So, the 100,000-ton ship turned into the wind. Our pilot wound up his little engines to full power. The deck hands made all sorts of silly Top Gun hand signals and, with a savagery that’s hard to explain in print, we were off.
Immediately there was a resounding crack and I knew something had broken. Sure enough, the plane dipped as it cleared the end of the runway and I braced myself for the impact that never came.
It turned out that the steel ingot that is used to attach the nose wheel to the catapult is designed to break, with a crack, as the plane lifts off. It sounds catastrophic but Barney, bless him, had forgotten to mention it.
My two days on that carrier were, without any question or shadow of doubt, the noisiest, most uncomfortable, most depressing I’ve ever endured. I was startled by the average IQ of those I met and genuinely amazed at the conditions in which they live. There was no drink on board, sex was not allowed and the smoking quarters were barbaric.
And yet the ship itself was a wondrous piece of engineering. Sure, it was designed to attack without pity and rain fire without remorse. But there’s no doubt that beneath its nuclear heart it has a soul.
Alfa Romeo 166
By any logical standard the Alfa Romeo 166 is not a very good car. Compared to, say, a 5-series BMW, it is not especially fast, spacious, economical or well equipped, and it doesn’t handle terribly well either.
It is pulled along by its front wheels, and while this space-saving option works well on small hatchbacks it’s rarely satisfactory in a large saloon. The problem is that the front wheels have enough to do dealing with the steering. To entrust them with the power from a 3.2-litre V6 engine as well is a recipe for disaster.
If you apply too much throttle in a corner in a rear-wheel-drive car, it is, of course, the rear wheels that lose traction. The back end consequently swings round and you know exactly what you do about that because you were told by your driving instructor. You steer into the skid, and all is well.
Get it wrong and the news is still good because the back will swing all the way round and you’ll go backwards into a tree. This is fine. It means your death is as instant as it is unexpected.
In a front-wheel-drive car it is the front wheels that lose traction, which means you can do whatever you like with the steering wheel – it won’t make a jot of difference. You’ll hit the tree and, to make matters worse, you’ll see it coming…
But there are problems with front-wheel drive long before you get to a corner. I’m talking about torque steer. When you put your foot down, hard, the steering wheel squirms this way and that, as the power applies all kinds of unpleasant and unnatural forces to wheels that, by their very nature, aren’t bolted in place.
Alfa uses front-wheel drive because it’s cheap. And there’s a ‘win free save’ feel to the cockpit as well. In a BMW these days you get a little pinprick of light from the rear-view mirror that bathes all the controls in a puddle of red light. You also get cup holders and volume controls for the stereo on the steering wheel. None of this expensive-to-design stuff is available on a 166.
As a result, anyone with £30,000 to spend on a large executive saloon car is going to be swayed by the Beemer, and as a result of that, Alfa Romeo’s sales in Britain are what an economist would call ‘pitiful’.
To make matters worse, no one wants them second-hand either, which means the poor sod who did buy one new, for £30,000, will lose £17,000 in a year. So he ends up with a car that’s not as fast, not as well equipped and not as nice to drive as a BMW. And what’s more, it’ll cost him £50 a day before he’s put any fuel in the tank or coughed up for some insurance. Frankly, then, anyone who buys a 166 is a full-on window-licking mentalist.
And yet, if I were in the market for a businessman’s car, I’d have one like a shot.
Don’t worry. This has nothing to do with Alfas of old being driven by men on black-and-white round racetracks that don’t exist any more. Buying a car because the firm that makes it used to be amazing 50 years ago would be like employing a team of Italian builders because the Romans were so organised. It’s people who make a car what it is, and the people who made Alfas so strong in Grand Prix racing in the fifties are all either dead or sitting in wingback chairs, drooling.
The people who run Alfa Romeo today are Fiat, and the people who run Fiat spend most of their days looking at the accounts, groaning.
However, they are for the most part Italian, which means that they have a certain exuberance and a definite sense of style, and that shows. The 166 may not be very good as a car, but as a place to be it has no equal. It’s a combination, really, of the hand-stitched upholstery and the exquisite choice of colours. Black carpets. Tan seats. Why does no one else do that?
And look at the styling. Some say the headlights are a bit piggy and the nose is far too big but that’s like chucking Cindy Crawford out of bed because she has a mole.
Ignore the details and concentrate on the overall shape, the stance. Note the way it seems to be leaning forward, like it’s in a hurry. And note too the gracefulness of the lines as they flow from the back to the front. This is an extraordinarily beautiful car. And, if you go for navy-blue paint, elegant and cool too.
I can see BMWs and Jaguars parked outside the local golf club. I can see Mercs parked outside celebrity parties, waiting to take the drunken Brookside star home. An Alfa though? I can see that parked outside an embassy cocktail party, at a schloss, in Austria. It’s as European and as perfect as a girl in a little black dress, at a pavement café, sipping an espresso coffee. You have a 166. You have style.
And then there’s the driving experience. Yes, it’s all a bit wayward when you’re going for it, but when you’re not – and let’s be honest, for 99 per cent of the time you won’t be – there’s always a sense that you’re in a car. There’s a crackle from the exhaust and a muted howl from the engine. You feel the road through the seat of your pants and when you run over a white line you can tell through the feel of the wheel whether it was gloss paint or emulsion.
Most modern executive cars try to distance you from all of this. You get in, move a couple of controls and with no fuss at all you arrive at your destination. The 166 doesn’t do that. It lets you know, always, that you’re in a car. It makes you feel like the organic part of a machine. That, I’m sure, would be a nuisance if you’re a motorist.
But if you’re a driver, it is exactly what you want.
Blackbird
In the mid sixties an RAF fighter pilot was cruising down the east coast of England in his Lightning when he saw something unusual. ‘It looked exactly like one of those sci-fi Airfix kits that I’d had as a boy in the fifties,’ he told me, years later.
Opening the taps a little on his fighter, he came up behind the mysterious plane for a better look. The USAF markings identified it as friendly so he pulled alongside to wave at the pilot. But he never got the chance because when the Americans saw him coming: whoomph. With an explosion of noise, they, and their astonishing machine, were gone. ‘I simply could not believe how fast it was,’ he said.
Back at base his colleagues were sceptical. ‘I see,’ they said, ‘so you saw a huge black plane that spewed circular blue flame out of its engines and rocketed away so quickly you couldn’t keep up.’ It did sound absurd because, at the time, everyone knew, with absolute certainty, that just about the fastest plane in the sky was the Lightning.
Everyone was wrong. Because what the RAF pilot had seen was the SR-71. The Blackbird. And it wasn’t just the fastest plane in the world then. It’s the fastest plane in the world now too.
At the time it was top secret, only taking off and landing when it was dark. And the reason why those Americans never saw our friend coming until he was alongside is that it flew with everything turned off. A black shadow in the sky. A streak that left almost no electronic mumbo-jumbo in its wake. It had the same radar signature as a fruit fly.
This was a plane built for spying. It carried no missiles and no guns. Its j
ob was to climb, at enormous speed, to a height of 90,000 feet, from where it was neither visible nor audible to anyone on earth. 90,000 feet is 17 miles. It’s 60,000 feet higher than a commercial jetliner goes. It’s 30,000 feet higher than Concorde flew. Any more and its mighty ram-jet engines would be sucking on the vacuum of space.
Once there, in a world it could truly call its own, it would go even faster, moving up past 2,000 mph to three times the speed of sound. And from that far up, at that kind of velocity, its ability to cover ground was staggering. In just one hour it could survey 100,000 square miles of the earth’s surface.
And it was almost completely unshootdownable. I spoke once to one of its pilots, who said that if by some miracle he was detected in enemy air space, he still had absolutely nothing to fear. ‘We’d see the MiGs coming up to get us, but when they hit 60,000 feet we’d have gone and they would fall out of the sky.’
Even if a MiG could get itself in front of the Blackbird and fire off a missile, there was almost no chance of a hit. ‘Think about it,’ said the pilot. ‘The missile’s going at Mach 2. We’re doing Mach 3. That’s a closing speed of five times the speed of sound and no computer at that time could have worked things out fast enough. Believe me, we were up there with complete impunity.’
The key to this height and speed – speed that saw a Blackbird once get from New York to London in just under 1 hour and 55 minutes, including a spot of in-flight refuelling – is its power.
The figures the engines produce are as vast as they are meaningless. But there is one that gives pause for thought. Flat out, just 20 per cent of the thrust is produced by the basic engines themselves. 80 per cent, then, is coming from nowhere at all. So how is this possible?
Well, in essence, those big pointy things that stick out of the intakes steer most of the air into escape channels that never go anywhere near the blades. This air is simply compressed and then, as it gets to the exhaust, ignited. And the more air you push in, the more thrust you get.
In other words the jet gets you up to a certain speed, but from that point onwards there are no moving parts. You simply burn the air and watch the speedo climb. Quite literally, the faster you go the faster it goes.
It may be simple but the spectacle that results is heavenly. On full throttle, two giant blue plumes are left in the Blackbird’s wake, each framing a series of perfect blue balls of equally perfect energy. You watch it and you think, ‘God almighty. How did man ever create a sight like that?’ And then you think, ‘Crikey. It’s all very well making power like that but how, in the name of all that’s holy, do we tame it?’
The simple answer is, we don’t. Occasionally one of these engines will suffer from what the pilots call an unstart. You’ll be flying along when it will suddenly ‘burp’, ejecting air not from the back but from the front. This is bad news, because all of a sudden you have full thrust from one side of the plane and full drag from the other. The result is a spin, and the result of that is a quiet and undignified end for the two men on board. Quiet because the crash won’t be reported – how can a plane crash if it officially ‘doesn’t exist’? – and undignified because when you hit the ground in an SR-71 they don’t bury the remains so much as hose them into the nearest drain.
Apparently, before an unstart there are tiny, audible warnings that you can just about hear if you’re really concentrating. But this makes the Blackbird not very relaxing. You have to keep your ears open, constantly, for the slightest hint that one of the jets is about to break wind. And you then have to think what you might do about it…
When the second Blackbird ever made crashed in Utah in 1963 two farmers who arrived on the scene were told by the military personnel that the plane had been carrying atomic bombs. This was a lie but word got round, and as a result none of the locals turned up to poke around in the wreckage. The press was later told that the locals had got their wires crossed, that there were no nukes on board and that the plane was an F-105 Thunderchief. That was another lie, but it’s how the accident is still catalogued today.
Of the 40 Blackbirds made, 20 have crashed, killing all sorts of Lockheed engineers and CIA operatives who were sitting in the back. But amazingly, when you think of the speed they’re going when they bale out, not a single USAF pilot has ever died at the wheel.
Perhaps the most astonishing crash happened in 1966, when it was decided the SR-71 would make an ideal launch platform for a new kind of reconnaissance drone. This pilotless jet would be launched from a mounting platform on the Blackbird’s back. Brilliant. Except for two things.
Why fit a supplementary spying device on the back of what was already the perfect espionage tool? And how was this ‘mini Blackbird’ supposed to penetrate the ferocious shockwave coming from the mother ship’s nose? No one seemed to have thought about that. And no one did until the drone took off and ran slap bang into what may as well have been a wall.
Unable to get through, the pilotless aircraft dived and smacked straight into the Blackbird, cutting it clean in half.
Both crew members survived the impact, and both survived the ejection and parachute descent, but one, Ray Torrick, died when he landed in the Pacific Ocean and opened his visor. His pressure suit promptly filled with water and he was drowned.
This is very sad, and yet it pales into insignificance alongside the destruction of the SR-71. That makes me angry. How could they have let this drone, this bastard infant son, turn on its mother? What were they thinking of?
I hate to think of a crashed Blackbird. It causes me physical pain. Because I’ve actually been to its natural breeding ground, Edwards Air Force Base, in the high desert of California, and let me tell you: this is so much more than a collection of exotic materials paid for by a paranoid nation and designed in an overgrown schoolboy’s wet dream. The SR-71 feels, looks and, most importantly of all, sounds like it’s alive.
When I walked though the door of its hangar the first thing to take me by surprise was the size of its engines. They’re actually wider than the fuselage of the plane. The second shock was the feel of the titanium airframe. Even in the chill of a desert night, it felt warm and soft to the touch; not at all like metal. More like moleskin, in fact.
But the most eerie sensation was the noise. When a Blackbird flies the friction is so massive, and generates so much heat, that the whole plane grows by a foot. Then, after it lands and begins to cool, it shrinks back down again.
The plane I was pawing had not flown for six months but you could still hear it creaking and groaning. And there was a constant drip-drip-drip as its oils and fuel leaked out of the tanks, their seams distorted by the shrinkage.
The nose, however, would never go back to its original shape. After two hours at 2,250 mph it became all wrinkled, and the ground crew would have to smooth it into shape again using blowtorches. It was, said one pilot, like ironing a shirt.
Inside the tiny cockpit it is mind-boggling. You have, oh, about 2,000 dials, none of which is a speedometer, and, because this was designed when the world thought blenders were space age, there are no computer screens. You have a sense that all is mechanical in there, rather than electronic. And that helps reinforce the sense of Blackbird being a living, breathing being.
No computer has a soul. You have no sense that a wire and a microchip are alive because they don’t actually do anything. But when you pull a lever and hydraulic fluid causes a part to actually move, that’s different. And that’s what happens in the Blackbird, a product of the fifties that could still cut it right up to the last ever flight in 1999.
This was the most successful spying device ever. In the early days the U-2 was too slow, and too low. Gary Powers would testify to that, since his was shot down by a surface-to-air missile in 1960. Worse still, he failed to activate the self-destruct button and, when captured, he was disinclined to swallow his cyanide pill. Maybe the Russians learned something from him. Maybe they didn’t, but either way, two years later another U-2 was shot down, and the pilot killed, over C
uba, right in the middle of the missile crisis.
Shortly after that the space race began, but early satellites were no match for planes. They had physically to drop a film canister back to earth, which would have to be retrieved and sent to Boots. Only when it was learned how to watch ‘real time’ footage did these eyes in space start to make sense. But they’ve rather lost the point in the modern age.
They were fine when Russia was the bad guy, but where do you put them now? Over Iraq? Iran? Syria? Libya? Afghanistan? You can never tell where the trouble will come from next. And it’s the devil’s own job to move one.
The Blackbird would solve all that. It can go wherever it wants, taking as many pictures as it wants, of whatever takes its fancy. It was the perfect solution in 1966, and nothing’s changed.
Submarine
Were there to be a war tomorrow, a big one against a properly tooled-up country, I wouldn’t hesitate for a second. I’d buy myself a nice white polo-neck jumper, get on the first train to Scotland and join the submarine service.
The infantry requires far too much running around, the cavalry spends most of its time playing polo, which is no good because I like horses when they’re accompanied with chips but not when they have saddles, and the air force is just plain dangerous. That means it’d have to be the navy and since I get seasick watching naval battles on television, I’d need a posting in subs.
I know you got soul: machines with that certain something Page 11