by John McPhee
In time, Drew reworked these thoughts into a preoccupation, and then converted that into an obsession. He sought financial support in various sections of Trenton— from the treasurer of the Fourth Presbyterian Church, from parishioners, from merchants, from industrialists. He expanded his quest beyond the city. To virtually everyone, he said, “How much can you afford to lose on a project that might be of truly great importance to the world?” Drew sensed that he had been given a mission. Earnest, humble, blue-eyed—his hair combed straight back, his gaze steadyhe spoke not with soapbox intensity but softly, with an almost mournful sincerity; and he had the forensic grace to transmit to others a share of his enthusiasm. Seed money resulted. All he lacked was a technologist in lighter-than-air. The telephone rang. The United States Navy ordered him to perform a funeral at McGuire Air Force Base, where, on arrival, he was to report to Lieutenant Commander John Fitzpatrick.
Drew organized the Aereon Corporation around John Fitzpatrick, and eventually made him president. They worked together for seven years. “John can worry about strength factors, shear forces, sharp gusts, and thunderheads,” Drew said. “I’m more free to dream.” He assembled a board of directors—a hospital administrator, a management consultant, a patent attorney, among others. He asked the session of the Fourth Presbyterian Church to allow him to spend half his time on the Aereon project in the interest of missionary aviation and with an eye to future profits for the treasury of the church. The session approved. A woman schoolteacher who was an officer of the church invested fifteen hundred dollars in Aereon. Outsiders came in with bigger sums. Lefty Klein ( “a Jewish gentleman”), owner of a vinyl-fabric firm in Trenton, invested five thousand. A stockbroker who owned his own P-51 put in ten thousand. Richard Hoerner, of the Hoerner-Waldorf box company, put in forty-five thousand. Laird Simons, the kid-leather king, began an investment that would eventually reach a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Promoting Aereon, Drew frankly stated that his ultimate goals were to advance the cause of the church. “I know what I want to do,” he said. “I know what I want to do right here in Trenton. But it’s going to take millions to do it. The result will be a breakthrough in the economics of transportation that will sweep across the world, at the same time serving the needs of church evangelization—a natural tie-in. The two dovetail.” He went to the Presbyterian Foundation seeking a list of their major contributors but was reverentially turned down. He hired a Japanese photographer to record the developing history of the corporation. He hired Vice Admiral Charles Rosendahl, U.S.N. (Ret.), the greatest living figure from the era of the naval airships, as general consultant. He engaged a Washington representative to establish close communication between Aereon and the patent office and other parts of the federal government. Looking into the existing situation in missionary aviation, he found it farcical. “The Missionary Aviation Fellowship is controlled by people who believe that God had a typewriter,” he reported. “They take Scripture literally. They ask you, ‘Brother, are you born again?’ And Heaven help you if you answer no. They have one Waco biplane. ‘Is that all you have?’ I asked them, and they said, ‘That’s all the Lord provided.’” Drew did not tell them that the Lord was about to provide the Christian Freight Line. He investigated the Roman Catholics to see what they were doing in missionary aviation, and he turned up a few pilot priests and some more biplanes. That was all. So he widened his vision of the Faith Fleet to include ecumenical Aereons that would transport Catholics, Congregationalists, Baptists, Unitarians, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Methodists, and their goods to farflung missions for five cents a ton-mile versus the dollar they were spending at the time.
Fitzpatrick, for his part, felt pressures rising. The company was heavy with consultants, representatives, photographers, attorneys, and other overhead. Before the money ran out, he was expected to design and to supervise the construction of an airship that would change the world. Fitzpatrick was the right sort of man to make such an attempt, for he liked to go from A to B without inventing letters in between. Ignoring such delays as blueprints, small models, and wind tunnels, he built Monroe Drew’s airship off the cuff. “Has it occurred to you that a wind tunnel is simply an admission of defeat?” he said. “Certainly it is. A wind tunnel is simply a sophisticated version of the old cut-and-try method. The existence of wind tunnels proves that. Mathematics alone is not enough. Designers use all the information they have. They build a model. They stick it in a wind tunnel and hope that they’ve got all the basic data correct, that the arithmetic is good, that their basic judgment is right. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn’t. In the end, they have to resort to empirical means. What is true for a model is not necessarily true for a full-scale aircraft. Think of a drop of water hanging for hours off the end of a faucet. There is a decided limit to the size of that drop. You couldn’t take that drop of water as a true indicator as to how a ton of water would act. I doubt if you’ve ever seen a ton of water hang off the end of anything for very long.”
It happens that a cubic foot of helium will lift about one ounce. The ratio between the surface area and the volume of a cylinder is not constant: the smaller the cylinder the more surface area, and thus the more weight, there is in proportion to volume. Fill with helium a small, rigid, cloth-covered aluminum-framework cylinder, and nothing happens. It is too heavy. Fill a large cylinder built the same way, and it rises into the air. How large? “Eighty feet,” said Fitzpatrick. “Anything smaller than that is a parade float.” He made the triple-hulled Aereon eighty feet long—the smallest model that could test all aspects of the concept at once. The concept was to create a hybrid of the airplane and the rigid airship—something with the buoyancy of an airship, the aerodynamics of an airplane. The three combined hulls, in their considerable breadth, would serve as an airfoil, however coarse. He used the Navy’s Class C airship form, because its profile produced the least drag of all airship hulls. He called the ship a “flying fuselage.” It weighed a ton and a half, and it carried its fifty thousand cubic feet of helium in plastic bags. Its gearbox was the rear end of a Chevrolet. Its engine was a sevenhundred-dollar four-cylinder McCullough, of a type used on drone aircraft—cheap to buy, cheap to run, sufficient for the job, Fitzpatrick said, because the helium would assist it. The helium would considerably prolong the engine’s life as well. Unlike an airplane engine, it would not have to be gunned to death at full bore on takeoff. “For an airplane, even a little sixty-two-horsepower turbine sells for about twelve thousand dollars,” Fitzpatrick said. “Figure that out on a per-pound basis. You’re better off eating the money.” His ultimate goal, after all, was to build a version of Monroe Drew’s airship that would move long distances through the sky cheaply, carrying two hundred tons of cargo. For propulsion and control, he mounted a helicopter rotor vertically on the stern of the middle hull. It could be used for both braking and steering at dead-slow speeds, when other control surfaces—elevens, rudders —would be ineffective. By regulating the temperature of the helium, the ship, while on the ground, could be heavier-than-air and thus far more stable. Heating the helium would add considerably to the tonnage of liftable cargo. Because the ship could fly aerodynamically, it would require no mooring mast, and it could land when it wanted to. “Airships used to kite and balloon while men were trying to tie them down,” Fitzpatrick said. “The big rigids cruised for hours waiting for right conditions for landing. We’re independent of that. What we have here is a revolutionary aircraft.”
The triple hull took years to complete. On Admiral Rosendahl’s recommendation, the Reverend Mr. Drew hired the airship rigger Everett Linkenhoker to do the actual labor, and Linkenhoker built the frame, weld by weld, while Fitzpatrick, at his drafting board, tried to stay a day or so ahead, and Drew, at his desks—in the church, in the hangar—played the light of his thoughts across future decades. It was up to him to generate money, and he did so with infectious images of thousand-foot automated Aereons moving in connected trains through the lower atmosphere. An Aereon would one day
hover above an orchard, pick up the entire crop, and deliver it by winch to waiting markets, he said. An Aereon would call at Moline, Illinois, hoist up a hundred tractors, and deliver them to the Valley of the Rhone. Everything would be organized in containers—fuel, cargo, even crews—to maximize efficiency. Containerfuls of commuters could be winched into the Aereons, moved over the megalopolis, and deposited in city cores. “I envision new cities built around this type of aircraft,” Drew said. “It will render obsolete road and rail connections. Today’s big helicopters can lift nine tons. We’ll stick nine tons in a back corner. At high altitudes, where air is thin, airplane payloads go down as landing speed goes up. Five thousand feet is about as high as an airfield can be. The Aereons will be just as useful at ten thousand as at sea level. They are not penalized by altitude. The airship coöperates with nature. The airplane fights nature.”
Fitzpatrick formed the opinion that Drew was putting out “enough propaganda to gag a maggot.” He said, “I don’t care how owlish you look, how convincing you sound, this is just yak yak yak until you do it. You have no product until you have done it. All you have is pie in the sky.” But Fitzpatrick was a believer, too. “We’ll never compete with jets in carrying Paris furs, cut flowers, gems, corpses, and refrigerated serums,” he once said. “But these are the exotic fringes of freight. The first time we lift a bulldozer, it will be very impressive.”
When the eighty-foot Aereon was ready to roll out of the hangar, it was a little heavier than intended, the rotor-prop required shortening because it created such grossly excessive vibration that it might well have shaken the airframe to pieces, and the power of the engine was, at best, marginal. None of these problems bothered Fitzpatrick. Experimental aircraft always have problems—items on the agenda of cut-and-try. “Before the first flight, we will have made speed runs and zoomed into the air for short distances to permit the human occupants of the thing to become familiar with it,” Fitzpatrick said.
“It is such an unusual-looking aircraft,” said Drew. “We expect a pretty definite reaction from the population.”
“It will look like an aluminum overcast,” said Fitzpatrick.
On April 15, 1966, in a fifteen-knot crosswind, Monroe Drew’s airship made a taxi run on a Mercer County runway, failed to slow down, tried to turn at the end, tilted on two wheels, and suddenly became a sail in the wind. “We can bring the nose of the ship down into an angle of attack that is negative, so that strong winds, rather than making the ship a kite, will simply cause it to hug the ground tighter,” Fitzpatrick had said. “We have introduced tricycle-type landing gear of extremely wide tread and extremely long wheelbase to increase the stability of the ship on the ground. This will be the first time that an airship has ever had three-axis control.” In the Plexiglasbubble cockpit at the forward end of the central hull were two airplane mechanics, one of whom was also a small-airplane flight instructor. These were the test pilots. Both developed panic. One jumped out the hatch, even though the drop was eighteen feet. The wind then blew the airship over—flat on its back. The other pilot, who was still in the cockpit, jumped straight down, smashing through the Plexiglas and falling out onto the ground. The weight of the pilots was critical—three hundred and fifty pounds of ballast gone. The wind overturned the airship again. Damage done by the wind was considerable, but embarrassment caused even more. Drew and Fitzpatrick decided to get the wreckage instantly out of sight, and the aluminum overcast was virtually bulldozed back into the hangar, arriving more or less in flakes. One of its nose cones is now in the collection of the Lighter-than-Air Society, in Akron, Ohio.
The end of Monroe Drew’s airship appeared to be the end of the Aereon Corporation. The company was six years and seven months old, and its fixed assets were one crumpled dirigible. Optimism was replaced, in part, by friction, and friction, often enough, by combustion. To Drew, Fitzpatrick’s confident empiricism now seemed a brightly lighted shortcut to nowhere. Fitzpatrick might be a genius, Drew said, “but he’s an arrogant genius—one of the most arrogant men I have ever known.”
“I look down on—generally speaking—ministers,” Fitzpatrick decided. “They get between man and God. Drew has around him a charisma. He can quickly pick up the patois of almost any profession, without talking intelligently. He believes he is meant for greatness. He believes there are forces that thwart him on the threshold of success. There certainly are. Long ago, Drew rubbed elbows with greatness. He sang on the radio as a boy.”
Drew was, indeed, a boy celebrity. At the age of fifteen, he had become a professional bass-baritone, singing florid segments of “The Desert Song” and “The Vagabond King” on the Columbia-Don Lee Network. He was a scion of Lawrence Tibbett. His expectations were high. He was part of a San Francisco family that had once built squareriggers for the China tea trade. His father was a Presbyterian minister. Fitzpatrick, after absorbing all this in fragments over the years, had become fond of telling the story of Drew’s father’s death, as narrated to him one day in the hangar by Drew. When his father was dying, Drew was in seminary and was about to become a minister himself. The old minister called Drew to his bedside for a parting word of advice. “Never trust another minister,” said the father to the son, and died.
Drew spoke less anecdotally about Fitzpatrick. “John’s Achilles’ heel is that he has an inordinate amount of pride —a really stupid pride,” Drew would observe. “He didn’t lie to me, but he didn’t tell me all the facts about the error he had made—about the weight of the ship. He is a very good engineer, though. A self-taught man. He once came very close to getting his degree.”
A management consultant was not needed to see that Aereon had entered a state of Cheyne-Stokes respiration. On no known economic indicator would the company have scored as high as zero. But it was not about to die. The term “helium head” had not developed casually. These men were not just building any aircraft. They were bringing back the rigid airships. They had support—mostly moral, to some extent financial—in all the side streets and shore cottages where the outphased, bypassed, disenfranchised men of the naval airships had settled down to disappear. In their separate ways, Fitzpatrick and Drew were both helium heads, and zero was not a low enough level at which to decide to quit. Maybe the triple hull was not the best configuration after all. It was something of an airfoil, yes, but maybe there was still too much friction drag. There might be a new and better solution. But what? Where? How to find it? Drew had repeatedly prayed for the milk-white Aereon. The wind had answered. Now where could they turn?
In Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, the General Electric Space Center maintained a computer so august that one did not actually approach it in person but communicated with it by teletype. Drew and Fitzpatrick decided to commit the future of their project to the decisions of this machine. To do so, they had to make a list of criteria, a statement of what they wanted to accomplish, and to help prepare the list they hired Jiirgen Bock, a physicist from the Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg and more recently from the U.S. military proving ground in Aberdeen, Maryland, who joined Aereon full time. Bock spoke in English, thought in German, and dreamed in a language no human being had ever heard. In the Mercer County hangar, therefore, communication was not perfect, but it had loft. At length, the list was complete and was teletyped by Bock and Fitzpatrick to the computer. They wanted an airplaneairship, they said, and they wanted to find the optimum configuration for enclosing maximum volume without too much penalty of drag. In numerical language, they went through the whole vision of grass airfields and flying warehouses, titanic cargoes, dollar efficiencies, cheap power plants, bagged helium, aerodynamic lift, long range, great endurance, and specifications for control of the airflow around the hull. In all, twenty items—twenty matriceswere sent to the computer. A response came back at once. The computer said, “Remove three matrices. I can only handle seventeen.” Conversation followed in Mercer County. The three least essential items were removed. Silence followed in Valley Forge, while the comput
er ingested the seventeen criteria and splayed them into hundreds of thousands of crosshatching possibilities. It selected the best of these, shaped them mathematically, and sent back to Mercer County Airport the precise configuration of the 7, the 26—the deltoid Aereons.