Boeing Vertol employees were also Yankees geographically and temperamentally, born and raised in Philadelphia or its environs, for the most part. Bell employees were mostly from Texas, or at least the South or Southwest. The North-South differences were a source of good-natured ribbing, but they also made for a partnership that combined the two qualities John F. Kennedy famously saw in the city of Washington, D.C.: “Southern efficiency and Northern charm.”
The Yankees from Boeing Vertol talked and worked at a big-city pace and had big-city manners. They had sharp elbows. The southerners at Bell went about life more placidly amid the noise and haste. Courtesy was important to them. To many at Bell, the Boeing Vertol people always seemed to be in a hurry. They were pushy, and sometimes downright rude. Lord, they’d even shout and curse at each other in meetings! (“We in Philadelphia have long enjoyed a culture of insult,” acknowledged a longtime Ridley Park employee I asked about this.) Boeing Vertol’s Yankees also talked a lot more than they listened, many at Bell thought, though that didn’t matter that much, because you couldn’t tell them anything anyway; they thought they knew it all already. Bell test pilot Ron Erhart remembered a meeting with a Textron executive who warned: “Those Yankees up there in Philadelphia will walk all over you if you let ’em.”
Boeing Vertol engineers and executives found the atmosphere at Bell amazingly casual and disconcertingly lax in procedures. At Boeing, if you wanted to redesign a part, you first did engineering drawings and got them approved and released to the shop. Only then would a new part be made. At Bell, the first step was often to “cut and try.” The drawings to document a change could be done after the fact. Some at Boeing Vertol thought that was no way to run an aircraft factory. But what did Bell know about building big aircraft anyway? Boeing Vertol built brawny, complex helicopters; Bell was just a little company that made little helicopters. “Bell, as far as we were concerned, only built these little puddle jumpers,” one retired Boeing Vertol engineer told me. “They were not used to, or experienced in, building stuff that size.” This engineer and others at Boeing Vertol knew Bell was going to need their help to build this big tiltrotor.
Troy Gaffey got acquainted with that attitude when he visited Ridley Park for the first time. His Boeing Vertol counterpart took him to meet the vice president for engineering, Kenneth Grina, a bearish man who ruled his engineers by intimidation. “When he said jump, all we said was, ‘How high?’ ” remembered William Rumberger, an engineer who worked for him. Grina “would come out of his office and throw everything off your drawing board and you’d start all over again,” Rumberger told me. “He was top dog.” Joe Mallen, Boeing Vertol’s president at the time, said Grina “was smart as hell and he didn’t take any crap from anybody, including me.” Grina had been the father of the Model 360, the mostly composite “Plastic Phrog” helicopter Boeing Vertol was trying to sell the Marines before the JVX came along. “That was his dream,” Mallen said. Grina wasn’t a fan of the tiltrotor. He thought it too complex, not as good as a helicopter and not as good as an airplane. He also didn’t think much of Bell Helicopter, as Gaffey learned.
“Grina was another one of these great engineers, probably as good as they come, with a specialty in structures,” Gaffey told me. When Gaffey went to meet him, the two companies were having an argument about how to make the JVX’s composite skin. Grina was standing behind his desk with his hands on his hips when Gaffey came in. “He leaned forward and looked at me from behind his desk—didn’t even hold his hand out to shake—and said, ‘I want you to tell me why you don’t believe Boeing’s right,’ or something like that—and I mean in a loud voice,” Gaffey said. “I was dumbfounded by this guy. And he started yelling and ranting and raving and carrying on about the fact that Boeing knew more about helicopters than Bell Helicopter had ever even dreamed about.”
Many at Bell weren’t so sure they needed Boeing Vertol, either. The company had bid against Bell for the XV-15 back in 1972, and some Boeing engineers had been working on tiltrotor designs when they learned Joe Mallen had agreed to team with Bell for the JVX. Even so, Bell engineers regarded the tiltrotor as their technology. They were the tiltrotor experts; Boeing Vertol was just going to build “the box,” the fuselage. Bell’s engineers had poured three decades of hard work into developing the tiltrotor. Many weren’t anxious to share what they’d learned with Boeing, which as far as they knew might use it to compete with them for some other contract in the future. Bell’s managers sometimes had to order subordinates to share information about the tiltrotor with Boeing Vertol.
Grina’s counterpart at Bell was Bob Lynn, who found working with Boeing “one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life.” Delays in getting work done often arose because the companies couldn’t agree on how to do something, or lower-level engineers would agree, only to have their solution vetoed by higher-ups—frequently Grina. “I would always let other people try to handle him,” Lynn said. “He was impossible to work with. If he wanted to do something, by God he was going to do it.”
The inherent friction in the partnership wasn’t a huge problem at lower levels. Most engineers had limited contact with the other company, though Bell and Boeing Vertol each sent a few people to the other’s facility to look over their partner’s shoulder and help coordinate things. Face-to-face meetings occurred most regularly in a steering committee of senior executives who met every other month. They thought about setting up videoconferencing for the engineers, but that was cumbersome in those days and expensive. Instead, the separate engineering teams held a telephone conference call each Monday afternoon to review their progress and talk about the week ahead. Individual engineers could get on the phone with each other, and small groups often traveled from Hurst to Ridley Park, from Ridley Park to Hurst, or from both places to Navair’s headquarters at Crystal City, just outside Washington. Designs were often faxed back and forth. But when they disagreed on a decision and it got kicked to higher levels, the culture clash between the companies and the 50–50 partnership often got in the way. “When decisions were made that one of the companies did not like, there was the tendency to either drag their feet or not do it at all,” observed a 1989 master’s thesis on the program written by a Naval Postgraduate School student.
* * *
All the challenges—making the JVX “shipboard compatible” while keeping its weight down, trying to use composites in ways never tried before, reaching decisions in a 50–50 partnership of companies so dissimilar—came together in a perfect storm when they set out to design the wing stow mechanism. This was the device needed to rotate the wing from crosswise to lengthwise along the fuselage so the aircraft could fit beneath an amphibious assault ship’s deck. The wing stow mechanism was Boeing’s responsibility, because it was part of the fuselage, but Bell’s wing had to attach to it, so the companies had to agree on the design. For a couple of years, they couldn’t.
The Navy and Marines had flown planes whose wings folded for aircraft carrier operation since World War II, but with its big nacelles and rotors, simply putting hinges in the wing wasn’t an option for the JVX. The alternative was to install a pivot in the top of the fuselage so the wing would rotate. Sounds simple enough, but it was excruciatingly tricky.
The mechanism would need to lock the wing into position for flight, then unlock it and swing it 90 degrees for stowing, all the while bearing the huge weight of the wingtip nacelles, which would bow the wing in the middle. It also would have to move the wing without transmitting strains into the fuselage that could distort its shape. “You have a fuselage that looks like it’s sturdy as heck, but yet it can bend and it can deflect, and you have a wing that can also bend and deflect,” Ken Wernicke explained. “So if one of them bends and the other one doesn’t, you’re binding up the wing stow mechanism.” The trick was to create a gizmo that would insulate the fuselage from the motions of the wing, not only when the wing was being stowed but also in flight.
There was more. The wing stow mec
hanism also had to hold and turn clusters of hydraulic and fuel lines, thousands of electrical, flight control, and other wires, plus a big driveshaft that needed to run through the area. The driveshaft’s purpose was to connect the rotors so that a single engine could power both of them if the other engine failed. On top of all that, the requirements said the mechanism had to stow the wings while the aircraft sat on the deck of a ship that might be pitching up and down as much as 3 degrees fore and aft, rolling side to side as much as 15 degrees, and sailing in 50-mph winds. And it had to do its job in no more than ninety seconds.
It was a monster of an engineering problem.
Small groups of engineers at both companies girded themselves for battle and rode out to slay this dragon, but they couldn’t agree on a plan of attack. For months, all they did was joust with each other over more than forty designs without ever agreeing to one. At that point, Boeing Vertol’s director of engineering, Bill Peck, and its JVX design chief, Tom Griffith, looked around for a new champion, a white knight with a design breakthrough in his armory. They thought they might have one in Bill Rumberger, an old-timer at Boeing Vertol who’d cut his teeth in engineering a quarter century earlier.
Rumberger had grown up down the road from Ridley Park in Essington and gotten his engineering degree from what was then Drexel Institute in Philadelphia. He’d worked at Boeing Vertol since 1959, had several patents under his belt, and was known for thinking outside the box. He was also personable and diplomatic by nature. As he started working on the wing stow problem, Rumberger got along well with the Bell engineers, even the notoriously difficult Ken Wernicke. But he soon felt he’d entered Never-Never Land. “Bell would do their own thing and Boeing would do its own thing and then we’d come together and have a wing stow meeting,” Rumberger said. “We’d walk away from each other agreeing to disagree on what we had each come up with. Each one had a veto power.” The diplomatic solution, Rumberger decided, would be to try to combine the best features of some of the dozens of designs both companies had already proposed, and thus win hearts and minds.
What he came up with was a large central bearing for the wing to pivot around, something like a giant ballpoint pen tip three feet in diameter. Rumberger showed it to other engineers at Boeing Vertol and they liked it. Ken Grina didn’t. He said it was too complex. Anyway, Grina wanted the wing stow mechanism to be made of composites. Rumberger went back to his drawing board.
Higher-ups at Boeing Vertol, meanwhile, brought in several engineers from “Big Boeing” in Seattle to solve the problem, a sort of SWAT team. By now, the matter was becoming urgent. Bell and Boeing Vertol needed to resolve their differences to get Navair to approve their design and give them a contract to start building prototypes. Over a period of weeks, the SWAT team came up with a new mechanism. Bell and Grina approved it, so the Seattle engineers went back home. The next day, Grina called Peck into his office and told him he wasn’t going to accept the SWAT team’s design after all. It was too complex, he’d decided. Grina didn’t want “that junk on my airplane.”
While the SWAT team was at Ridley Park, Rumberger had been off on his own, quietly working on a new idea. By the mid-1980s, many engineers were using computers to design things, but Rumberger wasn’t among them. As he’d always done, he drafted his designs on paper, then constructed cardboard models to test his theories. Rumberger always kept cardboard and a bottle of Elmer’s Carpenter’s Glue at his desk for that purpose. He called his new concept the Composite Flex Ring because it rotated and was going to be supple enough to handle the wing’s bending. It was especially designed to satisfy Grina’s demands. Rumberger modeled it, Grina, Peck and Bell approved it, and Boeing Vertol had a subcontractor fabricate a prototype. They tested it for nearly a year. Then one day, to Rumberger’s shock, senior managers at Big Boeing in Seattle rejected his Composite Flex Ring. Too novel and risky, they said. Rumberger thought Seattle’s real problem with his idea was that it was simply too new.
Now Grina came up with his own design, a “bed frame” system using a stationary ring—made of stainless steel, not composites. Bell and Boeing ended up putting Grina’s wing stow mechanism on their prototype aircraft, but it proved to be heavy, maintenance-intensive, and costly. Rumberger, though, never gave up on his flex ring. He refined it, adding a sort of capstan—a rotating post—to hold cables that would turn the ring. To get a feel for how they needed to wrap and unwrap, he brought a ball of string in to work, cut strands to represent the cables, and made them wind and unwind around a cardboard capstan he’d fashioned. Years later, after Grina retired, Rumberger’s stainless steel flex ring replaced Grina’s “bed frame.” The flex ring was 300 pounds lighter and cost $300,000 a copy less. When his design was accepted, Rumberger’s buddies at the office gave him a nickname: “Lord of the Ring.”
“It wasted a lot of time,” Rumberger shrugged.
* * *
The partners had endless debates over every issue imaginable, from who was going to manufacture the avionics to whether the flight controls should work like a helicopter’s or an airplane’s to how the aircraft’s tail should be shaped. Bell wanted the JVX to have an H-shaped tail, same as the XV-15. Boeing Vertol’s engineers wanted a T-shaped tail, which they thought would be aerodynamically superior and sleeker. They tried to sweet-talk Bell into a T-shaped tail by labeling their design the “Texas T.” The Bell engineers were amused, not seduced, by the ploy. Wind tunnel tests showed that either tail would work aerodynamically, but as with many issues, the requirement to operate aboard ships settled the argument. They’d had to make the rear fuselage higher than originally planned to allow room for the cargo ramp, which meant the Texas T was too tall to fit below the deck of a ship. The JVX would have a shorter H-tail.
Both companies argued bitterly with the Naval Air Systems Command, too, especially about materials. Shipboard operation was at the root of many of their disputes. One of the most stinging arguments with Navair—the kind that leads people never to speak to each other again— centered on something called honeycomb. Aircraft makers had been using honeycomb since the 1950s to cut weight in fuselages, wings, and other structures. Like the beehives in nature that inspired it, aerospace honeycomb is an arrangement of hexagonal shells—usually made of aluminum—that are hollow. The shells cut weight by substituting air for solid structure, but their shape makes them strong enough to reinforce the surprisingly thin skin of an aircraft, which is often no more than twelve-thousandths of an inch thick. Bell wanted to use aluminum honeycomb in the JVX’s wing, and Boeing Vertol wanted to use honeycomb made of a composite called Nomex in the fuselage. The companies figured to save hundreds of pounds that way. But there was a problem with honeycomb: if water got inside its hexagonal shells—and it often did—the moisture would add weight and could rust the aluminum or freeze and make the honeycomb separate from the skin. This could create weaknesses that would make an aircraft unsafe to fly. Water can seep into honeycomb through scratches and dings in the “face sheets” of the skin or through seams between skin panels. As the Navy had learned, the problem was even worse at sea, where salt spray gets onto and into nearly everything. Navair’s chief structures engineer, a snappish career bureaucrat named Mike Dubberly, was adamantly against using honeycomb in the JVX. Ken Grina, the snappish head of engineering at Boeing Vertol, was just as adamantly in favor of it.
Bell largely gave up debating the issue with Dubberly after he agreed they could use honeycomb in the JVX’s rotors. Boeing Vertol’s engineers, caught between Dubberly and Grina, tried repeatedly to change Dubberly’s mind. “There’s only one way we’re going to get this airplane to the weight that Navair’s looking for, and that’s with honeycomb,” Grina told his engineers. Every few weeks, during design review meetings at Navair’s offices in Crystal City, Dubberly would veto Boeing Vertol’s latest plans to use honeycomb, only to have them come back with new designs incorporating it again. “Honeycomb with you guys is like a fungus,” Dubberly groused more than once. “Eve
ry time I turn my back, go away for a month and come back, another little hunk has popped up somewhere, so we have to come back and eradicate it again.” Dubberly was often more profane than that—nasty enough that, after a while, Boeing Vertol’s chief JVX design engineer, Tom Griffith, refused to meet or talk with him anymore.
One day Dubberly’s boss came to him and said, “The secretary of the Navy is asking what did you do to these poor Vertol guys?” Someone at Boeing had complained about Dubberly by name to Navy Secretary John Lehman. Dubberly’s boss seemed more amused than annoyed; Dubberly was more annoyed than amused. Going way over his head didn’t alter his attitude. “They just pissed me off,” Dubberly told me. “The problem was that these guys were not technically competent enough to know how to design a stiffened skin. Honeycomb is for lazy and not very clever designers, and that’s what these guys were.” Dubberly returned the favor by sharing his opinion of the Boeing Vertol engineers with a top Boeing Seattle executive.
The only concession Dubberly made to Grina’s engineers was to allow them to use Nomex honeycomb in the doors and small removable panels of the JVX fuselage, items easily replaced. But he allowed that only years later, after Bell-Boeing had started building prototypes. During preliminary design, Dubberly vetoed honeycomb. The alternative was to make the skin out of solid composite, five to twelve layers thick, depending on how strong the skin needed to be at any given point. Boeing Vertol came up with a way to make the solid composite skin hold its shape by adding J-shaped “stiffeners” on the inside of the fuselage, but compared to honeycomb, the stiffened skin was heavy.
The Dream Machine Page 17
