by John McPhee
There was a brief spray of last-minute dialogue.
“Should we try a few runs to practice coördinating pitch control with power application?”
“No. We’re too close to the ground to try that. We’re likely to pop off into some bad attitudes.”
“This one is rotation with lift-off and sit-down—no lateral inputs.”
“Let’s not accelerate too fast.”
“The gentler the better.”
“No matter how it goes, we must not get false confidence from the 7. Remember, there’s going to be a human being in the 26.”
Olcott said, “Let’s try to get a feeling for what coördination of throttle and stick is required to hold a constant pitch attitude.”
Then, side by side, the automobile and the aerobody began to move. The two engines crescendoed. “Twenty-five!” Putman called out. “Thirty! Thirty-three!” The 7’s nose came up and held steady in its angle as the aircraft and the car gained parallel speed.
“I’m a little chicken about getting too much closer to that thing,” Putman said.
Olcott, beside him, said, “I would suggest you get a little farther away from it.”
“Thirty-four!”
“How’s that engine?”
“It’s good.”
“Thirty-five!”
The 7 went into the air at thirty-five miles per hour and climbed until it was eight inches off the ground. Then it began to skip like a stone—four times. Then, still gaining speed, it went up a little higher, and into further oscillation.
“Forty!”
The 7 bounced hard four more times, suddenly veered, closed in toward the Buick, tried to cross in front of it, and —in a nauseating screech of brakes—was crushed. Everybody jumped out of the car. In an atmosphere of absolute calm, they began at once to debrief. Miller himself showed no emotion. He circled the wreckage and recorded it with his Super 8. The right-front tire had crunched far into the left side of the 7, and the notch the tire had made was edged with shattered superstructure and torn orange silk. The debriefing established that the 7 had not turned in the air. The accident had not resulted from an aberration in flight. The 7 had, in fact, been glued down to the runway after the series of bounces, and had just begun its roll-out—its deceleration toward a stop—when the nose wheel had gone out of control. Olcott showed no alarm, no dismay, and no particular interest in the accident or its cause. Instead, he was absorbed with things he had noticed while the aerobody was scuffing along the runway in its awkward bursts of flight. “It occurred to me that the type of oscillation it got into was the type of oscillation that could not be controlled before. But it was under control this time,” he said.
“That’s right.”
“We don’t really know the air speed very well. We may be five knots slower than we anticipate, and five knots is very important. I think we’ve got to be right on the precise air speed or we’re going to have response problems. I believe that the computer simulation and what we’re seeing here with the model points up the necessity for very precise air-speed control.”
“Are we going to repair this thing, and, if so, how will that affect the test schedule of the 26?” Putman said.
“It will delay it,” Miller said reflectively. Keeping the 26 at NAFEC was costing about fifty dollars a day.
“From a technical point of view, we haven’t had a successful outing with the 7,” Olcott said. “We can argue amongst ourselves that the problems we’ve been experiencing are unique to the 7, and won’t be transferred to the 26. But we can’t say it with a high degree of certainty. The 7 may be trying to tell us something.”
John Kukon lifted a flap of the broken silk skin of the 7 and looked at the destruction inside. He said, “I think we ought to try to get this thing at least twenty-five feet up in the air before the 26 goes. I really do.”
There was a period of silence, during which everyone looked contemplatively at Kukon.
“How long will it take, John?”
Kukon had made the 7 in his basement. He was a master builder of aircraft models—with a virtuosity few other people had ever approached.
“Flat out—working on it myself—it will take a week,” he said. “There’s a fair amount of work involved. Even the main gear struts are broken up.”
“What will it cost, John?”
“Three hundred to five hundred dollars.”
Kukon spoke in a high nasal intonation, and he spoke rapidly—like a recorded voice going too fast but not unintelligibly so. Everything about him seemed quick. His eyes, dark brown, moved quickly. His gestures were staccato. His face, under wet-combed dark hair, was flushed. He was sick with a virus and should have been in bed.
“Would it go faster if you had help, John?”
“From somebody who knows how to build models, yes. From somebody I have to teach the whole story, there’s no hope.”
A name was mentioned. “How about him, John? What is your estimate of his ability in building models?”
“If he has a kit, he can glue it together.”
AFTER AERE0N HAD BEEN a going corporation for more than eight years, it had not yet flown anything higher than the bounce that might happen when a model hit a stone. This was around the end of 1967, a particularly depressed area in the company’s history. Previously, in another configuration, there had been an eighty-foot Aereon that had never left the ground and had rolled over in a gust of wind, more or less destroying itself. Moving on (more cautiously) into the deltoid form, the company built a four-foot plastic Aereon equipped with a noisy, powerful little gasoline engine. This version—Aereon 4—displayed absolutely no inclination to fly. It was tested at Lakehurst Naval Air Station, within a short distance of the historic swatch of ground where the German rigid airship Hindenburg had burned thirty years before. The model hobbled all over Lakehurst, and occasionally raced at high speed, but it never so much as tilted its nose into the air. Small crowds of investors, directors, and other onlookers were sometimes present. One observer whispered to Miller, “If I were a stockholder in your company, I’d worry about the engineer.” Less than a year earlier, Miller had become Aereon’s president, and now as his fortunes melted his spirits subsided, too. He was a study in gloom, in Princeton one day, when a friend of his whose work was also in aeronautics happened to see him at a simulated eighteenth-century tavern called the King’s Court, where Miller was having lunch. The friend asked what was the matter. Miller confessed his troubles. “The models go rocketing up and down the field, but they won’t even budge off the ground,” he said. “They’re too heavy, plain and simple, and there are problems with the radio control.”
“Call John Kukon,” the other man said. “K-u-k-o-n. He builds models for the university. There’s no one better. Maybe he’ll help you.”
Miller called Kukon and introduced himself. Aereon’s office was then in a hangar at Mercer County Airport, about ten miles west of Princeton. Kukon’s house was not far from there. Sure, he would be happy to come have a talk. Why not after work tonight?
When Kukon kept the appointment, Miller told him of the company’s difficulties and showed him sketches of the deltoid pumpkin seed. There were no detailed plans and never had been. Kukon examined the sketches and offered a suggestion. Before continuing the four-foot model series, Aereon might do well to start over again—with a model, say, around two feet long. It would be simpler —it could be rubber-powered—and it would probably serve just as well to indicate in a rudimentary way the performance characteristics of an aircraft shaped like the one in the sketch.
Miller considered the idea, and then asked, “Will you build it?”
“Sure, why not have a try?”
“How long would that take?”
Kukon looked around the hangar, and paused to think, while Miller reflected on the sorry history of his company: formed in the nineteen-fifties, now getting on toward the end of the sixties, its closets cluttered with former presidents, with records of a million spent dollar
s, and with broken aircraft, in various sizes, that had proved to be penguins all. Now here was still another beginning, almost from scratch—new departure, new delay. What difference, though, could another couple of months make after eight and a half years? He asked again, “How long will you need?”
Kukon said, “Will it be all right if I bring it here the day after tomorrow?”
Kukon was twenty-nine years old. He had started building gasoline-powered flying model airplanes when he was seven. Year after year, he built miscellaneously—indoor models, outdoor models, gliders, stunt models, and combat models that fought in the air. He was fifteen when he decided to specialize. He had joined the Academy of Model Aeronautics—the organization that regulates and administers flying-model competitions of regional and national scope—and his choice was whether to fly figure eights in front of judges or to fly for pure speed. “A stopwatch doesn’t lie,” he told himself. “It doesn’t have any personality.” So he elected to concentrate in the field of control-line speed. When he tried a competition for the first time, he placed third among thirty contestants, and he felt drawn to what he was doing as never before. He took a paper route to help pay for materials. Afternoons, almost without exception, he came home from high school and immediately went to the basement to build and build and build—Class A’s, Class B’s, Class C’s, proto-speeds, jets. He lived in Fords, New Jersey, outside Perth Amboy, where control-line exhibitions regularly took place in Waters Stadium on the Fourth of July. Kukon would be in there every year, exhibiting his Ringmasters, his scale-model Cessnas, his little P-51s—in dust and smoke and the rampant noise of V-1 scale-model pulse-jet engines. You could hear them seven miles away. He went to a contest somewhere every Sunday—to Wilmington and Baltimore, to airports and fairgrounds, to naval bases, to the Grumman plant at Bethpage, Long Island. The planes were hand-launched. Kukon’s father—a cook at a home for disabled veterans in Menlo Park—was his crewman. Once the plane was in the air, Kukon, holding the control line, would jam his wrist into a yoke (a thing that looked like an oarlock ) that was set into the top of a short steel pole. The plane would race around in circles on the end of the line while Kukon, rapidly circling the pole, determined the plane’s altitude by manipulating a monoline control system with his left hand. Classes were a matter of engine size, and the bigger the engine the longer the control line—forty-two feet, fifty-two and a half feet, sixty feet, seventy feet. The official stopwatch started after three laps. The timed distance was always a half mile. The planes were required to fly at an altitude of fifteen feet or less. The place to be, though, was close to the ground, because of a phenomenon known in aeronautics as ground effect. Ground effect, or the ground cushion, as it is sometimes called, is not fully understood but is somehow related to wingspan. An airplane in flight—any plane, from a small model to a 747—is in the ground cushion when its altitude measures less than the spread of its wings. Sitting on the cushion, the plane gets added lift without the penalty of drag. So Kukon—risking complete destruction of his models, which flew well over a hundred miles per hour—learned to fly them within two inches of the ground. He won three hundred and fifty trophies. He once set two national records in a single week—one in Maryland and the other at the New York Mirror Model Flying Fair at Floyd Bennett Field. Two thousand contestants were there, most of them adults. Kukon was nineteen. Flying started at dawn, and all day long Kukon won prizes. His Class C plane flew nine miles per hour faster than the national record. Kukon and his father went home in their twenty-year-old Chevrolet with five trophies, five radios, four wristwatches, a set of tools, two cases of Coca-Cola, a box of silverware, three wallets, and a cookstove. An accident that happened at Johnsville Naval Air Development Center, near Philadelphia, caused Kukon to decide to give up control-line speed flying forever. Sitting on a box with a stopwatch in his hand, he was monitoring a run by one of his regular opponents, a doctor from the medical faculty of Temple University. The engine, prop, landing gear, and other attached parts of the doctor’s plane—a two-pound package in all—broke away from the fuselage and projectiled toward Kukon’s head. Just then a young boy stepped in front of Kukon. At eighteen thousand revolutions per minute, the wild engine went into the boy’s kidney, nearly killing him. Kukon cancelled all his competitive plans. He had little time, anyway, for much but work and study. After high school, he had enrolled at the Academy of Aeronautics at LaGuardia Airport, where he got his Airframe and Powerplant credentials, the badge of the licensed mechanic. He had been about to go to work at Newark Airport as a mechanic for American Airlines when a friend told him about a job at Princeton that seemed unbelievable. The university actually paid people to build models. They had a unique test facility called the Long Track, a narrow building seven hundred and sixty feet long, where they worked with designs for low-speed aircraft. Soon Kukon was building models at Princeton which cost contracting companies as much as eighty-five thousand dollars; for example, a four-engine vertical-lift model whose wing could rotate through a ninety-degree arc so that the engines would point forward or up, as the pilot chose. Doing consulting work, he built a model tube train. The tube was two thousand feet long. The train was driven by counter-rotating propellers. It shot through the tube at two hundred miles per hour. For all the diversions of his work, though, Kukon’s thoughts, in the months that followed the accident at Johnsville, were drawn repeatedly to one trophy, its image sharp in his mind. It was a staggeringly big trophy, an elaborate gold sculpture in late aerobaroque. It was almost as tall as Kukon—a giant gold cup, fourteen inches from rim to rim, and it had a gold lid, on top of which was a gold airplane. It was given for the over-all best performance at a model contest held annually at Westchester County Airport, in White Plains. The trophy belonged to the Westchester Exchange Club, and not to the winner. There was a provision, however, that should anyone ever win it three years in a row that person could keep it permanently. There had never been a three-time winner. Kukon had won the trophy the year before. He had also won it the year before that. This fact tormented his decision to retire. He kept thinking about that stupendous cup with its gold filigree and its gold airplane. In the end, inevitably, he decided to go back into control-line speed for one more day. When the day came, he moved around the airfield from flying circle to flying circle, from class to class, and put his various planes through their lariat flights, always on the edge of record speeds. There were so many contestants that Kukon had time only for one flight in each class he entered, although the rules technically allowed him three. By late afternoon, though, he was beginning to relax into the expectation that the big trophy was on its way to Fords, for he had flown five events and his times were the best in each. Nothing less would do, because in the contest as a whole there were many events—speed events, free-flight events—and even a single second place could eliminate a contender for the high-point trophy. By the rules, all flying would cease at 6 P.M. At five-fifteen, someone beat Kukon’s Class A time by one-tenth of a second. With luck, he could try once more. He put his number in at the judges’ table and began the wait for a final turn in the Class A circle. Several others were ahead of him. It seemed likely that the contest would close before he could get into the circle. Half an hour went by, while Kukon chewed the ends of his fingers. The nails had long since been bitten back so far he could not reach them. At ten minutes to six, his number came up. Kukon opened his fuel box. He made his own fuels. Fuel bought in a store was castor oil and alcohol, and Kukon was far past that. In his fuel, only five per cent was alcohol. The rest was high-energy material in various blends—propylene oxide, nitromethane. In the fuel box were four bottles, four blends. Each bottle was wrapped in carpeting. Blend 4 had never been used. Kukon had never actually expected to use it. He had conceived of it as a fuel for a situation of extreme and unusual emergency. Its characteristics were that it would almost certainly destroy the engine that burned it, but meanwhile the engine would develop enough thrust to drive a sparrow to the moon. Kukon entered t
he circle with his Class A plane and poured Blend 4 into the engine. By the rules of the competition, he had three minutes to get the plane into the air. The engine seemed not so much to start as to explode. Its force immediately broke the propeller. Kukon ran to his equipment box for another propeller, and, with his hands shaking, tried to get it mounted before his time ran out. When he finished the job, he had twenty seconds left. He started the engine again. This time the propeller did not break. The airplane, screaming, bolted into the air. Kukon could barely hold on to the control line. He could not pirouette fast enough to keep pace with the plane. It was all he could do to get his wrist into the yoke. Class A planes are small, as control-line speed models go, and no one in the world had ever flown one a hundred and fifty miles an hour. Kukon’s model got right down onto the deck, deep in the ground cushion. An audio tachometer covered the run and showed that the engine was doing thirty thousand revolutions per minute. The plane ate up its half mile at an average speed of 150.013 miles per hour. Then it flew on and on and on. It flew six miles. There is no way to shut off one of those engines in the air. When the plane landed, the motor was extraordinarily hot but undamaged.
Forty-eight hours after his first meeting with Miller, Kukon returned to Mercer County Airport with a twenty-inch Aereon in a cardboard box. Using one-thirtysecond-inch balsa sheet—following the sketches, working essentially from scratch, from blueprints that developed in his imagination—he had made a double root rib as a keel, two tip ribs, and two more ribs to complete the structure. He had covered it with tissue paper that had come out of a shoebox. To the trailing edge of the delta he had glued a pair of vertical balsa fins. Unlike its successors—the 7 and the 26—this smallest of Aereons had no anhedrals, no horizontal tail fins. Kukon said, “You don’t need them indoors—no gusts.” Its motor was a single twenty-inch loop of rubber band. For landing, it had wire skids. And for sheer jazz he had painted a red streak down the axis of the delta, top and bottom. Miller and others gathered around him. Kukon held the wingless aerobody in his hand, gave the rubber two hundred turns, and arrested the pusher prop in his fingers. He looked around the big hangar. The place was full of posts and girders and airplanes, including a two-engine Grumman Gulfstream. Kukon himself had never flown anything larger than a model, and he apparently never would. The few times he had ridden in small aircraft, he had turned gray and become sick. He had once made plans to take flying lessons but changed his mind after a ride in a small plane made him sick for two days. He had never flown in a commercial airliner. He had, however, become an aeronautical engineer. At night, after work at Princeton, he had commuted for several years to the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, where he earned his degree. Now, in the Mercer County hangar, he studied the situation some more, and then he breathed on the elevons and the fins of the Aereon to warp them just so, to work the wood, to set a turning radius for the flight. He let the aerobody go. Its propeller whirring, it began to move, to fly, and it climbed out over the wings of the Gulfstream. It moved in a wide ascending circle toward the roof of the hangar, skimming under the girders and by the posts. It levelled off. In a steady state of flight—the first and only flight in the long history of the Aereon Corporation—it circled the hangar three times, high overhead. Then it made its descent and landed at Kukon’s feet.
