain a 360-degree turn. Every maneuver, every variation, was laid out in careful mission profiles. Boyd had worked on this for several years and knew exactly what needed to be done.
When the pilots landed, Boyd was waiting. A van that served as the flight-line taxi stood nearby, engine idling. Boyd took the data from the computers, jumped into the line taxi, and raced across the base to have the information compared to E-M charts. With the exception of inaccurate performance data from Wright-Pat and small errors induced by variations in aircraft performance, every mission proved almost exactly what the E-M charts predicted. (Years later, when he was ambassador to Vietnam, Douglas Peterson said the pilots who flew E-M profiles for Boyd knew from the beginning this was not another busy-work project of the Air Force. He said everyone involved “sensed that this was breakthrough work that would ultimately impact on aircraft design and, as we saw immediately, on air-combat tactics.”)