Supersonic Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age

by Boyne, Walter J.

  “You say that, but you know damn well that’s not the way Dad operates. More and more, he just picks up the phone and announces that he’s going to Sacramento or San Francisco or San Diego and he wants somebody at the airplane in an hour.”

  Rodriquez always maintained a low profile at the family gatherings, conscious that Tom had never approved of him as a partner, but now he said, “Can we hire an interim pilot for Mr. McAteer?”

  “No. You cannot believe the amount of time it took for us to get Pop used to the idea of an outsider flying with him at all, even though he knew Mac for years, flew with his father, for that matter. It would take forever to get him used to another pilot, and by that time, Mac will be back. I hope.”

  Tom spoke for the first time. “Well, this is something that we cannot delay on. I say we just make sure that someone is always here, that all three of us don’t get away on trips. If there is more than one of us here, we can take turns, but we’ll always have him covered.”

  Tom turned to Rodriquez and said, “I guess you know that this is going to be your big night.”

  The tone in his voice offended Rodriquez, but he only said, “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “You damn well do know what I mean. You know that you are going to get what you’ve been shooting for all along. Dad’s going to announce that Aviation Consultants is going to incorporate, and that he’s dividing it into two divisions, aviation and electronics. You’ll be running the electronic side, of course, and we’ll be divvying up what’s left of the aviation side.”

  The steel in his tone was unmistakable and Harry said, “Easy, Tom. We don’t have any beef with Bob. He’s been doing his job just like Dad wants him to, and he has made us all a lot of money.”

  Tom bridled but grew silent when they heard the front door slam, and Jill and Vance came laughing down the hallway. They had picked up Nancy, Anna, and Mae on the way back, and something had set them off.

  The women came in, Nancy excited as usual at the prospect of a party, Anna looking uncomfortable and ill at ease, conscious of her extra weight and embarrassed as always by the contrast with Nancy’s lithe figure and Mae’s Lena Horne beauty.

  The evening passed relatively smoothly until ten o’clock, when Vance said that he was going to bed early, as he always did lately, but that he had an announcement to make.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, I want you to be the first to know that within the next three months, Aviation Consultants as you know it will no longer exist. Instead, there will be a new firm, a corporation, Aerospace Ventures, Incorporated. I’ll be chairman of the board, and all of you here tonight will be board members. There will be two divisions to the firm. The first one will retain the name Aviation Consultants. Tom is going to be president and Harry will be a vice president and chief executive officer. We’ve done very well with it in the past, and I want to keep it going. Aviation Consultants will continue doing pretty much as it has done, and we’ve already got more work than we can handle. And that’s pretty good, considering the state the aviation industry is in.”

  He paused, letting his eyes sweep around the room and bringing back so many memories. Madeline had worked with the architect to create this library next to Vance’s office, and very few changes had been made in it over the years. He stood with his back to the centerpiece of the room, a huge stone fireplace with mantels that stretched to the wall on either side. The mantels were covered with models of all the aircraft he had worked on over the years, arranged in a chronological order, and extending from the Douglas World Cruiser on the left all the way around to one of the latest versions of the supersonic transport on the right.

  Huge sofas surrounded the fireplace and his family had parked themselves in the same spots that they always used. He glanced at them, taking in the many different expressions. At the far left, sitting on the arm of the sofa, something she would have yelled at him for doing, was Jill, apprehensive about his little talk, not sure that he could pull it off without a family fight. Harry and Anna were next, holding hands, Harry sitting bolt upright and Anna leaning back, trying to disappear into the sofa, eternally self-conscious about her weight and appearance and just as eternally unwilling to do something about it. A magazine rack, filled with ancient aviation magazines, was next. Three feet away was the matching sofa, with Tom and Nancy sitting on the edges of the cushions, Nancy grasping his arm, clearly frightened that Tom would react badly to the news. Tom looked defiantly hostile—being named president meant nothing to him, and he knew very well what was coming next.

  Mae stood by Bob Rodriquez’s chair. She was strikingly beautiful as always, watching Bob with pride, knowing what was going on in his mind, hoping that Tom would not make a scene, but nonetheless happy to be there, wondering when, if ever, Bob would agree to set a date for their wedding.

  Bob’s face was a dark Latin mask. He just hoped that Tom would not spoil things. It should be a good night. It could be a great night if Tom just didn’t fly off the handle.

  Vance went on, “The other division is going to be Avionic Consultants. Bob will head it up, as he has the expertise, and in a minute, I’m going to let him make an announcement himself. Two announcements, in fact. We’ll all work together as closely as before, but I think that before the year is out we’ll have to expand again. Right now, all the stock is being held in the family.”

  He looked at Tom, then at Bob and Mae. “And Bob and Mae are part of the family.”

  Tom muttered something and walked out of the room, slamming the door. Crying, Nancy ran after him.

  Vance shook his head. He didn’t do this right. He should have worked it out with Tom in detail well before tonight. But Tom was always so abrupt about Bob, it was almost impossible to talk to him.

  “Well, boys and girls, that sort of puts an end to the party. But Bob, I still want you to make the announcements you were going to make. It’s sad that things are like they are, but they will straighten out.”

  Rodriquez was on the spot. He had to conceal the natural elation he felt at Vance’s honoring his promise as he did and look as if he were not annoyed with Tom—difficult to do when all he really wanted was to punch Tom in the nose. Mae moved with him as he stood up to speak.

  “First of all, thank you so much, Vance, and Jill and all of you. I’m sorry that Tom is upset, and I’ll do anything I can to make it up to him. I know how he feels … .” He stopped, choked up. Mae squeezed his hand, and he went on, “Vance said I had two announcements. The first is that the first new program that Avionic Consultants will embark on is in the synthetic trainer business. Ed Link took synthetic trainers pretty far, and there are several firms making flight simulators today. I think the future of aviation, and ultimately of space, will be bound up in simulators, and we will be starting a new concept, operating our own simulators under lease to airlines. But that’s the unimportant news. The important news is that I want to ask Mae to marry me as soon as possible.”

  Mae buried her face in his shoulder, the other women screamed with joy, and Vance left to look for Tom and talk some sense into him.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  August 1, 1964

  Wichita, Kansas

  Tom Shannon had missed the party the night before, and from the debris around the pool—empty glasses, tattered napkins, the top of a woman’s swimming suit—it looked like it had been a good one to miss. He walked through the lobby of the Diamond Inn to take a short morning walk and pulled up short. At the top of the motel’s flagpole was a pair of men’s white underwear, huge shorts that must have been at least an Extra Large. On the shorts was painted, in red letters, “FAA CERTIFICATION.”

  Shannon turned around and headed back into the restaurant—there were a few Lear employees there and he had to get the story behind the shorts on the flagpole. To his amazement, Bill Lear himself was there, eating an enormous breakfast. As Tom came in, Lear stood up, yelling, “Get over here, Tom; you missed the damnedest party of your lifetime! You know the FAA certified the
Learjet yesterday, ten months after the first flight!”

  “I saw the news on the flagpole outside.”

  Lear laughed again. “Yeah, I was skinny-dipping and some smart-ass stole my shorts. I’m going to leave them up there as long as the motel lets me. You know Aero Commander is months away from certifying their jet; this was a big deal, worth lots more than a pair of shorts!”

  Tom sat down and ordered as Lear boomed out greetings to each of his employees as they began filtering in for breakfast, many of them looking the worse for wear.

  “Goddammit, Tom, you’d never believe it, but a crash saved us! We’d never have made it if the FAA test pilot hadn’t fucked up and crashed old number one on takeoff!”

  The month before, the FAA pilot, Don Keubler, and the Learjet test pilot, Jim Kirkpatrick, had been testing the Learjet’s single-engine performance. After one landing, Keubler forgot to retract the wing spoilers. He took off but couldn’t control it and crash-landed in a field off the end of the runway. He did a good job of setting it down, and he and Kirkpatrick evacuated the airplane without any problem. But the landing had broken some fuel lines, and the prototype Learjet burst into flames.

  “That goddamn insurance money for the prototype was the only thing that kept us in business, Tom; we were flat on our ass; we’d never have been able to get this airplane certified without the dough we got for it. I’m going to build that into future test programs; we’re going to crash and burn one every once in a while, just for cash flow.”

  Tom laughed with him—Lear had every right to be cocky, to be on top of the world. The FAA had no rules for certifying a small jet weighing less than 12,500 pounds, and so Bill Lear had to fight the agency every step of the way, proving his point time after time.

  “You outfoxed the FAA! Good for you!”

  “They just got exhausted and gave in.”

  “Well, just seeing the airplane at the Reading Air Show should have been enough.”

  Tom had been there and witnessed the public debut of the sleek twin jet, heard the crowd roar, seen the mechanics actually drop their tools and run to the edge of the taxiway to watch the white beauty pass by. There was nothing like it in the world—it was the start of a whole new species of jet aircraft.

  “How do you stand for orders, Bill?”

  “Orders we got, Tom; it’s cash that’s short again. I’ve spent every dime that I’ve raised, and more. I need another six million to start production, and the only way I’m going to get it is to go public. I hate to do it, I’d like to keep it all in my hands for a while, but there’s no way out. I’ve got sixty-three firm orders, and I’m going to try to convince the Securities and Exchange Commission to go public as soon as possible.”

  “What are you doing in the meantime?”

  “Hunkering down. My guys are all taking salary cuts; I’ll pay them all back, they know that, but it’s tough. Hell, I’m not even going to pay you until next year.”

  Tom had been expecting this. “Don’t worry about it. You can pay me off in stock when you go public.”

  “Your dad is going public, isn’t he? That will work out pretty well for you.”

  “Financially, it will be a godsend. I never expected to have as much capital. But it’s not the best; you know that, Bill. It’s best when you own it all yourself, when you don’t have any goddamn board of directors looking over your shoulder.”

  Lear stood up suddenly, put his hand on Tom’s shoulder, saying, “Keep your seat. You know your dad has ordered a Learjet, don’t you? He’s about thirty-fifth in line to get a production version. Don’t you go letting him fly it by himself, Tom. It’s a sweet airplane to fly, but it’s no C-45, and he can bust his ass in it if he’s not careful.”

  Tom was stunned. His father had joked about getting a Learjet, but no one thought he’d ever act on it.

  “You bet, Bill; we’ll both come out here and take your qualifying course, Harry, too.”

  “And send along that Rodriquez feller; he and I have a lot to talk about, simulators and stuff.”

  Lear whirled and walked off, missing the exasperation on Tom’s face as he thought, That blasted Rodriquez, he’s the fucking bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral.

  Suddenly he laughed at himself. Rodriquez had just been not the bride but the groom at his own wedding to Mae. What the hell was he doing still angry with the man? This was something he was going to have to beat, and as he watched a B-47 fly overhead, from McConnell Air Force Base, he realized that the only way to beat it was to get back into the Air Force. He had connections; he could do it. Maybe when he got out this time, he’d not be so pissed about Rodriquez.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  December 22, 1964

  Palmdale, California

  Vance Shannon watched the long, sleek Lockheed SR-71 roll toward the runway, its sinister beauty sometimes masked by the waves of heat pouring from its twin J58 engines. Kelly Johnson and Ben Rich had led teams that developed the CIA’s A-12 into the USAF’s SR-71, a twoseater whose existence had been announced to the world by President Lyndon Johnson on July 24.

  Shannon had been the midwife on the births of hundreds of new airplanes, but none had ever stirred his emotions as this airplane did. There was an unusual harmony in its appearance, its performance, and its unusual stealth, a harmony that he knew personally came from the intense hard work of Kelly Johnson’s team as they distilled their U-2 and A-12 experience into this new phenomenon, already being called the Blackbird from its jet-black radar-reflecting exterior.

  An old friend, Bob Gilliland, a veteran Skunk Works test pilot, was at the controls. Gilliland had lots of experience in the A-12, and although there were significant changes in the SR-71, none of them would significantly alter the flying characteristics of the extraordinarily capable aircraft.

  “Harmony.” Vance said the word aloud, letting all the changes, all the developments, run through his mind, recalling how each one seemed to affect five others. It was like juggling magnetic balls, all leaping to displace one another. The positioning of the engines was a typical point. After thousands of wind tunnel hours and hundreds of arguments with Ben Rich, the two men had finally arrived at the point where the engines had as low a radar signature as possible. The point itself was totally improbable—it was where the shock wave occurred as the aircraft passed Mach 1.0. The materials used in the aircraft were examined and evaluated in the same incredibly painstaking way. Lockheed had made over 13 million individual titanium parts, and records were kept on all of them, despite Johnson and the Skunk Works’s inveterate hatred for paperwork. The history of each piece could be traced back to the mill pour of the material, and a record had been made even of the direction of the grain of the titanium sheet from which the part had been made. Records like this helped when problems occurred with the titanium wing panels on the A-12, some of which were failing very early in their life cycle and some of which lasted seemingly forever. A check of the records showed that the panels that failed had been made in the summer. Further checking revealed that in the summer the Burbank water system added chlorine to cut down on the growth of algae. The solution was to use distilled water all year long.

  None of the thousands of problems solved were evident in the SR-71, serial number 17590, as it rolled out onto the runway at Palmdale. Gilliland advanced the throttles, and the beautiful aircraft accelerated rapidly, breaking ground at the precisely calculated point and climbing away to the cheers of the crowd. The test pilot flew for over an hour, coaxing the speed to 1,000 miles per hour before coming down to make a perfect landing.

  Vance missed Kelly Johnson’s debriefing Gilliland after the flight, because Ben Rich had reams of downloaded data on the engine that he wanted to go over with him.

  Sitting in the cool, antiseptically clean Skunk Work offices, Rich was distressed, clucking to himself in the oddly annoying manner he had when absorbed in his work. He would examine a page of the printout, sometimes pull out his slide rule to make s
ome calculations, then hand the sheet over to Vance without any comment, other than a sigh, an “oy vey,” or a “Holy Christ.”

  Vance had lost his reading glasses somewhere and was still poring over the first sheet using a tiny handheld magnifying glass when Rich said, “Well, there it is, our worst fears. The damn thing is thirsty! It’s eating up twenty-five percent more fuel than we had counted on, and it hasn’t even gone to Mach 2.0 yet. God knows what it will use when it hits Mach 3.0.”

  The words at least it’s not the engine flashed through Vance’s mind. The later A-12s all had variants of the same Pratt & Whitney J58 engines, and they cruised routinely at Mach 3.0, staying within their predicted fuel consumption rates. The difference had to be in the slight redesign of the aircraft.

  The SR-71 was longer and heavier than the A-12. Vance went into the classified storage area and pulled out some wind tunnel data on the A-12, then tried to correlate what he found with the SR-71. After about four hours, he gave up. There seemed to be no obvious reason that the SR-71 would demand so much more fuel than the A-12.

  As he was leaving the storage area, he saw some profiles of the two airplanes done on celluloid, for use with an overhead projector. Idly he put the latest SR-71 drawing over that of an A-12. The difference leaped out at him. The SR-71 was not only longer; its nose had a slight upward turn, compared to the A-12.

  Vance studied the two drawings and then got two more, of other A-12s, to be sure he wasn’t seeing things. There—no doubt about it, there was a slight difference in the geometry of their noses. It was not evident on the ground—the aircraft were so goddamn breathtaking that you’d never notice it, and besides, no one had seen SR-71s and A-12s tail-to-tail or nose-to-nose.