by Orr Kelly
Further strengthening would be needed to deal with the stresses involved in a catapult launch. On shore, a fighter plane may make a 5,000-foot takeoff run. On a carrier, a plane must absorb a stress equal to four times its weight as it is jerked from a standing start to its 125-knot flying speed in 250 feet. The forward landing gear would need special attention because it is pulled in one direction on takeoff and slammed back in the other direction on landing.
In the air force fly-off, both planes were equipped with small, lightweight radar sets of minimum capability. A substantially more powerful radar would be needed to enable the plane to do all the navy wanted it to do.
Much more attention would have to be given in the design of the navy plane to resistance to ocean spray, to prevent it from being eaten alive by salty sea air.
Many of the changes that would be needed to navalize a plane designed for air force use were fairly obvious. But engineers and managers from both competing teams spent a good deal of time trying to find out what the navy wanted, and that was complicated by the dispute within the navy over the kind of plane that was needed.
John Capellupo, who later managed the F/A-18 program for McDonnell Douglas, recalls flying to Washington for a couple of days every week or two. “The difficult question,” he says, “was, ‘who’s the navy?’ ” Although there was doubt then about who in the navy the companies had to satisfy, it seems now that McDonnell Douglas, which believed it could build a dual-role strike-fighter, correctly understood that the choice was being made by people who worked for Lee, who strongly favored such a plane, and that was the “navy” that had to be pleased.
Gradually, the designs and proposals coming in from St. Louis, as the McDonnell Douglas engineers worked over the YF-17, began to ease navy doubts. One Hill staffer who watched the whole process unfold was impressed by the masterful job McDonnell Douglas had done in understanding what each of the experts assembled to evaluate the designs wanted to see in an airplane, and in satisfying each of them in its proposal.
But the navalized versions of the YF-16 offered up by LTV remained troublesome. A number of naval officers had the impression that LTV, apparently assuming the navy would be forced to adapt their plane for carrier use, wasn’t trying very hard.
LTV’s engineers designed three different versions of a modified YF-16 in an attempt to satisfy the navy, so it is really not fair to say that they didn’t try. At least part of their problems may simply have been bad luck of the kind that struck the day the final drawings were due. All of the paperwork was loaded onto a company plane at Dallas and then, on takeoff, the plane slid into a duck pond, thoroughly drenching the drawings. The crew and passengers, including the company president, emerged unscathed but had to wade ashore, muddy and dripping. The joke around NAVAIR was, “Well, that bird won’t fly.”
As the source selection board compared the proposals from the competing teams, the most striking change from the prototypes involved in the air force fly-off was the significant growth in weight. The original YF-16 weighed 13,559 pounds without fuel or weapons. The three designs offered by LTV weighed from twenty-four to fifty-two percent more. The McDonnell Douglas-Northrop entry grew from 16,940 pounds to 20,583 pounds, nearly twenty-two percent. Neither, it was clear, would be a true lightweight fighter after it had been navalized.
It was also clear that none of the three navalized versions of the YF-16 measured up. A major concern was that the LTV planes would have difficulty landing safely aboard a carrier. A special device had been installed to keep the plane from banging its tail on the deck, but that made the plane more difficult to maneuver in the moments before touchdown.
Another worry was the so-called “fly by wire” electronic control system used in all the designs. The navy had two fears: One was that electronic emissions, especially in the shadow of a carrier’s giant radars, would damage or confuse the control systems. The other was that combat damage might make a plane uncontrollable. The study of the designs showed that, in the LTV proposals, the multiple sets of wires carrying electronic messages to the control surfaces merged in five distinct “single-shot kill points.” A hit at any one of those points would send the plane out of control. While the experts were still nervous about a similar arrangement in the derivative of the YF-17, they were comforted by the presence of a separate mechanical control system that would at least enable the pilot of a crippled plane to get back near the carrier before he punched out and parachuted into the sea.
When the board had finished adding up the score, all three LTV proposals were rated unacceptable or marginal in almost all categories. The McDonnell Douglas-Northrop proposal was found acceptable in almost all categories. Its separate mechanical control system saved it from an unsatisfactory rating on survivability, and it was considered marginal in carrier suitability because of a high approach speed, as well as in avionics, reliability, and maintainability. Although great stress was to be placed on reliability and maintainability of the new plane, and Northrop was to be a leader in that effort, that had not been a major consideration in building the YF-17 prototypes. They were expected to last only about a thousand hours, enough to test the design.
Were the two planes really that far apart? Probably not. Yet the selection board clearly found the YF-17 version superior. And then it almost certainly went on to make its assessment in such a way as to dramatize the difference between the winner and the loser.
On 2 May 1975, the navy announced the winner: McDonnell Douglas received $4.4 million to continue with work on the plane until a final contract was signed, and General Electric got $2 million for work on the engine. Northrop signed on as subcontractor to McDonnell Douglas. And Jones, characteristically, set out to sell a land-based version of the F/A-18 in the international market. Perhaps his dream could be made to come true after all.
William Clements, the deputy defense secretary, huddled with the secretary of the navy to look over a list of suggested names. He picked the name “Hornet.” He had no particular reason for his decision, but the name did endow the plane with an honorable pedigree. The navy’s first Hornet was a sloop chartered in 1775. Since then there have been seven more ships named Hornet, including two World War II carriers, one of which launched General Jimmy Doolittle’s raid against Tokyo in 1942. Clements also decided to give the plane a new number in an attempt to divorce the navy plane from the air force competition. The fighter version would be the F-18, and the attack version the A-18. But a simple change in the designation wasn’t enough to prevent a firestorm of protest.
For a number of companies in the aerospace industry, the outcome of the debate over the navy’s new plane was almost literally a matter of life or death. If the navy’s decision stood, Grumman, LTV, Lockheed, Fair-child, and Boeing were in danger of being locked out of the fighter plane business if they were not already excluded.
The one company that stood the best chance of a successful challenge of the navy’s choice was LTV. On 9 May, just a week after the decision was announced, LTV filed a formal protest with the General Accounting Office, a semi-autonomous agency that acts as a watchdog over the executive branch of government for Congress.
Kent Lee had seen such a protest coming as soon as he read the congressional language ordering the navy to use the same plane chosen by the air force. In fact, he considered the whole process “odd, unusual … unfair in many ways.” So he put together a small team at the Naval Air Systems Command to work out a strategy to get around the seemingly obvious language of the congressional directive ordering the navy to adapt the winner of the air force competition for carrier use.
Masterminding the effort were Harvey Wilcox, general counsel of NAVAIR, and Charles J. (“Chuck”) McManus, counsel for the F/A-18 program. Backing them up was John Shephard, who had retired as a captain after a career as a naval aviator and then had gone back to school in his fifties to earn a law degree. When Shephard came by Wilcox’s office looking for a job, Wilcox hired him on the spot and made him his link with the a
viators and engineers so everything the lawyers did would be technically accurate. By the time they finished, Wilcox, under Shephard’s tutelage, knew more about how to build an airplane suitable for carrier operations than many aeronautical engineers.
Looking at the issue as a lawyer, Wilcox probably understood the full implications of the situation better than anyone else in NAVAIR. His reaction when he read the congressional orders was: “Holy moly! We are in trouble!” Almost immediately, he began stockpiling the legal ammunition he knew would be needed.
This is the way Wilcox analyzed the situation: “We’ve got excellent directives and procedures for doing methodical, rational, sensible, yet flexible decision-making when we start a new weapon. The problem is that only in the smaller programs do we actually use them. The bigger programs refuse to live by the rules. There are powers at work that no number of mortals seem to be able, with the best of intentions, to overcome.”
That was true, in spades, of the new fighter plane program. And yet Wilcox reasoned that, if it appeared that the navy had not followed the rules, the new plane was almost certainly doomed. He and McManus set about trying to shove the program back on the tracks—or at least to make it appear to be on the tracks—every time it veered off. The two men were also convinced that the program was vulnerable to so many threats that, when it came to an almost certain protest, they couldn’t afford a partial victory. They began to talk, like fighter pilots, of the need for a “clean kill.”
Their first step was to draft identical letters to the chairmen of the two appropriations committees, John L. McClellan (D-Ark.) in the Senate and George H. Mahon (D-Tex.) in the House. The letters informed them the navy intended to use $12.5 million of the $20 million provided by Congress for development of a navy plane and evaluation of the designs. The letters were artfully written. They carefully left out any reference to the most troublesome sentence in the congressional directive, the one that said: “Adaptation of the selected Air Force Air Combat Fighter to be capable of carrier operations is the prerequisite for use of the funds provided.”
Once the letters were written, they were then lobbied up through the bureaucracy of NAVAIR, then to Houser, up to the chief of naval operations and the secretary of the Navy, and finally to Clements, the deputy defense secretary who served as a kind of procurement tsar during those days. Clements signed the letters on 4 November 1974, and both chairmen wrote back approving the navy’s plans—and neither used those dreaded words requiring adaptation of the air force choice.
Clements also played a key role in another way. On 16 October 1974, he called representatives of the two competing teams to his office at the Pentagon and outlined the rules for the competition for the navy plane. A summary based on notes taken during the meeting by his executive assistant tells how he moved away from the language of the congressional directive: “At no time did Secretary Clements state or imply that the NACF [Naval Air Combat Fighter] must be a derivative of the selected Air Force ACF, that performance was of lesser importance than commonality and cost, or that the evaluation criteria were other than those clearly set forth in the solicitation [sent to the contractors on 12 October].”
Clements himself was not nearly as concerned by the congressional language as those in the navy who were closer to the situation. With many more issues to worry about, he dismissed the troubling congressional language as “absurd.”
“We sure as hell didn’t do that and I never would have had any intention of doing that. The airplane picked to be the air force fighter, hell, it wouldn’t work as a carrier plane. No way it could work. That’s nonsense,” Clements says. While the navy worried, Clements put the peculiar congressional instructions out of his mind.
But his cooperation in the navy’s campaign to save its airplane paid off. When the expected protest came, the folks at NAVAIR were as ready as they could be. There was even some comfort to be taken from the fact that Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver, & Kampelman, the powerhouse New York–London–Washington law firm retained by LTV, appealed to the GAO rather than going directly to federal court. A federal judge would probably have issued a routine order delaying the aircraft program until he had a chance to look at the facts. The resulting headline—“Judge Blocks New Navy Fighter”—might have been the curse of death, given the program’s uncertain backing on Capitol Hill. On the other hand, the GAO would have access to the navy’s internal evaluation documents—something that would have been much more difficult for LTV to obtain if it had gone into federal court.
Unlike a trial in court, the GAO handles an appeal entirely on paper. The two sides never meet face to face to argue their cases. Normally, LTV would have filed its appeal, the navy would have responded, there might have been one more round of arguments, and then the agency would render its decision. But in this case, because of its importance, Ronald Berger, who served as GAO’s judge, permitted Fried, Frank to raise a number of new issues after its initial filing.
“It was a good fifteen-rounder for big stakes,” Wilcox said later. “The referee had shown in the first round that he wasn’t going to penalize a little butting and gouging. So we both just stood toe to toe and slugged it out.”
Both sides pulled out all the stops. The navy tried to entice Berger into making a visit to a carrier. When the GAO decided that wasn’t a good idea, the navy sent him a training film showing what happens in a bad carrier landing, including several crashes. It was a less-than-subtle reminder of the navy’s concern about the difficulty in bringing the F-16 aboard the carrier safely. LTV’s lawyers objected indignantly.
For their part, Fried, Frank managed to inundate Wilcox and his small staff with carefully researched legal arguments, each of which demanded study and a precise response. The paperwork became so voluminous that once, when Admiral Lee visited the lawyers’ office, the only place he could find to sit was on a cardboard box. Not only were the hours long, but Wilcox found his life disrupted in another way. His wife, Leslie, worked for GAO in an office next door to Berger’s. She didn’t handle any navy matters, but to avoid any possible conflict, she was sent to Capitol Hill for the summer to work with the Senate Public Works Committee on Tennessee Valley Authority matters.
On 1 October 1975, the GAO submitted its thirty-eight-page verdict, summed up in one final sentence: “We have concluded that the navy’s actions were not illegal or improper and that therefore the protest must be denied.” It was the “clean kill” for which Wilcox and McManus had worked so hard. And, as they had realized from the beginning, the issue was not the qualities of the two competing airplanes, but the question of whether the navy had followed the rules. The artfully drafted letters to the powerful chairmen on Capitol Hill had played a major role in convincing the GAO that the rules were followed.
The clear-cut decision by the GAO did not, however, end opposition to the new plane. Most importantly, it did not end opposition by factions within the navy itself and by manufacturers who felt they had been badly treated.
Because of the unusual process forced on the navy by Congress, several of the country’s major aircraft companies had simply been excluded from the competition. This was especially troublesome in the case of Grumman Aerospace Corp., which, of all the companies, had always had the best of relations with the navy. Many veteran naval aviators felt, with a good deal of justification, that they owed their lives to the Grumman planes, such as the Wildcats and Hellcats of World War II, that had brought them home time after time.
Whenever there was a gathering of naval aviators, like the annual Tailhook Association meeting, Grumman representatives were much in evidence, setting up drinks at the bar, organizing the golf match, and handing out golf balls. And now, with the biggest navy aircraft contract in history, Grumman was left out entirely.
Grumman did not protest formally. But Joseph Gavin, chairman and chief executive officer of the company, testified against the F/A-18 at a hearing of a Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on 17 September 1975.
“Grumman f
inds itself in an extremely sensitive position to be setting forth viewpoints on future weapons systems which appear to differ from those of our major customer, the U.S. Navy. …” Gavin said. “Our decision to speak out about the F-18 is not taken lightly. I hope it will do nothing to disturb the productive relationship which has long existed between the navy and our company.”
The F-18, he argued, would not only be “an inferior product” compared with the F-14 built by his company (“Today there are two kinds of fighters, the F-14 and all the rest”), but also more expensive.
Even more compelling testimony against the F-18, as the plane was then known, came from George Spangenberg, who had, until his retirement in 1973, been the Naval Air Systems Command’s almost legendary airplane designer. He had been deeply involved in the navy’s struggle against McNamara’s TFX or F-111. The F-14, which took its place on the carrier decks, had, to a large extent, been his inspiration. He had not budged from his conviction that the Tomcat was the fighter the Navy needed. The whole idea of trying to get a usable airplane for the navy from the air force competition, he told the senators, was “foolish.”
As a consultant to Lee’s source selection advisory council, Spangenberg had had a good chance to evaluate the plane. Asked his opinion of the F-18, he said: “It is clear that the F-18 is neither effective, nor cost effective, in either fighter or attack roles. It is vastly inferior in capability to the F-14 at about the same total cost, somewhere [sic] less capable and considerably more expensive than the F-4 and is inadequate in range and more costly than the A-7. There is no justification for continuing the program.”