As a $1.78 an hour co-op student, Spivey wouldn’t get to work on the XV-3 directly that first spring at Bell, but like many budding and fully grown engineers, he was fascinated by almost any new technology and open to new ideas. Spivey crawled all over the XV-3 anytime he could find a pilot or engineer working on the thing to show him something. Otherwise, the closest he got to the novelty was when he got assigned to do “data reduction” on some of its flight tests. That meant plotting the flight-induced strains on the XV-3’s major wood and metal parts, which would be fitted with “strain gauges”—small electric wires—to measure stress. Strain gauges “look like a lightbulb filament,” Spivey explained. “They glue them to the surface, and then if you put a load on it, the surface bends very slightly. That changes the resistance in the wires and you measure that to make sure the aircraft is not getting close to something failing.” Today, the data from strain gauges is fed into computers. Back then, the gauges were hooked up to an oscillograph, a machine that recorded data in squiggly lines on a moving roll of graph paper, something like an electrocardiograph did before the digital age. Bell had just bought a new automatic oscillograph reader that spring whose purpose was to transfer that data to punch cards so it could be plotted by another machine. The new device intimidated some of the old-timers, so they put Spivey to work learning how to use the thing, much as a parent today might ask a teenager to get a new computer running. Mostly, though, the new co-op ran errands on a bicycle from one part of the sprawling facility to another. He got to know the place pretty well.
The XV-3 left Fort Worth that summer. Bell shipped it out to NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, about forty miles southeast of San Francisco, for three months of flight-testing. But the tiltrotor stuck in young Spivey’s mind. He saw it and examined it again from time to time during his co-op quarters at Bell, studying every aspect of it. When he took his first aerodynamics course at Georgia Tech during his junior year, Spivey gave the first of probably two thousand or more tiltrotor briefings he would deliver over the next forty years. This was a class assignment. Everyone had to come up with some sort of briefing to give the class, a way of honing one of the key skills an aerospace engineer needs: the ability to explain a design to others and argue for it. “The premise was that the class didn’t want to build a tiltrotor, they wanted to build a regular helicopter, and I built a briefing to convince them to build a tiltrotor,” Spivey recalled. “I don’t know that I convinced anybody, but I came up with the reasons why it was a good idea. I compared the helicopter with the tiltrotor, and I think I got a pretty good grade.”
* * *
Spivey became infatuated a second time that summer. Her name was Janis Lee Glanzer. She was a year younger than he—to the day—and a sophomore at Texas Christian University. They met at a lakeside picnic for college singles organized by a Sunday school class at the First United Methodist Church, which Spivey had started attending partly as a way to meet people his age. There weren’t any at Bell. The church was just around the corner from a boardinghouse he’d moved into after a week or so at the YMCA. Things started clicking between Spivey and Jan almost as soon as he introduced himself at the picnic. Soon they were doubledating a lot with another couple, Spivey’s friend from First United, Howard Schenck (who pronounced his name “Skenk”), and his girlfriend. The two couples went to restaurants in Fort Worth’s touristy Stockyards area, they saw movies, they went dancing, and as often as Spivey and Schenck could talk the girls into it, they went to the lake.
Howard was a good mechanic. He had put a Corvette car engine into a 14-foot runabout boat he owned and he and Spivey both loved to water-ski behind it. Howard’s boat was so fast it was a little scary— it would beat you half to death as it bounced over the water—but they loved to take it out on Eagle Mountain Lake, a big body of water northwest of Fort Worth. One year, Spivey brought back from Georgia a primitive hang glider he had built out of bamboo poles, a piece of rayon cloth for a sail, a wooden, trapeze-style seat, and a handlebar to shift your center of gravity. He based it on a NASA design for space capsule recovery he’d read about. He and Schenck tied the glider to Howard’s boat with a ski rope and rode it all around Eagle Mountain Lake. The rider would get airborne by sitting on the seat and skiing behind the boat until the glider took off. Usually, whoever was flying just trailed along thirty or forty feet high behind the boat and came down for a gentle landing on his skis as the boat slowed, but one day Spivey had an idea. He had just finished a course at Georgia Tech that led him to believe he could really fly his glider, so he rigged it with a car seat belt buckle to release the ski rope. Howard gunned his boat down the lake and Spivey kicked off his skis as he got airborne. He let the glider soar far higher than usual—which he later thought was stupid—then released it from the boat. When he did, the glider nosed over and dove toward the water at a speed Spivey was sure would kill him when it hit. He desperately tried to shift his weight back to move the center of gravity and come out of the dive. He succeeded just in time, buzzing the boat at what must have been 55 or 60 miles an hour. Somehow he managed to land in the water, uninjured but scared to death. It was a stark reminder of something he was already learning at Bell: experimental aircraft can be dangerous.
* * *
Spivey and Jan Glanzer married on August 22, 1964, a couple of months after he graduated from Georgia Tech, at her parents’ church in Houston. They moved into an apartment in Atlanta near Emory University, where Jan had begun work on a master’s degree in Christian education. Spivey began work on a master’s in aerospace engineering at Georgia Tech a couple of weeks later. To pay the bills, he also took a night job at Lockheed’s aircraft plant in Marietta. He’d worked full-time there that past summer, doing data reduction on a project that was secret then but was later seen in the John Wayne movie The Green Berets, the James Bond movie Thunderball, and a couple of TV shows. It was called the “Fulton Pickup System.”
The Fulton Pickup System is a way for a fixed-wing plane to rescue a human being, such as a pilot downed behind enemy lines, without landing. It works this way: the plane doing the pickup drops the stranded pilot a kit containing a big balloon, a canister of helium, a flight suit with a special buckle on it, and 500 feet of nylon cord. The pilot dons the suit, attaches one end of the nylon cord to the special buckle and the other to the balloon, fills the balloon with helium, and lets it rise. The rescue aircraft, seeing the balloon, swoops down and snags the nylon cord with a sort of fork or set of “horns” attached to its nose. As the plane flies on, the pilot is whisked into the air, dangling from the cord, which the aircraft crew snares with a sturdy, J-shaped hook. The crew attaches the cord to a winch, which pulls the rescued pilot into the aircraft as it flies. Depending on the speed of the plane, the rescuee might pull as many as 10 G’s—ten times the force of gravity—as the horns jerk him into the air, sometimes swinging him up higher than the airplane’s tail before he settles into a steady position behind it. Someone who did it once told Spivey it was an “E Ticket ride,” definitely not for the fainthearted.
The CIA had used such a system a couple of times in the early 1960s with a plane that cruised at about 175 mph. Now Lockheed was trying it in various climates at various altitudes with a special operations version of its bigger, faster C-130 cargo plane. Spivey was part of a team that flew in a C-130 out to Yuma, Arizona, and then to Edwards Air Force Base in California to test the system in the desert. His job was to handle two life-sized dummies equipped with instrumentation including an oscillograph. He was to turn on the oscillograph about ten seconds before the C-130’s hook hit the nylon cord—then run. The C-130 had a cable from its nose to its wingtips to keep the nylon cord from getting tangled in its four propellers. Even so, one day the pilot missed the cord with his hook and it slid down the wing and got wrapped up in his number-three propeller. The dummy was jerked into the air, the cord broke, and the dummy plunged to earth. Spivey saw it happen. He later heard about another time the system
failed. The Navy was testing the system at sea and picked up a volunteer from a raft. The winch hauled him up and he got his hands on the sides of a hatch in the belly of the plane, ready to pull himself in, but the winch kept turning. The cord snapped. The volunteer fell into the ocean. He was never seen again.
* * *
Spivey and Jan decided to move back to Fort Worth after just one semester in Atlanta. He was working all the time, earning next to nothing and doing poorly in grad school. She was homesick. Jan transferred to a master’s program at Texas Christian. Bell was happy to hire Spivey full-time as an aerodynamicist in engineering. He went back to work there in January 1965.
Business was booming at Bell. Since 1956, the year Larry Bell died of a heart attack, the company had been selling the Army its Huey helicopters, first as medevac aircraft, then as troop transports. In 1962, a board of officers and civilian experts had endorsed a plan for the Army to establish “air cavalry” units equipped with helicopters. A few months after Spivey went back to work at Bell, the 1st Battalion/7th Cavalry of the Army’s newly redesignated 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) used Hueys to launch the first large-scale helicopter-borne air assault in history into Vietnam’s Ia Drang Valley. Soon the Army was buying Hueys and an armed gunship version called the HueyCobra by the thousands. Bell was pumping them out the two big doors of its assembly plant like a Krispy Kreme store making doughnuts. Its test pilots could barely run ground tests on them and fly each one the required three hours before the Army sent in flocks of pilots—twenty-five at a time, some days—to fly the helicopters away. At its Vietnam-era peak, Bell was producing 150 Hueys a month for the Army and about fifty other kinds of helicopters as well. Aside from Da Nang, the massive U.S. military airfield in Vietnam, Bell’s was perhaps the busiest heliport in the world.
One of Spivey’s first assignments as an aerodynamicist—an engineer who analyzes forces imposed on an aircraft by the air, such as drag—was to work on the HueyCobra gunship. Within his first three years back at Bell, Spivey came up with a rotor tip design for the HueyCobra so good he was able to patent it. He swept the tip of the blade into a shape that retarded the onset of “compressibility,” an aerodynamic phenomenon that limits a helicopter’s speed. Compressibility also causes the loud “whump, whump, whump” noise characteristic of some helicopters, such as early models of the Huey. Spivey’s design was called the “Whisper Tip” because it reduced the rotor blade’s noise.
Spivey was soon regarded as a rotor expert at Bell, though his calculations didn’t always come out right, even on the Whisper Tip. Bart Kelley and others in management were keenly interested in equipping the HueyCobra with a quieter blade because the prototype was unbelievably loud—a bad characteristic for a combat aircraft. Early on, Spivey thought he had it figured out, so he had the shop fabricate a rotor based on his calculations and install it on the HueyCobra prototype. One day a test pilot took off in the machine and flew out toward the horizon. Pilots, engineers, and others gathered on the edge of the heliport in anticipation. Kelley even came out. Dorman Cannon, a longtime Bell test pilot, couldn’t help laughing when he remembered how Spivey stood out on the ramp with his bosses nearby, waiting for his moment of triumph. The machine flew south out of eyesight and earshot, but when it turned to come back, you could hear it before you could see it. It was even louder than the standard blade. Kelley turned on his heels and went back to his office without a word. For years afterward, even after Spivey succeeded in designing a true Whisper Tip blade, the test pilots called him “Whisper Dick.”
The test pilots liked to tease Spivey. He was always bugging them to test some new rotor design, which meant juggling their schedules. A lot of other people at Bell ribbed him a lot, too, because of the way he dressed. Spivey was the company flower child. Not that he was a hippie. He didn’t smoke dope or anything like that. In 1968 and ’72 he voted for Nixon. But as the Age of Aquarius dawned in the ’60s, Spivey awoke to it. He started showing up at work in plaid bell bottoms, blindingly loud sport coats, and wide ties in the godawfulest patterns you ever saw. (He didn’t let on that his mother was making some of the ties for him.) He drove a snazzy little red convertible Karmann Ghia, Volkswagen’s version of a sports car, until he totaled it in front of the plant one day. He was only in his twenties, but his naturally red hair was thinning, and what was left, he wore long. As the disco era began, Spivey got into that, too. He started showing up to work in white shoes and leisure suits. One of his favorites was rose pink—pinker than his skin. But most people at Bell liked Spivey, even if he was a bit of a free spirit. He always had a smile on his face and a kind word on his lips. He was easy to get along with.
* * *
One day in 1971, Spivey’s boss, Jack Buyers, called him into his office.
“Ted Hoffmann wants you to move over and work for him in marketing,” Buyers said. Hoffmann was one of Bell’s top military marketers. Spivey was startled. He was also intrigued. He didn’t know a lot about how Bell sold its helicopters, but he’d worked with its marketers as they’d tried to interest the Army in a new helicopter he’d helped engineer. The marketers would go talk to Army officials, then come back and give the engineers ideas about what might sell. Spivey also had spent time with some of Bell’s marketers at trade shows and the annual American Helicopter Society convention. He liked them. They seemed to have interesting jobs.
“What do you think I should do?” Spivey asked. Buyers told him the move might be good for his career. Management liked people to work in more than one department, to broaden their perspective. Marketing was being reorganized and needed somebody with the technical expertise to pursue research and development contracts. Spivey could work there a while, then move back to engineering with a better chance of getting a promotion in the future. “Marketing is strange, but you’ll learn an awful lot about the business of the company,” Buyers said.
The vice president for military marketing, Cliff Kalista, told Spivey he’d seen him deliver talks at American Helicopter Society conventions and liked his briefing style. Kalista also told him, only half jokingly, that he was especially impressed with how at conventions Spivey was “one of only two people who were still awake at one in the morning in the hospitality suite,” where alcohol flowed freely. Spivey knew what Kalista was saying: “You’re a party animal and therefore you fit into the Marketing Department.”
Spivey decided to do it.
Soon he moved from the somewhat spartan, tile-floored offices in Engineering, where desks were crammed together so tightly engineers had to stand to let each other by, into the carpeted offices of Marketing. The decor was nicer in Marketing because military officers and corporate executives—potential customers—often came to call.
Spivey’s new title was “Sales Engineer.” Like other defense contractors, Bell avoided the term salesman. The military and NASA didn’t like the idea they were being “sold” anything. Most companies even shied away from the term marketer, which to some people implied a greasy salesman telling lies. “NASA hates marketing guys; they like to deal with engineers,” Spivey observed. Eventually, like other defense contractors, Bell dropped the term marketer altogether. Marketers were given titles such as “Director, Business Development” or “Manager, Military Applications.”
Bell had three marketing divisions: International, Commercial, and Military. The military division’s ten or twelve marketers had a team system. “Sales engineers” like Spivey, who could explain the technical aspects of Bell’s aircraft, teamed with “applications engineers.” The latter weren’t necessarily trained engineers; they were former military officers, usually pilots, who knew the armed forces and their strategies and tactics. Most importantly, the applications engineers had contacts in the services, in the Pentagon, at military bases, and in the fleet. They could call up a guy they had served with, swap war stories, ask about the wife and kids, find out what the troops thought they needed and what the brass was thinking about buying. The applications engineer’s job
was to “kick down the door” so the sales engineer could pitch a product to The Customer, as defense contractors call the military. But that was just part of it.
Selling the military an aircraft or a major weapons system isn’t like selling a car. It’s more a courtship or a seduction than a sale. A defense company such as Bell won’t build a military aircraft on speculation, the way Ford builds sedans. But it will spend its own money to develop a concept for a new aircraft or an improved model of an existing one, designed to suit some presumed future military need, and try to get the services interested in developing it. Company engineers will do a “predesign study” including drawings of the configuration—where the engines go, things like that—and compile charts of engineering data to show what, in theory, the craft would be able to do. Marketers will take the study and produce briefings showing how the theoretical aircraft would perform in specific military missions. Then they take it on the road. They show it to military officers and relevant Defense Department civilians. The marketers carefully note their reactions, pro and con. Some might think the aircraft should carry more troops or more fuel, be armed with more or different weapons, or fly higher or farther than the engineers were thinking. If the concept isn’t just right—and it never is—the marketers go home and huddle with the engineers to tweak the design, trying to tailor the concept to what the military seems to want and Congress will buy. “They want this; can you do that?” the marketers might ask the engineers. The engineers modify the design, then the marketers take it back out and brief it again and come back with still more suggestions. This can go on for years.
The Dream Machine Page 6