Roaring Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age

by Boyne, Walter J.

  Harry started to say, “What do you want me to do?” but Boyd cut him off at “What do—”

  “I’ve got two main jobs for you. The first one will be fun. Jet airplanes are coming out of the woodwork! We have a whole stable of new planes here that we are running every sort of test on. And every damn one of them has a different cockpit layout, with the instruments all over the place, flap handles that work in different directions, switches that go up in one airplane and down in another. I want you to get checked out in all the fighters and the bombers and figure out what the best arrangement for instruments and controls should be. Then write up a specification we can give to manufacturers to start getting things standardized. We’ve had more than one guy pull up his wheels when he thought he was putting down his flaps.”

  Boyd paused to carefully polish his sunglasses, breathing on them and then rubbing them with his silk scarf. “But the real problem we have with fighters and bombers is range. We could whip the hell out of Mexico or Canada, but if we had to fight Russia our fighters don’t have the range to get there. We have to do something about aerial refueling for the bombers. I want you to get started on that, but I want you to include fighters. They’ve got to escort the bombers or Moscow will turn out to be another Schweinfurt.”

  Schweinfurt was the scene of two costly debacles, both stemming from a lack of long-range escort fighters. The Eighth Air Force had lost sixty airplanes in August 1943 and another sixty in October. After that a decision was made not to fly the bombers deep into Germany unless escort fighters were available.

  Without another word, Boyd grabbed his helmet and started out of the room. At the door he turned and said only, “Check in down the hall at Flight Ops; they know you’re coming, and they’ll get you all the manuals you need, and assign instructor pilots to check you out in all the different airplanes.”

  While he was digesting Boyd’s rapid-fire comments, Harry went down to the Base Operations Officer and got permission to go up in the control tower that was built as a part of the building. Harry paused at the last landing to catch his breath, promising himself he’d get in shape. After climbing the last set of the interminable stairs, he introduced himself to a courteous but very busy team in the control tower, who were directing takeoffs and landings for a continuous stream of traffic.

  Harry borrowed a pair of binoculars and began looking up and down the flight line.

  Boyd was certainly correct about the airplanes, which crowded the field, lined some taxiways, and were even parked in the open area on the opposite side of the runway. There were plenty of piston engine fighters—Mustangs, Thunderbolts, Lightnings, even two of the new Twin Mustang P-82s, and Harry vowed he’d fly them all if it meant flying every weekend. All the transports were there, from the ubiquitous Beech C-45 and Douglas C-47s to bigger four-engine C-54s and even one of the huge new bug-eyed Douglas C-74 Globemaster transports.

  But it was the jet aircraft that interested him. He called them off to himself, “Lockheed P-80, Republic P-84, Lockheed T-33.” A grinning staff sergeant in the tower watched him. “You planning to fly them all, sir?”

  Harry smiled back, said, “That’s the general idea,” and went on with his inventory. The strong bond between officer and non-commissioned ranks was one of the American Air Forces’ great strengths. They were the only services in which officers were sent in harm’s way, tasked with the primary duty of fighting the enemy, and there was not a pilot who did not know that his life depended upon the enlisted personnel who serviced his aircraft. There was a minimum of spit-and-polish discipline, just a nicely tuned atmosphere of mutual self-respect.

  A beautiful North American P-86 was parked next to a strange-looking four-jet aircraft. “Sarge, what’s the big jet next to the Sabre?”

  “That’s the North American XB-45; it just came in last week. I don’t know if it’s going to be here for a while or not. Good-looking airplane, though. Four jets! Imagine that.”

  After Harry made the long climb downstairs he went into the Flight Operations section, where Master Sergeant Orbin Shackleford ran things with a crisp administrative efficiency. He took Harry to a row of ten-by-twelve offices plastered against the side of the hangar. “Cold in winter, hot in summer, but it’s the best we’ve got, sir.”

  “Fine with me, Sarge.”

  “Colonel Boyd told me to fix you up, sir, so I’ve got your office all set up, all the manuals in place, and a list of instructors for each plane, along with their phone numbers. They all have regular jobs, so you’ll have to work out your flight schedule with them. I expect you won’t get to fly more than four or five times a week.”

  They spoke for a while longer and Harry knew he had made the most constructive move of the day, becoming friends with Shackleford, who, like all the top NCOs, really made the Air Force work. It was good to be friends with the Base Commanding Officer and with the chaps at the personnel office, but if you really wanted to get along you made friends with the first sergeants and their like. They would still work with you if you didn’t get along, but only to the point that it was correct. But if they liked you, you could count on them to make something happen, no matter how the regulations had to be bent.

  That night he took Anna to the Officers Club to celebrate his lucky new assignment. As they walked from the parking lot, Harry, as always, enjoyed the sensation of all eyes being on Anna. It gave him a smug sense of proprietorship, basking in the notion that he not only took this darling woman to dinner, he also took her to bed, and that was what they envied most. Heads turned as Harry and Anna walked through the big reception area and down the hallway toward the dining room, probably the best restaurant in Dayton. Anna pretended to ignore the admiring looks but clearly enjoyed them, the smiles and the nods and the quick greetings never getting old despite her long experience at being beautiful.

  When she and Harry had ordered, she reached across the table, pressed his hand, and said, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you as happy as this, not even at the wedding—not even on the honeymoon, not even on our trip across country.”

  Suddenly this was clearly dangerous ground, and Harry looked closely in her eyes. Anna could be feisty, and the wrong word here might cause an argument. He was learning. “Honey, I’m just happy to be here with you. It was great to drive across country, but here we are, all settled in like an old married couple, a good dinner here at the club, with all the guys admiring you. And then to top it off, I get to take you home to bed. What could be better than that?”

  “Good recovery, but I don’t believe a word of it. You are happy because you’ve got so many airplanes to fly—and if you are happy, then I’m happy, too.”

  They ate well-done prime rib with enthusiasm, and Anna had another Manhattan with her meal. Harry never drank the day before he flew—his father had taught him that “eight hours between bottle and throttle” was not nearly enough. He would have a beer or two on the weekend, but Anna had grown up in a family where wine was served with every meal, and she enjoyed cocktails every evening.

  They had the club dessert specialty, Cherries Jubilee, and she took his hand again, squeezing it, saying, “It’s late. You said something about taking someone home to bed?”

  The next six weeks flew past in a blur. Harry saw Boyd only twice, and both times Boyd said only, “I see you’re making progress.” And Harry was, at least on analyzing the instrument problem. Almost all the aircraft had their flight instruments—the airspeed, altimeter, turn and bank, artificial horizon, and, for those that had them, gyro compasses—arranged pretty much in the center of the instrument panel, but beyond that, anything could go anywhere. He had already written draft recommendations about standardizing on instrument size and placement, and he was engaged in correspondence with some psychologists on the West Coast about making the various controls—gear levers, flap levers, throttles—somehow look and feel like their function. It would take time, but with guidance, the manufacturers could begin to get some uniformity into cockpit design. I
t was more necessary now than ever because things happened so swiftly in a jet. If you made a mistake, you probably wouldn’t have time to recover.

  He knew intuitively that the range problem was more difficult. Jet engines were getting more sophisticated, but they still gulped fuel voraciously. Each new jet coming down the line was bigger and could carry more fuel, but they also had more powerful engines, which kept their range down to a minimum. The North American P-51 that won the air war in Europe had an extraordinary range for the time, about 1,350 miles. With jets this dropped down immediately. The P-80A’s range was only about 540 miles. They were being fitted with wingtip tanks, but even that would only bring the range up to about the same as the P-51. The Air Force’s first post-war jet fighter, the sleek-looking Republic P-84A, was supposed to have a range of about 1,300 miles, but the new P-86A’s range was only 800 miles, clearly inadequate for combat unless there were plenty of prepared forward bases available. It was almost as bad with bombers. The new Boeing XB-47’s range was estimated to be less than that of the B-29.

  The irony was that neither Great Britain nor the Soviet Union had an absolute requirement for range. The mission of their air forces was different, primarily aimed at defending against incoming bombers. With less need for onboard fuel, they could use smaller aircraft, interceptors, where a fast rate of climb and speed were more important than range. The USAF had to have bombers with intercontinental range, able to operate directly from U.S. bases against any enemy. And those bombers had to have long-range escort fighters, able to escort them to the targets and back and win air superiority just as the Mustang had done over Germany in 1944.

  Harry knew that there were some radical ideas in the works, such as parasite fighters tucked in the bomb bay or attached physically to the end of the wing and flown along like flexible extended wingtips. He had been given some top-secret studies on both programs, and it seemed obvious to him that they failed the practicality test. He called them kamikaze cures because both ideas were too complex, put too much strain on the pilots, and gave the fighter almost no chance of recovery if it engaged in combat—which was the only reason for its existence.

  He spent hours reading the manuals on each of the new jet fighters, trying to work out flight profiles that would stretch the range by even a few miles. Then, after a brief checkout, usually no more than a cockpit familiarization, he would fly the flight profiles he had created to see what the results were. By changing the climb speeds, cruising at optimum speed and altitude for the weight, and making rapid descents, he found he could add about 10 percent to the figures in the charts in the manuals. It was something, but not at all what Boyd had in mind. Ten percent of 800 miles for the F-86 gave it an extra 80 miles, almost not enough change to bother about, because other factors—ordnance loads, weather, engine trim—could easily erase the gain.

  The days passed all too quickly, and while he had pretty well settled all the issues on the first attempt at standardizing cockpit layout, he had not accomplished much more in the range extension line. His studies had commissioned some wind tunnel tests for new and larger drop tanks, but there had been no significant findings. He did what he and Tom usually did when they were stumped and called his father at his Boeing office in Seattle, getting him on the first try, a rarity.

  Tom was not with their father—Marie had some difficulties back in Los Angeles, and although Vance did not elaborate, Harry assumed that it was the sex problems that Tom had only hinted at.

  Harry said, “Give them both my love, Dad, and send Anna’s, too. I’m not going to tell her anything about this; she can get it straight from Marie.” Then he went on, “Dad, your old friend Al Boyd has handed me a tough nut to crack. He’s concerned—that’s not the right word—he’s outraged over the short range of jets, and he’s asked me to see what can be done.”

  Harry went on to tell him about the changes he’d suggested in the flight profile, in fuel management, and so on.

  Vance’s first response was, as he knew, obvious. “You’re considering external tanks, of course?”

  “Yeah, but it’s strange; they are a big help on piston engine fighters, as we know, but they are marginal on jets. Jets are so clean that the external tanks cause so much drag during the climb to altitude that they don’t do much more than pay for themselves.”

  There was a momentary silence, and Vance came back. “You’ve put me on the spot, Harry. Boeing is working on some proprietary in-flight refueling ideas, and of course I cannot discuss them with you. They’ll be getting to the Air Force with them in time, but right now it’s top secret, and it’s not as applicable to fighters anyway, not right away. But I tell you what. I’ll wire Stanley Hooker in Great Britain. He’s pretty discontented with his work at Rolls-Royce right now, so he may not be in the best of moods. But I’m sure he’ll help you if I ask him. They’d done a lot of experimentation with in-flight refueling in Great Britain. A man named Alan Cobham has been doing it for years, and he’s got a firm, Flight Refueling Limited. I’m sure Hooker knows him—it’s a small community there—and he’ll get you an introduction. See if you can get orders to go to England to study the problem. If the Air Force won’t send you, see if you can take leave and go. I’ll pay for your expenses, charge it off to Aviation Consultants, Incorporated.”

  They discussed what Vance knew of Cobham’s efforts for a few minutes, and Harry rang off, glad that he had used an Air Force phone for the long-distance call.

  Harry, ever the student, plunged into a study of everything available on aerial refueling and was pleased to see that it had originated in the United States in 1921, when Wesley May, a wing walker, carrying a five-gallon can of gasoline on his back, stepped from the wing of a Lincoln Standard to the wing of a Curtiss Jenny and poured the fuel into its tank in flight. The Army became interested in 1923 and used a de Havilland DH-4B as a tanker with another DH-4B as a receiver in a series of tests. Some fourteen world records in endurance were set, with the longest flight lasting thirty-seven hours.

  Then in 1927, some of the future great Army Air Force leaders set a world record in a Fokker Trimotor. The Question Mark, flown by a crew of future generals including Tooey Spaatz and Ira Eaker, essentially proved the value of aerial refueling. The technique it demonstrated was relatively primitive, yet the plane flew for 140 hours before a malfunctioning engine required them to land. Later, because the range of planes such as the Boeing B-17 and B-29 had grown so much, the apparent requirement for in-flight refueling diminished, and little further was done except for some minor experimental work during World War II.

  Harry had deferred talking to Colonel Boyd until he was fully prepared, knowing that asking to go to England would look like trying to boondoggle a free trip to Europe. But on the following Monday morning, Harry waylaid Boyd in the hallway. “Colonel, I’ve got to go to Great Britain to look into what they are doing with in-flight refueling. I’ll need about three weeks.—”

  Boyd strode past him saying, “Fine. Pick a group and get going. You can use one of our B-29s for the flight; be good training for everybody.”

  “I’ll need contractual authority, probably.”

  “No problem; have General Carroll pick out somebody from Contracts to go with you. Take a lawyer, too. But get going—you can see we are hurting for range.”

  The B-29 flight over was uneventful, and even though he gladly took turns flying, Harry had time to read a packet of material Hooker had sent him through the local Royal Air Force representative at Wright-Patterson, Wing Commander Rob Dick. Harry found that Cobham had been experimenting with in-flight refueling for years, making an attempt at a non-stop flight from England to India in 1934 in an Airspeed Courier. He got as far as Malta before an engine malfunction forced him down. Then during the war, he was given a contract to convert six hundred Avro Lancaster bombers into tankers, to enable the Royal Air Force to begin bombing Japan. The war ended before they could go into action. In the post-war years he had done extraordinary work experimenting wi
th refueling aircraft for commercial service, but the advent of the long-range Lockheed Constellations and Boeing Stratocruisers once again snuffed the requirement. Now Cobham was down to a handful of Lancaster tankers and not much of a market. Harry Shannon was confident that they could do business.

  His B-29 landed at London Heathrow Airport on March 19, and after a perfunctory run through customs, his team was met by representatives of Flight Refueling Limited. Using two big black Daimlers, they drove him immediately over to their offices in nearby Littlehampton.

  Sir Alan Cobham was there himself to greet them, confident, smiling, and with a self-deprecating sense of humor that belied the great successes he had achieved in more than thirty years of flying experience. He was not an aristocrat in the conventional sense, coming from a humble background in London, but he had the aristocratic demeanor of one who has won his spurs in battle.

  “Colonel Shannon, we need your business, and we’ll do anything we can do legally to get it. I’ve got two Lancastrians being prepared for a demonstration flight tomorrow, if you’d like to see our system in operation.”

  As tired as he was, Harry immediately agreed, and at seven the next morning he found himself in the back end of a converted Avro Lancastrian, a transport version of the famous bomber. Unlike the B-29, the Lancastrian was not pressurized and virtually unheated, and he was barely able to move in the winter flying gear Cobham had provided. Paul Russell, Cobham’s right-hand man, was similarly attired and flew with Harry, explaining in detail the length of the hose, the diameter of the reels, and the cost per refueling. If Cobham’s figures were correct, commercial transports could actually save money using in-flight refueling rather than making intermediate stops on their transoceanic crossings.