Supersonic Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age (23 page)

Vance agreed, and the two men reminisced through lunch, talking about their trip to Germany before the war had ended, about the Cuban missile crisis, painful as it was with its memories of JFK, and about cars—but they left anything skirting the issue of supersonic flight alone.

“I see the Russkies have another first in space—what’s her name, Valentina Tereshkova?”

“Brave woman! They seem to have a better grasp on what catches the public’s eye. Putting a woman in space is a public relations master stroke, even if it doesn’t do that much for advancing space science.”

Jill had opted out of eating with them, but as she swept in with the coffee and ice cream she said, “I think you’re wrong, George. Even if she doesn’t do much up there to advance space science, she’s going to get women interested in it, and that generates another fifty percent of the population using their brains about space. It’s bound to help space science in the long run.”

“Touché, Jill—you are right as always.”

The two men moved back to Vance’s familiar library, stocked almost exclusively with books on aviation and engineering.

Schairer looked around. “It’s a long time since I was here, Vance, but I just noticed something. You don’t have an ‘I’m a Hero’ wall.”

Vance laughed. Most people kept at least one wall for their plaques, photos with dignitaries, diplomas, and so on. It was a standard feature in dens and libraries around the country. “No, I’ve got an ‘I’m a Hero’ chest—I just toss all of them into a big shipping trunk in the basement. The kids can sort them out when I’m gone.”

“That’s not going to be for a long time.”

“I don’t know, George; I get the feeling my time may be running out. My doc says I’ll be fine if I take it easy, and take my medicine, but I don’t know; I’ve got a funny feeling. But let’s talk about something else. You didn’t come down here to listen to me bellyache.”

“Vance, I know you have a problem keeping everybody happy and not stepping on anybody’s toes. This may seem crazy at this late date, but I want to talk to you about the SST, not what you’ve been doing, not anything technical, just some generic stuff on how you feel about it. I’ve got some misgivings, we’re not reaching any kind of consensus at Boeing, and I need your opinion. You’ve got more common sense than anybody I know. I’ve seen you pull an intuitive thought right out of your gut, time after time, and it’s almost always right. So let me have it straight, without regard to our contract or to anything else. What do you think the prospects are for a viable SST?”

Vance considered this for a minute. It was something he could talk about safely to anyone—the FAA, Boeing, Lockheed, it didn’t matter—and he had strong feelings. “I can do that, George, and just to be fair, I’m going to have to tell what I tell you to Lockheed and North American. Is that OK with you?”

Schairer nodded agreement, and Vance sighed, then went on, “The truth is, I am a bit of a crank on this, George. I think the supersonic transport is too risky and too expensive to pursue for any valid economic reason. As a matter of national pride, that’s different. The Soviet Union will put one up for almost the same reason they put
Sputnik
up, to show the world they can do it. Great Britain and France have made a colossal mistake. They put their countries’ pride on the line and launched into something that will be impossible to back out of and will cost a fortune that will never be recovered. The market is just too small to support enough SST transports to recover their costs on a production run.”

Schairer nodded, then said, “Do you mind if I make notes?”

“Go ahead; we can tape it if you want. Bob Rodriquez built this for me, he’s an electronic whiz. I know you have some Ampex equipment back at Boeing that will be compatible with it.”

“Let’s do that, but I’ll make notes, too.”

Vance fiddled with his recorder, tested it twice, then turned it on and began in the professorial voice the instrument always induced in him, “The first thing to realize is that the productivity of a supersonic transport is so great, if it is used as intensively as present jet airliners, only a few of them will be required to handle the traffic. Therefore the production run for whatever company—or combination of companies—that builds them will never generate enough income to cover the tremendous research and development costs, which will amount to fifteen billion dollars or more. The airplanes themselves will be expensive, perhaps fifty to one hundred million—if you try to amortize fifteen billion in development costs over a fleet of even one hundred aircraft, the total costs skyrockets to an impossible number. And the fleet will never be one hundred. At the outside, it might conceivably be fifty; I think it will be far less, no more than twenty-five.

“The second thing to recognize is that the utility of a Mach 3.0 airliner, or even a hypersonic airliner, is limited by the implacable differences in time zones. To talk, as some are already talking, of a hypersonic ‘Orient Express’ to fly people from New York to Tokyo in a few hours is utter nonsense, because you could leave at breakfast to arrive in the middle of the night, or vice versa. The difference in time zones makes it virtually impossible to have compatible working days.

“Then there is the matter of the environment. We are only beginning to hear the beginning of objections of people to the daily—or, if the great dreams are realized, the hourly—sonic boom that would be destroying windows, shaking walls, and startling grandmothers. There is also ominous talk about what it might do to the ozone layer.

“Proponents of the SST point to the continual growth in traffic as an argument, citing that annual traffic increases at the rate of five percent per year. And it does—but not in the rarefied atmosphere of people who can pay the high prices that supersonic travel will command. Airlines will have to charge at least ten thousand dollars for a round-trip between New York and London. The base of the number of people in this upper bracket is small, and even if it grew at a rate of five percent also, it would not be sufficient to fill the seats of a fleet of SSTs.

“In short, while it will be technically feasible to build a supersonic transport—difficult but feasible—the costs involved are going to be impossible to recover commercially.”

Vance shut the machine off, rewound it, and handed the tape to George along with a sheaf of papers.

“Here’s some mathematical backup for my opinion—predictions on urban concentrations, growth of international travel, passenger miles flown, world airline fleet numbers, airliner utilization—the usual stuff. It’s valid for jet airliners, and even if you plug in a Ford Trimotor, it’s valid. It will be valid for the SST as well. George, there is just no way to make money on an SST, and there are probably a thousand ways to lose your shirt.”

“It’s a good thing you taped it—I stopped taking notes halfway through, amazed by what you were saying. But what if we get pushed into it for reasons of national pride, you know, not wanting the Brits or the French or the Russkies to show the world they are ahead of us?”

“If the government is willing to subsidize the effort, pick up the research costs, help with the operating costs, it becomes much more attractive. But I don’t think you are going to see the government putting that kind of money into a risky prestige project when there are so many social programs that need funding. Not the U.S. government, I mean; I can’t speak for what will happen to the Concorde or to the Soviet efforts.”

“Well, Boeing is going to have to keep putting development money into the program until the government declares its hand. We can’t afford to have it become a national prestige project and not be in the forefront. I just wish it would dry up and go away.”

“That will happen, but not for a few years. In the meantime, you’ll learn a lot from the experimentation. Not enough to justify the costs, but since you have to compete, you’ll be making some breakthroughs that apply somewhere else. It’s always like that.”

As they were walking to the door, Vance said, “What did you think—” and bit his tongue. He was about to ask Schairer what he thought about the first flight of the Lockheed YF-12, an interceptor version of the A-12 and a top-secret item. It had flown on August 27 and Kelly Johnson was absolutely delighted with the results.

“What?”

“Nothing, George. I almost spoke out of school.”

Schairer grinned his small grin. “I was hoping you would.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

December 31, 1963

Palos Verdes, California

B
y pre-arrangement, Jill had hauled Vance off to do some last-minute shopping for the night’s festivities, leaving Harry, Tom, and Bob ample time to discuss their current problem: how to always be on hand when Vance wanted to fly his C-45. The company pilot, Ray McAteer, was off on three months’ leave because of some family problems back east. And Vance, feeling his oats under his new health regime, was flying more and more often. He never went solo—he was too considerate of others to do that, not wishing to become ill and crash into someone’s house. But when he wanted to fly, he wanted to fly, and it took time out of everyone’s tight schedule.

Harry led off, “I don’t want to discourage his flying. I think that it is doing him as much good as his medicine or his diet. But we’ve got to talk him into making some sort of advance schedule, so we can accommodate it.”

“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.