Supersonic Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age (Novels of the Jet Age)

by Walter J. Boyne

  “Who’s flying?”

  “Abe Gentry; he’s a new man, one of the production test pilots. I doubt if you would have met him. I don’t even know the name of the guy in the backseat.”

  Gentry applied power, smoke boiled from the two J79 engines, and in a hurricane of noise the F-4C accelerated down the runway, lifting off at the mid-point and climbing straight out.

  “He’ll be gone for the better part of an hour. It’s not like this is the first flight of a prototype. The Air Force is champing at the bit for deliveries, so he’ll wring it out, they’ll fix whatever he finds is wrong, and it will be on its way to Langley as soon as possible.”

  The two men walked back toward the hangars and Harry asked, “Who do you think your foreign customers will be?”

  “Well, Great Britain for sure, and Germany. Israel, too, if they play their cards right, and oddly enough, Iran is probably going to place a big order. After that, it could be anybody.”

  “Are you talking to anyone about putting a gun in the airplane?”

  Elliot shook his head. “No, and it makes me uneasy. The airplane was designed as an interceptor, mainly, intended to shoot down Russian bombers. It’s going to carry the Sparrow and the Sidewinder missiles, but I don’t know how good they’ll be in air-to-air combat.”

  Harry snorted. “I’ll tell you—they’ll be lousy! If we get in a war we are going to be fighting MiGs, itty-bitty little airplanes that can turn on a dime. They are not going to sit out there and let a missile get them, not when they can outturn it. You really ought to get them working on a gun installation.”

  “Maybe we’ll have better luck with the Air Force. The Navy’s adamant; this is the missile age, and they are not buying any guns for the Phantom.”

  “They’ve got them on the Vought F8U, and the pilots love them. They carry Sidewinders, too, but for the close-in work the pilots prefer the four twenty-millimeter cannon.”

  “I know, Harry, I grew up firing guns, but there’s a whole missile lobby out there, and nobody’s interested in spending the money to retrofit guns on the Phantom.”

  “Well, what about hanging them on as external ordnance? You could make up a pod of machine guns or even cannon, and hang it on the wing like a bomb. At least you’d have something to shoot with.”

  Elliot stopped for a minute and said, “Let me think about that one. We could do that on the side, not related to the airplane, wouldn’t even need to get Navy approval to build it. Then they’d probably test it if we offered it to them.”

  “I’ll tell you what. You build a little 7.62 minigun pod, and I’ll guarantee that the Air Force tests it. A flat guarantee!”

  “Harry, you are on. After the way you sold the Air Force the Phantom, I’m sure you can sell them a piddling little minigun!”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  October 7, 1963

  Wichita, Kansas

  Tom Shannon ran his hand over the PERT chart hanging on the wall of the Learjet ops’ office. “Look how fast this bugger came together, Harry.”

  Vance was back at the hotel, resting; they’d promised to come pick him up as soon as it seemed probable that the Learjet would take off. Tom started signing off the key points on a chart started by his dad earlier in the year. “February 2, 1963, assembly of number one starts; June 7, first fuselage leaves its jig; August 2, forward and aft fuselage sections mated—it’s still like a kit, so far, in August! Then August 16—fatigue tests passed. We sweated that one; you can never forget the Comet on a deal like this. Then September 15—roll out. Now today—touch wood—we’ll make the first flight.”

  “How come they had to redesign the tail?”

  “It was too much of a good thing, the GE engines were putting out more power than expected, and they needed a new tail to take advantage of it. It drove Bill Lear nuts, it took forty days, twenty-four hours a day, to do it, but it had to be done. You know what he said when it was finally mated to the fuselage?”

  “No, but I’ll bet it’s ribald.”

  “Right you are. He said, ‘That’s the best-looking piece of tail I ever saw.’”

  “There’s more rolling on this first flight than just proving the engineers right, Harry. Bill Lear is in hock up to his eyeballs, and unless he puts on a convincing demonstration today, he might be forced out of business. The fiasco yesterday really hurt.”

  The day before, a nosewheel problem on a taxi test forced them to cancel the test flight before a disappointed audience of press and stockholders. Vance had been there the entire day, and it had tired him.

  “Well, everybody is unhappy; the creditors are yipping; the investors are groaning. If they don’t have a spectacular first flight today, he’ll never get the money he needs to mass-produce it.”

  “Is he going to do the test flight?”

  “He was, but Dad talked him out of it, told him that if he crashed in the first one, there would never be another one. That did it. They hired Hank Beaird—you remember him from Republic; he was chief experimental pilot there for the late-model F-84s and the F-105. And Bob Hagan, the Cessna chief of flight tests, will make the takeoff.”

  “Hagan? I remember him from the old Massey Quad Four days. The airplane’s in good hands.”

  The day ground by slowly until 3:00 P.M., when to a flurry of applause the first Learjet, 801-L, slowly taxied down toward runway fourteen. Hagan made a series of high-speed taxi runs, then brought it back into the hangar to be fueled for the test flight.

  It was now 5:40 P.M. and growing dark. The tarmac was crowded with workers from the factory. The boys had picked Vance up and he was standing near Bill and his wife, Moya, among a little knot of loyal friends. Everyone was quiet, almost afraid to speak, as Hagan lined the little jet up on runway nineteen. Lear was perspiring profusely; he’d been down with a bad cold earlier in the day, but now all the symptoms were gone, sweated out of him by the sheer excitement of what might happen in the next minute.

  Hagan advanced power, the little GE engines responded, and the Learjet moved swiftly seventeen hundred feet down the runway, lifting off at 103 nautical miles per hour at the exact spot predicted.

  There was a cumulative cheer from the onlookers as Hagan climbed out at 170 knots to 5,000 feet, where a Cessna chase plane was waiting to give it a visual check, to see if there were any leaks, if the gear doors were sealed, if there were any panels missing.

  Bill Lear slapped Vance on the back, grabbed a microphone, called Hagan, and said, “By gosh, you’ve got her up!”

  Bill turned and hugged Moya and began pumping hands of his employees as Hagan took the Learjet to the north, out of sight of the airport, where he could do some practice stalls. Vance, Tom, and Harry moved to the edge of the crowd.

  “Boys, do you remember how all this got started?” Tom and Harry looked embarrassed. It was not something they would have brought up.

  “Well, I’ll tell you. I was down in the dumps about Madeline leaving, and you two were trying to figure out a way to cheer me up. I think it was you, Tom, that suggested a little executive jet, just because I was working on those Learstars at the time. Well, it took a while, but there it is. I’m not going to mention this to Bill; you know him, it’s Learjet now, pure and simple, and that’s OK with me, but I wanted to be sure you boys remembered.”

  Word had gone out that the Learjet had made a successful takeoff, and Highway 42 into the airport was already jammed with cars, people coming from the Piper and Cessna plants, Wichita, from everywhere, to watch the first landing.

  Beaird didn’t disappoint anyone; he brought the Learjet low and fast across the field, then pulled up, made a perfect pattern, and landed, touching down at ninety knots. It was over; Bill Lear had shown everyone, once again, that he was a maverick genius ahead of his time.

  That night, at a small party he threw for close associates—the big party for the plant employees would come a week later—Bill had a word for the reporters that crowded in, telling them, “They said we’d never build the L
earjet. We built it. Then they said the Learjet would never fly! We just flew it. Now they say we won’t sell any. I tell you, they’ll be wrong again, we are going to sell these like hotcakes, and owning a Learjet will define whether you are a celebrity or not.”

  Vance leaned over across the table and shouted to Tom, “We better order one for the firm, Tom; we’re getting big enough now that we could use our own jet. Besides, I’d like to check out in one more airplane before I check out for good.”

  “Don’t talk like that, Pop; you’ll be around for a long time. You’ll be checking out in rocket planes before you get your harp and wings.”

  “Or shovel and tail.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  October 28, 1963

  Weybridge, Surrey, United Kingdom

  The two old friends stood with their hands clasped for several seconds, neither man saying anything, each taking the measure of the other, ignoring the cold wind blowing rain-laden clouds on the horizon, their minds flashing back to other airfields, other rollouts, and long forgotten first flights. They had seen the debut of many new aircraft and engines and they knew intimately both the promise and the hazard of each one. If Frank Whittle and Hans von Ohain were the fathers of the jet engine, it was fair to say that Stanley Hooker and Vance Shannon were its able godparents. Both men had facilitated the growth of jet aviation, Hooker by his direct hands-on approach with Rolls-Royce and later, if somewhat under protest, with Bristol, Shannon by acting as an apostle for the new power plant in the United States, working with both General Electric and Pratt & Whitney to further its development.

  Over the years they had met at conferences and seminars, but now it was like the old days, waiting for the company’s press people to go through a hokey opening ceremony, as if it were a Broadway show being previewed rather than a powerful new weapon.

  As Vance’s son Harry looked on, they talked of mutual friends, Whittle, Alan Cobham, and others, before going into the dreadful litany of the recently dead that inevitably defaces the conversations of older people.

  Hooker asked him directly, “And how about you, Vance? I’ve heard some talk that you were not well. I’m glad you could make it for this rollout.”

  “Yes, I had a little problem with my heart, but my physician has me on some new medicine, and Jill has me on a diet and makes sure I rest. Actually, I feel better than I have in years. Harry insisted on accompanying me, more to see the competition than to be with me, I think.”

  Harry had taken over some of Vance’s consulting duties with General Dynamics, just as he had done with Boeing. At both places Harry met the same reception—a genuine acceptance based on his previous performance but also an unmistakable sense of loss in having him as a substitute for his father. It annoyed Harry at first, but he had grown used to it, realizing that it might take another decade of effort before he was evaluated purely on his own merit. It was both tough and a pleasure to follow in his father’s footsteps.

  The two older men were talking about Hooker’s experience at Rolls and his reasons for leaving when the Englishman said suddenly, “British Aircraft Corporation, Vance! Isn’t that a bastard name for you?”

  Shannon knew his volatile, voluble friend was off on a rant and merely nodded approvingly.

  “For God’s sake, we had great names like Vickers, English Electric, Bristol, and the blasted government chops them up into a faceless mess with a symbolic acronym, BAC.”

  Faced with the prospect of an expensive new weapon system, the British government had merged the three venerable firms to undertake this project, a new fighter, giving Vickers and English Electric a 40 percent share each, with Bristol getting 20 percent. The aircraft was called the TSR.2, for its tactical strike and reconnaissance missions and its Mach 2.0 speed. The design was derived from earlier efforts proposed as replacements for the venerable English Electric Canberra.

  “It’s all your fault Vance, you and your American friends, with all your so-called efficient management. The British government took over and is imitating you, and they’ve created the worst damned bureaucracy you can imagine.”

  Hooker, bigger than ever, weighing close to 250 pounds, leaned over and grabbed Shannon by the shoulders.

  “Listen to this, Vance; you won’t believe it. When we delivered the first engines, they would not fit inside the airframe! There had been engineering changes in the airframe that the government forgot to send us while we were making the engines.”

  His indignation was real enough to force him into a coughing spasm. Hooker had reluctantly left Rolls-Royce in 1949, angry with the management there. At Bristol, he had created a world-beater, the Olympus, which put out 10,000 pounds of thrust on its very first trial run. Since then he had brought the engine along, redesigning it as necessary, and two of the latest version, the Olympus 320, putting out 30,000 pounds of thrust each, powered the TSR.2. It was an engineering masterpiece.

  There was a sudden cascade of trumpets, and they moved with others to the front of a hangar cloaked with blue and gold curtains. A spokesman for BAC took the podium and announced in his best BBC voice that there would be a short film program. The first set of curtains was drawn back, a screen was lowered precariously on two ropes from the top of the hangar, and the spokesman nodded to the cameraman.

  Vance watched with some amusement. They did things like this so much better in the United States. Any public relations man there would have been fired on the spot for arranging to show a film in a setting with so much ambient light, and then they would have fired his boss for not introducing all the dignitaries who were on hand.

  The crowd settled down in their seats, and the film began with a series of historic early Vickers and English Electric aircraft, ranging from a World War I Vickers “Gunbus” down through Spitfires, Canberras, Vulcans, and the latest mark of the English Electric Lightning, with its unorthodox mounting of its twin engines, one on top of the other. Then the film shifted to rather primitive animation and the TSR.2 was presented flying a typical mission, going out at altitude to save fuel, penetrating at low altitude and high Mach to avoid radar, popping up to release four bombs, thousand-pounders, they looked like, to streak back home. The animation showed vortices curling back from the wingtips at high speeds.

  Hooker poked him in the ribs. “It doesn’t show the smoke from the engines. I’m fit to be tied, but I cannot get the test engines to stop smoking at high power settings.”

  Even though the animation was crude by American standards, it was evident that the airplane was not. With its delta wing, equipped with downturned wingtips for stability, the TSR.2 was clearly a radical advance in aviation.

  Vance and Harry found the performance numbers more than impressive—they were troubling. BAC was claiming a speed of Mach 2.0 at altitude and a combat radius of 1,000 nautical miles. The TSR.2 was supposed to be able to carry up to six tons of bombs. This was on a par with the performance promised by their client, General Dynamics, for the new F-111A. While the TSR.2 would never find a market in America, General Dynamics was hoping to sell the airplane to Great Britain as well as Australia. Hooker was talking animatedly with a passing friend, and Harry whispered, “Looks like I’ll be making a quick trip to Dallas as soon as we get back. General Dynamics won’t be happy with the TSR.2’s potential.”

  His dad whispered back, “And it’s no small matter that the TSR.2 is a far better-looking aircraft than the F-111A. Say what you will, many an airplane has been sold on the basis of its looks, and on that score, there is no contest.”

  Harry had to agree. The F-111A, with its long drooping nose and complex swing-wing arrangement, was an ugly duckling.

  There was another flurry of trumpets, the movie screen was hauled up, and, as the final set of pale gray curtains were drawn, a small tractor emerged, connected by long tow bar to the pure white TSR.2 prototype. It was even better looking in life than on the screen. The tractor towed the aircraft to a spot painted on the tarmac and stopped. The driver raced back, disconnected th
e tow bar, and then drove away, leaving the gleaming TSR.2 standing amid a still-silent crowd. A few seconds later, a spontaneous cry rang out, and the group surged around the new aircraft, huge for a fighter, standing so tall on its undercarriage that most could walk under the nose or tail without doing more than bending their heads.

  The three friends joined the crowd, walking around, mentally taking notes. Deceptively simple looking, the TSR.2 had a shoulder mounted delta wing with a tiny span, no more than thirty-seven feet. Its fuselage was huge, eighty-nine feet long.

  “It is absolutely stunning, Stanley! Tell me all about it.”

  “Vance, it is beautiful, is it not? But the real beauty is not just skin deep, but in the avionics it carries. This thing can go in at two hundred fifty feet or less, at night, in bad weather, on autopilot. It has a forward and side-looking radar, inertial navigation, and all the information is fed to both the pilot and the autopilot. The terrain-following equipment is incredible—I’ve made test flights with it in a Canberra, and it will make your skin crawl.”

  “With all that wing area, it should be able to maneuver pretty well.”

  The crowd had begun to thin, moving toward the tables where BAC had laid out a very nice tea, and as they sat down, Vance said, “It looks like a winner, Stanley, but will they let you take the time necessary to get it operating right? You remember what happened to the Avro Arrow.”

  When Avro Canada’s Arrow had first flown in March 1958, it had been by far the most advanced fighter in the world, with a speed of Mach 2.5, incredible avionics, and the long range Canada and the United States needed for an interceptor. But a change in government and political infighting canceled the program in February 1959. The new government ordered all ten of the airplanes built so far to be utterly destroyed, along with their tooling, engines, drawings, even their models. It was government vandalism, an engineering and an economic outrage, strangling Canada’s position in the aviation market. Then, adding insult to injury, the government purchased Boeing Bomarc missiles as a substitute.