Roaring Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age (28 page)

Schairer’s grin narrowed a bit, and he glanced at his watch and said, “Sure, no problem, let’s go in the conference room down the hall here. Anyone else you think ought to be called in?”

Vance Shannon knew he had an opportunity here that might not come again. “How about Wellwood Beale, Ed Wells, Cliff Leisy, and Elliot Merrill?” Beale was the rotund, heavy-drinking chief of engineering, who also happened to be one of the best airplane salesmen in the world. Wells was sedate and retiring but a top engineer who had first brought Boeing to prominence with the 247 transport. Leisy was an all-around engineer who Vance knew had been researching in-flight refueling. Merrill was Boeing’s top test pilot since the death of Eddie Allen in 1943.

Schairer snorted. “How about the president, Bill Allen, too? Let’s get serious; I call Ed in, and Cliff, but that’s it. And I’ll give you thirty minutes, because we’ve got to get back on the B-47 stuff we hashed out last night.”

All the Boeing types sat on one side of the table, dressed almost identically and behaving in the normal Boeing way, friendly, correct, but just formal and distant enough to maintain decorum.

One of Sergeant Shackleford’s gifts was being a pretty fair artist, and Harry had asked him to sketch out both the British system used by Cobham and the new system he was proposing. Shackleford had used a grease pencil on two-foot-square sheets of paper, drawing in clean, straight lines and even managing a little perspective.

Harry walked them through the Flight Refueling Limited system first, pointing out the strong points—availability and track record. He noted the weak points as well—slow fuel flow, lots of equipment required, and some rather delicate hardware used to engage the lines when they crossed.

“And there is the hazard of equipment and hoses freezing in subzero temperatures at high altitudes. But the system works; they’ve tested it scores of times, and never had a failure. We are going ahead and ordering forty sets of Cobham’s equipment to install on B-29s. We’ve got to gain some actual in-flight refueling experience, and this is the fastest way to do it. But let me show you a very simplistic idea that I’ve had drawn up. I don’t know how feasible it is, but it seems to me to be a better way to go, because you could use it on both fighters and bombers. The Cobham system will work for bombers only, obviously.”

Harry pulled out the second set of drawings, far more sophisticated than the ones he had shown Colonel Boyd. They depicted the rear end of one B-29, fitted with a refueling compartment and an extended boom, equipped with two little wings. Shackleford had outdone himself,
and the drawings showed how the receiver aircraft, equipped with a refueling receptacle just behind the cockpit, would move into position, fly formation at a distance, then close the distance, open the refueling receptacle, and have the refueling boom operator steer the boom into the hatch.

Leisy slammed his fist down on the table. “That’s it, man; that’s it! That will work; we’ll get rid of all these damn hoses and reels and throwing lines. This is the way to go, no question about it.” He jumped up and looked at the others, waving his arms, saying, “This will save the 377 program; we’ll finally make some money on that clunker by turning it into a tanker. This is a godsend.” Then, almost confrontational, he turned to Schairer and said, “Well, what about it?,” his expression changing as he realized that not only was everyone from Boeing in the room far senior to him, but there were also strangers, before whom such things were never discussed. The 377 was Boeing’s Stratoliner, an adaptation of the B-29 into the transport role, using a new fuselage. It was liked by travelers but not by airlines, who found it too expensive to operate, and Boeing was hemorrhaging money on the program.

Ed Wells interrupted, speaking gently. “Sit down, Cliff. It’s a good thing we all think you are right. Colonel Shannon, I take it we have your permission to proceed with this? Have you patented the idea?”

Harry was nonplussed. “Patented it? No, sir, it’s just something that came to me on Air Force time, and my boss told me to tell you about it. From now on, it’s Boeing’s baby as far as I’m concerned.”

Schairer smiled and said, “How about coming back in the morning? I’ve got an old friend of yours coming in from Wright-Pat, Pete Wharton. I think all three of you might be interested.”

That night at the Windsor, after the flaming pupu tray of appetizers had been pulled away and they were waiting
for their steaks, Vance said, “Harry, you probably gave away a few million dollars today.”

“No, it would have been the Air Force’s money; I worked on it on Air Force time. And the Air Force doesn’t care about making money; as Al Boyd said, it’s just interested in getting one airplane to squirt a lot of fuel real fast into another.”

The steaks were good, and they finished with cognac. Tom had told his tale of wifely woe, and so did Harry.

“Well, it looks like the Shannons are a pretty sorry crew when it comes to women. My woman won’t marry me, Tom’s may be about to leave him, and the votes aren’t in on Harry’s. I guess I must have done something wrong when I raised you.”

“There’s a lot of talent here tonight, Dad.” Tom ran his eyes around the room where some of the Windsor regulars as well as some new faces were seated.

“Not on your life, Son, nor on mine.”

They were back in Schairer’s outer office the next morning, where an old friend, Lieutenant Colonel Wilbur P. “Pete” Wharton, was waiting for them. Wharton ruled bomber development at Wright-Patterson with an iron hand, running it virtually by himself. He worked a three-way street—the Air Force budget, Congress, and the manufacturers—and he kept them all in line, turning out the airplanes, engines, and propellers needed for bombers.

“Pete, how are you? What are you doing here?”

“Going crazy, Harry, trying to keep up with Boeing.”

Schairer’s secretary opened his door, smiled in the sincerely cordial way that was standard for Boeing office help, and motioned them inside. Schairer’s office was as neat as his appearance and his mind, with nothing out of place on his desk and two sets of bookcases totally filled with models of Boeing aircraft, including some interesting projects that had never been built. Vance had worked on many of them and had a fond spot in his heart for some of the most radical—a bulky jet fighter that had a
ramjet for power at altitude, a wicked-looking interceptor, with a thin, straight wing and three engines, two jets and a rocket. There was also one that was being developed at the same time as the B-47, a smaller version with two jets and the same bicycle landing gear. It had been dropped because Boeing didn’t think there was a sufficient market for it. Shannon always thought it would have made a good aircraft for export sales, but there was no interest at Boeing despite all his work on it. Next to the model case, a huge walnut table was piled with drawings, wind tunnel models, and odd bits of hardware.

Schairer stood like a country schoolmaster beside a large easel. “I know all of you are cleared at least for secret, but oddly enough, everything I’m going to show you except the last sheet is unclassified. I won’t show you the last one, although Pete is familiar with it.

“As you gentlemen know, we desperately need to find a way to increase the range of our jet bombers. We need to be able to hit the Soviet Union hard and from high altitude, and the only thing the Air Force has for the job is a few Convair B-36s—basically a 1940s airplane, blown up in size. It’s no wonder the Navy is skeptical about spending so much money on it.”

Harry had been at Convair the previous August, quite by chance, and seen the XB-36 fly. It was a tremendously impressive airplane, with a 230-foot wingspan and six pusher engines, but it had to be slow—there was no way six piston engines, even the big Pratt & Whitney R-4360s, could push that much metal through the air very fast.

Schairer carefully covered the first chart, then opened the second. The drawings were of the XB-47; a series of photos, taken at every angle, were thumbtacked around the drawings.

“It took a while to convince even me, but this is a terrific airplane, the best bomber in the world. But it is too short ranged of course, and until we get some kind of a tanker fleet, it will be a while before it is really useful.
It’s fast, though, six hundred mph, and Guy Townsend will tell you that it is also very maneuverable.”

Townsend was the Air Force test pilot who had sold the airplane to the Air Force at a time when all the emphasis was on building the B-50, an improved version of the B-29 but still a piston engine bomber.

Schairer went on as if he were lecturing a class, going through the drill of covering the drawings again. It was habit; these drawings had been unclassified, but he couldn’t bring himself to leave them open. He opened up the third sheet. “Here’s where the problem is, though. I’ve been working on this devil for two years.” He showed a drawing of a huge aircraft with a straight wing, and four enormous turboprop engines. “This is the Boeing Model 464-17. We started out with six engines, but when Wright bumped up the power of their T-35 turboprops to about eighty-nine hundred horsepower we went to four. Less drag, less maintenance, less inventory.”

Vance Shannon asked, “What’s its gross weight?”

Schairer moaned, “Four hundred thousand pounds and growing. You know the old problem: you need fuel to carry fuel, so you scale up, and then you need extra fuel to carry the extra weight, and then you need extra fuel to carry the extra fuel. It’s a vicious circle. We project that the airplane would have a speed over target of about three hundred eighty mph and a combat radius of about three thousand miles. That’s way too short, obviously; it’s just a little better than the B-36.”

Shannon turned to Wharton. “Pete, Pratt & Whitney have some terrific jet engines coming down the pike. You know how I feel about coupled engines and gearboxes—and I feel the same way about turboprops; I just cannot believe they are going have any advantage over a jet engine for a bomber or a fighter. A transport, maybe, but not a first-line combat aircraft.”

Wharton responded, “Well, the Russkies wouldn’t agree with you. We don’t know a hell of a lot about what they
are doing, but we do know they are developing some monster turboprop engines, probably based on some German designs. We also know that Tupelov, their big bomber guy, is designing a huge turboprop bomber. Probably looks just like this.” Wharton jabbed the drawing of the Boeing turboprop.

The Soviet Union’s famed Andrei Tupelov had added another laurel to his crown just after the war, reverse-engineering impounded Boeing B-29s to create the Tupelov Tu-4. The Tu-4 represented a real threat to the United States, for it could reach most of its major cities on a oneway mission. Almost the entire USAF interceptor force was being concentrated to counter such an attack, but with the current primitive radar system, there was no doubt that many of the Soviet bombers could get through.

Wharton flopped down in his seat. “The Soviets scare me. They inherited a whole mass of German technology, and the stupid Brits gave away the store by giving them Rolls-Royce engines. But those will just get them started. They’ll bring their own genius to play, and they’ll have airplanes that will be able to hit the U.S. and return. That’s why we’ll have to build up Air Defense Command and buy a whole bunch of interceptors, and build a radar system across the Arctic. And that’s why we have to have something to retaliate with.”

The room rocked with the sound of a B-29 taking off on the factory runway, and they were quiet until the noise was gone.

Schairer rapped gently on the easel and said, “I cannot show all of you the last chart—it’s still top secret, and we haven’t done what we need to do to check your clearances. But Pete here knows what’s there, and I’m going to leave it to Pete to decide how you can help the program along.”

Wharton turned to the Shannons, father and sons. “We have to do better than we are doing, or we are just going to have to abandon the heavy bomber program. That will make the Strategic Air Command very unhappy. There
are some alternatives—we can base B-47s overseas and we can accelerate the tanker program—but none of that is really satisfactory. We need a big bomber we can send from the heartland of the United States to the heartland of Russia.”

He paused for a moment and said, “Harry, I want you to go to Hartford, to work directly with Pratt & Whitney and get their big jet engine rolling. Right now they are making plenty of money with their smaller engines. I want you to convince them to risk a lot of experimental money to get me a new jet engine with at least eight thousand pounds of thrust, no matter what it takes. If you can do that, I’ll switch Boeing off turboprops and get them started on a big jet.”

Harry stalled for time. He wasn’t ready to be shuffled off to Hartford, away from the great flying at Wright-Pat. “I don’t know much about engines, and certainly nothing about turboprops.”

“I know that, Harry. No one really knows a great deal about jet engines yet, especially turboprops; they are an unknown quantity. But you know people, and I have faith that you can convince them that the Air Force is serious about the big jet engine.”

Realizing that he was being reeled in, Harry came back with a fairly weak, not too pertinent question: “What have you learned from the B-47?”

Wharton slapped the desk with his hand. “Good goddamn question! The biggest, most important thing we learned is that the wings don’t have to be as thin as they are on the B-47. All the drag calculations on the B-47 were too high, and Boeing’s decided it can build the next bomber with a thick wing. It makes for a lighter structure, and means that you can store fuel in the wings, and not have all the tanks in the fuselage like the 47.”

“Who’ll I talk to up there?” The words were out of his mouth before he realized he’d agreed to accept the assignment without even talking it over with Anna.

“I’ll introduce you to Luke Hobbs and Perry Pratt. Luke’s been in jet engines since they started, and Pratt is a genius. Good name to have working at Pratt & Whitney, huh? Don’t even know if he’s related, but he is a powerhouse!”