by John McPhee
For stopwatch timing and for photography, Miller, Putman, and others were delivered by station wagon to various points on the airfield. Fire and crash vehicles were operating on both sides of the runway this time—yellow lights, red lights flashing everywhere. The morning was pale blue, clear, and fine. The sun was above the horizon, its light streaming to the west. “This is a day the Lord has made,” Miller said. “Let us rejoice and be glad in it. It’s just ideal. No wind. Dry. Clear. This day is a gift.” Olcott was facing west, at the head of the runway. Cleared, he accelerated, rotated, and lifted into the air. He climbed to forty feet and levelled off. He tried a coördinated bank and gentle turn to the left. It went well. He did the same to the right. The 26 responded as he had expected it would. It did not seem to have a tendency to roll excessively. The roll damping was light. He got a promising sense of the roll-control effectiveness of the vehicle. Reducing power over the seven-thousand-foot markers, he descended, landed, and taxied to the turnaround block at the runway’s western end. The brief flight had been Olcott’s warmup. He now felt that he had the vehicle all around him. NAFEC had asked him to take off to the east if he ever intended to leave the airspace of the runway, because the terrain at the eastern end of the NAFEC reservation had a dirt road winding through it and was particularly accessible to fire trucks and crash vehicles. Olcott was now facing east. He called the tower and said this was Aereon 2627 requesting permission to lift off and make a circuit of the field. Two miles of broad runway reached out before him. The parallel taxiway, where the fire trucks would race him, was to his right. To the right of the taxiway and a little more than halfway down was the great dark block of the NAFEC hangar, its near wall lined with tiers of offices behind shining plate-glass windows that reflected the low rays of the sun. The fire trucks and other cars were lined up and ready. Olcott showed them a raised thumb, moved the engine up to four thousand revolutions per minute, and left the head of the runway. He watched the black tape marks on his windshield, rotated, established his angle of attack, and went into the air. He climbed to forty feet. This time, however, he did not level off. Still in a position to abort the flight with ease, still in an environment he had been in many times before, he now had to decide whether the rate of climb was sufficient to warrant an advance to where he had not been. He had hoped for a rate of climb of two hundred, or even two hundred and fifty, feet per minute, but the engine was running flat out and he was getting a hundred and fifty. He figured that a hundred feet per minute, or less, would be so marginal that he would have to go down. This was, for sure, the inverse frontier—an exploration of the lower, most economical limits of aerodynamic possibility. Some commercial jets climb six thousand feet per minute. He watched the rate-of-climb indicator. It was holding at one hundred and fifty, positive rate of climb—positive enough for him to decide to stay with it. He put in a little rudder and made a slight right turn. Moving obliquely, he would add something to the time when he would be near enough to the runway to get to it if the engine failed. He was flying directly toward the NAFEC hangar, however, and NAFEC sternly told him to head somewhere else at once. He was about eighty feet in the air. If his engine failed, he could not have hit the NAFEC building even if he tried. The building was half a mile away. The 26 had a glide ratio of about five to one. From that altitude, the 26 could not have glided more than four hundred feet before scraping the ground. Moreover, the 26 was so light that if it had hit the building head on it might have had difficulty breaking the glass. Olcott corrected his turn, though, and continued to climb slowly to the east. It was like driving a station wagon stuffed with cordwood up the side of a mountain in first gear. He was getting there. He knew he would make it over the hill. Meanwhile, there was nothing to do but be patient. He reached a hundred feet, a hundred and fifty feet, two hundred feet, all the while reminding himself: Do not change anything. Stay at this airspeed. Hold the controls with constant pressure. Let the vehicle do the work. These tests are important, they must be concluded. You knew all along that the vehicle was never going to behave like a homesick angel. It just wasn’t going to climb like that. Within the margins of our considerations was a poor rate of climb.
The 26 was almost over the end of the runway, and was two hundred and fifty feet in the air. Seen from the ground and from a mile behind, it appeared to be a small black diamond moving into the sun. “Fantastic!” John Kukon said. “It’s got a lot higher nose attitude than I expected, but if that’s the way it is, so be it.”
Olcott was now about to try the first significant turn the 26 had ever made. He could not with certainty predict what would happen. He did not have the altitude he had planned for, and he had to ask himself a lot of questions. He had to keep looking for and selecting places where he might set the Aereon down if the engine stopped, or if much of anything else went wrong. You can’t wait until the engine quits to decide how to handle the situation. It’s too late then. You have to know what you’re going to do before you have to do it. So you are continually saying to yourself: What will I do if this happens? What will I do if that happens? If the engine quits now, I’ll put the stick forward to make sure I’m going downhill, like the boy on a bicycle who doesn’t want to pedal anymore. He’s got to be pointed downhill or he’ll topple over. Get the nose down. Establish the glide. Keep the airspeed the same, so you have control. Then go into one of those preselected landing spots. The engine is the primary consideration. Stability is the secondary consideration. The Aereon is not a broom balancing on the palm of your hand. It is a stable vehicle. Nevertheless, you do not yet know to what extent it is stable. As long as you don’t disturb anything—as long as you move into any control input very slowly and smoothly—the chances are that you’ll never upset the dynamics of the vehicle so drastically that you cannot cope with it. I am two hundred and fifty feet over the end of the runway. If the engine fails here, there is no way I can turn around and get back into the runway. If I were to try, I’d probably lose control of the aircraft. So what do I do? Where would I go? The dirt road. It is sort of a hard dirt road. I believe I could get in there. Maybe damage the nose gear but not do too much harm. I could negotiate that landing.
He went into the turn. He made it shallow, because he had never been in one before. His mind raced with the conditions and problems of the turn, addressing himself, addressing the aircraft. Let’s take it nice and easy. Let’s not depart too much from what we’ve done before. Here we go. This is the first time we’ve really got a sustained angle of bank. Really a turn. We know from the computer simulations that if the angle of bank gets a little too high, and the rudders are not coordinated just right, the vehicle will want to continue to the left and will be difficult to control. That would be disconcerting at low altitude. There’s a straightforward way out, with use of rudders and manipulation of the stick.
He had taped one end of a bit of black yarn to the outside of the cockpit canopy, and now he watched it closely. Air should always be flowing straight back, no matter what maneuver the aircraft might be making. If the yarn were to move sidewise, the 26 would be going into a yaw. The yarn was straight. The sideslip angle was zero—just what it was supposed to be.
The 26, continuing to climb, had turned through an arc of ninety degrees and was heading north. Olcott no longer needed the dirt road. If trouble developed now, he could probably get around to the runway, heading west, if he had to. It was like trying to cross a stream from one bare rock to the next bare rock, trying not to fall in. Meanwhile, in addition to and above all else, he was supposed to be collecting test data. What is the rate of climb now? What is the indicated airspeed? What is the angle of attack? What is the control-position transducer saying? How am I doing? How am I doing relative to what I want to be doing? How much will this turn hurt the rate of climb?
The 26 completed its wide arc to a hundred and eighty degrees and was headed west, parallel to, but considerably north of, the runway. The rate of climb had remained steady. The ship was four hundred feet up now,
and it continued to rise until Olcott levelled off, as he had planned to, at five hundred feet. Data now flowed from the instruments. The maximum speed, full throttle, was sixty-four knots—a little better than Olcott had expected. He planned his route over the western end of the reservation, telling himself not to fly over the houses there, because that was not good professional technique in an aircraft that had a limited flight history and a configuration that had never flown before. I’ll just have to go into the shrubbery if anything happens here, he told himself, but he swung into a perfect hundred-and-eighty-degree turn and was now pointed again into the sun. He was five hundred feet over the broad white stripes from which he had begun his takeoff. He had completed a circuit of the field.
“Wow!” Miller said, shooting straight up with his Nikon Super 8. “This is fantastic!” The fire trucks stopped running around. All the ground vehicles stopped. Everyone watched the sky.
Olcott now had the Atlantic Ocean spread before him, wide marshes and bays, the skyline of Atlantic City to his right, Absecon Bay straight ahead, and to the left the Brigantine National Wildlife Refuge. Almost below him was the Garden State Parkway, a superior alternative to the dirt road as an emergency landing strip. Northbound or southbound, the 26 could blend right in with the cars there, if necessary, at an identical speed. Olcott found the scope of his view extraordinary, because there were no wings around him to impede it.
Olcott again circled the field, this time reducing his air-speed to fifty-nine knots to see how the 26 would handle there. Then he went around again, at fifty-two knots, and again, at fifty. Each circuit was about eight miles.
“It’s slowly sinking in,” Miller said. “He’s not going to come down.”
In subsequent days, Olcott would fly the 26 right out to the end of its engine time. It would be tracked by NAFEC’s theodolite, yielding, for two hundred dollars an hour, precise airspeed data. Olcott would do Dutch rolls and steady sideslips, kicking out hard with his rudders. He would do aileron rolls to the right, aileron rolls to the left, rudder kicks right, rudder kicks left, as if he were practicing swimming. He would climb, slow down, dive, speed up—a fundamental longitudinal mode, the phugoid motion. Investigating the phugoid, he would go into a steady sideslip and then “put in a doublet—just to get the thing excited.”
“That’s how we lost one of the Aereon 4s,” Linkenhoker would say, biting a toothpick, watching from the ground, and then, perhaps because he was unable just to stay there and watch, Linkenhoker would jump into a Piper Cherokee and chase the 26 into the sky. I went with him. The 26 seemed to float beside us, over the field, pinewoods, the parkway—with tidal estuaries, salt marshes, and the sea beyond. Shafts of sunlight sprayed down from behind clouds in which the sun kept appearing as a silver disc, and, moving in and out of these palisades of light, the 26 went into smooth roll angles and controlled yaws—part airplane, part airship, floating, flying, settling in to landings light and slow. “Aereon is great,” said NAFEC’s chief executive officer. “Just look at it and you can see the potential. What made New York great? What made Chicago great? The carrying of freight.” One could almost see New Yorks and Chicagos springing up under the slow-moving shadow of the Aereon as it flew. A subtler and perhaps more durable endorsement had come from NAFEC beforehand, however, on the day of the first circuit of the field. Flying on and on—the first circuiting flight lasted more than half an hour—Olcott looked up at one point to see a Starlifter approaching the field. The two aircraft—one weighing eleven hundred pounds, the other weighing seventy tonswere more or less on a collision course. “Tell them to give me plenty of room,” Olcott said to the tower. “I cannot tolerate their wake.” The tower told the Starlifter to turn right, go south, and keep on going south indefinitely. “The traffic on your left,” the tower explained, “is an aerobody —a wingless vehicle—proceeding northwest.”
THE LAST TIME I saw John Fitzpatrick, I rode with him in his tow truck from Neshaminy Esso to a shopping mall, where he changed a flat tire for a woman who had telephoned him an hour and fifteen minutes before. When the call came, he had been adjusting a set of points in a two-year-old Mustang, and he had gone back to work on them and then had drifted off into a long elegy on the grace of naval airships. Finally, he shut the hood of the Mustang and remembered the woman at the mall. Even as his truck approached her, he was strafed with bitter complaints. Fitzpatrick said to her, “When something like this happens, the person it happens to tends to be conscious only of his own problem.” Kneeling, he began vigorously to spin nuts. Driving away, he said to me, “That woman and I have no common basis for communication.” Before long, Neshaminy Esso had a new owner. Fitzpatrick returned to New Jersey, to a job at Autobahn Motors, on Route 1, near Princeton.
The last time I saw Monroe Drew, he showed me four small sketches he had drawn of a rigid airship to be called Aereon 500. He said he had designed it to run on solar heat caught in a parabolic mirror. Its configuration consisted of four cylindroid hulls bunched together like four sticks of dynamite within an over-all airframe that was deltoid in shape. The lifting gas would be not helium but hot air, also produced by the parabolic mirror, except on cloudy days, when an alternate heat source would be required. Powdered-graphite spray coating would insulate the inside of the hull against the solar heat, which would be thermostatically controlled at about five hundred degrees. Among other things, Drew said, Aereon 500 could serve as a flying bakery. He suggested strongly that he might still bring force to bear that would unseat Miller as president of Aereon. “Bill pays lip service to Solomon Andrews and the airships, but Bill is just not an airship man,” Drew said. Drew had become Senior Training Adviser for Medicaid in the State of New Jersey. The Fourth Presbyterian Church of Trenton no longer existed.
Jürgen Bock, the German physicist who developed the deltoid configuration with John Fitzpatrick and the Valley Forge computer, had been far more interested in theory than in experimental trivia, or so Miller once told me. Bock had lost interest, Miller said, and had gone home to Germany. Charlie Mills, the last time I saw him, removed from his desk drawer a letter from his friend Jürgen in Germany showing sketches of hypersonic lifting bodies that Bock was developing for a company called Erno, G.m.b.H. Charlie Mills, once Air Operations Officer for the naval airships at Lakehurst, was still teaching German at Hamilton Township East High School, outside Trenton, and was still using Windex to clean his glasses. He put them on, and looked over my shoulder at Bock’s sketches. “If Miller ever saw these things, he would die,” Mills said. Bock’s new aircraft were wingless. From the side, they looked like fat pumpkin seeds. From above, they were deltoid.
John Kukon, in the Long Track at Princeton, was testing the control effectiveness of a model helicopter he had built with coaxial rotors. They counterrotated. There was no rotor at all on the tail. He was also trying to defeat problems associated with tilt-wing airplanes when they come close to the ground. Lift force decreases about twenty per cent and controls get soggy, and the eighty-five-thousand-dollar tilt-wing model that Kukon made was apparently not immune to these difficulties. What Kukon built for the university between nine and five was only part of what Kukon built. He was building all the time, and much of the time he was at home. There he had become interested in the problems involved in making model airplanes so light that they would almost be lighter than air-airplanes with fuselages two feet long and wingspans greater than that but with an over-all weight of one gram, or less than one-third the weight of a penny. When Kukon first made such an airplane and picked it up, he could not feel its weight on his hand. When he walked with it, he had to use a hesitation step, or the air the model was moving through would crush it. These aircraft were almost lyrical in their debt to structure. They were made of balsa wood twelve one-thousandths of an inch thick, had wing coverings of microfilm one ten-thousandth of an inch thick, and were held together by tungsten bracing wires too slender to be seen in most light. Yet they supported the torsion and tension of long rubber ban
ds wound two or three thousand times. Propellers turned so slowly they could be strobed by a human eye. They turned one revolution per second or, toward the end of a flight, one revolution every two seconds. Cruising speed was just over half a mile an hour. Rate of climb was about fifteen feet per minute. International championships were held for indoor models of this type once every two years. The 1970 championships took place in a salt mine in Rumania, the 1972 championships in an airship hangar in England—big rooms with still air, where the object of the competition was simply to remain airborne. Kukon for many years had ignored this field, because he viewed it as more a matter of structure than of aerodynamics, since there was no limit on how light a model could be. It all seemed too simple. The lightest structure would fly the longest. Then, in 1971, the Federation Aeronautique Internationale decided that indoor models in this category should weigh a minimum of one gram (the rubber motor was not included), and the rule change sent Kukon into his basement, for now it was a matter of structure and aerodynamics—something complex enough to be worth the while. He ground his own rubber cutters and cut his own rubber. He sanded down his balsa wood until it was translucent. He outlined the wing structure in strips of balsa that were thirty one-thousandths of an inch square in section. Onto still water he poured cellulose nitrate, which formed a film like an oil slick. Floating on the water, the film dried. Very carefully, Kukon lifted it with the aid of a wet wooden frame. A week later, after the film had stabilized, he placed it across the balsa structure of the wings—wings so frail they would have drooped like basset ears if they had not been held up by the tungsten wires. Propellers were similarly outlined in balsa and covered with film. The film was so thin—one-tenth the thickness of Saran Wrap—that light could not pass through it in the way that light ordinarily goes through a transparent substance. Instead, it refracted, reflected, caromed wildly, and split itself into all the colors of the spectrum in shimmering iridescence. When these airplanes flew, they were fantastically beautiful, slowly circling, climbing, spraying color in all directions. They flew, most notably, in Hangar No. 1 at Lakehurst—a giant barn a thousand feet long, almost two hundred feet high, stee-structured, sheathed in wood. This had been the hangar of the Hindenburg, which had burned just outside. Hangar No. 1 had been built for the big rigid airships, and now, in their continuing absence, the all-day twilight of the hangar was sometimes weirdly alive with eight, nine, or even ten almost invisible airplanes climbing slowly toward the roof, each barely heavier than air. In folding lawn chairs, the model-builders sat below. They held stopwatches. Around their necks were magnifying goggles, which they needed in order to see parts and wires as they prepared their models for flight. At launch, they carried their planes as if they were holding nitroglycerin. Sometimes an accident happened. There was a weakness in the fuselage, say, and the tight, knobby wound-up rubber band would snap the plane to bits. All the wreckage—of a model more than two feet long and two feet in wingspan—could be placed in the center of the palm of one hand. Flight occurred in three parts: the climb, the cruise, the dead-slow, hanging descent. The propellers turned like the arms of ballet swimmers, throwing off flashes of color. When the planes rose above a hundred and fifty feet, they were so hard to see that the competitors followed them with binoculars. If the aircraft got into trouble in the high girders, helium-filled balloons were sent up on long fishing lines and with the balloons the fliers expertly moved their planes into new courses of flight. The competitors brought their own helium to Lakehurst. For a time, Kukon, like everyone else, built single-wing airplanes. He suspected, however, that he could probably build a better airplane in a radically unconventional configuration. With the help of another engineer in Princeton, he worked out an optimum design in terms of wing area, wing loading, gross weight with rubber, ceiling height, a revised structure, ratio of motor weight to over-all weight, and forward speed. Many times over, he built his new configuration. His airplanes now had two wings, one forward, one aft, each with tip dihedrals. His airplanes were strong enough to carry more rubber than any competitor carried. He gave the rubber thirty-one hundred turns. The others always stopped at two thousand. The others included a building contractor, a five-and-ten-cent-store manager, assorted mechanical engineers, a welder, a retired Navy commander. They were empirical builders. Most of them had been flying indoor models for twenty and thirty years. When Kukon, a novice, arrived at Lakehurst with his awkward, outsize, two-wing aircraft, he inspired half-hidden chuckles all the way down a thousand feet of floor. He flew six, nine, fourteen minutes at first, less than anyone else there. He kept improving his techniques of building and flying, however, and eventually his models were flying twenty-nine minutes at a time. But that would not do. His competitors were five to seven minutes better than he. Giving up his unconventional aircraft, he reverted to a single-wing design, and soon he was up there with the best of the others, making flights of thirty-four and a half minutes, nudging into the zone of record time.
