Two things Young heard there inspired him. One was in a paper on helicopters delivered by Haviland H. Platt, a mechanical engineer, inventor of the first automatic transmission for cars, and yet another pioneer out to conquer the air. Young was struck by Platt’s theoretical solution to the confounding question of how to keep rotor blades stable in flight. Young thought Platt wrong, but the paper got him thinking. When Young returned to his workshop, Platt’s argument stirred him to come up with a device called a “stabilizer bar” that solved the problem. Young’s other eureka moment at the conference came when he saw a film there in which aircraft designer Igor Sikorsky proposed a solution to another gnawing dilemma: the fact that the torque, or twisting force, of the main rotor makes a helicopter’s fuselage want to rotate in the other direction. Sikorsky suggested adding a tail rotor, today standard on most single-rotor helicopters.
Young knew he had to take what Sikorsky said to heart. Igor Ivanovich Sikorsky was no starry-eyed dreamer but an aviation practitioner of the first order. Some aviation historians put him on a par with the Wright brothers. He is known as the father of the helicopter.
A Ukraine-born émigré from imperial Russia, where he had made a name for himself as a pilot and airplane designer, Sikorsky in 1938 headed a subsidiary of the aviation conglomerate United Aircraft in Stratford, Connecticut. His Sikorsky Aircraft division had specialized for years in building “flying boats,” which took off and landed on water. Flying boats had been popular as airliners for a time but now they were fading from the scene. Earlier in 1938, Sikorsky had learned that United planned to shut his division down. He persuaded top executives to let him put his team of engineers to work on a helicopter instead. Sikorsky had attempted a helicopter years ago in Russia but given up. Engines back then didn’t produce enough power per pound to lift themselves, a pilot, and an aircraft straight up into the air. Over the years, though, engines had improved and Sikorsky had continued to ponder how to make a helicopter work. Once United gave the go-ahead, it didn’t take him long to succeed.
Two weeks after Nazi Germany’s September 1, 1939, invasion of Poland ignited World War II, Sikorsky flew the first successful helicopter in the United States at Stratford, his VS-300. Nine months later, the Army began using Dorsey-Logan Act money to buy prototype helicopters rather than Autogiros. The second helicopter contract went to Sikorsky Aircraft. The Autogiro soon would be largely forgotten. The helicopter’s long and dubious gestation, however, was over. A new industry was being born. One of its fathers was Igor Sikorsky.
Another was Lawrence D. Bell, founder and namesake of the company Dick Spivey was representing when he took the Bell-Boeing tiltrotor bid to Washington in 1983. Larry Bell was a visionary, too, but he was neither inventor nor engineer. Bell was an airplane mechanic turned aviation executive who had a keen eye for the next big chance and a knack for public relations. Thickset and good-natured, Bell encouraged innovation at his company, which he had formed in 1935 in Buffalo, New York, to build fighter planes. Bell Aircraft not only produced thousands of P-39 Airacobra fighter planes during World War II, it also built America’s first jet fighter in those years, though the craft was experimental and never saw combat. After the war, Bell Aircraft built the X-1, the stubby-winged rocket plane that test pilot Chuck Yeager was flying on October 14, 1947, when he became the first human to break the sound barrier and live to tell about it.
Three months before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, bringing the United States into World War II, Larry Bell played a hunch. In 1938, Bell had been one of a group of industrialists sent on a tour of Germany by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to report back on Hitler’s capabilities. During the trip, Bell saw the Fw 61 helicopter with its side-by-side rotors. Now the U.S. Army was getting interested in helicopters and there was money to be made on them. When one of Bell’s engineers heard about Art Young, who by then was able to fly his remote-controlled model helicopter in and out the door of his Paoli barn, they invited Young up to Bell’s plant in Buffalo for a demonstration.
Young arrived, carrying his model helicopter in a suitcase, on September 3, 1941. He flew the model around inside a fighter plane hangar, impressing Bell’s engineers with how he could control it completely in flight and make the little helicopter hover. Two months later, Young signed a deal with Bell Aircraft. The company agreed to spend as much as $250,000 to build two full-size helicopters according to Young’s designs. In exchange, Young signed over to Bell various patents he had obtained over the years. Thanks to Larry Bell’s willingness to gamble on the esoteric inventor, Bell Aircraft was one of four companies in the world that sold helicopters in any volume during the 1940s.
* * *
The helicopter caught on slowly. “The matter of the actual military value of the helicopter was widely debated after 1938,” noted an Army Air Forces study written in 1946. “There was doubt in the minds of some AAF personnel as to whether this machine had any real combat value.” The Army Air Forces spent $45 million on helicopters during World War II, buying 151 from Sikorsky Aircraft and another 201 of Sikorsky’s design from another company. Helicopters flew in combat only nineteen times, however, being used only in the China-Burma-India Theater to rescue downed pilots or wounded soldiers. Still, the helicopter’s advent made imaginations soar in the aviation world. After all, if the helicopter could be made to work, why, just about anything must be possible, because people had been trying to build helicopters forever. The first attempt is thought to have been made by Leonardo da Vinci in the late fifteenth century. Now, at long last, the stubborn problem of vertical flight had been solved. The arrival of the helicopter kindled new, wider, and far stronger interest in convertiplanes for another reason as well. It quickly became apparent that helicopters had an Achilles heel: the aerodynamics of rotors dictated that they would never be able to fly very fast.
A rotor works well in a hover but creates all kinds of aerodynamic problems in forward flight. One of the most important is the fact that when a helicopter flies forward, the speed of each rotor blade compared to the relative wind varies dramatically, depending on whether the blade is moving toward the front or rear of the aircraft. A blade moving forward and into the relative wind, an “advancing blade,” creates far more lift than one moving backward and away from the relative wind, a “retreating blade.” The helicopter became possible only because inventors and engineers developed mechanisms to compensate for this, in part by changing the angle, or “pitch,” of the blades as they turn so that they meet the air at a higher angle during their retreating arc. The faster a helicopter goes, though, the higher the pitch on the retreating blade must be to produce as much lift as the advancing blade does. At a certain point, the task becomes impossible and the retreating blade stops producing lift. This “retreating blade stall” limits a helicopter’s top speed, usually to well less than 200 miles per hour. By the end of World War II, with jets zooming through the sky at hundreds of miles an hour but helicopters barely breaking 100, the dream of the convertiplane began to entice more than just starry-eyed inventors such as Gerard Herrick.
“Engineers are devoting increasing attention to the convertaplane, an aircraft combining the hovering and slow-landing features of the helicopter with the high-speed characteristics of the conventional airplane,” Aviation Week magazine reported in April 1948, borrowing Herrick’s spelling. “Such a combination of features offers interesting and attractive possibilities not only as a means of increasing the utility and safety of the passenger plane but as a military weapon. . . .” The NACA’s Aerodynamics Committee had studied the possibilities in 1947, the article noted, and “recommended, last November, further examination of the configuration.” In a brief survey of the six main ideas proposed so far, Aviation Week cited Herrick’s efforts. It noted that he was “continuing his work in New York.”
Herrick, now seventy-five years old, was indeed continuing his work, obsessed as ever and still flexible on how to spell his invention’s name. Among his pap
ers when he died was a typewritten “RECORD OF INVENTION” that begins: “At 2 A.M. on May 8, 1949, I Gerard P. Herrick conceived the mechanical arrangement for stopping the rotor on a convertible aircraft. . . .”
Burke Wilford, the gyroplane developer who had organized the 1938 Rotating Wing Aircraft Meeting, was now committed to the quest for the convertiplane himself. On December 9, 1949, he organized another conference in Philadelphia, this time at the posh Warwick Hotel at Seventeenth and Locust streets. Somewhat pompously, Wilford called the event the “First Convertible Aircraft Congress.” Co-sponsored by the Institute of the Aeronautical Sciences and the five-year-old American Helicopter Society, the gathering attracted 250 engineers and others eager to talk about convertiplanes. Herrick was among the speakers, of course. The organizers presented the old man with a plaque honoring him as the “father of convertible aircraft.” In a foreword to the published proceedings of the conference—written before detailed histories of Nazi Germany lent the phrase he used the jarring ring it has today—Wil-ford gushed that the convertiplane would be “the final solution of useful flight for humanity.”
The days when the quest for the dream machine would be led by such iconoclastic inventors and individual entrepreneurs as Herrick and Wilford, however, were ending. The newly emerging military-industrial complex was about to take it over.
CHAPTER TWO
THE SALESMAN
The north Texas sky was clear that Thursday in early spring but the air was already muggy around 9 a.m. when a Greyhound bus stopped in front of a one-story industrial building in Hurst, a suburb thirteen miles northeast of Fort Worth on Highway 10. A young man with square shoulders, a muscular swimmer’s neck, and short red hair stepped out into the dust wearing a new suit and shiny black leather shoes. As the bus pulled away, the youth walked through an open gate and knocked at the door of a small blockhouse. A guard stuck his head out. The visitor smiled and introduced himself politely in his Georgia drawl, then got some bad news. Yes, this was Bell Helicopter, but it wasn’t the main plant, where the Engineering Department was. “You need to be down the road a piece,” the guard told him. The main plant was a mile and a half away, over a big hill in the distance. And no, sorry, there wouldn’t be another bus for a couple of hours. The young man grimaced, thanked the guard and started walking. Great. First day on the job and I’m late already.
The date was April 2, 1959. Richard F. Spivey was eighteen years old.
Spivey liked to say later in life that he became an aeronautical engineer because his parents didn’t have enough money to pay his way through college, and that he ended up at Bell because he couldn’t spell. Born in Chicopee, Georgia, and raised in Marietta, where his father worked for the phone company, Spivey had entered the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta as a freshman the previous fall because he could pay his own way there. Georgia Tech let students earn tuition money and gain job experience by splitting their time between going to school and working for companies that were in its “co-op” program. Students would spend an academic quarter at school, then one at a company, alternating back and forth until their senior year. Georgia Tech didn’t have a co-op program for physics, which was what he wanted to study, but Spivey could co-op in aerospace engineering, which involved a lot of physics. One co-op opportunity was with a company at Cape Canaveral working on the space program. That sounded really cool, so Spivey signed up for that. But on the final exam in his first term English theme-writing course he misspelled three words, enough to fail him for the quarter. He had to repeat the course. The F disqualified him from co-oping next term anyway, so he stayed at school that winter. By spring term, he had requalified for the co-op program, but by then the Cape Canaveral job was taken. The alternative was Bell Helicopter.
Spivey was late when he reached the low-slung, yellow-brick building that housed Bell’s executives and engineers. To his relief, the engineering personnel director, Warren Jones, who met him in the lobby, seemed to take no notice of the new co-op’s tardiness, the perspiration on his brow, or the gritty dust on what had started the day as his carefully shined black shoes. He welcomed Spivey with a smile and handshake and began showing him around.
Spivey immediately liked the place. Indoors, what interested him most was the helicopter assembly line, a long sort of warehouse behind the administrative building. There, workers in dungarees and short sleeves were assembling aircraft against a cacophony of whining power tools and metallic clunks and clanks. Outdoors, on the west side of the factory, beyond two cinder-block and aluminum hangars with massive blue doors, was a long, concrete flight line. Out there, Jones explained, test pilots ran hours of ground checks on every new helicopter, sitting in the cockpit with the aircraft tethered to the ground for safety. Then they flew each one at least three hours before turning it over to its purchaser. Bell’s business was thriving, Spivey could see. Parked on the apron were various versions of those neat little piston-engine Model 47 helicopters, the kind with the glass bubble canopy featured in the current hit TV show Whirlybirds and the just-canceled Highway Patrol. A specially modified blue and white Model 47J had picked President Dwight D. Eisenhower up on the White House lawn in 1957 and taken him to Camp David, inaugurating the practice of presidents using helicopters for short trips. The same model helicopter would be featured years later in the opening credits of the TV show M*A*S*H. Spivey also saw a couple of HU-1As, a brand-new, turbine-engine helicopter that Bell was building for the Army, which had named it the “Iroquois.” Soldiers would dub it the “Huey,” a nickname that would stick even after the Army changed the aircraft’s designation to UH-1.
Spivey especially liked how friendly and casual almost everyone at Bell seemed. It wasn’t like Lockheed Aircraft’s factory in Marietta, where he had worked the previous summer after graduating from high school. Sure, the few dozen engineers among the 3,200 employees here wore neckties with their short-sleeve white shirts and pocket protectors, but no one acted stiff. The relaxed atmosphere had minuses as well as pluses, though. Everywhere Jones took him that day—the administration building, the steamy back hangar where Spivey would work for Bell’s flight test engineers that spring, the offices of Bell’s cocky test pilots—the personnel director introduced him as “Dick.” Spivey’s mother always called him Richard. His friends called him Rick. Spivey always respected his elders, though, and he was easygoing by nature. He felt it would be rude to contradict Mr. Jones. So he just let the personnel director call him “Dick,” and the nickname stuck. Spivey didn’t mind. He was just happy to be here—so happy, he forgot he’d loosened his tie and unbuttoned his collar on his rush to the main gate. No one seemed to mind, though, not even when Jones took him to meet the intellectually formidable, if generally genial, Bart Kelley, vice president for engineering.
Tall, rail-thin, and cerebral, Bartram Kelley had a master’s degree in physics from Harvard but had come to Bell in 1941 for ninety cents an hour as helicopter inventor Arthur Young’s right-hand man. They had been childhood friends in Pennsylvania, though Young was four years older than Kelley. They started Bell Aircraft’s helicopter operation in Gardenville, New York, near Buffalo, but in 1951 Larry Bell moved it to Fort Worth. Bell wanted to take advantage of the better flying weather, a friendlier tax climate, and the absence of strong labor unions. A violent strike by workers at his New York factory in 1949 had left Bell bitter. He also wanted to get the helicopter operation out from under the shadow of the company’s far larger fixed-wing projects. The fixed-wing engineers and administrators were good at elbowing the helicopter types aside when it came time to divvy up resources. Besides, with the Cold War under way, the Pentagon was encouraging defense companies to move away from the east and west coasts to make them harder for the Soviet Union to attack. Bell’s move was financed by a big contract to build a new antisubmarine warfare helicopter for the Navy. After the move, Bell Helicopter Corporation was formed as a wholly owned subsidiary of Bell Aircraft Corporation. By then, Art Young had gone back to h
is farm in Paoli to continue his philosophical and metaphysical investigations, but Kelley moved with Bell Helicopter to Texas. Aside from becoming the company’s top engineer there, he indulged his passion for playing oboe by helping found the Dallas Chamber Music Society.
Kelley scared the crap out of Spivey. The former prep school teacher wore wire-rimmed glasses and a dark mustache. He had a broad smile and he was generous with it, but he was also a stern taskmaster and a stickler for proper English. Kelley would mark grammatical or spelling errors in memos his engineers gave him with a red pencil and send them back for correction. Troy Gaffey, a Purdue University grad who retired in 2003 as senior vice president for engineering after thirty-eight years with Bell, never forgot how Kelley once brought a memo so marked up it looked like it was bleeding back to an Australian engineer the company had hired. He stood by the man’s desk, said “I can’t understand this,” then dropped it in a trash can and walked away. In the 1960s, after Spivey had graduated from Georgia Tech and returned to Bell as an engineer, his inept spelling often got him into trouble with Kelley. If Spivey found Kelley intimidating, though, he also looked up to him. Spivey tried to emulate the older man’s discipline of keeping a diary of his work in inch-thick, dusky brown “Computation Books” ordered from the Harvard/MIT Cooperative Society.
Another man Spivey would work for at Bell who scared him more than a little was yet another Pennsylvanian, Robert L. Lichten. A brainy, opinionated engineer with a dark complexion and often matching demeanor, Lichten was chief of flight technology. He was Bart Kelley’s deputy and heir apparent as chief engineer. He was also—at Bell—the father of the tiltrotor.
The Dream Machine Page 4