by John McPhee
IN THE PUMPKIN-SEED configuration, helium would be ineffective at any length that was much under a hundred and fifty feet. So helium was not included in the tests of the 7 and the 26. They would have to get up there on their own—without wings, without lifting gas—and ratify the computer that had created them. Then the way would open to the behemoths. The 7 was tested for the fourteenth, and last, time on September 2, 1970, near Princeton. Monroe Drew was not invited. He was in Trenton—eleven miles, and many light-years, away. John Fitzpatrick was in Neshaminy, pumping Esso. Drew and Fitzpatrick by now were like old Russian premiers. They had been there once, but no one quite remembered them. When Miller had become president of the company in 1967, he replaced Drew’s overt and provocative optimism with a hair shirt of caution and secrecy. Something called the Technical Advisory Group replaced Fitzpatrick. The image of Aereon flew by night, and Miller dedicated himself to building a different impression. He found his consultants, in the main, in the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Sciences of Princeton University. Putman, the aerodynamicist, was one of these, as was Kukon, and Olcott had been trained there. The evening of September 2nd was heavy with the heat of the day. Air was moving, but barely. Everyone wore a sports shirt but Olcott, who was dressed in a plain brown suit and did not remove his jacket or tie. The advisory group formed a circle around the 7, at the head of the runway. “Today’s outing must be a success or a complete failure,” Putman said. “We are here to make a flight. And to get a flight—to get out of ground effect and make a circuit of the field—we are willing to risk totalling the 7.”
To salvage the aircraft, Kukon had worked for a week, steadily and far into the night, in a shop near Princeton. The work had been done so skillfully that the others had to think to remember which side had been crushed by Putman’s car. The orange silk glistened with fresh, clear butyrate dope. Kukon showed no trace of concern for the 7’s immediate future. It was part of his routine to build with uncompromising care devices that might be destroyed in an instant. He did say, however, “If I can’t get above six feet, I may just set it back down in the grass.”
Olcott said to Kukon, “In trying to get out of ground effect, try not to do it too quickly. Let the vehicle go out at a shallow angle. Don’t raise the nose so much that you start to lose air speed.” Within a few days—everything going well—Olcott was expected to get into Aereon 26 and fly it. He had been flying it for the last couple of days on a computer. Now he wanted to see if the model would reflect or contradict what he had learned. He wanted to see how it would behave when it got out of ground effect, among other things, and what sort of roll angle would be best for a turn, what the diameter of the turn would be, and how much elevator deflection would be needed to fly at a given altitude as a function of center-of-gravity location. He said, “Try one control input at a time, John. First try pitch excursions. I don’t want anything gross. Just small things. So we can see what’s happening. Try coördinated rolls. I think the vehicle may have N delta A, adverse yaw, a little more than predicted, and the only way to take care of that would be with rudder. So you may have a problem with just-aileron rolls. I think where this vehicle can get in trouble is that it can become grossly uncoördinated. If you let the sideslip build up quite a little, I think you’ll find that it becomes unmanageable. In the 26, I’m going to try very hard to keep everything coördinated, to keep that ball right in the center. The simulations indicate that life remains manageable when the ball is in the center, but if the ball gets way out, if the sideslip angle builds up, life can become very difficult.”
“Gentlemen, I think we ought to do it,” Putman said.
“O.K.,” said Kukon.
The engine started—small, rear-mounted, earsplitting—and the 7 taxied around, limbering up. Everybody got into Putman’s convertible. As before, Putman would drive in close formation with the aircraft, but when it went into the air he was to stop. Kukon sat on the convertible’s trunk, his feet dangling into the rear seat, his Logictrol transmitter in his lap. Miller was beside him with his Super 8. Olcott was in front. Kukon advanced the throttle. The aerobody and the automobile raced side by side. Putman called out, “Twenty! Twenty-five! Thirty! Thirty-two!” At thirty-seven miles per hour, the 7 took off.
The wreckage this time was total and irreparable. Small pieces of Styrofoam, balsa wood, piano wire, and orange silk were scattered across a dirt road and into a cornfield. No remark showing disappointment or dismay was made by anyone. They all got out of Putman’s car, stood in the middle of the orange and white debris, and talked about what had happened. Miller’s movie camera, clicking as if it were packed with tree frogs, committed each fragment to film. Olcott looked reflectively at the bits and the pieces, the Styrofoam spread out like snow in the late, slanting light. He spoke at length with Kukon, and as he did so he flew his own hand, in various pitch attitudes and aileron rolls, in the air before him. Now and again, he grinned. The 7 had at least flown to its final destination. It had flown high and, for a while, straight.
Putman said, “We haven’t seen anything shockingly unusual on this outing. I don’t think the 7 had stability problems. I think it had control-effectiveness problems and trim problems. Any power problems, John?”
“No. Here’s the story, and it’s very strange,” Kukon said, speaking rapidly and supporting his words with gestures. “The aerobody lifted off very gradually. Then it seemed to settle. I gave it more up-elevator. It sort of got a little soggy. I gave it more up-elevator. It climbed a little—to three or four feet—and I gave it more up-elevator, which was probably two-thirds of what I had. I held that elevator, and the aerobody very gradually started to settle. At that point, I had to make a decision. Was I going to throttle back and set it down, or go all the way? I decided to go all the way. I throttled back just a little bit, though—three notches. And when I throttled back, the whole thing levelled off and climbed. It surprised the hell out of me. When I saw that, I gave it full throttle and full up-elevator. It kept on climbing. I felt a very strong trim change when it moved out of ground effect.”
“In ground effect you need a lot less elevon?” Putman said.
“Exactly.”
“The proximity of the ground gave you a more positive angle of attack?” Olcott said.
“Right.”
“O.K.,” said Putman. “This would indicate to me that we need a more nose-up elevator after we get out of ground effect. With the more nose-up elevator, if the separation and scale effects are severe, your aileron effectiveness will accordingly go to pot. So you may have a lot less aileron effectiveness out of ground effect not due to the fact that you are out of ground effect but due to the fact that you need more elevator.”
“Close to the ground, everything was sensitive,” Kukon said. “I had a lot of power. I could put it where I wanted. Everything was terrific. Even the rudders were more effective. Once I got a little higher, though, it was as if I was trying to hold a long rubber band that was hooked into the controls.”
“There’s a distributed lift effect,” Putman said. “It might be less severe on a full-scale machine. I don’t think it is something that we can do anything about at this point, but ground effect is the major unknown area that is going to give us problems.”
“After it had climbed out, I tried the ailerons a little bit, and they were responsive to low roll angles,” Kukon went on. “Everything seemed O.K. But then the aerobody rolled sharply to the left. I gave it some right aileron. This was at fourteen feet of altitude. I gave it some more right aileron, and it really wasn’t responding. Then I gave it some rudder, and, boy, did it respond! That was the first time I used rudder, and it just zipped right around and straightened itself out. I neutralized the ailerons and neutralized the rudder. That’s when the aerobody went up to forty feet. Flying straight. Everything fine. Until I tried to turn around. I rolled it over with a little bit of aileron. It held there pretty well, but then it started to slip off to the left. I straightened out the ailerons. N
othing happened. The amount of roll that I was allowed on the whole flight was essentially zero. I mean, just a little bit and it was already too much. I gave it a little more right aileron. Nothing happened. I gave it full right aileron. Nothing happened. I gave it full right rudder, and it wasn’t enough—full right and full right! There was no way I could get out of it. It was over too far. It spiralled down.”
“That seems very close to what we learned in the computer simulations,” Olcott said.
“If you ever get to that point, there’s no way out,” Kukon said.
“The thing is not to get to that point,” said Olcott. “With this aircraft we have to be very careful that we don’t let things get too far out of trim.”
“I agree.”
“Because by the time we got that second rudder input—”
“It would be too late.”
“—we would have gone too far. Do you have any notion what might happen if we did not use the ailerons but just the rudders?”
“I think the vehicle would be uncontrollable,” Kukon said. “Because the motion I got out of pure rudder was a wild thing. The whole flight was very difficult. I was working pretty hard, I thought, even during the straight portion. One puff, one gust, one very small disturbance, and I’d have lost the whole ballgame right there. That one time I put in full rudder was almost a panic control.”
“John, thank you,” Olcott said. “Thank you for that flight.”
“I’m sorry I couldn’t get it a little better around for you, but that was the best I could do,” said Kukon.
“Flying the 26, we’ll have a lot more information at our command than you had flying the 7—a lot more abort opportunities,” said Olcott. “The whole philosophy of the 26 is that we’re not going into any unknown area quickly. We’ll go in small, manageable steps—so we can always back out. I’m not going to force the 26 to do anything it doesn’t want to do. I don’t intend to force it into the air. It has to fly into the air. Meanwhile, the 7 has told us a heck of a lot. The 7 supports the simulator study. There is no glaring conflict. It indicates that N delta A is a little higher than predicted and that L delta A might be just a little less than predicted, but we’ve got a consistent set of data.” Olcott unbuttoned his jacket. A lock of hair had fallen across his forehead. He paused a moment and looked down into the wreckage, but he was not really seeing it. “That flight was worth its weight in gold, John,” he said finally. “We have a way of approaching the 26. We’ve identified a risk. Now we want to say, ‘If we can keep it small, we can handle it.’ I think we ought to go to NAFEC. I think we ought to go into an attempted lift-off Friday morning.”
ON SATURDAY EVENING, September 5, 1970, John Olcott and his wife gave a dinner party at their home, in Basking Ridge, thirty miles north of Princeton. Beforehand, Olcott dialled the Aereon Corporation’s number and spoke with an answering service. He gave his name, and waited while it was checked against a list. Rain and wind had delayed the first attempt to fly the 26. Now the message was “Good weather tomorrow morning. The winds will be south-southwest three to six knots at 6 A.M., building up to six to ten knots by 8 A.M.” Aereon had reserved dawn to eight Sunday on the big runway at NAFEC. The guests came. Olcott prepared drinks. He did not want to be a killjoy, so he privately mixed himself water on the rocks with an olive. He revealed nothing of his plans until after dinner, when he said he was sorry but he had to work early the next morning; and abruptly he went to bed. He got up at three, and although he was on his way to a remote and all but deserted airfield, he dressed in a blue button-down shirt, a dark-blue narrow tie, gray flannel slacks, and a blue-white-and-yellow madras jacket. By three-thirty, he was moving south in his Karmann Ghia—Interstate 287, the New Jersey Turnpike, the Garden State Parkway. At seventy miles per hour, glued to the banked turns, he was going about as fast as Aereon 26 would ever go or was ever meant to go. He moved under stars through mile after mile of dark-corridor forest on the eastern perimeter of the Pine Barrens. He crossed over the Mullica River, shot through the vacant streets of Pomona, and went on through a countryside of open fields and stands of pine to a set of gates in the high chain-link and barbed-wire fencing that surrounded the flat immensity of NAFEC. Inside, he drove on for another mile or so, until windowless walls seventy feet high loomed up black before him against the barely graying sky. He parked the Karmann Ghia at the corner of Lindbergh Drive and Firehouse Lane. Carrying his flying boots and his test pilot’s note pad—his jump suit over one arm—he walked toward the big building. He went through a small door in an acre of wall, like a mouse going home.
More cars came into NAFEC—small auroras moving in through the darkness and blinking out near the big hangar: William Miller from Princeton, William Putman from Staten Island, Charles Mills from Toms River. Mills, a German teacher in a high school on the outskirts of Trenton, had once been Air Operations Officer at Lakehurst Naval Air Station. He was now an Aereon consultant. He had been a celebrated pilot of naval airships. When the airships, just before the Navy abandoned them, gave ironic proof of themselves flying out of South Weymouth, Massachusetts, in the middle nineteen-fifties, it was Mills who piloted the most dangerous flights. He rigged up closed-circuit television so he could watch ice coating up on his Z.P.G.s—big ships, three hundred and forty-three feet long —until he had as much as five tons of it weighing down his leading edges, his propellers, his control wires, and his windshield. Then he would hunt for the worst of a storm. Mills had the feel of the airships, of the wind and the weather. His responses were quick, and he knew how to use them. He had an athlete’s sense of anticipation. An airship moved cyclically in pitch and yaw. Anticipated lead time was the middle of the art. When the nose was going down, the moment was right for some down elevator to check the up cycle that was coming later on. Pilots who did not feel this could let their ships stand on end or slide, giddily, sideways. Mills liked to take the Z.P.G.s out onto the triangle of runways at South Weymouth and slide around on his landing gear with the precision of a figure skater, upwind, downwind, crosswind—strange exercise, a waltzing cow. Watching all this from an engineering office, Lieutenant Commander John Fitzpatrick, who did not overestimate other men’s abilities, came to regard Mills as “a master of lighter-than-air flying.” To show just how much strain a dirigible could withstand, Mills deliberately flew one carrying eight thousand pounds of ice into a front of warm air, and somehow—through touch, verve, whatever—emerged safely on the far side of an aerial avalanche. For that flight, he was given the Harmon Trophy. Mills now opened the small door in the big wall and stepped into the brightly lighted interior of the NAFEC hangar, where single-engine, twin-engine, and four-engine aircraft were spaced out on fifty thousand square feet of smooth concrete, and where reciprocating engines, out of their nacelles, had been set up on mounts and looked like big women in curlers.
“Hello, Charlie.”
“Hello, Charlie. Did you have any trouble getting up this morning?”
“Negative.”
Aereon 26 was in the central foreground, bright orange and lustrous, fat, sleek, and implausible, with its black stripes, its black markings, its nose-mounted Pitot boom pricking forward a full six feet. This boom, from which a little stub-winged airspeed indicator hung like a model rocket, was about the only added feature that made the 26 different from the 7—other than, of course, its scale. Everett Linkenhoker was crawling around inside the 26, completing its final preflight checkout. He had been there most of the night.
Mills put his head in through the hatch—a squarish head, with short hair, blue eyes, reading glasses hanging from a cord around his neck. “Hello, Link.”
“Charlie.” Linkenhoker spoke around a toothpick, without really looking up. His hands were on the airframe. His eyes were moving from weld to weld. He was a short man, heavy in the cheeks, heavy in the middle, a quiet, contemplative man, inventive within his realm. He had light-blue eyes under bifocal lenses, and sandy-blond hair that had gone partly to strings. When Mi
lls had been Air Operations Officer at Lakehurst, Linkenhoker had been a petty officer there, rigging airships.
In volume, Aereon 26 was twenty times as capacious as light airplanes of the same length. At eleven hundred and forty pounds, it weighed about half as much. If its structure had been formed from sheet-metal jigs, the way modern airplanes are built, Linkenhoker would have been able to move around quite easily inside it, but Aereon had had no sheet-metal-working equipment nor the money to buy it. What the company did have was Linkenhoker, a Heliarc welder, and in building the airframe he had used neither a bolt nor a rivet. The 26 had a totally welded tubular structure, consisting of many hundreds of slender aluminum rods compiled in intricate rhomboids, trapezoids, triangles. Drenched now in filtered orange light, the interior of the 26 seemed to have been composed rather than engineered. Or it might have been some prize-winner’s discovery in organic chemistry—a novel molecule magnified eight hundred billion times. These aluminum tubes had been salvaged by Linkenhoker from the wreckage of the triple-hulled Aereon, as had most of the 26’s instruments: the cylinder-head temperature meter, the free-air temperature meter, the altimeter, the artificial horizon. Piper Aircraft asked thirty-two hundred dollars for a big Pitot boom of the type Aereon wanted (with a yaw instrument, an angle-of-attack instrument), and that was beyond Aereon’s means, so Linkenhoker borrowed a set of plans and made the boom himself. He built the fuel tank—ten gallons—out of new sheet aluminum, and he mounted it to the aluminum rods in the exact center of gravity. To make landing gear, he bought at an auto store some half-inch-diameter bungee shock cords—the things that keep suitcases from falling off roof racks—and he cut them into pieces eleven and a half inches long, bunching up six for each main gear and four for the nose gear, attaching them to landing-gear tripods with aircraft wire and U-shackles. He foraged at small airports until he found an appropriate wreck and from it took the 26’s brakes. He found the plastic cockpit canopy on a decaying glider. One day there was an odd and tragic accident at Red Lion Airport. A mechanic flew off in a Cessna to another airport to pick up a case of oil. It was a bumpy day. The Cessna had dual seats, dual controls. Returning, the mechanic put the case of oil on the empty seat beside him. He was on final, approaching the Red Lion runway, when the plane hit a bump and the heavy package jumped off the seat and rammed the stick forward. The Cessna plunged to the ground, nose first. The mechanic was killed. Linkenhoker took the seat that the oil had been on and emplaced it in the cockpit of the 26. To this pattern of aircraft construction by junk collage there was one exception, the control system—rudders, elevons, cables, hardware—all of which was new. The engine, though, was the same four-cylinder, horizontally opposed, two-cycle McCullough that had powered the triple-hulled Aereon.
