The Dream Machine

by Richard Whittle

  After the JVX requirements were written but before Bell-Boeing got the initial contract, the companies weren’t going to tell The Customer he was asking for too much. “You don’t want to do anything that would take you away from your chance of getting a chance to do it,” Lynn said. Besides, most at Bell or Boeing Vertol didn’t think what the military was asking couldn’t be done, they just knew it was going to be damned hard. Lynn put it this way: “I don’t believe in doing something you know will not work, but if you don’t know it will not work, then I’m sort of reluctant to say it won’t work.”

  Emotion as well as reason figured into the equation. Lynn had been Bell’s chief of research and development when the company built and flew the XV-3, its first tiltrotor. He’d shepherded the XV-15 along as well. The JVX looked to Lynn like “the last chance for the tiltrotor, and I’d been working on this system since the early fifties. I wanted to see it go because I thought, no matter what, that we’d come out and give them a capability that we didn’t have now.”

  Anyway, there was an escape clause in the Joint Services Operational Requirement. “All capabilities and performance goals established herein shall be subjected to cost, weight, capability and performance sensitivity analyses,” it said. In other words, the requirements could be eased if the companies could prove to Navair there was no choice. After Bell-Boeing won the contract in 1983, Lynn and others at the companies broached the idea of easing some of the requirements with Navair but got nowhere. The attitude among Navair officials seemed to be “Don’t bother me with facts, my mind’s made up,” Lynn found. Arguments that the requirements were too ambitious fell on deaf ears in that phase of the program, when the JVX was still just a “paper airplane.”

  * * *

  A paper airplane was all the JVX was for several years, but that was the normal course of things. A multibillion-dollar military aircraft procurement unfolds in long, complicated stages. Each can take years to complete and require one or several contracts and dozens of subcontracts. Bell-Boeing’s initial JVX contract, in April 1983, was for preliminary design. What they had given Navair in their bid was just a concept, rudimentary drawings backed by performance and cost estimates. A team of engineers from both companies put the bid together in 1982, after Lynn talked Wernicke down from his high dudgeon. Boeing Vertol’s director of engineering, William Peck, led about fifty of his engineers to Bell’s main facility in Hurst from their plant in Ridley Park, Pennsylvania, a borough just south of Philadelphia. They rented apartments and stayed several months. About the time the Boeing engineers got used to seeing workers in cowboy hats and cowboy boots eating biscuits with gravy for breakfast in Bell’s cafeteria, the bid was done and the Boeing Vertol engineers went home to Pennsylvania. Now, in 1983, the companies had to get down to actually designing this new tiltrotor, figuring out how its major components should be shaped aerodynamically, selecting and testing the materials they’d use to build it, and getting Navair to approve their plans and give them a contract to build some prototypes.

  The broad outlines were clear from the start. In aircraft design, “form follows function” more intrinsically than in architecture, the source of that alliterative principle. An aircraft’s purpose usually determines its form. Most fighter jets have a streamlined fuselage and short wings to make them fast and maneuverable. With notable exceptions, such as the Concorde SST and the bat-winged B-2 stealth bomber, long-range airliners or bombers usually have big, round fuselages to carry a lot and long, slender wings for fuel-efficient flight at high altitude. In the Western world, conventional helicopters usually come in one of two basic configurations: they either have a main rotor that turns horizontally for lift and thrust and a small tail rotor that turns vertically for directional control, or they have two large rotors, one behind the other. Only two successful tiltrotors, the XV-3 and the XV-15, had ever been built when Bell and Boeing Vertol started the JVX, but the configuration was clear. A tiltrotor was a helicopter-airplane hybrid, so it combined elements of both. Like an airplane, it had a fuselage with a wing and a tail; like a helicopter, it had rotors. The rotors were positioned on the wingtips and held in “nacelles”—pods—that swiveled to tilt them. That was a tiltrotor configuration. Its form followed its function.

  The companies decided the broad division of labor early on. Bell had the most tiltrotor experience, so it would take charge of the wing, the proprotors, and the nacelles. Boeing Vertol specialized in big, tandem-rotor helicopters, so it would do the fuselage and landing gear. Boeing also would take primary responsibility for the electrical and hydraulic systems and the computerized electronic “fly-by-wire” flight controls, though Bell would have a lot to say about those items. Boeing also would take charge of the avionics—a contraction of “aviation electronics.” The engines would be GFE—“government-furnished equipment”—bought by Navair from one of the big four aircraft engine makers under separate contract and provided to Bell for installation in the nacelles.

  If you were Ken Wernicke of Bell or Thomas W. Griffith of Boeing Vertol, the chief JVX designers, your first step was to size the aircraft to meet the requirements. Okay, you might say to your design team, it has to fit on this amphibious assault ship, so its total width, rotor tip to rotor tip, can’t be more than 84 feet, 7 inches. When it flies in airplane mode, we need clearance between the rotor tips and the fuselage, which has to be as big as a CH-46. If the rotor tips clear the fuselage by a foot, the wingspan including the nacelles needs to be 45 feet, 10 inches, rotor hub to rotor hub. That gives us a rotor diameter of 38 feet. Now, how long is this thing going to be? Besides holding twenty-four troops, the fuselage has to have a rear ramp for loading people and cargo, room up front for the cockpit, space for the forward landing gear and a refueling probe, and so on. It’s going to be a little longer when we rotate the wing to stow it, but the requirement says it can’t take up more than one-point-two times as much space as a CH-46. So the length can be 63 feet maximum. How are we going to fold the rotors and stow the wing? And where are we going to put all the fuel we need to get the range they want? The wing’s the usual place, but we’re going to need more fuel than the wing will hold, so where do we put extra tanks? The nacelles need to be big enough to hold the engines and gearboxes and transmissions, and we’ve got to put infrared suppressors at the bottom of them. How much is this thing going to weigh? How much of it has to be metal? How much can we make out of composites? . . . And so forth.

  Hundreds of engineers were assigned to the project in Hurst and Ridley Park, organized into “design” and “technology” groups at each location, the principal two divisions in engineering departments at most helicopter companies. Design engineers were figuring out how the various components and subsystems of the aircraft would be shaped and fit together. Technology engineers were analyzing the aerodynamics and dynamics and the materials to be used. Within each group were dozens of specialists in acoustics, vibration, and other arcane engineering disciplines. One of their main jobs was what’s called “risk reduction.”

  In this context, “risk” doesn’t mean whether the aircraft will be safe but whether it’s going to perform as advertised. For example, in their bid the companies proposed using carbon fiber composites rather than aluminum to build the basic structure, the aircraft’s skeleton and skin. This was near revolutionary. Composite structures begin as pliable, clothlike weaves or sticky, tapelike strips of special fibers that are laid down in layers to form a desired shape. The shape is then baked in an autoclave, a kind of pressurized kiln, to create a stiff, strong structure. Composites had been used in aircraft before, but never to the extent Bell-Boeing planned. “Frankly, we didn’t know how to do it,” said Allen Schoen, who was Boeing Vertol’s technology director on the project.

  Both companies had made composite rotor blades before, but there was a lot they didn’t know about using composites in larger structures, and manufacturing methods for specific parts still had to be figured out. Using composites as much as possible was
going to be vital to holding the JVX’s empty weight down, but Navair required the companies to prove they could measure and predict how the materials would behave under the stresses and strains of flight. To assess the risk of the materials failing, the companies had to fabricate major parts of the aircraft in model size or full scale, then test them in various ways. During preliminary design, Bell built a 25-foot composite rotor with the twist it planned to use in the JVX’s 38-foot rotors. Bell also fabricated the structure of a wing out of composites. Boeing Vertol used composites to build a 34-foot “test specimen” of the fuselage, but that was just a start. Boeing Vertol alone made more than 14,000 samples of composite parts to test, ranging from small joints for holding bits of the fuselage together to large panels of aircraft skin. Engineers usually tested such things in wind tunnels, on special machines that pulled and twisted the parts to gauge their resistance to stretching and tearing, or in portable “environmental chambers,” where the materials could be broiled or frozen, soaked with simulated rain or drenched in salt water. So much of what they planned to do with composites was novel, though, that some parts would give them trouble for years. On these, the testing continued well after preliminary design was over, and the engineers were forced to get creative at times.

  That’s why Bell materials engineer Greg Marshall had a hard time explaining what that was in the back of his car when a Texas state trooper pulled him over as he drove from Fort Worth to San Antonio one summer evening in 1988. Nestled in the cargo area of Marshall’s company car, an avocado green station wagon with wood paneling on the sides that had seen better days, was a large black object that looked mighty suspicious to that trooper. It was a composite part that had been giving Bell fits: a rotor grip formed by laying down layers of carbon fiber one over the other until the sides were as much as an inch and a half thick and the grip weighed forty pounds. The companies were two years into building their first prototype aircraft by now and Bell still wasn’t certain this part was going to work. The young engineer was on his way to San Antonio to run a special test on the grip, which was roughly the size and shape of those elephant’s foot umbrella stands big-game hunters used to bring back from Africa in colonial days. The grip was nearly square at the bottom and open at each end. The round end would hold one of the JVX’s proprotor blades by its stem. The square end would fasten to the rotor yoke, a solid part with three arms for connecting the rotor blades to the rotor hub. Besides holding the blades onto the yoke, the grip would have to twist and turn constantly in flight to change their pitch. No one had ever built rotor grips out of composite before, and this was going to be one of the keys to reducing the JVX’s weight. There would be six rotor grips on each aircraft, and they cost more than a quarter of a million dollars each to make. If the composite grips didn’t work, the alternative would be steel, which would be three times heavier, so the technical risk was huge.

  The key to figuring out how to make the rotor grips correctly was to find a way to inspect their insides when they came out of the autoclave to ensure there weren’t wrinkles or voids in the layers of tape, which might make a grip fail as the rotor spun at hundreds of revolutions per minute. Ultrasound and X-rays, the usual methods, weren’t yielding good enough evidence to satisfy Navair. Then an engineer at a company in San Antonio gave Bell a suggestion. Why not give the rotor grip a CAT scan? Computerized axial tomography scans take hundreds of X-ray “slices” to generate a 3-D image of an opaque object, usually a human body. CAT scans were fairly new in those days, and scanners were a little rare, but there was a scanner at Bexar County Hospital in San Antonio, part of the University of Texas Health Science Center. Hospital officials readily agreed when Bell’s contact requested an appointment for a rotor grip. That’s where Marshall was headed when the trooper stopped him.

  “You realize you got a headlight out?” the trooper asked Marshall. No, sir, the engineer replied in his native Texan drawl. This was a company car, he explained, and he hadn’t realized the light was out. He’d get it fixed soon as he could. When the trooper heard “company car,” he shined his flashlight around the outside of the old station wagon and frowned. “Where you from?” he asked leerily. “Where you going?” Then he swept his flashlight beam into the back of the station wagon and saw the big, black rotor grip. “What’s that in the back of your car, son?” the trooper demanded. Marshall, dressed in jeans and a Windbreaker, was twenty-seven at the time. His thick black hair cascaded over the edges of his ears a bit, and he wore a mustache.

  Marshall gave a straightforward answer. The black thing was part of a new tiltrotor aircraft his company was building for the military, he explained. “What’s a tiltrotor?” the trooper replied. Marshall elaborated, but the trooper had a hard time with the concept. Part helicopter, part airplane? The more Marshall talked, the more skeptical the trooper looked. What’s that thing made of? Is it dangerous? Can it blow up? Where you going with it? The trooper had a lot of questions. Marshall assured him the grip was perfectly safe, ominous as it might look. He was just taking it to UT Southwestern to get it scanned in a special X-ray machine. Oops. Now the trooper wanted to know if that thing was radioactive. It was supposed to be tagged if it was. Marshall was sure the trooper was going to give him a ticket of some kind, or at least take him and the rotor grip to the station. Finally, though, after Marshall pulled out his Bell ID badge and did a lot more talking, the trooper let him go.

  The next morning, Marshall wheeled the rotor grip into the hospital on a dolley. He was told to put it on a gurney, same as any other patient. He wheeled the gurney into the CAT scan room, laid the grip on a table as instructed, and watched a bemused technician prop pillows under the faux elephant’s foot to position it correctly, same as any other patient. When the scan was done, Marshall put the grip back on the gurney and wheeled it back out into the corridor. He couldn’t restrain himself when he saw how a couple of elderly patients awaiting CAT scans gawked at what was on his gurney. “We cooked this one a little too long,” he told them gravely.

  The CAT scan showed voids in the rotor grip that ultrasound hadn’t revealed, which allowed Bell’s engineers to refine their manufacturing and inspection methods to Navair’s satisfaction. “Right away, management wanted to CAT scan everything in the plant,” Marshall chuckled. In the years that followed, they didn’t scan everything, but as local hospitals started offering CAT scans, Bell’s rotor grips were among their regular patients.

  * * *

  As is probably the case with any arranged marriage in which the couple know each other only slightly but have mutual respect, the Bell-Boeing partnership began smoothly enough. After the champagne was drunk and the honeymoon was over, though, the newlyweds started getting to know each other. They quickly saw it wasn’t a match made in heaven.

  Compared to Boeing Vertol and its parent, Boeing Company, Bell Helicopter and its parent, Textron, were small fry. This was why Bell president Jim Atkins had offered Boeing Vertol president Joe Mallen a 50–50 partnership when they first met, rather than the 60–40 split Atkins would have preferred, or at least 51–49 so Bell could be in control. Atkins came to rue the even-steven split, but at the time, he figured there was no way “big, bad Boeing” would take a minority position in such a venture. Mallen told me Atkins was right. As they and many others in their companies and in the government came to fully appreciate only too late, however, a 50–50 partnership has a fundamental weakness: no one is in charge. When tough issues arose, as they often did, there was no easy way to settle them. They became speed bumps.

  Size wasn’t the only thing that mattered. The companies’ person-alities—their corporate cultures—were as far apart as their locations, which were separated by 1,400 miles and, perhaps more significantly, the Mason-Dixon Line.

  Bell’s culture reflected its beginnings and surroundings as much as its status in the aviation business. The company had sprung from the savvy of entrepreneur Larry Bell and the genius of helicopter inventor Art Young. Bell’s culture nur
tured individuality. Engineers were allowed to pursue their own ideas. Workers were treated like artisans, not cogs in a machine. Two different assemblers might put together a part in slightly different ways; as long as it worked—okay! Bell’s corporate parent, Textron, was a conglomerate that had pioneered diversification in the 1960s. Its other companies made watchbands, fountain pens, golf carts, snow-mobiles, greeting cards. There was little if any overlap among its businesses, and the small corporate headquarters in Providence largely let Textron’s subsidiaries have their heads, as long as they contributed to the bottom line. Contribute to the bottom line they must, though, and every year, if possible. Textron wasn’t into losses, even short term.

  Boeing Vertol also traced its corporate genealogy to one of the founding fathers of the helicopter industry, Frank Piasecki. But Piasecki’s imprint had been erased in corporate makeovers that ended in 1960, when Boeing bought Vertol Aircraft Corporation, successor to Piasecki Helicopter Corporation. (“Vertol” was an acronym for “vertical take off and landing.”) Seattle-based Boeing was an aerospace behemoth, the New York Yankees of the aviation game: rich, powerful, strong at all positions. Commercial and military aircraft manufacture, space technology, missiles, helicopters—you name it, if it was an aviation business, Boeing was a leader in it. There was a lot of cross-fertilization among Boeing’s many subsidiaries, and Boeing wasn’t afraid of long-term investment. That was part of building commercial aircraft. But the corporation was adamant about schedules, and Boeing’s philosophy prized process over people. “It’s process that gets things done, it’s not people,” a Boeing Vertol engineer once argued to one of his peers at Bell. Like Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, Boeing changed managers a lot. Executives were often reassigned, transferred, or simply removed. Top engineers were traded or loaned within the corporation like ballplayers within a league, though some stayed put. A few had been at Boeing Vertol for years, even worked for Frank Piasecki in a few cases. But they were governed by Seattle’s rules and procedures.