by John McPhee
For twelve years, Everett Linkenhoker had literally welded together the fixed assets of Aereon—two prototype rigid airships, the one rampantly empirical, the other shaped by computer, the one blown over by the wind, the other successfully tested. As the test program ended, he knew that it signified an end of things for him, too. “I feel simultaneously the success of it all and the emptiness of the beginning of the end. In my mind are two conflicting trains of thought, a buildup and letdown all at one time. It unsettles me. I have to go out and rearrange my whole life.” He was a welder, not an aircraft plant. He could hardly build a big rigid Aereon. He was an airship rigger. There were no airships to rig. He removed the 26 from NAFEC and supervised its storage—first, and briefly, at Red Lion, and then in a hangar at still another obscure airfield in south-central New Jersey. For weeks, he stayed close by the 26 and worried over what he was going to do. He stayed so long that he became maintenance manager at the airport. He completely hid the 26 from public view under an enormous black tarpaulin.
John Weber, the structural specialist, had an analogous problem, and it led him to a far more exotic solution. His license from the Academy of Aeronautics and his advanced degree in aeronautical engineering suddenly added up to nothing much but unemployment. Aircraft development had become virtually a no-opportunity field, forsaken by the federal government. Weber did not need a skywriter to spell this out for him. Bethpage, Marietta, Santa Monica, and Seattle had turned into burning ghats for his kind. So he bought into the Charles H. Dennis Cesspool Corporation, Fifth Avenue and Sunrise Highway, Bay Shore, New York. Readily, he developed expertise in the installation and cleaning of cesspools and septic tanks. Occasionally, he moonlighted for the Federal Aviation Administration, inspecting airplanes.
Bill Putman was working on advanced helicopter concepts and vertical-takeoff-and-lift projects at Princeton University. He had designed some of the helicopter models that Kukon was building there. Government contracts had atrophied so rapidly that the university’s aerospace department was clawing hard for survival. After contemplating where the money might have gone, certain senior professors had developed serious interest in air pollution, or, as they called it, “aerothermochemical processes.” A name change was pondered. The Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Sciences was thinking of becoming the Department of Aerospace and Ecology.
John Olcott had been assigned to explore “new-business development” for his firm, Aeronautical Research Associates of Princeton. He was seeking ways for the company to make its abilities negotiable beyond the confines of aeronautics. Meanwhile, he continued his contracted research and consulting work, test-flying anything interesting that came along. For the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, he was evaluating the use of spoilers on general-aviation aircraft. For Bell Laboratories, he had been flying a Cessna 337 with special wing-tip antennae for measurement work involving Safeguard antiballistic missiles. He had also been asked to evaluate a prototype two-engine low-horsepower airplane developed with private funds by a free-lance entrepreneur. Rapidly, Olcott’s role in Aereon had thinned, the job for which he was hired having been completed in all but its consultant aftermath. When Miller had passed around finger-press-appliqué self-sticking tigers for everyone to wear after Aereon 26 had made its initial circuits of the field, Olcott smiled amiably, accepted one, and set it on a table. “This has been a very good day,” Miller said. “This is a good moment.” Olcott smiled, and said nothing. “I’m pleased with the way things turned out,” he said later. “And I’m also pleased for the other people who are much more emotionally involved with Aereon than I am. To me, the challenge was ‘Can you plan something with due consideration for all the risks, all the contingencies, all the limitations on the problem? Was your planning accurate enough? Were you good enough in your planning to be able to implement it without too many deviations?’ There’s no point in jumping up and down for joy. It was a pleasure to know that I had done my task professionally. The flight went as planned. We achieved all the objectives we were looking for. The implementation was about as complete as one could have hoped for.”
Miller alone continued to work full time for Aereon. He still lived in a garden apartment off U.S. 1, and led Bible-study groups at Princeton University, and in the summertime worked as a volunteer for the Children’s Sand and Surf Mission. The tests of the deltoid Aereon had been determinative, but no one could say in what sense. An experimental aircraft had at one moment been doing Dutch rolls and controlled phugoid oscillations in the here and now. In the next moment, it was a museum piece hidden away in a secret hangar. The group that had been around it dispersed. Months went by. A year went by. Two years. Aereon attracted interest but no developmental contract, no developmental funds. The summary result of all tests, all flights, all briefings and debriefings, all computations, two configurations, three propellers, one founder, four presidents, twelve years, nearly one and a half million expended dollars, and a hundred miles of circuit flight had been reduced to data that could be expressed on a single sheet of paper. Miller travelled around the country holding up the data like a lamp.
BY JOHN McPHEE
The Founding Fish
Annals of the Former World
Irons in the Fire
The Ransom of Russian Art
Assembling California
Looking for a Ship
The Control of Nature
Rising from the Plains
Heirs of General Practice
Table of Contents
La Place de la Concorde Suisse
In Suspect Terrain
Basin and Range
Giving Good Weight
Coming into the Country
The Survival of the Bark Canoe
Pieces of the Frame
The Curve of Binding Energy
The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed
Encounters with the Archdruid
The Crofter and the Laird
Levels of the Game
A Roomful of Hovings
The Pine Barrens
Oranges
The Headmaster
A Sense of Where You Are
The John McPhee Reader
The Second John McPhee Reader
Copyright © 1973 by John McPhee
All rights reserved
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
www.fsgbooks.com
Designed by Paula Weiner
eISBN 9780374708627
First eBook Edition : June 2011
Published in 1973 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
First paperback edition, 1992
The text of this book originally appeared in The New Yorker, and was developed with the editorial counsel of William Shawn and Robert Bingham.
Library of Congress catalog card number: 72-84783
