“Still, a private jet airliner would really be something, wouldn’t it? And they wanted to call it the Shannon Jet! That’s pretty good. I’d like that.”
February 2, 1954, Palos Verdes, California
It was V.R.’s first birthday, and Jill had decorated the house to celebrate. Though she had never had any children herself, she was the quintessential grandmother to young Vance Robert, babysitting at every opportunity.
Everyone was coming to dinner, everyone except Anna, who was at yet another clinic, still trying—or appearing to try—to shed the ravaging burden of alcohol that had consumed her beauty even as it consumed Harry’s life.
Vance came in from the garage, where he had spent the morning changing the oil in his old De Soto, their second car. “What are we having? Turkey, roast beef?”
Jill looked at him sadly and put her arm around his neck. Vance’s question was pro forma. His appetite was gone; he no longer exercised and spent most of his time in his office, supposedly reading, but most often staring at the wall. Changing the oil was the most positive thing he had done in weeks.
“It’s your favorite, beef Stroganoff. And you had a call while you were in the garage. I didn’t want to disturb you just when you were draining the oil, so I took the number.”
“Who was it?”
“He said he was an old friend of yours, Bill Lear. Sounded like a real nice person, laughing and kidding.”
“Well, if it’s the Bill Lear I think it is, he is a son of a bitch, a no-good bastard. We were at a party over at North American about twenty years ago and he made a pass at Margaret! I decked him, just belted him without thinking, knocked him ass-backward over a table. He’s a big guy, too.”
“You actually hit him?”
“Well, I’d had a couple of drinks, and that was not usual for me. But he was always romancing everybody. There was actually a round of applause when I slugged him.”
Jill laughed and kissed him. “Always a knight in shining armor! I hope you’d do the same for me.”
He kissed her back and said, “But he is one smart guy as well. He’s the guy who invented the first practical car radio, plus a lot of stuff for aviation—direction-finding gear, autopilots, and so on. Won the Collier Trophy one year, 1947, I think, and that’s really something. Right now he’s in the modification business, taking old clunker Lodestars and cleaning them up so that they are fast, long-ranged executive aircraft. Calls them Learstars.”
“Well, go ahead and call him.”
“I’ll go into the office, where it’s quiet.”
“The hell you will! I want to hear this.”
Smiling, Vance dialed the number she gave him. A big booming voice answered, “Lear here.”
“Bill, this is Vance Shannon. You called me?”
“Absolutely, Vance, and thanks for calling back. I need your help. Can you spare me a few months of your time?”
Vance would have liked to have said, “Not on your life, you fanny-patting bastard.” But economics intervened, and he said, “Maybe; what’s it all about?”
Lear went into a lengthy explanation. He was taking war surplus Lockheed Lodestars and putting them through a modification process that included bigger engines, new instruments, ultra-deluxe passenger cabins, and so on, but the whole enterprise depended on increased speed for sales.
“Vance, here it is in a nutshell. My guys have slicked this buggy up as much as they know how, and we are still twenty miles per hour below our guaranteed top speed and fifteen below our economy cruise speed. If we don’t get that fixed, I’ll lose a sale of about twenty airplanes to an importer in South America. I want you to come in and see if you can squeeze a lot more speed out of it. I’d like to exceed the specs, if I could, but I need to at least meet them.”
Shannon felt reborn, just as he used to feel as a kid after Confession when he had said the usual five Hail Marys and five Our Fathers for penance. This was perhaps a way back into the industry. It was a start, anyway.
“I can’t pay you what the big outfits do, Vance, but I can make it interesting. What do you say?”
“When do I start?”
“Come on up to my office in Santa Monica on Monday. We’ll have a contract for you to sign, and we’ll get started.”
Shannon said good-bye, put down the phone, and moved over to the window. His eyes were misting. It was sort of humiliating, going to work for Bill Lear, polishing up piston engine leftovers from World War II, but by God, it was a start.
Jill didn’t say anything. She saw the emotions flashing across Vance’s face, knew that it was good, that whatever Bill and he had agreed on was helping him. There was no need to kiss him or congratulate him. She let him soak it up from the inside.
On Monday, Lear greeted him like a long-lost father. As Vance walked through the immaculately clean plant, he enjoyed the badinage between Lear and the workers. The man clearly was the boss, and the people liked him. That was promising.
Lear led him to the end of the hangar where no fewer than seven airplanes were completed.
“These Learstars are all ready to roll—but they haven’t passed our acceptance tests because they are too slow. We cannot figure it out.”
“They look mighty slick, Bill.”
And they did. On this casual inspection, it looked like everything that could be done was done. The finish was beautiful. Lear’s experts had filled in every crevice with body putty and sanded it down before painting, so it gleamed from end to end with none of the usual plates sticking up, fasteners exposed, and so on. The cowling was long and beautiful, and the propellers were enclosed in a deep spinner that seemed almost anteater-like in appearance. The cowl flaps were like articulated wings, perfectly matched when open or closed.
“Can we fly one, Bill?”
“Damn right, I’ll fly you myself.” He began shouting orders, and one of the Learstars, finished in an immaculate deep emerald green, was rolled out. Lear climbed into the left seat, motioned Vance into the right seat, and quickly, expertly, went through the checklist. Behind them stood Lloyd Carr, an experienced instructor pilot, carefully following the process. Lear nodded to him, saying, “I never fly without another qualified pilot on board. Getting too damn old, I forget things.”
Vance had flown Lockheed Hudsons during the war and the Lodestar was just an enlarged version, but the Learstar had far more instrumentation and was much more comfortable. They climbed to altitude heading out toward the ocean, and Lear leveled off at 6,000 feet, saying, “You got it.”
Shannon flew the airplane carefully, moving it through a series of ever steeper banks. Then he did a few speed runs, on which the airplane topped out at about 240 mph. Before he turned to go back to Santa Monica, he did some stalls. The airplane paid off rapidly and rolled to the right, far sharper than Vance liked. “This could be tough for a novice, Bill. That’s a wicked stall.”
“Yeah, I know, but we can’t do much about it. It’s just built into the airplane—the Hudson and the Lodestar did the same thing.”
When they got back to the field, Lear made a perfect wheels landing, and they taxied in without speaking. After he had shut the airplane down, carefully going through the checklist, he turned to Vance, saying, “What do you think?”
“Well, it’s a hell of an improvement over the Lodestar, obviously. And you really have a slick interior. The stall worries me, though, and I don’t see any obvious way to boost the speed. Let me think about it, and I’ll come back to you tomorrow.”
“What about your contract? It’s up on my desk.”
“Let’s see if I can do you any good first, and we’ll talk about the contract later.”
All the way home from the plant, all during dinner, and until late at night, Shannon analyzed the airplane. He hadn’t said anything to Lear, but to him there was an obvious connection between the sharpness of the stall and the inability to reach higher speeds.
Shannon spent the next five days crawling over the Learstar, examining it in ev
ery configuration, flaps up, flaps down, gear up, gear down, flaps up, gear down, flaps down, gear up. Sometimes he flew his own Navion in formation with a test pilot flying the Learstar, giving him instructions on what to do. There had been a little resistance to Vance’s being there at first, but Lear had quickly ended that by announcing that whatever Shannon wanted he would get. By the end of the first day, everyone was cooperating.
On the following Monday, Vance went into Lear’s office with a memo and a couple of sketches. Lear was noted for not wishing to read any more than he had to. “Tell me what you said, Vance. I don’t have the time to wade through long reports.”
“OK Bill, a question for you. Did you ever run the prop spinners through a wind tunnel test?”
“No, we did the earlier ones. They were sort of snub-nosed and we figured these would be even lower drag.”
“Well, here’s what I want to try. It won’t cost much, and your guys can probably do it in a day. First of all, let’s pull off the prop spinners entirely. Leave a bare hub, for tests anyway. Then I want you to have about sixty of these made. We’ll fasten thirty of them to the wing on each side, where I say they should go.”
He handed Lear a little drawing of a small airfoil, about two inches high, with a plate on the bottom that could be riveted to the wing. There was a little hole at the top of each airfoil.
“What the hell are they? They look like little turbine blades.”
“They are vortex generators, Bill. I think you are getting a flow over the engine cowling that moves out onto the wing, and creates a lot of drag. It also causes the ultra-sharp stall. I think if we put these in the right spots, we can smooth out that airflow, pick up the airspeed, and smooth out the stall.”
“What’s this little hole for?”
“We can tie a cotton tuft there and see how the airflow behaves. Just like using smoke in a wind tunnel.”
Lear looked doubtful, but he carried the drawing out to the machine shop himself. They told him they’d have sixty made by the next morning.
In the meantime, Vance had a ladder thrown up to the wing. He crawled out and, using a drawing he had created, marked the exact spot for each airfoil on the wing surface.
“Bill, we can check this in a wind tunnel later if you want, and maybe improve its efficiency. I’m always leery about wind tunnel results on very small surfaces, though. Sometimes an empirical approach is best. We’ll put tufts on these and take some film when we fly it—could give us some more ideas.”
It took longer to install the vortex generators than Vance had estimated, and it was not until Friday that he and Lear suited up once again for a flight in the emerald Learstar. Carr had two assistants standing in the rear, equipped with motion picture cameras to film the cotton tufts attached to the vortex generators.
This time Lear did not relinquish the controls to Vance at any point. Lear took the Learstar up quickly to 6,000 feet and put it in a speed run that saw the airplane reach 265 mph, five better than required.
“Damn, that’s amazing, Vance. Do you think we can squeeze any more out of her?”
“Maybe. We’ll look at the film and see if we should move the vortex generators around a bit, or add a few to the layout. Might put some right on the cowling itself, but we’ll see. Why don’t you see how she stalls now?”
Lear was a careful pilot. He did two ninety-degree clearing turns, racking the Learstar up on its wing to be sure there was no one in the area, then did a series of stalls, gear up and gear down. The airplane entered the stall just as before, but instead of the sudden snap, it just shuddered and fell nose-first forward until airspeed had built up.
“Stalling like a Convair 240 now, just easy-greasy.”
“You really did it, Vance. No wonder they call you Mr. Fix-It.”
“Bill, this was just a cut-and-try setup. We can improve this a lot with some wind tunnel time, or if you don’t want to pay for that, just let me play with moving the vortex generators around, and we’ll see if we can’t squeeze another five or ten miles an hour out of it. You’ve got plenty of power there, and if you up your cruise speed a bit, it will do wonders for your range.”
“Sure, Vance, you do what you want—we’ll experiment as long as you wish—but the twenty planes for South America are going to get the fix just like this. I can’t wait to improve on it.”
At a celebratory party that night Lear called his engineers together and told them they were going to do a massive retrofit. “We are going to fit these things to every Learstar in the field, at no cost to the owners. And every new Learstar will get them from the start. Shannon here calls them vortex generators, but from now on they are Learspeed generators, and don’t you forget it.”
Before the party broke up, Lear called Shannon into his private office, where he poured three fingers of Jim Beam into crystal tumblers. “Vance, we’ve had our problems in the past, and I apologize for those. You gave me a good shot, and I thought maybe someday I’d get a chance to pay you back. All that is just water over the dam. You’ve made a hell of a difference here, and I want you to go on retainer for me, four thousand a month for a maximum of ten hours a week. More than that, and I’ll bump the ante. What do you say?”
“That’s great; I’ll be pleased to sign a contract for that. Maybe you could find some test work for my boys, too.”
“Sure I can do that; be glad to have them. But we don’t need a contract, just a handshake. And do you have any other ideas? I’ve been thinking about maybe buying up some Catalinas, fitting them with four engines, for the really wealthy sportsman.”
“Bill, I do have an idea, but it’s proprietary with me and my boys. I’ll show it to you, but we’d have to have a majority interest.”
“Well, maybe we can work something like that out. What have you got?”
Vance reached into his battered old leather briefcase and brought out a portfolio of drawings of the Shannon Jet. “I think this is a sure thing, Bill, but it will take a lot of capital to develop. The idea is to create a small jet transport for executives to use to really make better use of their time.”
Lear looked at the drawings and said, “Executives, hell. This is an airplane that I’ll have people like Sinatra and Elizabeth Taylor lining up to buy! It will be expensive—we can’t do it overnight—but we’ll do it, by God!”
March 15, 1954, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio
Life was sweet and getting sweeter for Hans von Ohain. No longer just a five-thousand-dollar-per-year contract employee, he was a U.S. civil servant, eligible for promotions and pay raises. He had brought his parents and his brother over from Germany, and they were adjusting as well as he had to life in Ohio. Since 1949, Hans had been a legal immigrant, and he was soon going to apply for citizenship. Best of all, he was married to a beautiful girl, Hanny Shukat, and they had three children—Steven, a child from Hanny’s previous marriage, and two of their own, Chris and Cathy.
In company with all this domestic bliss, Hans’s work was increasingly challenging, as the Air Force moved from plumbing his knowledge about jet engines to applying his abilities to new and ever more exotic projects at the Aeronautical Research Laboratory. Projects on thermo-mechanics, hypersonic speed, and even an electro-fluid dynamic generator passed his desk, and he could participate as he wished. He had fifteen scientists working for him, something he never would have believed possible when he left Germany.
He was especially proud of the electro-fluid dynamic generator and knew that his guest today, Anselm Franz, would be helpful with a problem he was having. Von Ohain fussed around the office, polishing the chair that Franz would sit in with his handkerchief and arranging and rearranging his desk to look neat yet still busy.
Franz had always been more daring than he. During the war, Franz had brought the Junkers Jumo 004 engine from nothing to mass production with daring innovations. Then, in 1951, he left contract work with the Air Force for a position at Avco Lycoming, where he was now developing gas turbines for ground equip
ment and helicopters. Von Ohain was happy that Franz, brilliant man and always pleasant, was doing so well.
There was a knock at the door, and von Ohain literally ran to admit Franz. They talked first of their families, then of their old friends in Germany, and finally of the reason for Franz’s visit, taking care to speak only in English.
Franz said, “I wish you would think about joining us at Avco, Hans. We need you. There are certain fluid flow problems with the turbines that I have not been able to solve, nor have any of my people. I know how you work: you visualize the problem; you see the currents and the eddies.”
Von Ohain jested, “You must be thinking of Kármán; that is his specialty.”
Franz laughed and said, “Yes, he could do it as well. But you are the man for Avco. What do you think? I don’t have to tell you that commercial companies are much more generous with their salaries than the government.”
“Dr. Franz, my friend, I’ll gladly try to help you, but from here. Let me show you what they have asked me to work on, and I think you will see why I couldn’t leave.”
The two men spent more than an hour immersed in the reports and documents on von Ohain’s desk. Occasionally von Ohain would pick up the phone and ask someone to come in to explain a particular point. Franz’s remarks were confined for the most part to, “Fascinating,” with an occasional “ach du lieber” slipping out.
At last Franz leaned back in his chair and said, “I hate to say it, but I understand why you want to stay. This is like an engineering toy store for you!” He glanced at his watch, saying, “I’m sorry, but I have to go. It has been wonderful seeing you.”
Visibly distressed, von Ohain said, “Are you not going to come home to dinner with me? Hanny will be so disappointed.”
“No, but before I leave, I have a compliment to pay you. From Sir Frank Whittle.”
Perplexed but smiling, von Ohain stood there, waiting.
“Frank was knighted, as you know. Now his primary work is advising the Shell Group. It is not very much to his liking; he’d rather be doing what you are doing, or what I am doing. But when I saw him in London earlier this year, he inquired about you. When he learned that I would probably see you in the next few months he said . . .”
Roaring Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age (Novels of the Jet Age) Page 31
