Supersonic Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age (17 page)

The day before, Lou Schalk’s taxi test caused some real worries. The plan was for him to lift off and fly for a mile or so no more than twenty feet off the ground. But as soon as the A-12 parted from the runway, it veered sharply to the right, and Schalk had to boot in left rudder. This set up a series of lateral oscillations that terrified him and everyone else watching. Chopping the throttles, he put the airplane back on the ground but disappeared from view in a cloud of dust. Hearts were pounding, sure that he had gone in, but in a few minutes the titanium nose came poking out of the dust cloud as Schalk taxied back.

Everyone, especially Kelly Johnson, knew that the A-12 was going to be a dangerous airplane to fly—they just had not counted on it being this dangerous on its first hop. Danger was implicit in an aircraft that was going to fly higher and faster than any other and do it for sustained periods. This was no sprint airplane; it was a long-distance Mach 3.0 cruiser, and thanks to Kelly’s intuitive genius, the A-12 was intended to be almost invisible to radar. The radical shape was dictated by the totally incompatible need for speed and stealth.

Johnson maintained a notebook in which he entered events on a daily, sometimes hourly basis. Its closely spaced entries, so neatly written that they seemed typeset, were illuminated with his careful drawings. His very first vision of this incredible aircraft was the A-1, rejected by the CIA as too big and too visible to radar. There had been a series of alterations, and now they had the A-12, which, as Kelly noted to all, was almost an exact duplicate of the A-1, only larger.

Kelly decided to use titanium in 85 percent of the A-12’s structure to withstand the extraordinary temperatures its skin would reach at a sustained high Mach numbers. Kelly knew that the high temperatures would actually stretch the aircraft more than two inches in flight and had designed the structure to expand and contract. Using titanium meant entirely new standards of quality control—there was only one supplier in the United States, and its product varied widely in quality from batch to batch. It meant new tools, new techniques, and lots of training, but there was no option—titanium kept the weight down. The remaining 15 percent of the aircraft was largely composite materials intended to reduce both the radar signature and the weight.

There were thousands of problems to solve by inventing materials and methods that did not exist. Johnson jokingly announced a prize of fifty dollars for anyone who came up with an easy problem—it was never claimed. A special fuel—JP-7—was developed to handle the variations in heat as the plane went from ambient ground temperatures to more than a thousand degrees Fahrenheit. Aerial refueling presented a special problem—fuel cold-soaked to 60 degrees below 0 in the tanks of a KC-135 would plunge down the refueling boom into tanks where the temperature hovered at 350 degrees at cruise. Ordinary jet fuel, the standard JP-4, would simply have exploded.

The need to compensate for structural expansion meant that the A-12’s integral tanks leaked continually on the ground, spawning a huge pool of JP-7 underneath the plane. Fortunately, the volatility of the new fuel was so low that you could throw a match into the pool and it would simply go out.

Lubricants were an even bigger concern, for vital equipment—pumps, control mechanisms, gears—had to work in areas where cruise temperatures reached 600 degrees and every known lubricant simply fried itself out of existence. Hydraulic fluid temperatures soared to 960 degrees, so new fluids had to be invented. The peak temperatures came at the leading edge and at the tail, where they rose to more than 1,200 degrees—while flying in the 60-degree-below-0 stratosphere. Ordinary electrical wiring would not work in the torrid heat, so the Skunk Works produced its own Kevlar wiring with asbestos covering.

The A-12’s internal complexities were cloaked in a sinister external beauty. Its huge engines seemed disproportionately large, seeming to gulp in the air even on the ground. Any pilot looking at the A-12’s engines, widely spaced on the thin double-delta wing, knew immediately that an engine failure in high-speed flight could create catastrophic asymmetric forces. The slender, sweeping fuselage had its angular cockpit canopy mounted well forward, surmounting the innovative chines that both smoothed airflow and reduced the radar signature.

The entire design was built on risks piled upon risks. Everything had to function correctly, and the pilot’s hands had to move the controls as precisely as a brain surgeon moved a scalpel to avoid a sudden catastrophic disintegration. Kelly had insisted on a triple redundancy for all systems, despite the weight and cost. He knew that if everything worked—and not a man on the field believed it would not—the increase in performance would be worth it. When the aircraft went into service, with the J58 engines intended for it, it would have a top speed of Mach 3.3 and an altitude capability of over 100,000 feet. Thanks to aerial refueling, it would have an unlimited range. Carrying a portfolio of cameras and sensors, the A-12 would give the Central Intelligence Agency a reconnaissance capability beyond that of the Corona satellite, which followed a pre-determined path around Earth. The A-12 could be sent anywhere, anytime, and was almost impossible to shoot down.

Vance Shannon felt the ambient tension and found that it helped stifle his sense of personal disappointment. The aircraft had originally been designed for Pratt & Whitney J58 engines, but despite all he, Pratt, and Ben Rich could do, the J58 was running far behind schedule. Vance had spent months shuttling back and forth from the P & W plant to the NASA high-speed wind tunnel at Moffett Field and then down to Burbank. He soon found that Ben Rich was using him as a lightning rod with Kelly Johnson. When there was good news or even just a fairly solvable problem, Ben found ways to tear himself away from the wind tunnel and go to Burbank to brief Kelly personally. But when there was bad news—and there was more often than not—Ben would plead that the wind tunnel work needed him and send Shannon to brief Kelly.

Vance still shivered remembering the day when he reluctantly had to advise Kelly to install the smaller but available J75 engines for this test flight. Johnson, under pressure from the CIA and already concerned about delays, went through the roof. It was hours before he could be persuaded that putting J75 engines in the first five aircraft would not irrevocably damage the A-12 program.

As Vance reminisced, the flight line assumed a familiar geometry. On first flights like this, the area around the aircraft was carefully sanitized and only people vitally needed at the moment were permitted access. Then about fifty yards away were the specialists, experts who might be called in to solve a problem if one surfaced. Finally, another fifty yards to the rear were the hundreds of people involved in the project. Many key personnel were not there—there was still too much to do to allow them time off. But everyone who could get away was there to watch as Lou Schalk set about the business of bringing the A-12 to life.

Only thirty-six years old, Schalk had a remarkable career of test flying behind him. A former Air Force test pilot tutored by Chuck Yeager and Pete Everest, Schalk was as much admired for his engineering analysis as his piloting skills.

Shannon had worked with him on the F-104 program and again during the awful days of the Electra catastrophe. Now Schalk had the most prestigious job in the aircraft industry—chief test pilot for the Skunk Works.

At 7:05 A.M., Schalk made one last survey of his instrument panel, checking that everything was solidly in the green. Then, as he always did, he said a silent prayer, not for safety but of thanks for the opportunity to fly a new airplane. Holding the stick lightly, gazing out the right side of the triangular front windscreen, he advanced the two throttles with his left hand, felt the A-12 roll forward and gather speed swiftly, for it was light and the J75 engines were putting out their combined 50,000 pounds of thrust. The A-12 hurtled down the runway, becoming alive in Schalk’s hands, the acceleration amazing him as the aircraft, bronze and silver flashes glinting in the sun, broke ground at 170 knots, precisely the speed he had calculated, the earth trembling with the throbbing power of the engines.

Schalk resisted the almost reflex action to raise the gear—this flight would be made with gear down. He leveled out at 10,000 feet and began checking the stability, hoping that there would be no repeat of the taxi test’s problems. He turned one damper off, then another, trying to determine what had gone wrong on the taxi test. Then it hit him. The fuselage was filled with cavernous fuel tanks. Only twelve thousand pounds of fuel had been loaded for the taxi test. He realized that with the taxi-test fuel load, the center of gravity was so far aft that the aircraft was unstable on takeoff. The margin for error was very small. If there had been as little as a thousand pounds of fuel forward, the airplane would have been just been within trim; a thousand pounds more in the aft tanks, and the A-12 would probably have thrown its nose up into a stall and crashed right on the runway.

The thought sobered him. It was a mistake that neither he nor Kelly should have made—and it spoke volumes about the hazards of the future.

By chance, Kelly and Shannon were standing side by side when Schalk brought the A-12 in for a beautiful landing, the long Cobra-like nose kept well up for aerodynamic braking until the speed had dropped off to a minimum.

“Congratulations, Kelly, looks like you’ve done it again.”

Johnson showed no sign of pleasure—his brow was furrowed with his usual look of intense, worried concentration.

“I hope so, Vance, but this aircraft is dangerous. We’ve lost a lot of people on the U-2 program, and I’m worried about the same thing happening with the A-12. We are pushing the limits on everything here, and I hope we can get to an airplane an ordinary pilot can fly—they are not all Lou Schalks out there.”

Schalk taxied into the hardstand, and as they walked forward, Kelly said, “Shannon, I want you to check the engine installation from front to back, inside and out. I’ll get ladders out for you and some coveralls, but I want you to check every inch for cracks, abrasions, and anything else you can see as soon as it cools down.”

He paused for a second as he considered Shannon’s age. “Hell, you may have gray hair, but you are in better shape than I am. You going to have any problem crawling around the engines?”

Shannon laughed. “No, Kelly, I’m sixty-eight, but I can still crawl up and down a ladder. I’ll get a flashlight and a magnifying glass from my kit.”

It was two o’clock in the afternoon before he was finished. There were suspicious cracks in a half-dozen spots, and he would have to check with Ben Rich to see what he thought of them before reporting back to Kelly. Shannon thumbed down a flight-line pickup truck, asked for a ride back to the operations shack and crawled into the cargo bed amid a clutch of fire-extinguisher bottles and wheel chocks, thinking,
What a year! We put Glenn into orbit in February, and then fly a miraculous airplane like this in April. What will it be like by December?

Tired from the heat and from inspecting the engines, he wondered if he was getting to old for the business, if things were not speeding up too fast for a man his age to handle. Mach 3.0 speeds, men circling Earth in orbit. Still, what was he going to do, retire and play golf? The thought sickened him. Travel? He’d been around the world so often that there was no place he wanted to go. If Jill wanted to take a trip, he’d go along, but for sure he didn’t want to see another foreign country on his own.

The truck pulled to a stop, and the driver, a fresh-faced young man of perhaps twenty, said, “Everybody out, Gramps. I’ve got to take this thing back to the motor pool.”

Shannon eased his way out of the truck bed, thanked the young man, and walked briskly toward the operations shack, anxious to get to his typewriter, where he could get the hastily written notes on the cracks in the engine and nacelles down on paper. Ben Rich was pleasant to work for, compared to Kelly at least. But Rich was undeniably demanding in his own way.

As Shannon rolled the first sheet of paper into his battered portable Royal, a sudden wave of fatigue hit him. “Must be getting as old as Kelly and that blasted young truck driver think I am.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

July 10, 1962

Santa Monica, California

T
om Shannon flew the red-eye back from Washington. Rumpled, sleepy, and needing a decent breakfast, he stopped to wash up in the posh executive restroom. The meeting was scheduled to be held down the hall in the gimmick-filled conference room of Lear, Incorporated, Bill Lear’s principal moneymaker.

Lear was a brilliant entrepreneur and inventor who had started his career in the U.S. Navy in World War I at the age of sixteen. With an eighth-grade education, he had mastered everything the Navy could teach him about radios. By the time he was twenty, he had his own wireless company. In 1930, he had invented the first successful car radio. As his fortunes grew in a variety of industries he also won the most prestigious awards in aviation, including the Frank M. Hawks Memorial Award and the Collier Trophy.

Vance Shannon and Lear had been thrown together when the latter was building Learstars, souped-up Lockheed Lodestars for executive use. They had a sparkling, sometimes combative but always productive relationship, and Shannon had suggested the idea for building a small jet for executive use. Lear saw the merit at once, adding that the Learjet, as he named it on the spot, would have an even bigger market with celebrities, the same people who bought Rolls-Royce cars and maintained yachts.

Acting on that tip from Kelly Johnson, Vance believed that Lear could save an enormous amount of money if he used one of the new, small European jets being developed as a basis for his new plane. Tom Shannon toured Europe, looking for the right formula.

He found it in Switzerland, where an indigenous fighter, the P-16, was being marketed for use by a Swiss firm. Unfortunately, when two of the four prototypes crashed, the Swiss Air Force lost interest in the project. Both Tom and Bill Lear’s son, Bill Junior, flew one of the surviving P-16s and quickly arranged for the purchase of the design rights. Since then, Tom had been working with the P-16’s designer, Dr. Hans Studer, to create the Learjet.