The Minotaur

by Stephen Coonts

  The next morning, Wednesday, the F-14 took off with a cracking roar that seemed to split the desert apart. Smoke Judy pulled the power off when he was safely airborne and made a dirty turn to the downwind leg. He came drifting down toward the earth paralleling the runway and stabilized at one hundred feet just as Rita began to roll.

  The prototype was noticeably quieter, so quiet that its noise was barely audible above the howl of the Tomcat’s engines as Smoke used his throttles to hang the heavy fighter just above the runway as the stealth bird accelerated. When Rita lifted off and retracted her gear, Smoke added power to stay with her and the sound of the stealth plane was entirely muffled.

  “Damn quiet,” George Wilson remarked. “About like a Boeing 767, maybe less.” The low noise level was a direct by-product of burying the exhaust nozzles and tailpipes in the fuselage, shielded from the underside, to reduce the plane’s infrared signature.

  In the cockpit Rita concentrated on maintaining the selected test profile and getting the feel of the controls. She had spent hours sitting in the cockpit the last few weeks memorizing the position of every switch, knob, and gauge, learning which buttons she needed to press to place information where she wanted it on the MFDs, and so even now, minutes into her first flight in the plane, it was familiar.

  In the backseat Toad was busy with the system. He checked the inertial, it seemed okay. With ring laser gyros, it had not a single moving part and was more accurate than any conventional inertial using electromechanical gyros. It would need to be. To keep the stealth plane hidden, it would be necessary to fly with the radar off most of the time, and the ring laser inertial would have to keep a very accurate running tally of the plane’s position.

  The computer was also functioning perfectly. He had encoded the waypoint and checkpoint information onto optical-electronic—optronic—cards on the ground and loaded them into the computer after engine start. The two-million-dollar pocket calculator, he called it. It hummed right along, belching readouts of airspeed, groundspeed, altitude, wind direction and velocity, true course, magnetic course, drift angle, time to go to checkpoint, etc., over fifteen readouts simultaneously. He had this information on the right-hand MFD, roughly the location on the panel where it would be in an A-6E.

  Some of the displays were not yet hooked up since development work was not yet complete. Consequently the three-dimensional information presentations on the pilot’s holographic Heads-Up Display could not be tested.

  The phased-array radar in the nose received Toad’s attention next. The antenna was flat and fixed, it did not rotate or move. Actually it was made up of several hundred miniature antennas, individually varying their pulse frequencies to steer or focus the main beam. A conventional radar dish would have acted as a reflector to send the enemy’s radar signals back to him. Toad tuned the radar to optimize the presentation and dictated his switch and dial positions on the ICS, which, like the radar presentation, was being recorded on tape for later study.

  The next major pieces of gear he turned on and integrated into the system were, for him, the most interesting. Two new infrared search and tracking systems that were able to distinguish major targets as far away as a hundred miles, depending upon the aircraft’s altitude and the relative heat value of the target. One could be used for searching for enemy fighters while the other was used to navigate or locate a target on the ground. The range of these sensors was a tenfold improvement over the relatively primitive IR gear in the A-6E. Since a stealthy attack plane would fly most of its mission with its radar off, these new gizmos would literally be the eyes of the bombardier-navigator.

  Toad took a second to glance to his left. Smoke had the F-14 about a hundred feet away in perfect formation. The backseater’s helmet was hidden behind his camera, which was pointed this way.

  That videotape would show every twitch of the flight control surfaces. Toad turned back to the task at hand.

  He felt the plane yawing as Rita experimented with the controls and advanced and retarded each throttle independently. She was talking on the radio, telling Smoke what she was doing, reading the engine performance data to the people on the ground so it could be coordinated with the telemetry data, giving her impressions of the feel of the plane.

  “Seems responsive and sensitive in all axes,” she said. “Engine response is good, automatic systems functioning as advertised. Got a hundred feet a minute more climb than I expected. Fuel flow fifty pounds per hour high. Oil pressure in the green, exhaust gas temps are a hundred high. I like it. A nice plane.”

  She leveled the plane at Flight Level 240 at .72 Mach, 420 knots true. Toad checked the range and depression angles of the radar and IR sensors, and ran checks on the inertial and computer.

  Thirty minutes later, after hitting three navigation checkpoints, Rita dropped the nose two degrees and began a power-on descent back toward Tonopah. She leveled at 5,000 feet at 550 knots and raced toward the field. Smoke Judy was a hundred feet away on the right side, immobile in relation to the stealth bird.

  In the backseat Toad ran an attack. His target was the hangar that had housed the plane. The system gave Rita steering and time and distance to go to a laser-guided bomb release. Everything functioned as advertised. No weapon was released because the plane carried none, but a tone sounded on the radio and was captured on all the tapes, and it ceased abruptly at the weapons-release point, interrupted by the electronic pulse to the empty bomb rack cunningly faired into the airplane’s belly.

  After three attacks at different altitudes, Rita slowed the plane with speed brakes and dropped the gear and flaps. She entered the landing pattern.

  Two fleet Landing Signal Officers that Jake had borrowed from Miramar—they had flown the F-14 to Tonopah—stood on the end of the runway in a portable radio-equipped trailer that a truck had delivered. They had spent the last three days painting the outline of a carrier deck on the air force’s main runway and rigging a portable Optical Landing System—OLS—which the truck had also delivered. Now they watched Rita make simulated carrier approaches flying the ball, the “meatball,” on the OLS. Jake Grafton stood beside them.

  “Paddles has you,” the senior man told Rita as she passed the ninety-degree position. One other LSO wrote while the first watched the approach with the radiotelephone transceiver held to his ear and dictated his comments.

  “On speed, little lined up left, little too much power…” The plane swept past and its wheels whacked into the runway, right on the line that marked the target touchdown point. The nose wheel smacked down and the engines roared and Rita flew it off the runway. The LSO shouted to his writer, “fair pass.”

  Jake Grafton stared at the plane in the pattern. It just looks weird, he told himself. The lifting fuselage and invisible intakes and the canards and the black color, it didn’t look like a real airplane. Then he knew. It looked like a model. It looked like one of those plastic planes he had glued together and held at arm’s length and marveled at.

  “You’re carrying too much power in the groove,” the LSO told Rita after the second pass.

  “I’m just floating down with the power way back,” she replied. “And we’re hearing a little rumble. Maybe incipient compressor stall. I’ll use the boards next time around.”

  The Consolidated engineers had thought the speed brakes would be unnecessary in the pattern. Yet with the intakes on top of the plane, behind the cockpit, maybe the air reaching them was too turbulent when the plane was all cocked up in the landing configuration. Jake Grafton began to chew on his lower lip. The air force doesn’t land planes like this, he reminded himself. They wouldn’t have tried these maneuvers when they flew the plane.

  With the boards out the plane approached at a slightly higher nose attitude, its engine noise louder. The speed brakes allowed—required—Rita to come in with a higher power setting. “This feels better,” she commented. “But I’m still hearing that rumble. Little more pronounced now, if anything.”

  “Looks better,” th
e junior LSO told Jake. “I think the boards give her more control.”

  “Six-hundred-feet-a-minute sink rate,” Rita reported. Once again the main mounts smacked in with puffs of fried rubber from each tire as it rotated up to speed. The main oleos compressed and the nose slapped down, then she was adding power and pulling the nose right back up into the sky.

  After the sixth pass she pulled the throttles back to idle and the plane stayed on the deck. The engine noise was really subdued.

  “Quiet bugger, ain’t it?” one LSO said, grinning. “We’ll have to call this one the Burglar. First we had the Intruder, now the Burglar.”

  “I think it ought to be called the Penetrator,” the senior man said. “’Yeah, baby, I’m a Penetrator pilot.’” He cackled at his own wit.

  When Rita cleared the runway, Smoke Judy called the LSOs. “Since you guys are all set up, how about giving me a couple?”

  “If you got the gas, you get the pass,” the LSO radioed.

  The debriefing took until 9 P.M. with an hour break for dinner. The telemetry data and the videotapes were played and studied. Rita and Toad were each carefully debriefed as a dozen engineers gathered around and the naval officers hovered in the background.

  The plane was then thoroughly inspected by a team of structural engineers. The simulated carrier landings had placed stresses on the structure that the air force had never anticipated when it developed the specifications for this prototype. No one expected visible damage, and there was none, but if the plane were to be put into production, strengthening would inevitably be needed. Just where and how much was the concern, and the telemetry data would pinpoint these locations.

  And some minor equipment problems had surfaced. The Consolidated technicians would work all night to fix those as navy maintenance specialists watched and took notes. The intake rumble in the landing pattern was the most serious problem, and Adele DeCrescentis discussed it on the phone with the people at the Consolidated factory in Burbank for over an hour.

  All in all, it had been a fine day. Rita and Toad were still going a mile a minute when Jake loaded them all into the vans at 9 P.M. for the two-mile trip to the VOQ, the Visiting Officers’ Quarters.

  Jake and his department heads gathered in his room that evening. Someone produced a cold six-pack of beer and they each took a bottle.

  “The day after tomorrow. It’ll all be decided then,” Les Richards, the A-6 bombardier, told the assembled group. “Day after tomorrow we pull some Gs, and I don’t think we can live with a five-G limitation. I don’t think the navy needs an attack plane for a low-level mission that is that G-limited. It’ll get bounced around too much down low, and if a fighter ever spots it or someone pops an IR or optically guided missile, this thing is dead meat.”

  “What if they beef it up?” someone asked. “Strengthen the spars and so on?”

  “Cut performance too much. More weight. We don’t have a whole lot of performance to begin with. And what if the compressors stall?”

  “Could they enlarge the automatic flaps on the intakes that raise up and scoop more air in when the engines need it?”

  “It’d be turbulent air. We learned today that those two engines like a diet of smooth, undisturbed air.”

  “Oh no we didn’t.”

  So it went. Jake ran them all out at midnight and collapsed into bed.

  The following day was spent in further intensive review of the videotapes and telemetry data, and planning the second flight.

  Glitches developed. Under the usual ground rules for op-eval fly-offs, the manufacturer cleared various areas of the flight performance envelope for the navy test pilots to explore. Rita wanted to examine the slow-flight characteristics of the aircraft before she proceeded to high-angle-of-attack/high-G maneuvers. Consolidated’s chief engineer did not want her below 200 knots clean and 120 knots dirty.

  When Jake joined the conversation, Rita was saying, “I flew the plane at 124 knots yesterday, three o’clock angle of attack. Now, is that 1.3 times the stall speed or isn’t it? How are we supposed to verify the stall speed if we can’t stall it?”

  Jake merely stood and listened.

  “We’ve told you what the stall speed is,” the engineer explained patiently, “at every weight and every altitude and every configuration. Those speeds were established by experimental test pilots.”

  “Well, I’m an engineering test pilot—all navy test pilots are trained to that standard—but I can’t see how we can do a proper operational evaluation of your airplane if we don’t explore the left side of the envelope.”

  The civilian appealed to Jake. “Listen, Captain. This is the only prototype we have. If she drills a deep hole with it, we have big problems. It’ll be goddamn hard to sell an airplane when all we have is the wreckage.”

  “What makes you think,” Jake asked, “that she can’t safely recover from a stall?”

  “I didn’t say that. You’re putting words into my mouth.”

  “Get DeCrescentis over here.” The chief engineer went off to find her.

  “We have to stall that plane, Captain,” Rita told him. “If those rumbles in the landing pattern yesterday were incipient compressor stalls, we’ll get some real ones if we get her slowed down enough. I think that’s what Consolidated doesn’t want us into.”

  Adele DeCrescentis backed her engineer. Jake heard her out, then said, “I don’t think you people really want to sell this plane to the navy.”

  The vice president set her jaw. “We sure as hell want it in one piece to sell to somebody.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you this. We’re going to fly that plane the way I want it flown or we’ll stop this show right now. The navy isn’t spending ten million bucks for a fly-off if all we can do is cruise the damn thing down the interstate at fifty-five. We’re trying to find out if that plane can be used to fight with, Ms. DeCrescentis, not profile around the Paris Air Show.”

  She opened her mouth, but Jake didn’t give her a chance. “I mean it! We’ll fly it my way or we won’t fly it. Your choice.”

  She looked about her, opened her mouth, then closed it again. Finally she said, “I’ll have to think about it for a bit.” She wheeled and made a beeline for the Consolidated offices and the phones, the chief engineer trailing after her.

  “Maybe you had better make a phone call too,” Rita suggested.

  “Nope.” He looked at Rita and grinned. “Captains have to obey orders, of course, but George Ludlow and Royce Caplinger shoved me out in front on this one. They want me to make a recommendation and take the heat, so they sort of have to let me do it my way.” He shrugged. “Generally speaking, doing it your way is not very good for your career, but I’ve been to the mat once too often anyway. That’s why I got this job. Ludlow’s a pretty good SECNAV. He understands the navy and the people in it. He wouldn’t send a guy with a shot at flag over to Capitol Hill to get his balls cut off, not if he had any other choice.”

  Rita looked dubious.

  “Are you right about this, Miss Moravia?”

  “Yes, sir. I am.”

  “I think so too. So that’s the way we’ll do it. As long as I’m in charge.”

  When Adele DeCrescentis returned, she agreed with Jake. Apparently the president of the company could also read tea leaves.

  “Go find that Consolidated test pilot,” Jake told Rita when they were alone. “Take him over to the club and buy him a drink. Find out everything he knows about stalling this invisible airplane, off the record.”

  “Aye aye, sir,” Rita said, and marched off.

  Cumulus clouds and rain squalls moving through the area from the west delayed the second flight another day, but when she finally got the plane to altitude, Rita attacked the performance envelope with vigor while Smoke Judy in the F-14 hung like glue on first one wing, then the other.

  Stalls were first.

  They were almost last. With the nose at ten degrees above the horizon and the power at 70 percent, she let the plane coast int
o the first one, but didn’t get there because the pitty-pat thumping began in the intakes and increased in intensity to a drumming rat-a-tat-tat played by a drunk. The EGT rose dramatically and RPMs dropped on both engines. She could feel vibrations reaching her through the seat and throttles and rudder pedals.

  Compressor stalls! Well, that mousy little test pilot for Consolidated hadn’t been lying. She pushed the nose over, which incidentally worsened the thumping from behind the cockpit, and held it there while her speed increased and the noise finally abated, all the while reading the numbers from the engine instruments over the radio.

  With the engines back to normal, she had another thought. If a pilot got slow and lost power in the landing pattern, on final, this thing could pancake into the ground short of the runway. Aboard ship the technical phrase for that turn of events was “ramp strike.”

  She smoothly pulled the nose to twenty degrees above the horizon and as her speed dropped began feeding in power until she had the throttles forward against the stops. The airspeed continued to decay. This was “the back side of the power curve,” that flight regime where drag increased so dramatically as the airspeed bled off that the engines lacked sufficient power to accelerate the plane.

  The onset of compressor stall was instantaneous and dramatic, a violent hammering from the intakes behind the cockpit that caused the whole plane to quiver. Before she could recover, the plane stalled. It broke crisply and fell straight forward until the nose was fifteen degrees below the horizon, then the canard authority returned. Still the engine compressors were stalled, with EGT going to the red lines and RPM dropping below 85 percent.

  Rita smartly retarded the throttles to keep the engines from overtemping. The pounding continued.

  Throttles to idle. EGT above red line.

  She chopped the throttles to cutoff, securing the flow of fuel to the engines.