by Orr Kelly
The test got off to a questionable start. The two pilots chose a runway heading in the direction they wanted to go. But that gave them a slight tail wind and forced them to use their fuel-guzzling afterburners on takeoff.
The flight was uneventful until they reached the target area. There, Hollandsworth’s flight plan called for him to turn on his afterburner while just above the waves and fly a tight circle, pulling six Gs. Carter thought it a tough assignment even for a younger man, and Hollandsworth almost blacked out. He also misjudged the tightness of the turn and pulled only about four Gs. That meant the turn required an extra fifteen seconds in afterburner and a drain on the plane’s supply of fuel.
Moments after Hollandsworth had made his bombing run, the pilot of the chase plane called “bingo.” He was running short of fuel. The two pilots broke off the test and flew straight back to Patuxent. Reports of the flight very quickly leaked to the press. It was represented as a failure of the plane to fly the required distance even though it was the chase plane that had run short on fuel.
Gillcrist, alarmed that the distorted reports of the test, added to the negative OPEVAL, might doom the Hornet, confronted Carter. “I told him that if that guy [Hollandsworth] worked for me, I’d fire his ass,” Gillcrist recalls.
“I don’t understand why Gillcrist was unhappy. It was the chase plane that ran out of gas. I guess I’ve missed the point some way,” Hollandsworth says. But then he adds: “We did not part the best of friends. That’s too bad. It is a lot of hard work for those guys up in Washington to push something through and then have your own navy types shoot it down.”
Actually, the test flights ordered by Lehman had almost nothing to do with aeronautics and almost everything to do with politics. From at least the time the navy had set about converting the YF-17 into a strike-fighter, it had been obvious that, since its “fuel fraction” would be lower than was desirable, its range, or radius of action, would be a matter of concern. Test flights, depending on how they were flown, would demonstrate that the range was somewhat short or just about what the specifications called for, but they added very little to what was already known about the plane’s performance.
Range continued to be the center of controversy, however, as the time approached for a decision on production of the plane for use in the attack role. In fact, that decision was coming very late in the program. The plane had been in production for five years and flying for four years and was scheduled to become operational with the marines in January 1983.
Hollandsworth, who continued to believe the F/A-18 was a mistake, felt increasingly that the program was going ahead and that “we were kicking a dead horse” in raising objections.
But the top-level Pentagon board had yet to make its decision, and that decision remained in doubt to the last minute. Normally, the program manager presents all the evidence, pro and con, on his weapons system at such a meeting. In this case, in an unprecedented move, Carter and several of his pilots were invited to attend the meeting and make their case against the plane. “They got it straight with all the bark off,” Carter says.
Then it was Lehman’s turn to speak. If, as many of the aviators suspected, his real goal was to kill the Hornet, this was his clearest—and last—chance.
Perhaps the best witness to the role Lehman played at that point is Rear Adm. George Strohsahl, Jr., who was then a captain. He was at the time Weaver’s deputy and was soon to become program manager himself. Strohsahl, who was an A-6 pilot and an early skeptic about the F/A-18, had known Lehman for a number of years before he became secretary, and the two men had flown in the A-6, Strohsahl as the pilot, Lehman as the bombardier-navigator.
“The only fair thing,” Strohsahl says, “is not what he thought, but what he did. What he did, when the chips were down and he had to make a stand, was he supported the F/A-18, and he supported it very strongly. Had he not, I’m not sure it ever would have made it through.”
As both Strohsahl and Carter recall, Lehman spoke only briefly. “I’ve looked at it a lot, and that thing goes just as far as it needs to for a strike-fighter. We want it,” he told the assembled Pentagon brass. On 17 March 1983, approval was granted for production of the Hornet for the attack role.
One last obstacle remained before it was safe to say that the F/A-18 was assured of an important part in the navy arsenal. On 14 June 1983, Carter and a group of pilots from the test squadrons met in a closed session of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, still the center of opposition to the plane. The subcommittee had twice in the previous months issued its own hostile reports on the plane’s performance—much of it based on information provided by foes of the Hornet within the navy. Carter and the pilots listed the problems they had found with the plane and emphasized their deep concern with its range.
That afternoon, the proponents of the plane paraded up to the Hill to meet with the same subcommittee. By the time the session ended late in the day, the majority of the subcommittee had been convinced that production should go ahead.
The production decision in March and the subcommittee’s day-long session in June marked the end of most of the political opposition to the plane. And it left to the fleet the question of how to get the most out of a plane that carried less fuel than most of the pilots would have wished for.
When Strohsahl took over from Weaver in the fall of 1983, he had every reason to look forward to smooth sailing during his tour of duty. All the big problems—technical, political and financial—seemed to have been solved. He couldn’t have been more wrong. The old jinx, in which every program manager leaves an unpleasant surprise for his successor, had not gone away.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“A Tremendous Amount of Grief”
To the designers of the F/A-18, the strict rules laid down by the experts at the Naval Air Systems Command seemed to be a bad case of overkill.
If the designers had had their way, they would have taken full advantage of the new way of building airplanes by using as much lightweight, honeycomb material as possible, and then gluing on large sheets of graphite epoxy to form the outer covering of the plane. The result would have been a structure that was very strong, impervious to corrosion, simple to manufacture, and relatively cheap.
But NAVAIR said no. The experts insisted that many of the external panels be attached by titanium screws rather than glued on. This way, the panels could be removed for a look at the innards of the plane. They were especially concerned about the ability to inspect the bulkheads that carry the heavy loads imposed by the wings and tail. One aircraft generation earlier, they had forced Grumman, when it wanted to use the new plastic technology in its F-14, to carry out parallel development of metal structures in case the new system didn’t work out. The substitute panels had not been needed, but NAVAIR remained distrustful, and the Hornet was designed so mechanics can routinely look at its inner structure.
NAVAIR’s caution paid off during one such routine inspection in the summer of 1984 at the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station in southern California, where the first Hornets had entered active service early in the previous year. A mechanic removed Panel No. 88 from one of the F/A-18s. The panel covers the metal beams to which the tall vertical tails are attached.
Peering inside, the mechanic was startled to see a crack several inches long in one of the structural I-beams that support the vertical tail. Finding a crack there was almost unbelievable. The plane was nearly new—only a little more than 400 hours in the air. It was designed to fly 6,000 hours without structural failure, and that part of the plane had already experienced nearly 12,000 hours of simulated flying in a test rig without any problem.
Within minutes, the phones were ringing at McDonnell Douglas in St. Louis, at Northrop in Hawthorne and Century City, and at NAVAIR in Crystal City. The rest of the Hornet fleet was quickly examined, and similar cracks were found in the tails of a number of other planes. On 26 July 1984, the Navy grounded its Hornets and stopped accepting delivery of new planes. The expert
s said none of the cracks posed an imminent danger of a tail breaking in flight, but the grounding order was so sweeping that two instructor pilots from the training squadron at Lemoore were stranded at Fallon, Nevada, and had to get a special emergency order to permit them to make the short flight back to their base in California. Canada and Australia, which had purchased some of the earliest planes off the production lines, also grounded their fleets and angrily demanded action from St. Louis and Washington.
Once again, John Capellupo was called in to deal with a serious problem. This time, he was made the leader of a McDonnell Douglas “Tiger Team,” so-called, he says, because “a tiger is a ferocious animal.” He was given authority to spend money as needed and draft experts from other parts of the company to find what had caused the problem and find a way to fix it—fast.
“It was a very large problem, a major deficiency, a problem we should not have created,” Capellupo says. “Planes were piling up at St. Louis and they were grounded in the fleet. We were causing ourselves and our customers a tremendous amount of grief.”
Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger and Navy Secretary Lehman threatened to sue McDonnell Douglas if the company refused to absorb the cost of fixing the tails. If the issue had gone to court, the government might well have lost because of a side effect of Lehman’s triumph, two years before, when he forced the manufacturers to agree to a fixed price of $22.5 million a plane. As part of that deal, the warranties provided by the manufacturers were drastically watered down. But McDonnell Douglas apparently gave little, if any, thought to the possibility of refusing to fix the tails and fighting the issue in the courts.
“They were just plain embarrassed,” says George Strohsahl, the navy’s program manager at the time. “Sandy McDonnell was very embarrassed to build a fighter plane that had the tails crack after a few hundred hours. Legally, contractually, McDonnell Douglas wouldn’t have to pay. Sandy McDonnell stepped up to that, whether contractually obligated or not.”
Capellupo felt the pressure. Planes were scheduled to come off the production line at a rate of more than one a week, but the navy wouldn’t accept or pay for them until the tails were fixed. And naval pilots at Lemoore were in a critical phase of their training in preparation for the Hornet’s first deployment at sea.
All the other problems experienced in developing the new plane and getting it ready to go to sea—cracked wing carry-through bulkheads, the flat spin, the roll rate, landing gear failures, corrosion and exploding engines—seem to fade into insignificance when compared with the difficulties posed by the tail cracks. An old timer at McDonnell Douglas told Capellupo it was the worst problem he had seen in forty years in the business. Once again, the possibility that the entire F/A-18 program would be scrapped seemed very real. “It was like a chicken on a June bug. I was the June bug,” Capellupo recalls.
His number one priority, of course, was to find out why the tails were cracking. To understand what had happened, it is useful to go back to the early 1970s when Northrop was involved in the air force-financed effort to develop and demonstrate new ways of designing and building fighter planes. This is before the YF-17 came into existence and years before the YF-17 was converted into the F/A-18.
Although there were many in the military and in the aircraft industry who were convinced that radar and the long-range missile had made the dogfight a thing of the past, the Northrop engineers deliberately set out to design a dogfighter. Inevitably, they reasoned, pilots will find themselves in close-in, one-against-one combat—what the pilots call “a knife fight in a telephone booth”—ending only when one plane has been destroyed.
In such a fight, with the planes turning as tightly as possible and zooming up and down, in a maneuver known as the “yo-yo,” both planes rapidly bleed off energy. The planes move slower and slower, like two groggy heavyweights groping for a knockout punch. The airplane designer can do a couple of things to help a pilot survive such an encounter. First, he can provide him with engines powerful enough to regain lost energy faster than the other fellow. But the designer can also help the pilot immeasurably by making the plane so it will perform well at very slow speeds.
That accounts for Northrop’s decision to use two large vertical tails. Because they are set off on either side of the fuselage, they receive air that is not blocked by the body of the plane. This enables them to maneuver the plane more precisely at all speeds. This idea of using two tails was not unique to the Northrop plane. Twin tails are a distinctive feature of the American F-14 and F-15 and of the new Soviet fighters, the SU-27, the MiG-29, and the MiG-31. The major exception to this trend is General Dynamics’ F-16, which has a single vertical tail.
The innovative contribution of the Northrop designers was to combine the advantages of the twin tails with a new shape for the wing. With their YF-17, they added a narrow section to the wing extending forward along the side of the fuselage, almost to the nose of the plane. They called this the “leading edge extension,” better known by its acronym, LEX.
This small section of the wing, extending far forward, helps to support the nose of the plane when it flies slowly, with the nose pointing sharply upward. With its LEX, the YF-17 was able to continue flying with its nose pointing almost straight up—an attitude at which other planes depart and fall off into a spin. Moreover, the plane didn’t simply hang there. The pilot remained in control, able to maneuver, bringing his nose around for a snap-shot at his adversary with his gun.
The LEX also has another effect on the performance of the plane. It churns up the air passing over the junction between the wings and the fuselage and sends it swirling back toward the vertical tails in a stream so violent that a pilot, looking back over his shoulder, can actually see it as a kind of churning, grayish fog. Aircraft designers spend much of their effort trying to prevent air from becoming turbulent and trying to calm it down when it does. But in this case, the vortex, as it is called, is highly desirable because it gives the vertical tails an added bite on the air when the plane is aimed sharply upward and flying very slowly.
The Northrop designers knew that this turbulent air would batter the vertical tails. In the F-14, the twin tails had, on occasion, moved so far that the tips had banged together. And equipment such as lights and radar antennae attached to the vertical tails of the F-15 had often broken. But, with the vortex coming from the LEX, the tails of the YF-17 and, later, of the F/A-18, were subjected to a much more severe battering.
Even for someone accustomed to flying in a modern combat aircraft, it is disconcerting to look back and see the vertical tails shaking violently from side to side as much as ten times a second. Hornet pilots say you look once, and that’s enough. But that visible buffeting is not something to worry about. The tails have built-in flexibility designed to withstand stresses at their tips of more than a hundred times the force of gravity.
What the designers didn’t realize is that the movement of the vortex past the tails would also set up an invisible high-frequency vibration, at the rate of forty to sixty vibrations a second, and that is the kind of stress that breaks tails.
“No one ever visualized the extreme loads that would be placed on that tail,” says Corky Lenox, who was the program manager throughout all the early test and development phase. “The loads were underestimated to begin with, and the plane flies so well at low speed and high angle of attack that the pilots fly in that regime far more than we ever dreamed they would. The environment there is more severe than envisioned, and it’s more severe more often. It was a great surprise to me that we had that problem.”
Using his authority as leader of the Tiger Team, Capellupo drafted some 400 experts from throughout the McDonnell Douglas operation. If he needed a specialist in metallurgy or vibration analysis, he simply took him. The result was close to chaos in other parts of the plant. Work was not only disrupted on the F/A-18 production line but on the F-15 and the AV-8B as well.
Working with the experts at Northrop, Capellupo’s Tiger Team came
up with a fairly straightforward solution for the weakness in the tails. Three strips of metal, called cleats, were bolted to the base of each tail where it is attached to the plane. It was not a very elegant solution. In fact, the cleats, attached where they could be seen on the outside of the tail covering, looked like an example of country carpentry. But they did the trick. By increasing the amount of metal at the point where the cracks were occurring, they increased the safe flying time of the plane by several thousand hours.
A special team of 250 mechanics took over a hangar at Lemoore, where the Navy pilots were preparing to take the plane on its first deployment. They quickly added cleats and put the planes back into service. By the end of November, delivery of new planes, with the strengthened tails, resumed. McDonnell Douglas announced that it would absorb the $25 million cost of fixing the tails.
All in all, it seemed a fairly quick and relatively painless ending to a very serious episode. Unfortunately, it was only the beginning of a problem far more serious than anyone imagined—or cared to think about.
True to the jinx that has afflicted each F/A-18 program manager, Strohsahl left the office on 30 September 1986, to be succeeded by Capt. J. A. (“Spider”) Lockard, one of the pilots who had helped introduce the F/A-18 into the fleet and who had been involved in the plane’s baptism of fire. He took over just as it was becoming apparent that the quick fix had not really been a lasting fix.
Adding the reinforcing cleats was a fast way of getting the planes back into the air and resuming deliveries. But there had been no time for exhaustive analysis and testing to see whether the cleats really did solve the problem and to determine how much they added to the lifetime of the plane. To believe that the addition of the cleats, which strengthened the tails without decreasing the stresses to which they were subjected, had solved the problem involved a good deal of wishful thinking. The cleats had probably increased the service life of the tails from 400 or 500 hours to some 2,000 hours. But that was still well short of the 6,000 hours the plane was supposed to be able to fly.