It Looked Good on Paper

by Bill Fawcett

  The main rudder power control unit controlled the hydraulic fluid flow that activated the movement of the rudder. As all designers know, every crucial system should be built with a backup system—but in the case of the 737’s rudder control unit, the backup system was built into the same mechanism as the primary, as a sleeve around the primary, with both valves on the same slide. The NTSB states that the 737 is the only commercial airplane with two wing-mounted engines that was designed with a single-panel rudder controlled by only a single unit that allows the hydraulic fluid to flow into the system to move the rudder, called an actuator. There were also only two valves that controlled the system and both of these dual-concentric servo valves were used jointly instead of two completely separate systems to provide the redundancy needed. All other designs use multiple rudder surfaces and/or multiple rudder actuators. In other words, the backup isn’t really a backup—it’s still just part of the primary, with a second valve.

  While the actuator was designed to allow only one valve to be in position at a time, in actual practice the slide could stick in a neutral position, allowing both valves to activate, causing dual fluid flow and making the rudder to do the exact opposite of what the pilot intended—with the result that a left rudder pedal actually sent the rudder right.

  Of course any pilot’s instinctive reaction when he says left and his plane goes right is to turn left again, harder—which in this case was exactly the wrong thing to do—causing the rudder to move further in the wrong direction to its “blowdown” or maximum available limit and sending the plane hard over. In the case of Flights 585 and 427, they were too close to the ground when the sudden reversal occurred to have any chance of making corrections—even if they had figured it out.

  The NTSB has recommended design changes that would make the secondary system completely separate from the primary, but the FAA says that it will take years to refit all the planes currently in service. Instead of fixing the planes, they offer optional pilot instruction to teach pilots how to react when the unit sticks. In the classes, pilots learn solutions such as releasing the pedal to release the pressure on the unit, or switching the hydraulic master control from primary to secondary for the entire plane to free the rudder.

  The NTSB was not impressed. In a 1999 press release, the board stated, “Even with these changes, the 737 series airplanes…remain susceptible to rudder system malfunctions that could be catastrophic.”

  And yet the 737 is still the most widely used jet in commercial aviation. Thousands of people fly in them every day, counting on those optional pilot classes in case of trouble.

  Enjoy the friendly skies.

  “There’s no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you.”

  —Will Rogers

  The Plane Was Invisible Until It Was Killed

  William Terdoslavich

  Remember the A-12 Avenger II?

  You don’t? Don’t worry. You’re in good company. Hardly anyone ever knew it was there.

  The plane was supposed to be the stealthy replacement for the Navy’s A-6 Intruder, a carrier-borne strike aircraft that debuted during the Vietnam War. The A-12 was supposed to be able to carry the AIM-120 AMRAAM air combat missile, the AGM-88 HARM missile to take out SAM radars, an array of bombs, and be able to carry that entire load up to a range of 800 nautical miles at 500 knots.

  But we’ll never know what the A-12 could do, because according to the Navy they spent close to $5 billion developing the plane and not one was ever built.

  The A-12 started as a gleam in the eye of the Navy in 1988, when a fixed-cost contract was signed with the development team formed by McDonnell Douglas and General Dynamics. The defense duo was going to design a triangular-shaped flying wing optimized for carrier operations to replace the aging A-6 Intruder and A-7 Corsair II strike aircraft. The Air Force also wanted to get a variant of the A-12 to replace the aging F-111 “Aardvark” and F-15E Strike Eagle. The initial program was going to deliver eight prototype aircraft for just $4.8 billion. Total program cost was going to be somewhere north of $50 billion.

  The plane was supposed to be invisible to radar.

  It was also invisible to the Pentagon, Congress, and the media for a simple reason: it was top secret.

  A portion of that current defense budget was devoted to “black programs,” weapons and sensors which, if subjected to open oversight, would surrender a competitive advantage to any peer rival. This same budgetary practice also gave us the B-2 bomber and F-117 Stealth Fighter.

  So how bad could this be?

  Apparently, things got really bad. And no one knew about it.

  By April 1990, then defense secretary Dick Cheney received a Major Aircraft Review of the A-12. It is not publicly known what the review said, but afterwards Cheney trimmed the Pentagon’s purchase of A-12s from 858 aircraft down to 620, normally a sign that program costs were becoming excessive. The first flight deadline remained December 1990.

  By early May that year, the contractors’ development team warned the Pentagon’s A-12 program office to expect major delays due to cost problems. This did not seem to discourage the Navy, which went ahead with an option to purchase six production model A-12s for $1.2 billion. This is interesting as not one of the eight A-12 prototypes was finished yet.

  The Navy’s leadership finally found out that the contractors were having development problems with the A-12. The Navy and the Defense Department each launched their own investigations.

  All I Want for Christmas Is My A-12

  By November 1990, the murky situation became a little clearer. The A-12 was not coming together as planned and the Pentagon was being kept in the dark. In fact, Pentagon investigators found that the need for secrecy compromised oversight so badly that none could be exercised.

  The Navy wanted to have a new airplane by Christmas. But Cheney was in no mood to play Santa Claus. He was getting ready to become Scrooge.

  On December 14, 1990, Cheney ordered the Navy to “show cause,” explaining why the A-12 should not be cancelled. The Navy had three ways it could have handled the situation. It could restructure the A-12 program and stretch it out over a longer period of time. It could give McDonnell Douglas relief from the fixed-price contract. Or it could accept a higher price tag for the airplane, thus helping the contractors recoup their unexpectedly higher costs.

  The A-12’s costs to date were not encouraging. The program had a $4.8 billion ceiling, but trade press reports put the actual program cost at $7.5 billion, and it was lagging behind schedule by as much as 18 months, pushing the plane’s first flight back to 1992. The first production lot of aircraft would be $300 million more expensive than the $1.2 billion price the Navy agreed to.The Navy had only received $1.2 billion in goods and services to date, and still had no airplane to show for that expense. The Pentagon wanted to recover $1.9 billion in progress payments for work it claimed was unperformed by the contractors.

  “No one can tell me how much more it will take to keep the A-12 going,” said Cheney. “If we cannot spend the taxpayer’s money wisely, we will not spend it.” With that said, Cheney took the budget ax to the A-12, chopping the program right out of the budget in January 1991.

  The Navy took an ax to its roster as well. Two admirals in charge of the A-12 program were either retired early or transferred, as was a third officer in charge of the program’s development. Pentagon purchasing chief John Betti resigned as well, because he had believed the contractor’s claims that the program was on track when his own aides told him it was not, according to press reports.

  When You Can’t Fix a Problem, Fix Blame

  Upon terminating the A-12, Cheney declared that the contractors were in default for failing to “design, develop, fabricate, assemble and test the A-12 aircraft within the contract’s schedule.”

  General Dynamics shot back. “This is the result of the government’s insistence on a fixed price contract for a major program on the cutting edge of technology,”
countered company spokesman Alan Spivak. McDonnell Douglas and General Dynamics claimed the program was improperly terminated, adding that the government caused the A-12’s costs rise by constantly changing specifications.

  Shifting from outrage to chutzpah, General Dynamics and McDonnell Douglas then sued the Defense Department in 1991.

  In late December, 1995, long after the A-12 was buried in a sea of red ink, U.S. Court of Claims judge Robert Hodges found in favor of McDonnell Douglas and General Dynamics. In a 52-page opinion, Judge Hodges declared the contractors were entitled to $1.2 billion to recoup costs suffered from the improper termination of the A-12 program, and could keep the $2.6 billion already paid to them by the Pentagon.

  Why Did This Happen?

  In doing the autopsy on the A-12, two major factors converged to turn the Avenger into a costly turkey.

  The first was the untried technology that had to be integrated into the design, for which no price tag could be affixed before work began.

  The second was the fixed price contract that the Navy signed with McDonnell Douglas and General Dynamics. If the cost of developing the plane exceeded the price, then the contractors had to eat the loss. If the project could be brought in below budget, then the profit would be that much sweeter for the contractors.

  Weapons systems were usually developed on a “cost plus” basis, where the contractor simply delivered a new plane, tank, or ship meeting the Pentagon’s performance specifications. Then they were paid for the weapon.

  John Lehman, who served as Navy Secretary during the Reagan Administration, engineered the fixed price contract as a way to save money during an expected dollar drought that would follow the completion of the Reagan defense build-up.

  “The moans you hear from the industry in the past few years are the moans of people facing up to the free enterprise system,” Lehman told Aviation Week and Space Technology in a 1990 interview. “They didn’t have a culture of managing costs,” he said. “They manage technology.”

  But that was not how Eleanor Spector saw it. As deputy assistant secretary for Defense procurement, Spector was the senior civil servant overseeing how our tax dollars were spent to buy our security. “The overrun on fixed-price contracting is infinite,” she said. “When they [the contractors] start hurting much, they don’t do a good job for us.”

  Lehman wanted a system where no weapons system went into production until all problems were worked out. But Spector pointed out that a program’s risk cannot be reduced to the point where there is no further risk.

  The A-12 was supposed to be a low risk program.

  How did we know that?

  General Dynamics and McDonnell Douglas certified it in writing.

  Exit Stage Left

  Among the most over-the-top endeavors anyone indulges in is entertainment. The whole idea is to do something so entrancing people will pay to watch or listen to it. The audience demands a steady stream and new and original ideas. So it should be no surprise that some of these ideas turn out to be real stinkers.

  “Only thing worse than watching a bad movie is being in one.”

  —Elvis Presley

  Smell-O-Vision

  Mixing Odors with Cinema

  Douglas Niles and Donald Niles, Sr.

  This Movie Stinks! No, Really…

  The movie industry has always been known for its willingness to innovate and for possessing the creativity to come up with new ideas that seem to stretch the bounds of common sense. Of course, most of the new ideas crash and burn. But, once in a while, a new technique changes the whole industry.

  The whole idea of moviemaking as an artistic medium is a good example. It was 1887 when scientist and inventor Eadweard Muybridge set up a number of cameras in a row and used them in sequence to photograph a number of models running past. He was finally able to provide the answer to a question long and passionately debated by equestrians: can a galloping horse have all four feet off the ground at the same time? His images proved it could.

  By the late 1890s, Louis Lumière had invented a special camera that could feed a reel of 35mm film past the lens, snapping the shutter thousands of times to take individual pictures. Another invention, the movie projector, could display those images in rapid sequence on a screen, and thus the movie industry was born. The flickering black-and-white images are crude and jerky by today’s standards, but a whole industry, including studios and a network of theaters to show the products of those studios, grew up in response to those flickering images. Many theater managers even hired piano players to add a touch of dramatic music to the silent epics projected on the screen.

  The cinema flourished during the early decades of the twentieth century, of course, but in 1927 the first of several cataclysmic changes rocked the industry. The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson, coupled a sound track with a movie, and was an immediate, and colossal, hit. Suddenly, all movies had to have sound!

  In the next decade or two, movies introduced images with a barrage of stunning color. Epics such as Gone With the Wind embraced the new medium, as did fantasies like the classic Walt Disney animation features. When a dark gray tornado picked up pallid little Judy Garland and deposited her in the domain of The Wizard of Oz, the stunning contrast of color’s vivid imagery became clear. Suddenly, all movies had to be in color! (Though, primarily because of budgetary concerns, black-and-white film continued to be a common medium into the 1950s.)

  Still, those creative minds out in Hollywood were bound to keep thinking, trying to come up with the next big innovation. If we can make movies look and sound spectacular, how about making them smell good? Initial attempts included scratch cards, bursts of perfume into the theater, and squirts of aroma at individual seats, but none of these captured the imagination as sound and color had.

  But finally, in 1960, one film made a serious attempt to involve audience noses in the movie experience. The film, called Scent of Mystery, included some thirty different smells released at each seat in synchronization with the projector. This patented device—surely the inventor was drooling at the prospects of his imminent profits—was called Smell-O-Vision.

  Mike Todd, Jr. produced the movie. He, with his father, had created the successful big-screen epic Around the World in Eighty Days. For Scent of Mystery, he employed the acting talents of Denholm Elliott and Peter Lorre, and even briefly used his stepmother, Elizabeth Taylor, albeit without putting her name in the credits. Bursts of scent would accompany the story as the movie was screened in three specially equipped theatres. A key plot element—a connection between an assassin and pipe smoke—actually relied upon the scent to help tell the story.

  Unfortunately, Smell-O-Vision, in practice, simply stank. The odors came out too late or too early, sometimes with overpowering strength, at other times so faint that viewers were forced to sniff loudly as they vainly sought the next clue. The early reviews were terrible, and the movie a complete flop. Mike Todd, Jr. wouldn’t be able to produce another movie until he made The Bell Jar more than nineteen years later.

  And theater-filling Smell-O-Vision would never stink again.

  “A real failure does not need an excuse. It is an end in itself.”

  —Gertrude Stein

  Nick & Nora

  The Musical

  Brian M. Thomsen

  Sometimes the potential of the parts do not guarantee a successful whole…

  Not all Broadway “sure things” are the result of a successful composer/writer/director’s next work in the pipeline (as related in the next section on By Jeeves).

  Sometimes it’s the presentation of the perfect package.

  An inspired collaboration between playwright and composer under the auspices of a sympathetic and sure director.

  A top notch cast with marquee quality names attached that are willing to play up to their potential.

  And—perhaps most important—enough time to put the show together right, including an adequate number of workshops and out of town dates to get the produc
tion perfectly timed and polished. Put them all together and you have a surefire chance for a successful Broadway run. But on Broadway nothing is ever a sure thing, no matter how good it looks on paper.

  Such was the case with Nick & Nora.

  Before there was Macmillan and Wife, Remington Steele, or Moonlighting, there was Nick and Nora Charles, the archetypal bantering crime-solving upper-crust couple.

  The creation of shamus author extraordinaire Dashiell Hammett in his last novel The Thin Man (and, according to some critics and friends of the author, based on himself and his paramour Lillian Hellman—though most would agree that Nora was profoundly more likeable than Lillian), Nick and Nora were the idle rich’s detectives of choice.

  He was a jovial retired Pinkerton (like Hammett himself).

  She was a happy-go-lucky heiress (unlike Hellman). Amid a life of parties and the consumption of way too much alcohol, they merrily stumble their way into a crime scene and, over the course of numerous points of befuddlement by the police, wind up solving the crime.

  As mentioned before, this was Hammett’s last novel, and the only one featuring the Charleses. It is also worth noting that “The Thin Man” of the title does not refer to Nick, but rather to the suspect of whom he finds himself in hot pursuit. Notwithstanding this pesky fact, hordes of fans of the 1934 film version starring William Powell and Myrna Loy (with Skippy the terrier as their beloved schnauzer, Asta) misappropriated the moniker to Powell’s character of Nick. That allowed the studios to spawn five additional Thin Man movies, a radio series, and a fairly successful two-season TV series starring Peter Lawford and Phyllis Kirk as the sleuthing spouses—and begetting the archetypal TV mystery duo along the way.