by Robert Coram
People in the Flight Dynamics Lab at Wright-Pat heard of Boyd’s work and were working day and night to disprove the E-M Theory. It was embarrassing in the extreme to have a fighter pilot from Eglin develop a theory that should have been developed there at WrightPat. The comptroller at Eglin was lying in wait; he knew that sooner or later Boyd would make a mistake that could not be shielded by a general. But now that the E-M report was circulating and its information had been backed up by flight tests, Boyd could not be held back. The Mad Major was ready to take on the U.S. Air Force.
Chapter Twelve
Pull the Wings off and Paint It Yellow
THE last half of 1964 and the first half of 1965 was a glorious time for Boyd.
It began when Boyd briefed a group of pilots from TAC headquarters. Because they were fighter pilots and because they were from TAC headquarters, he included for the first time data showing the superiority of Soviet aircraft. The pilots were stunned. Naturally they asked Boyd if he was sure of his facts. He told them about going back to Foreign Tech and reconfirming all the inputs, of reprogramming the computer, and of having an outsider check everything. “If it’s wrong, I can’t find where the mistakes are,” he said.
The headquarters people shook their heads in dismay. “Wait until Sweeney hears this,” one said. “He is going to come unglued.” Sweeney was General Walter Campbell Sweeney Jr., head of the Tactical Air Command.
One Thursday in the fall of 1964, Boyd received a phone call from a colonel serving on General Sweeney’s staff. “The general has heard of your briefing,” the colonel said. “I believe you call it energy-maneuverability. He would like you to deliver the brief Monday at o-eight-hundred in his office at Langley.”
“Yes, Sir,” Boyd said.
The colonel hung up before Boyd could ask any of the questions swirling through his mind, the most important being: “How much time do I have?” The E-M brief, depending on the number of questions asked, could last three or four hours. Would Sweeney block out that much time? Who else would be in the room? Did Sweeney simply want information or was this to be a decision briefing?
Whatever the answers, Boyd was elated. Sweeney “owned” every fighter aircraft in the Tactical Air Command. If Boyd could show how Sweeney’s fighters compared with Soviet aircraft, and if Sweeney accepted the briefing, not only would E-M become part of Air Force doctrine, but the Air Force would have a powerful argument in convincing Congress to fund its proposed new fighter.
Four-star generals rarely receive briefings from someone as far down the food chain as a major. It was presumptuous enough for a major to come up with a radical new theory that caused so much talk, but now he was stepping into the office of one of the most powerful generals in the Air Force. This would be the most important briefing of Boyd’s life. Sweeney would be accompanied by his retinue—bright people all, most of whom would consider it their bounden duty to disprove this new E-M Theory.
Boyd had one unsettling thought: at Eglin he was under the ultimate command of General Bernard Schriever, head of the Air Force Systems Command, who had not yet been briefed on E-M. To brief the four-star who headed another command before briefing the four-star who headed his own command was a serious breach of military protocol. Not only that, but Sweeney would call Schriever and want to know why the hell he was giving TAC inferior airplanes.
Unfortunately, Schriever was out of the country, but at Boyd’s request his deputy called Sweeney and postponed Boyd’s briefing. Then Boyd delivered his brief to Schriever’s top people, all of whom demanded the information be checked and confirmed. Even after Boyd told them of the laborious process he had gone through, one of the officers left the briefing, called Foreign Tech, and was told Boyd’s data were correct. The briefing quickly became acrimonious, and Boyd was the target.
“You are trying to say we do not know what we are doing,” said an angry colonel. “You are telling us we are buying the wrong airplanes when we have the best minds in the Air Force on this.” Across the room a general was going through a book that listed Eglin research projects. “I am missing something here,” the general says. “Where in the hell is this energy-maneuverability project? Did you list it under another name?”
“It’s not in there,” Boyd says.
“I just heard you talk about the resources to make this thing go. There is no way you can get those resources in the computer without having a project.”
“I can steal computer time on any computer in this command and you would never know it,” Boyd said.
“Are you telling me you stole the computer time?”
“I am being honest with you.”
The general locked eyes with Boyd and barked, “Everybody out but Boyd.”
“If you are wrong,” the general told Boyd, “we are going to court-martial you.” In the end no one could find any mistakes in Boyd’s briefing, and he was cleared to brief General Sweeney.
Now the resources of TAC were his to command. He flew to Nellis to gather more information and pick out additional slides for the briefing. Nothing but the best for General Sweeney.
“You’re going with me,” he told Raspberry. “You flip the charts and advance the slides while I do the brief.” The two men sorted through and rearranged a stack of slides Raspberry estimated to be more than a foot tall. Boyd worried over every selection, worried that the slides and graphs could be of better quality. Finally the two men gathered all the briefing equipment, climbed into an F-100F, and flew across country to Langley AFB in Virginia. They arrived late in the afternoon.
A young major, the aide to General Sweeney, met them on the ramp. “I hope you are prepared for a full brief before General Sweeney and his staff,” the aide said.
Technically speaking a briefing is a briefing. There is no distinction between a brief and a full brief. Nevertheless, the phrase “full brief” gives pause. It implies a more serious briefing, greater formality, all the unwritten briefing rules peculiar to each commander, and—most of all—an uninhibited salvo of questions. A full brief can be bloody. If it goes wrong it can wreck a career.
“How much time do we have?” Boyd asked.
“Twenty minutes.”
Boyd grimaced. “Twenty minutes? That’s not enough time to—”
“Twenty minutes.” The aide handed a set of car keys to Boyd and pointed to a blue Cadillac Coupe deVille gleaming in the afternoon sun. “My car. Use it tonight. Go out and get a good meal. I’ll see you at o-eight-hundred tomorrow.”
“Good meal” sounded too much like “last meal” to Boyd and Raspberry. They checked into the visiting officers’ quarters, ate quickly, then came back and practiced the brief far into the night. Razz threw questions at Boyd, the questions Sweeney’s staff was most likely to ask.
If told to shorten a four-hour briefing to twenty minutes, most officers would simply condense the briefing. Not Boyd. He would start at the beginning and proceed as if he had all the time he needed. By a few minutes after seven the next morning, Boyd and Razz were in the briefing room down the hall from the big corner office that is the lair of the TAC commander. Boyd tested the projector, adjusted the screen, chewed on his hand, made sure the slides and charts were in the proper order, moved the lectern a quarter inch, slid the pointer a half-inch down its rack, and chewed on his hand some more. He paced, practicing the brief in his head.
By 7:45 A.M. most of General Sweeney’s staff was seated. A colonel noticed Boyd was not wearing the lapel microphone placed atop the lectern.
“Major, the microphone is for your use,” he said.
“I don’t need a microphone,” Boyd said.
“Our rules are that briefers wear the microphone.”
“Yes, Sir.” Boyd clamped on the microphone.
At precisely 8:00 A.M. the general and his aide entered.
“You may begin, Major Boyd,” the general said.
And the Plum was off and running—smooth, easy, confident, and professional. He had to turn down the volume on the
microphone several times. Sweeney was attentive. But the briefing clearly pained him. He was agitated, shifting in his chair and grimacing.
At 8:20 Razz gave Boyd a signal. Boyd stopped, said, “Thank you, General. Unless you have questions, that will be all.”
“Where do you think you’re going?” asked Sweeney.
“Sir, your aide said we had twenty minutes. We’ve used up our time.”
“Continue the brief.”
“Yes, Sir.”
Sweeney turned to his aide. “Cancel my appointments for today.” He glared at Boyd. “What you’re saying can’t be right.”
“I believe it to be correct, sir.”
“Who else have you briefed on this? What was their reaction?”
Boyd told Sweeney whom he had briefed and said their reaction was “the same as yours, General.”
Sweeney turned to one of his staff members and said, “Get my intelligence guy on this. And call those people in Foreign Tech and make sure these numbers are right.”
A few minutes later Sweeney’s intelligence specialist returned and said, “They have a copy of Major Boyd’s brief, Sir. They say his data is correct.”
“How many airplanes did you run this on?” Sweeney asked.
“All of them, Sir. I’ve just shown you the interesting ones so far. But I’ll be glad to run them all for you.”
“Continue.”
And continue he did. All that day Boyd briefed Sweeney. He whispered, he cajoled, he confided. He could not smoke while briefing a four-star but he could roam the stage and wave his arms and raise his voice. As the day wore on, he grew cocky. This was the brief that would change the Air Force. When Boyd was at his best—and he was at the top of his form that day—he was one of the best briefers in the Air Force. The Plum was in full bay.
During breaks, aides rushed in and out and the general delivered orders. And the briefing resumed. The questions grew tougher and more frequent, but Boyd answered them all courteously, completely, and confidently. General Sweeney followed each exchange and occasionally nodded.
The office of a four-star general is not unlike the court of a pasha, replete with all the trappings of high rank as well as intrigue and constant jockeying for favor. The general controls the careers and lives of those on his staff. For an outsider to seize a day of the general’s time and to have the general’s undivided attention is seen by some on his staff as a threat. Several members of Sweeney’s staff began to ask questions designed to embarrass Boyd, to throw off his timing, to reveal how shallow this new theory was.
That was fine with Boyd. He looked on the questions as if they were bullets fired during an air-to-air engagement. Before more than a few words were out of a man’s mouth, Boyd knew where a question was going, and he knew how to respond. Like any fighter pilot he turned into the fight, confronting every question head-on. And because he knew his material better than any other person in the room, no one touched him.
Sweeney sat impassively through it all. In such a situation, generals imagine underlings as gladiators in a pit. The gladiators are encouraged to do battle. The last man standing, the man to crawl over the edge of the pit and emerge victorious, is the general’s favorite. Sweeney must have hoped someone on his staff could leave Boyd in the pit. He did not want to know his warplanes were inferior to those of the Soviet Union. The animosity toward Boyd reached its climax late in the afternoon when the most hostile interrogator, a colonel who wore no silver wings over his left breast pocket, a colonel aching to exchange the eagle on his shoulder for a star, suddenly interrupted Boyd and said, “All of this work, this so-called theory of yours, has been done before.” He paused. Everyone in the room turned to look at him. “And it has all been proven wrong.”
Sweeney nodded. His best gladiator was in the pit.
Boyd expected something like this from a nonrated staff puke and he was ready. He smiled. “Colonel, show me the source document that says this has been done before.”
Boyd saw the colonel not as a gladiator but as an angry bull. His demand that the colonel reveal the source document was what Boyd called a “cape job,” beckoning the colonel to charge ahead with his proof. Boyd had dealt with this criticism for months and knew there was only one possible name the colonel might raise.
“It was done at Edwards and disproved.” The colonel spoke with great authority.
Again Boyd waved the cape. “Colonel, do you have the source document?”
For a moment the room was quiet. Sweeney looked at a two-star sitting near him, a general who had recently transferred to his staff after a lengthy assignment at Edwards. The general smoothed the crease in his pants and said, “Sir, if it had been done at Edwards I would have known about it.” He looked at Sweeney. “This work is new to me.”
The colonel was wounded and the others sensed it. One extended what was apparently a helping hand. “Do you have the name of the person at Edwards who did the work?”
Boyd flicked the cape. “Perhaps there is someone, Sir. If you’ll give me his name and show me that he did this work, I’ll walk away from this project today.”
Boyd was doing more than saying he would walk away from E-M; he was laying his career on the line. If the colonel came up with a name, Sweeney could, with one phone call, drive Boyd out of the Air Force.
“Rutowski,” the colonel said.
“Hmmmm,” Boyd said, bending his head as if in deep thought. “In the index of my briefing I refer to a 1954 article by E. S. Rutowski entitled ‘Energy Approach to the General Aircraft Performance Problem.’ Is that the same Rutowski?”
The colonel charged ahead. “It is.”
“He developed what we know as the ‘Rutowski Curve,’ which, if I understand it, is an optimization theory about the quickest way to reach an assigned altitude. The airlines find that information useful but I don’t believe it has anything to do with fighter aircraft, with pulling Gs, with maneuvering against an opponent.” Boyd paused. “If I’ve overlooked something, Colonel, I’d be glad to hear about it.”
The colonel had charged over the cliff and was in free fall. Many superior officers were to experience the same thing in coming years.
After that the questions were less adversarial. Boyd had proved he was not intimidated by rank and he knew his subject. No one else wanted to meet the same fate as the colonel. The questions shifted and were now asked in the spirit of understanding or for clarification. Late in the afternoon, Sweeney stood, signaling the briefing had ended. He looked at Boyd. “Major, I want you back here at o-eight-hundred tomorrow.”
“Yes, Sir.”
The colonel who said Boyd’s work had been done earlier was not in the briefing room the next morning. The other officers were almost cordial. Boyd knew from the look on the face of the general that he had prevailed. He had won over the head of TAC.
The briefing was winding down, but Sweeney had one more question. “Major, yesterday you said you had run the numbers on all U.S. aircraft. But nowhere did you mention the F-111. Did your research cover that aircraft? If so, what conclusions did you draw?”
Boyd clicked the slide projector. His final slide was an E-M diagram of the F-111. Boyd did not speak. The general and his staff had seen enough E-M diagrams in the past two days to grasp the implications of the F-111 display. Even so, they studied the solid-red slide and then looked at Boyd in disbelief.
Boyd gave them the numbers that showed how at any altitude, any speed, any G-load, any part of the flight-performance envelope, the F-111 was inferior to the Soviet threat. If the F-111 faced a MiG, it would be shot down. Period. End of story. The F-111 was, in the traditional phrase of fighter pilots, a dog.
The general thought for a moment. Maybe there was something the charts did not reveal, something he could salvage. “Major, based on your extensive research, do you have any recommendations regarding this aircraft?”
Boyd did not miss a beat. “General, I’d pull the wings off, install benches in the bomb bay, paint the goddamn t
hing yellow, and turn it into a high-speed line taxi.”
Sweeney’s acceptance of Boyd’s briefing meant E-M had the imprimatur of the Air Force high command. In the coming months Boyd briefed a series of four-stars, the USAF Scientific Advisory Board, and the secretary of the Air Force. When he briefed the Air Force Science and Engineering Symposium, a convocation that lasted almost a week and included dozens of the best briefers in the Air Force, he was given the award for having the best presentation. Boyd even briefed the president’s Scientific Advisory Board, the most respected and one of the most influential groups of scientists in America. It was an extraordinary streak of high-level briefings for anyone; for a major it was unprecedented.
Boyd was a model of decorum during these briefings. The Air Force chief of staff sent down an order that he not include the F-111 slide in any of the briefings and that he particularly leave out the comment about turning it into a line taxi. Boyd complied, and with Christie’s calming influence, his briefings became slightly more decorous.
The briefing to the president’s Scientific Advisory Board is noteworthy in several respects, the most obvious being that there is no higher body to which a technical brief can be presented. Nevertheless, Boyd embroidered the event in a way that perhaps reveals his deep insecurities. He wanted people to think he hosed one of America’s preeminent scientists.
It began when one of the scientists took a long look at the basic E-M diagram and saw what appeared to be an anomaly. On a standard day the temperature at sea level is fifty-nine degrees Fahrenheit and the speed of sound is 1,117 feet per second. For each 1,000-foot increase in altitude, temperature decreases at three point five degrees and speed of sound decreases at about four feet per second, until the tropopause at about 36,000 feet. At this altitude the temperature is minus sixty-eight degrees and the speed of sound is 971 feet per second. Upward from the tropopause, these values remain constant until about one hundred twenty-three thousand feet. At the point where the values stop changing and become constant, there is a bump in the E-M diagrams. The bump is called the “tropospheric discontinuity” and is well known among scientists.