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

by Walter J. Boyne

  “Vance, you are exactly right. Everybody expects missiles to be the weapon of the future, and there are already politicians at work claiming that the TSR.2 is an expensive dinosaur that needs to be killed at birth.”

  A BAC engineer spotted Hooker and came up with a special set of expensive-looking brochures. A far less technical example had been prepared for the reporters and the rest of the crowd. These, bound in a faux leather, were prepared for the knowledgeable, and he pressed one into Hooker’s hands. Then with a sudden glance of recognition he said, “Mr. Shannon, it’s an honor,” and gave him one as well.

  “Ah, Vance, it’s wonderful to be an international celebrity.”

  “He’s probably the only man, besides you, in a hundred-mile radius who would know who I am.”

  But even as he said it, he felt a glow of pride. He was old, he’d been through the wars, but he still had a little clout, and Harry was there to see it, to be proud of his old man.

  Harry excused himself from their dinner engagement. He spent the time in his room analyzing the thick, fact-filled brochure that BAC had provided them, preparing a wire to send to General Dynamics in the morning. In the dining room, Vance and Hooker ate with their usual gusto, while Hooker went on and on about the imminent downfall of the British aviation industry.

  “They are trying to force the old firms out of business. Whereas in the old days they tried to keep everybody alive with a few contracts, nowadays they are telling us to merge or die. Pretty soon we’ll be down to one firm, making one airplane, and then pffft, it will be over.”

  “What about the Concorde? How is that coming along?”

  “It’s an amazing cock-up as well, but somehow both teams have a passion for the project, and they overcome the difficulties of language, of measurement standards, of politics with effort and money. Lots of money. The airplane will cost billions in development before one ever flies, but when it does, it will be a treat. I keep telling myself that it has to be done, just to keep up the momentum on research. But I know I’m lying to myself, because it’s using my engines, bigger versions of the Olympus.”

  Hooker said, “Now that you’ve pumped me, let me pump you. What’s going on in America on the SST?”

  Vance bit his tongue. He should never have asked about the Concorde, for now he had to level with his old friend. “Boeing and Lock heed are competing. Harry is working directly with Boeing, but he keeps me informed. Against his solid advice, Boeing is opting for a swing-wing configuration. Harry kept telling them there is no way that they can sustain the weight of the swing-wing mechanism, but, as usual, they don’t listen. You know how it is with consultants; we have to give our opinion, but once the client’s mind is made up, we salute and follow orders.”

  Hooker nodded. “It is the same over here. And what about Lockheed?”

  “All I know about Lockheed is that they are going with a delta-wing setup. There are just the two competitors; everyone else has backed out. It is much too expensive to propose an SST, much less build one.”

  “Any chance of them teaming up?”

  “No, I don’t think so, not this go-around. But that’s coming. Our industry is melting down, too, and there will be some big mergers in the future. Our problems are the same as yours; neither the government nor the airlines are buying enough new airplanes to keep all the companies in business. Airplanes are getting more efficient, so you need fewer, and they are getting more expensive, so you can afford even fewer than you need. One of our leading thinkers, Norm Augustine, has said that if this keeps up, the Air Force will ultimately spend its entire budget to buy just one airplane. Same thing can be said about the airlines.”

  Hooker signaled the hovering waiter for another round of cognac, and even though he knew he would pay for it later that evening, Shannon agreed.

  “Tell me about your boys, Vance; I was glad you brought Harry and I am sorry to miss Tom.”

  “Tom wanted to come, but he’s so busy and traveling so much that he couldn’t. He sends you his best regards. I didn’t want Harry to come, but he insisted. The boys are concerned about me; they think I’m a lot worse off than I am health-wise, and do their best to protect me. They are both doing well in the business, and I’ve brought in a new man that I regard almost as a son, Bob Rodriquez. I’ll send him over to you soon; you would like him.”

  Hooker moved his chair closer to Vance and said, “How about sending Harry back over to see me in a few months? There is a strange bit of business going on with the Tupolev bureau; they are asking too many questions about what we are doing with the Concorde, and we are fixing up a poison pill of information for them.”

  “What would you want Harry for?”

  “He’s got your name, Vance, and he’s got a terrific personality. We’d like to have someone like him, not directly connected with either the British or French firms working on the Concorde, to supply the information to the Russians. Do you think he would be willing?”

  Vance thought for a moment. Harry was perfect for a job like this and would enjoy it. “Let me ask him.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  November 26, 1963

  Palos Verdes, California

  The atmosphere of shock and disbelief was swiftly supplanted by one of suspicion bordering on paranoia in the Shannon household. It seemed impossible to Tom and Harry, who had watched him master the Cuban crisis and then saw him at the Air Force Academy less than six months before, that the vibrant, inspiring John F. Kennedy was dead. To Vance, increasingly irascible and opinionated as his health declined, Ruby’s shooting Oswald made it obvious that there was some sort of conspiracy involved.

  “Dad, you may well be right, but who is in the conspiracy? You don’t think that Lyndon Johnson had anything to do with this, do you?”

  Vance grunted. “I don’t know. I’m more inclined to think it’s the Soviet Union, working with Cuba somehow, trying to avenge the Cuban debacle. Khrushchev will never forget that he had to back down, and Castro will sure as hell never forget the Bay of Pigs.”

  The three of them worked the theories over for an hour before the two boys saw that Vance was getting agitated, and knew it was time to go.

  As they walked out the door, Vance said to himself, Gad, I’m getting to be an old man, screaming at my boys over something I don’t know anything about, something nobody really knows about, nobody but the bastards who did it.

  He moved over to the desk and pulled out the bottle of cognac. It was only 10:00 A.M. and he rarely drank, but he felt he needed something. George Schairer was coming down for lunch, and it wasn’t going to be easy talking to him, for Vance was smack in the middle of a building confrontation. A few months before he was killed, President Kennedy was alarmed by Pan American’s Juan Trippe placing a “protective order” for six of the British-French SST—they were calling it the Concorde. As a result, he backed the United States building a competing aircraft. Under Jeeb Halaby’s aggressive and enthusiastic leadership, the FAA had put out requests for proposals, and Boeing, Lockheed, and North American had all responded.

  This put Vance on the spot, because his firm was working on proposals for all three firms. He had been working with Harry on some preliminary ideas for the Boeing SST, as well as continuing to work on the Bomarc. But Vance was also helping North American with their magnificent Mach 3.0 XB-70 and of course was continuing work at Lockheed on the A-12/F-12/SR-71 programs. All of the programs involved supersonic flight, and he would have to be extremely careful not to give anything away. Normally he would have just excused himself on a potential conflict of interest basis, but he couldn’t do that now, not when George said he needed him.

  Vance walked into the bathroom, kept perfectly hospital neat as always by Jill, brushed his teeth, and rinsed with Listerine.

  “Never do for George to smell cognac on my breath, especially in the morning.”

  Schairer had agreed to come down from Seattle to see him for lunch today when Vance asked to delay the meeting because he d
idn’t feel like flying up. That meant the meeting was important, for Schairer’s time was too valuable to be spent flying back and forth from Seattle.

  Jill flew in, her arms full of flowers.

  “What are we giving George for lunch?”

  “You said keep it simple, and I did. There’s just fresh shrimp cocktail, two different kinds of sandwiches, ham and cheese and corned beef, and a salad. And ice cream for dessert.”

  “Good—I was afraid you might fix one of your Mexican specialties, probably too spicy for George.”

  The doorbell rang, and Vance moved to greet his old friend. As soon as the first pleasantries were over, Schairer said, “Do me a favor, please. Let’s not talk about the Kennedy assassination. I’m just heartsick; when I think of it, my mind goes off track and I cannot concentrate.”

  Vance agreed, and the two men reminisced through lunch, talking about their trip to Germany before the war had ended, about the Cuban missile crisis, painful as it was with its memories of JFK, and about cars—but they left anything skirting the issue of supersonic flight alone.

  “I see the Russkies have another first in space—what’s her name, Valentina Tereshkova?”

  “Brave woman! They seem to have a better grasp on what catches the public’s eye. Putting a woman in space is a public relations master stroke, even if it doesn’t do that much for advancing space science.”

  Jill had opted out of eating with them, but as she swept in with the coffee and ice cream she said, “I think you’re wrong, George. Even if she doesn’t do much up there to advance space science, she’s going to get women interested in it, and that generates another fifty percent of the population using their brains about space. It’s bound to help space science in the long run.”

  “Touché, Jill—you are right as always.”

  The two men moved back to Vance’s familiar library, stocked almost exclusively with books on aviation and engineering.

  Schairer looked around. “It’s a long time since I was here, Vance, but I just noticed something. You don’t have an ‘I’m a Hero’ wall.”

  Vance laughed. Most people kept at least one wall for their plaques, photos with dignitaries, diplomas, and so on. It was a standard feature in dens and libraries around the country. “No, I’ve got an ‘I’m a Hero’ chest—I just toss all of them into a big shipping trunk in the basement. The kids can sort them out when I’m gone.”

  “That’s not going to be for a long time.”

  “I don’t know, George; I get the feeling my time may be running out. My doc says I’ll be fine if I take it easy, and take my medicine, but I don’t know; I’ve got a funny feeling. But let’s talk about something else. You didn’t come down here to listen to me bellyache.”

  “Vance, I know you have a problem keeping everybody happy and not stepping on anybody’s toes. This may seem crazy at this late date, but I want to talk to you about the SST, not what you’ve been doing, not anything technical, just some generic stuff on how you feel about it. I’ve got some misgivings, we’re not reaching any kind of consensus at Boeing, and I need your opinion. You’ve got more common sense than anybody I know. I’ve seen you pull an intuitive thought right out of your gut, time after time, and it’s almost always right. So let me have it straight, without regard to our contract or to anything else. What do you think the prospects are for a viable SST?”

  Vance considered this for a minute. It was something he could talk about safely to anyone—the FAA, Boeing, Lockheed, it didn’t matter—and he had strong feelings. “I can do that, George, and just to be fair, I’m going to have to tell what I tell you to Lockheed and North American. Is that OK with you?”

  Schairer nodded agreement, and Vance sighed, then went on, “The truth is, I am a bit of a crank on this, George. I think the supersonic transport is too risky and too expensive to pursue for any valid economic reason. As a matter of national pride, that’s different. The Soviet Union will put one up for almost the same reason they put Sputnik up, to show the world they can do it. Great Britain and France have made a colossal mistake. They put their countries’ pride on the line and launched into something that will be impossible to back out of and will cost a fortune that will never be recovered. The market is just too small to support enough SST transports to recover their costs on a production run.”

  Schairer nodded, then said, “Do you mind if I make notes?”

  “Go ahead; we can tape it if you want. Bob Rodriquez built this for me, he’s an electronic whiz. I know you have some Ampex equipment back at Boeing that will be compatible with it.”

  “Let’s do that, but I’ll make notes, too.”

  Vance fiddled with his recorder, tested it twice, then turned it on and began in the professorial voice the instrument always induced in him, “The first thing to realize is that the productivity of a supersonic transport is so great, if it is used as intensively as present jet airliners, only a few of them will be required to handle the traffic. Therefore the production run for whatever company—or combination of companies—that builds them will never generate enough income to cover the tremendous research and development costs, which will amount to fifteen billion dollars or more. The airplanes themselves will be expensive, perhaps fifty to one hundred million—if you try to amortize fifteen billion in development costs over a fleet of even one hundred aircraft, the total costs skyrockets to an impossible number. And the fleet will never be one hundred. At the outside, it might conceivably be fifty; I think it will be far less, no more than twenty-five.

  “The second thing to recognize is that the utility of a Mach 3.0 airliner, or even a hypersonic airliner, is limited by the implacable differences in time zones. To talk, as some are already talking, of a hypersonic ‘Orient Express’ to fly people from New York to Tokyo in a few hours is utter nonsense, because you could leave at breakfast to arrive in the middle of the night, or vice versa. The difference in time zones makes it virtually impossible to have compatible working days.

  “Then there is the matter of the environment. We are only beginning to hear the beginning of objections of people to the daily—or, if the great dreams are realized, the hourly—sonic boom that would be destroying windows, shaking walls, and startling grandmothers. There is also ominous talk about what it might do to the ozone layer.

  “Proponents of the SST point to the continual growth in traffic as an argument, citing that annual traffic increases at the rate of five percent per year. And it does—but not in the rarefied atmosphere of people who can pay the high prices that supersonic travel will command. Airlines will have to charge at least ten thousand dollars for a round-trip between New York and London. The base of the number of people in this upper bracket is small, and even if it grew at a rate of five percent also, it would not be sufficient to fill the seats of a fleet of SSTs.

  “In short, while it will be technically feasible to build a supersonic transport—difficult but feasible—the costs involved are going to be impossible to recover commercially.”

  Vance shut the machine off, rewound it, and handed the tape to George along with a sheaf of papers.

  “Here’s some mathematical backup for my opinion—predictions on urban concentrations, growth of international travel, passenger miles flown, world airline fleet numbers, airliner utilization—the usual stuff. It’s valid for jet airliners, and even if you plug in a Ford Trimotor, it’s valid. It will be valid for the SST as well. George, there is just no way to make money on an SST, and there are probably a thousand ways to lose your shirt.”

  “It’s a good thing you taped it—I stopped taking notes halfway through, amazed by what you were saying. But what if we get pushed into it for reasons of national pride, you know, not wanting the Brits or the French or the Russkies to show the world they are ahead of us?”

  “If the government is willing to subsidize the effort, pick up the research costs, help with the operating costs, it becomes much more attractive. But I don’t think you are going to see the government putting t
hat kind of money into a risky prestige project when there are so many social programs that need funding. Not the U.S. government, I mean; I can’t speak for what will happen to the Concorde or to the Soviet efforts.”

  “Well, Boeing is going to have to keep putting development money into the program until the government declares its hand. We can’t afford to have it become a national prestige project and not be in the forefront. I just wish it would dry up and go away.”

  “That will happen, but not for a few years. In the meantime, you’ll learn a lot from the experimentation. Not enough to justify the costs, but since you have to compete, you’ll be making some breakthroughs that apply somewhere else. It’s always like that.”

  As they were walking to the door, Vance said, “What did you think—” and bit his tongue. He was about to ask Schairer what he thought about the first flight of the Lockheed YF-12, an interceptor version of the A-12 and a top-secret item. It had flown on August 27 and Kelly Johnson was absolutely delighted with the results.

  “What?”

  “Nothing, George. I almost spoke out of school.”

  Schairer grinned his small grin. “I was hoping you would.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  December 31, 1963

  Palos Verdes, California

  By pre-arrangement, Jill had hauled Vance off to do some last-minute shopping for the night’s festivities, leaving Harry, Tom, and Bob ample time to discuss their current problem: how to always be on hand when Vance wanted to fly his C-45. The company pilot, Ray McAteer, was off on three months’ leave because of some family problems back east. And Vance, feeling his oats under his new health regime, was flying more and more often. He never went solo—he was too considerate of others to do that, not wishing to become ill and crash into someone’s house. But when he wanted to fly, he wanted to fly, and it took time out of everyone’s tight schedule.