by John McPhee
On the windscreen before him were two horizontal strips of black plastic tape, one above the other, like an equals sign. The upper tape was on the line of sight between Olcott’s eyes and the horizon. The other tape was ten degrees lower. Gaining speed, he scanned his indicators: air-speed, angle of attack, control position, revolutions per minute. At fifty-two knots he deflected the elevators and watched the horizon descend, steadily, fairly rapidly, just as it should do, from the one tape almost to the other. In rotation. Angle of attack: eight degrees. One hand on the throttle, the other on the stick, he held things just where they were, and he began to ask himself questions. How much stick force is necessary? Is there sway? Is it heavy on the main wheels? Is it spongy? He was feeling his way toward the first indication of lift-off. He thought of nothing else and noticed nothing else—not Mills beside the runway, smoking a cigarette, his stopwatch running; nor Miller, following the aerobody with the Super 8 like a duck hunter; nor the file of automobiles, bouncing and lurching at high speed over the ground swells of the taxiway, racing to stay with him, while engineers within them narrated the scene into spinning cassettes. He asked himself if the 26 was responding. Did it have a mind of its own? Did it tend to stay where he put it? He sought motion cues. Vibration. Acceleration. Runway shock. There was now no runway shock. Fifty-six knots, and the 26 was airborne.
Putman, riding in Linkenhoker’s car, said, “I see daylight! I see daylight under the wheels! Estimated angle, ten degrees.” Linkenhoker chewed his toothpick, drove the car, and said nothing. Miller, by the runway, shooting film steadily, did not dare to expect anything after eleven years. The moment brought to his mind an image, as he later put it, “of long bedraggled nights at Mercer County Airport, with dead flies on the floor, Linkenhoker working late, night after night—a whole fragile structure brought to focus: torn between ultimate trust that all things work together for good for those who are the called (my own overarching awareness of the providence of God) and authentic human stress.” Mills grinned, standing there in his old flying boots, his reading glasses dangling from his neck. As the 26 came at him and went past him, he said, “Steady as a rock. I haven’t seen an Aereon fly that steady since the old rubber-band model.”
The 26, as the computer had said it would, moved its own angle of attack, after takeoff, from eight to ten degrees and firmly held it there. No wild oscillations for this ship. No need to manhandle it. Everything seemed to Olcott to be on nice, manageable terms. The 26 had slid into the air. Felt just like that. It eased into the air. In the right lateraldirectional sense, it sat there. It was very soft. It felt very smooth. He reduced power. Kept everything else the same. Felt for the ground. Maintain the body attitude, he told himself. Feel for ground contact. He was concerned about ballooning into the air. He searched for the first indication that the wheels were on the ground. He asked himself, Is the pitch effect right? The runway gave him his answer. Main wheels down. Power change. Adjust for attitude change. Roll out. He came to the end of the runway. He turned the nosewheel. The 26 spun around, and sat still, pointing back into the airspace it had come out of, having its day as a falcon, spreading the wings it did not have.
It had flown a thousand feet at an altitude of twenty-four inches.
Mills said, almost to himself, “What a beautiful flight!” Watching it, he had multiplied the size, the altitude, and the range of what he had seen. He had seen a rigid airship, with new proportions, new missions, flying not a thousand feet but a thousand miles. The rest was detail. Work it out, men; on the double. Mills might have been an admiral if the lighter-than-air program had survived. One of his last acts in the Navy had been to write a thesis for the War College called “Airships—Renaissance or Requiem.” Then, like many others, he faded into the sycamores of a small New Jersey town—a picket fence, a frame house, big airships visible, if nowhere else, in pictures on his study wall. He kept a bottle of Windex on his desk. He cleaned his glasses with Windex, the better to see the pictures of the blimps. “This was the M. The sweetest ship that ever flew. Look at that long car—a hundred and seventeen feet; in effect, a dorsal fin. She’s more stable in yaw than any other airship I’ve ever flown. This is me at the controls. And here’s an idea we had—a helicopter pad on top of an airship. We actually had it half built. If new airships were constructed today, we would have a line waiting to use them tomorrow, for radar calibrations, for atmospheric samplings, for ecological surveys, for airfreight. Airships used to use goldbeater’s skin (ox intestines) for gas cells. Engines were built at eight pounds per horsepower. Now we could do three-quarters of a pound per horsepower. Think what could be done with modern materials. We came to an untimely end.” He pressed the stopwatch. Olcott, a mile away from him, was starting another run.
Don’t step out of the straight and narrow, Olcott told himself. Don’t get carried away. False confidence can attend the second run, so this is where I have to be careful. Then he drove the 26 up an invisible ramp until it was ten feet off the ground, where it remained in level flight without a quibbling motion while he diverted his attention to collecting data. After flying two thousand feet, he landed, smooth as talc. Pausing, making notes, he almost quit for the day, because he wondered if he had become overconfident. Deciding that he had not, he took off again. This time, he allowed his left hand to leave the controls, and with it he clicked pictures. (A camera was mounted above his left shoulder and focussed on the instrument panel.) The flight was again perfect, nose high, ten feet up, three thousand feet from lift-off to touchdown. Mills clicked his watch, and said to Miller, “Don’t stop now, Bill. Don’t, for heaven’s sake, stop now. Have the test go on. Conditions are right. Everything is right. Do the next phase now.”
“I’ll speak to Jack,” Miller said, but there was really no need to. He could already hear Olcott saying, “I want to go into unknown areas on my terms, with no surprises.” In fact, the 26 was already moving toward the hangar. Miller and Mills walked across the runway, and for what had happened Miller silently offered thanks to the Lord. The heel of one of Mills’ boots came off and settled like a coin on the asphalt. He picked it up, and took off the boot, and walked with one shoe off and one shoe on, attempting repairs. “All my eight thousand hours of flight are in these shoes,” he said. “All my eight thousand hours of flight.” With his fist he punched the heel back on. “Don’t stop now, Bill. Do the next phase now.”
Miller was swelling with exuberance, but Calvin within him would not let it brim over. On the apron beside the hangar, Miller suggested that Olcott and Linkenhoker pose for photographs with the ship the one had built and the other had flown. Olcott looked uncomfortable. Linkenhoker—much too shy for show business—blushed, bent his head forward, took hold of the 26 by the nose, and dragged it into the hangar. The debriefing, held around a table in the NAFEC cafeteria, was in its way like the debriefing after the last, and most spectacular, crash of the 7. Everyone’s voice was flat. The discussion was totally technical. Neither joy nor dismay had relevance there. Developed facts were what mattered. “The sequence was to accelerate on the ground with the controls faired,” Olcott was saying. “The controls felt a little mushy, but they’re responsive. I had no difficulty setting the angle of attack. The landing was accomplished by maintaining the same angle of attack and reducing the power. Letting the 26 settle at that attitude is just the way to do it.”
“We need a ratio of predicted to actual values, and then we can decide how far to back off the tab,” Putman said.
Olcott nodded in agreement. “I would say we’re right where we ought to be,” he said. “Tuesday morning, we’ll explore prolonged hops in transition out of ground effect, and prolonged hops out of ground effect.”
Afterward, Olcott gave me a lift back to Princeton in his Karmann Ghia. “We’re exploring relatively unknown areas,” he said at one point. “It’s not an airship. It’s not an airplane. It’s what Bill Putman says it is: an original concept—something like the lifting bodies that NASA tested fo
r reentry vehicles to land on land. When we lifted off today, it was just a very, very small step into an unknown region, and we had been there before in the piloted analogue simulation. I felt no big heartbeats or adrenalin inputs. The first flight was a normal extension of what we had done beforehand. No quick judgments. Right on plan. I didn’t want to dump on Miller’s elation, but for me it was business as usual. No hurrahs. The thing that pleases me is that we were able to predict what would happen. If the predictions were correct this time, we can have more confidence in other predictions to come, when we try to take the vehicle a little farther.” Olcott suddenly showed alarm, a trace of panic, the only trace of panic I was ever to see in him. His gasoline gauge was riding on “Empty,” and had been for who knows how many miles. He drove on for ten minutes, a little tight in the lips. “I do this often,” he said. “I just forget.” An Amoco station saved him. Sitting there beside the pumps, he took out a notebook and recorded the current mileage and the replacement volume of the gasoline.
CELEBRATION was even less in order than Olcott might have thought. The 26 had got off the ground, but that was all it could do. In successive tests in following days, it flew on the ground cushion, never more than fifteen feet above the runway. It could not get out of ground effect. The increased drag in the zone of transition out of ground effect was too much for it. It was trapped like an electron in a magnetic bottle, a live mosquito under glass. The 26 would make straight, low, steady flights of about a mile, one after another, always settling back to the runway. Olcott’s small steps forward into the unknown grew ever smaller, as the amounts of freshly acquired data diminished with each run. The test program went into a cycle of getting nowhere—the long rides in the dead of night to NAFEC, thermos coffee, the gradual breaking of the glaze that comes with getting up at 3 A.M., the brightly lighted hangar, the briefing, the roll-out into the dawn, moon hanging there as orange as the aerobody. The startup. The coughing engine. The fire trucks, checkered flags, whirling lights. Flight. The 26 fighting against prohibitive physical odds. Scraping against an aerodynamic ceiling. Unable to climb. End of outing. Debrief. Go home. Nothing much accomplished. NAFEC people sometimes looked at each other in amusement after watching the so-called aerobody in action. On the same runway, they had seen McDonnell Phantoms, capable of going sixteen hundred miles an hour, and Lockheed U-2s that could climb thirteen miles into the air. Now here was something that took off like a snail going up a grape leaf and could not go higher than fifteen feet—an aircraft that could be outrun by a fire truck. The woman behind the counter in the NAFEC cafeteria, where windows gave a panoramic view of the runway, looked through tiers of glass shelves in front of her and remarked that the 26 regularly got up into the English muffins but seemed to get stuck there. “What do they think they’re doing out there?” “I doubt if they know.” “Beats the living hell out of me.” “They call it an aerobody.” “Milk or lemon?”
The test program was operating within margins that were narrowing. It had been agreed, for example, that the engine would not be used more than twenty-five hours. It was just a drone-aircraft engine, and an old one at that, but, within the concept of a slow-moving aircraft cheap to run, the engine’s ninety-two horsepower was supposedly and necessarily sufficient for this stage in the evolution of the aerobodies, no less than the power in a rubber band had been for John Kukon’s smallest of Aereons when it flew at Mercer County Airport. To replace the engine now, or even to overhaul it, would queer the mathematics and shatter the data already collected. The engine had been used twelve of the twenty-five hours.
Fatigue failures had to be pondered, too. The 26 had not been built to fly the Hump. It was the “proof-of-concept model” in the long chain of Aereons, and once it had tested the concept it would have done all it could. Miller had called upon a Long Island aeronautical consulting firm to do a stress analysis of the 26, and they had sent a young engineer named John Weber, who had a saturnine expression, piercing blue eyes, and an obvious love of what he was doing. “I had a dream,” he said one morning. “I dream about this ship sometimes. I’m going to check out those antennae.” His left arm was broken, from a motorcycling accident, and he wore an Ace bandage around it while he worked, with Linkenhoker, on the 26. “There are fatigue failures in some of the weld surfaces, caused by droop loads,” he told Olcott. “All your failures so far have been fatigue-type failures due to vibrations and other motions in the various systems.”
“So you’re suggesting keep the running time down.”
“Exactly.”
The effect of all this on Miller was to heighten his nervousness—deadlines rising over him like halberds. Surrounded by friendly mercenaries, haunted by imagined adversaries, he saw that it was up to him to do the worrying, for he had Linkenhoker on salary and everyone else was a paid consultant. Miller, by now, had a third of a million of his own dollars in the project and the tenth part of his life, and while consultants directed his show he could only stand by with a Super 8. When they talked strobes, tachometers, L delta A, he could comprehend, more or less, but he could not contribute. They had facts. He had faith. They consulted computers. He talked to God. They got direct answers. He did not. His reaction was to generate more faith. He would soon have to generate more money as well. He fretted. He lost too much sleep. His eyes were rimmed in red. One of the vertical fins seemed to him to have suddenly developed an alarming concavity. He caressed it with his hand. “I notice a flat spot here,” he said. “Was it always here?” Weber looked up and nodded, speaking across the memory of dozens of such questions. “Yes,” he said. “The flat spot was always there.” Miller was too polite to become a rampant nuisance. He retreated, for the most part, into his nerves. His fears ran to a deep source and often brimmed over. He spoke sotto voce in restaurants and did much peering around. He could be having eggs in a diner and imagine that the truck driver sitting on the stool next to him was straight out of the spy bin at Boeing. He suspected anyone in the NAFEC cafeteria who happened to sit down at the next table. “Careful,” he would say. “We have a listener.” He wrote security memos and distributed them to the group: “We continue to require privacy and your help to achieve it. ‘No comment’ will be your response to inquiries … . No photographs are permitted … . No visitors are welcome except as invited by Management.” He mimeographed a non-disclosure agreement, a promissory note of eternal mumness, and placed it, asking for a signature, before almost anyone who happened to glance at the 26. “Miller is psycho as far as security is concerned,” said Mills. “He makes you sign agreements that you will not smoke cigars shaped like airships.” Miller had his reasons. “I want to preserve our lead time” was the way he put it. Big companies would discover the 26 soon enough. Moreover, he felt that Monroe Drew, Aereon’s founder, had seriously eroded Aereon’s credibility by not delivering on his ballyhoo, a mistake the company might not survive twice. Whatever the cause, he was so fearful that he always seemed to be looking under closed doors for the telltale foot of the invader, and out on the airfield at NAFEC he would scan the middle distance with slow and careful eyes. One day, Olcott, who had sharp eyes, too, opened the hatch after a run and told Miller that a fireman in one of the NAFEC fire trucks was busy snapping photographs. Miller was galvanized—fears confirmed. He reported the discovery to NAFEC. The film went out of the fireman’s camera and into Miller’s pocket. The fireman had wanted to show the flying pumpkin seed, weirdest thing he had ever seen on the job, in Kodacolor, to his children.
A propeller of a different pitch was tried. It was made of lemonwood. Pusher props are not common, and this one was virtually unique. Igor Bensen had used it trying for a world speed record in autogiros, but that did not work out, and Linkenhoker had found the prop “just lying around,” as he put it, at Bensen Aircraft, in Raleigh, North Carolina. A second battery was added, because Olcott said an up-and-away flight would not be possible without it, and it was installed just enough to the rear to shift the center of gravity in that directio
n five-tenths of one per cent. With the Detecto scale under the nosewheel, Olcott and the fuselage around him now weighed five pounds less, the better to nose up out of ground effect and into the sky. Everyone was full of anticipation for the next takeoff. These minuscule changes could make the difference. If derision was rising among the personnel of NAFEC, it was possible that they were too used to watching experimental aircraft that were pushing at the upper limits of aerodynamic possibility. This one was at the inverse frontier. Its ambition was to become the Super-Slow Transport. It wanted to burn next to no fuel, in low-cost, low-power engines. Its immediate goal was not merely to fly but to fly within severe conceptual limitations. Future aerobodies would be large enough to take advantage of lifting gas, and minutiae would matter less. Meanwhile, the economics underlying the whole Aereon idea could be assayed in the 26, and fine points were extremely critical: the pitch of the prop, the weight of a few gallons of fuel, the pilot’s choice of flying clothes, a little extra fat in his dinner.
Now Olcott moved the engine up to thirty-eight hundred and fifty revolutions per minute and began his bid to get out of ground effect. Linkenhoker, toothpick dancing, raced along the taxiway in his Dodge full of engineers. The taxiway was uneven, many dips and rises, and suddenly a congress of waddling seagulls was directly in front of the car. “Man, those birds are slow,” Putman said as the car sped into them. Weber said, “It’s early in the morning. They’re tired.” Somehow, Linkenhoker missed all but one, which jumped into a headlight and caromed off in a spray of feathers. A man in the fire truck, close behind, laughed uncontrollably. The 26 was airborne. Everybody in the Dodge sat forward expectantly and looked for sky beneath the landing gear. It never came. “He’s not at altitude. He’s not at altitude,” Weber said. “I don’t think he knows his altitude.” The 26 was flying, as it would fly on to the end of its traditional mile, six feet off the ground.
