by John McPhee
“That thing ain’t going to fly,” he said. “That thing ain’t go-ing to fly. What is it, anyway?”
“It’s an aerobody,” Miller told him.
“It looks like an orange,” said the trooper, and, with another tympanic laugh, he drove away.
As the motorcade moved on, I watched the faces of the people in oncoming automobiles. Almost no one noticed the 26. It could have been a dome mobile home or an eleven-hundred-pound pizza. It could have been a flying saucer or a lithic slice of the moon. It did not seem to matter. I did see two jaws drop. While Miller was absorbed with a suspicious green Pontiac, a small white car passed the 26 on the right and nearly clipped off a fin. The young woman in the car raised a finger. Miller said, “She probably thinks we’re part of the military-industrial complex.” A NAFEC police car was waiting. Its siren began to wail. It led the 26 through the NAFEC gates and across the two final miles to the big hangar. “They’ll only give us three weeks maximum here,” Miller said as he parked. “NAFEC has become difficult, skeptical, and impatient.”
The NAFEC policeman got out of his car, sighed, chuckled, and said, “You’d never get me in that son of a bitch. You’d have to tie me.”
At least thirty people had surrounded the 26 in wonder on its first arrival at NAFEC. Now one heavy-lidded man in white coveralls shuffled over and stood by the NAFEC policeman. “They never got that thing more than fifty feet off the deck,” he said. “It never turned to the left. It never turned to the right. The pilot just flew straight and low, over Runway 13.”
“I don’t blame the son of a bitch,” said the policeman.
Sheets of the Trenton Times were peeled away from the fuselage: “OUTLOOK BRIGHT FOR YULE BONUS.” “SECOND CHALICE STOLEN, RETURNED TO CHURCH.” As the new propeller was uncovered, the man in white coveralls whistled. Something interesting had happened after all. “Look at that,” he said. “Look at that propeller. That thing must have cost six thousand dollars if it cost a cent.”
ON THE FIRST DAY of March, the tests resumed. It was a mild, calm morning. At dawn, the 26 was already addressing itself to the big runway, and had been cleared by the NAFEC tower. This ultimate phase of the test program had been coded the Quick Look. The test outline included seven “tasks,” designed to yield the “hard facts.” Miller and the Aereon board of directors could then decide, and would have to decide, whether to liquidate their company, after twelve fruitless years, or to move on toward the building of the big rigid Aereons. On the day’s first run, Olcott never left the ground. This was intentional. Task 1 was “high-speed taxi without rotation.” Its purpose was to give Olcott a chance to feel out the thrust of the new propeller with regard to indicated airspeed, and to refamiliarize himself, after six months, with the ground-handling qualities of the aerobody. It felt good. The new prop appeared to be delivering on its promise. Task 2 was, among other things, an evaluation of the new vortex generators. Bill Putman, the aerodynamicist, observed with binoculars the hundreds of bits of yarn taped to the trailing edges as Olcott made three more runs without lift-off. “Those tufts are beautifully attached,” Putman said. “Those vortex generators are working, no doubt about it. They have attached the flow.” Olcott, in the cockpit, noticed that when the propeller got up to about four thousand revolutions per minute it developed a vibration and a peculiar buzz. Out of the north a Starlifter came and ponderously sank toward the runway. The 26 got out of the way, and the Starlifter was cleared for landing. Its ten tires screeched on touchdown. Almost at once, its big turbofans began to push for takeoff. The Starlifter went back into the sky. The Starlifter upset Miller. Jets that size leave roiling invisible whirlpools in the air for many minutes—turbulences that can destroy light aircraft. The morning air now smelled of kerosene and burned rubber. Never mind. If the little airship at the end of the runway was—in a general sense-to go up where it wanted to go, the Starlifters would scarcely last long enough to stink up another morning. The engine of the 26 was popping now and again, seeming to miss a little, and Olcott became concerned. All other considerations aside, he would have turned for the hangar and ended the day’s outing. Olcott was beginning to respond, however, to pressures extraneous to the patterns of the testing. He could hardly be said to have adopted a devil-may-care attitude, but his basic approach—of cautious, methodical, incremental steps into the unknown-was giving way in fragments here and there. Olcott felt pressure, for example, in the rising skepticism of the personnel of NAFEC, and he felt a need to show NAFEC that the Aereon could get up off the ground higher than ever before. The popping sound disconcerted him, but he decided for the moment to ignore it. Task 4 was “lift-off out of ground effect”—a repetition of the final accomplishment of the flight tests of the previous September, when everything but Olcott had been thrown out of the aerobody in order to make it light enough to succeed. This time, though, the weight was back in the aircraft. The new propeller would pass or fail. Olcott asked for the tower’s permission to take off and make a straight flight out of ground effect, landing at the far end of the runway. Cleared, he began to move—fire trucks, station wagons racing in parallel. The 26 took off at fifty-two knots and went up and out of ground effect with no strain at all. If there was turbulence from the Starlifter, the 26 punched through it without apparent shock. Olcott levelled off about sixty feet up, and accelerated to sixty knots. He had a margin of speed, power, and thrust that he had not had before. The engine popped again. He thought he felt a jolt, an interruption of thrust. Nonetheless, the flight continued and ended in steady trim. Olcott taxied in. Debriefing, in the cafeteria, he said, “I really wish we knew more about that engine. I really wonder if, even in the best of all worlds, it is producing ninety-two horsepower. The go, no-go factors are not completely clear.” Task 5, the next in line, was what Aereon had been waiting for for twelve years—“up-and-away flight, to evaluate climb capability and speed range and to obtain additional assessments of the vehicle’s handling qualities.”
“Tell me about Task 5 again,” Putman said.
Olcott said, “It’s a circuit of the field.”
“I thought we were going to do some shallow turns first,” Putman said.
“I think there’s enough extra airspeed so we’re not going to stall out the vehicle or get an excessive rate of sink when we start to turn. I think the maximum speed is going to be about sixty-two knots.”
“We don’t know how it will turn—we’ve been thinking straight for so long.”
“We may have the turning radius of a big airplane.”
“At least try a few turns first that cover the width of the runway.”
Olcott nodded. “What I want to do,” he went on, “is to circle the field and then go over through the speed course and get some data. As I said before, though, I really wish we knew more about that engine.”
One thing they knew about the engine, Putman reminded everyone, was that it had only a few more hours left. They had agreed not to use it more than twenty-five hours, and the deadline was now pressing in.
“We’re really hanging on to the end of that string, aren’t we?” Olcott said. Lifting one hand, he pinched the end of an imaginary bit of string. “I thought I could feel the aerobody respond to the fact that the engine was cutting out,” he continued. “This would be disconcerting if I were circling the field. Check it out carefully, Link. And really check that prop, that vibration. If we lost the prop, we’d probably shake the engine off, too.”
“No question about it,” Linkenhoker said.
I looked around the table—Linkenhoker, Weber, Miller, Olcott, Putman—and noticed for the first time that everyone had sky-blue eyes. There was something new in their manner: a little more verve and less deliberation, aspects of a rush, under pressures to perform—NAFEC impatient, engine time running out, the money sponge all but dry. The group was talking about problems that were possibly quite serious—insufficiencies of the engine, enigmas of the prop—but at the same time the decision seemed inevitable. It se
emed swept in. Task 5 was next. That was that. Tension had continued, in recent days, between Miller and Olcott. Olcott had said again that the word was around that Aereon did not really want these tests, because they would be too definitive. “They say the Aereon Corporation is afraid to learn that its concept is a bust, and I’m beginning to think they’re right,” Olcott had said.
“Well, they’re wrong,” said Miller.
“Well, I’ll be there at NAFEC to see if they’re wrong,” Olcott said.
Miller said, “You’re being quite unfair to Aereon.”
Olcott said, “I’m concerned about my professional reputation.”
This concern had removed from Olcott, in some measure, the advantage he had had in being unconcerned, merely consultative, detached. He was troubled by more than the vulnerability of his name. He was worried for Miller, for Linkenhoker, for the people who had been most deeply involved in the Aereon project over the years. “They’ve got not only their time and money tied up in this, they’ve got their whole ego tied up in it. Suppose it proves necessary to tell a person like Miller that the machine just won’t hack it, that it just won’t do it? How do you tell him? Yet I may have to tell him something like that. That’s what I’m paid to do. It may not work within the laws of nature. Sheer wishing will not make something go. Wearing the hair shirt a little tighter just won’t do. I’m paid to give him a completely unemotional, objective assessment of that aircraft, and that is exactly the way it’s going to be. There’s a high probability that the outcome will be negative. I do sometimes wonder what people like Miller are going to do if this thing fails.”
Miller, now, at the cafeteria table, was wearing a black tie covered with small orange tigers. On the field, earlier, he had been wearing an orange-and-black Princeton baseball cap. Among all the other things Miller was, he was an old grad, an old Tiger, a glint in the eye of Annual Giving. That was why the aerobody was painted orange, and why its stripes and markings were black. The over-all name for the development of the 26 was Project Tiger. Olcott, looking out the window and over the main runway, seemed to be contemplating something that was some distance above the horizon. Miller was taking the opportunity to remind everyone about the crucial importance of security at this time. “To any question say, ‘We’re not at liberty to talk about our tests.’ Fend off people with cameras.”
Olcott turned back to the group. “Fix the thrust meter,” he said. “Fix the control-position transducer so it doesn’t slip. See why the engine is popping. Maybe new plugs are needed. I’d like a smaller parachute, an eight-pound chest chute. Inspect everything thoroughly, especially the prop. Investigate but don’t change the tab gearing. Put a tape recorder in the cockpit if possible. The next time we go, we’re going to try to do Task 5.”
MILLER HAD LONG SINCE discovered the hole in the fence between religion and superstition. All week long, as he worried and as he watched the weather, he looked for omens. When he learned that a major reunion of American airship men would be held at Lakehurst on June 26 and 27 next, he shivered with hopeful presentiment. The aircraft registration number of Aereon 26, boldly painted on its side, was N2627. The weather forecast for Saturday, March 6th, was more than promising. All the mechanical work Olcott had asked for had been done. So word went out on Friday, through the Aereon answering service, that the test group should meet at NAFEC at five-thirty the following morning. Reaching into a pocket, Miller took out his daily appointment book. It was called the Success Agenda Seven-Star Diary, and it included a fortune message for each day. Turning the page, Miller read the message for March 6, 1971. It said, “The mocker’s arrow turns back like a boomerang.”
Jack Olcott and his wife, Hope, happened to be giving a dinner party March 5th, as they had on the night before the first lift-off, six months before. Olcott mixed himself an aquatini—water with an olive in it—and after dinner he passed cordials around and said to his guests, “I hope you won’t consider me rude, and I hope I won’t break up the conversation, but I have a very early morning appointment and I have to retire for the night.” He got up at four, and took fifteen minutes to dress, choosing a blue blazer, a blue-and-gold button-down striped shirt, his royal-blue tie with fleurs-de-lis, gray flannel trousers, and a pair of defeated, broken-down loafers with flapping soles. In the blazer’s lapel was a small set of wings, emblematic of his membership in the secret society of Quiet Birdmen. At four-thirty, he parked his car at Morristown Airport, and shovelled an aging snowdrift from the apron of a T-hangar. He rolled out a Beechcraft Travelair, climbed in, and took off. His route south passed above McGuire Air Force Base. The McGuire approach controller said to him, “Are you going home late or getting up early?” Olcott gave the controller a straight answer. Crossing the Pine Barrens, he ate a box breakfast that his wife had packed—crullers and coffee, meat-loaf sandwiches. At five-thirty, he raised the galactic blue lights of NAFEC.
The big hangar was crowded. The 26 was nestled like an orange-dyed egg between the wing and tail fin of a Convair 880, a four-engine commercial jet roughly the size of a 707 or a DC-8. Around the 26 was a nonagon of gold nylon cord, strung among nine wooden stanchions. Linkenhoker, inside the barricade, was finishing up the preflight inspection. (“I had one major thing in my mind,” he said later. “How might I feel if through some fault in the aircraft it cracked up and we lost a man? This was the foremost thought in my mind the whole time we were down there. I know one thing now: I’ll never be placed in a position where I have to take complete responsibility for a man’s life again. The design was good, but, nevertheless, the over-all putting together of the aircraft was mine, and that presented a hell of a feeling, I’ll tell you. I thought, Here we are using an unaccepted structure and an uncertified engine, and we have low prior knowledge of the vehicle’s flight characteristics. It presented a rather dismal picture in my mind. Fortunately, we were so damned busy—the buildup to the tests was so great—that I didn’t have much time to think.”) Everything seemed right with the aircraft and its engine—eleven hundred and one pounds minus Olcott, center of gravity fifty point three five per cent, examined and ready to go. Linkenhoker began to remove the gold cord. John Kukon, who had no official role to perform, had got up in the middle of the night and come to NAFEC anyway, unable to resist seeing this particular outing. Olcott, now in his test-pilot clothes, slot pockets bristling with stubby pencils, was telling Kukon stories about experimental airplanes he had known and interesting troubles they had had. There had been one in India, for example, “with a classical aileron wing-bending flutter problem” that always developed at just so many miles per hour. Olcott would accelerate the plane until he got a nice, pronounced flutter going. With a high-speed camera he would take pictures of the flutter. He also told a story about a plane that had recently crashed in a bizarre way, yielding three survivors. If these were parables, they were to Olcott himself subliminal. His manner was, as always, calm and precise. He asked Kukon what he thought about the popping in the engine. Small power plants like that were not unlike model-aircraft engines, about which there was very little that Kukon did not know. Kukon told him not to worry. The 26 had a two-cycle engine, like a chain saw or an outboard, developing a great deal of horsepower for its weight. Two-cycle engines run on combined gas and oil, lubricating themselves as they go along, and just the right amount of air has to be mixed with this fuel to produce maximum horsepower. If the mixture is too lean, horsepower declines, and—more important—the engine can develop too much heat and destroy itself. If the mixture is too rich, horsepower declines also, but the engine functions well. One sign of a rich mixture is that the engine occasionally, harmlessly, pops. Olcott was used to flying four-cycle engines, and that, of course, was another story altogether. Popping in a four-cycle engine could be a symptom of catastrophic trouble. With a two-cycle engine, though, the best ratio for the fuel-air mixture was just a little way over on the safe side of the power peak—popping now and again, like corn on a stove.
Olcott thank
ed Kukon and said he felt relieved of that problem. The tall, telescopic doors moved apart. The Aereon was rolled toward the breaking day. Emerging from beneath the Convair 880, the 26 seemed small to the point of absurdity, with its little chain-saw-type engine mounted above the rear like a horsefly sitting on the head of a pin. Minuscule beside the giant airplane, the Aereon was hard to imagine at full scale, but if it ever grew to its ultimate conceptual dimensions it would not be able to insert into this big hangar a great deal more than its nose, for it would be the size of the Hindenburg and the Graf Zeppelin placed together in the shape of a T, with superstructure filled in to form an immense rigid delta. A couple of dozen Convair 880s could fit inside it. Linkenhoker, standing on an iron stool, primed the Aereon’s engine, and tugged at a blade of the new propeller. The engine eventually coughed, ignited, and racketed against the walls of NAFEC. Olcott closed the hatch, radioed for permission to move, and routinely went up Taxiway Bravo toward the head of the runway.
