Supersonic Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age (Novels of the Jet Age)

by Walter J. Boyne

  There was a general silence, everyone thinking much the same thing. Steiner had named some heavy hitters. If Mikoyan and Tupolev were supporting a supersonic transport, one would get built, for sure. Any country that could beat the United States into space could also beat it in the race for an SST.

  Schairer shook his head and went on, “How about the British and the French? What do we hear from them? Vance, you are close to a lot of people in Great Britain. What are they saying?”

  “They are also interested, for sure. It is the only way they can take the lead back from the United States in transport aviation. They are still smarting from the Comet, of course, and that makes them a little gun-shy. But I know that they’ve had an official British government advisory committee on the supersonic transport for at least five years. They’ve got the big airframe and engine builders on it, and spent pretty close to three million dollars in research. But one thing for sure—they are not thinking about Mach 3.0. They are sticking with aluminum structures, so far, and that means Mach 2.0.”

  “Interesting! Thanks, Vance. Now how about the froggies? What are they doing after the Caravelle?”

  Schairer, like most American engineers, had regarded the French success with their first jet airliner, the Caravelle, with something between amusement and disdain. It just seemed improper for France to try to sell transport airplanes to Americans, even good ones like the Caravelle.

  Pennell spoke up again. “Send me to the next Paris Air Show, and I’ll tell you all about it. Sud Aviation is going to have a model of their proposed SST there.”

  Wells’s quiet voice came through the room. “Good idea, Maynard, except it will be me taking a peek!” He then went on, “Regardless of what anybody else is doing, we’ve got to do some serious thinking on this. We can use our proposals for the B-70 and the TFX competitions as a baseline.”

  Boeing had competed for the Mach 3.0 bomber contract that North American had won and also for the advanced tactical fighter contract that General Dynamics had won with the F-111. Many people thought that Boeing had had the best entry in both competitions, but because it already had so much business with the KC-135 and B-52, the contracts were awarded to runners-up. That’s what Boeing believed, and firmly.

  Wells stood up, saying, “One thing for sure, until the airlines buy enough airplanes for us to recover our costs on the 707 and 727, we cannot spend much money or time on the SST. But George, why don’t you subcontract the work out to Vance here, and that way we can keep a tight control, and nobody will be trying to build an SST empire at Boeing.”

  “Yes, sir, will do.”

  Meetings never lasted long at Boeing—there was always too much to do back in each man’s office. There was a little more discussion, and as the others left the room Schairer waved the two Shannons back to their seats.

  “You heard Mr. Wells, George. Do you have the capacity to start the initial studies on the SST for us?”

  Vance felt like he was over the barrel. There was absolutely nothing he could tell Schairer about his work for Lockheed—it was beyond top secret. But this was a golden opportunity for Harry.

  “George, you know I’m finishing up some work for you. And I’ve got a contract with Lockheed that is going to keep me pretty busy. But Harry is breaking out from some of his own work with Convair and McDonnell. I can accept a contract on the basis that Harry, not me, will be your primary contact. We’ll work together, of course, but it will be Harry’s baby.”

  Schairer nodded. “That’s what I expected, Vance. And if Harry does as well on this as he’s done on past projects, like the refueling boom, we’ll beat the Commies and the Brits and the French on the SST.”

  FLYING BACK COMMERCIAL would have been a lot safer and far faster, but Harry elected to fly back with Vance in his C-45. There was something magical about droning along at low altitudes down the Pacific coast, watching the seemingly endless chain of huge mountains pass by on the left. The best part was the communication. The C-45 was far too noisy to hold a normal conversation—you could make yourself heard by leaning over, but it was easier to use the intercom. Then you could stare straight ahead at the horizon, check the instrument panel, or gawk at one of the myriad lakes passing by and still talk directly to the other person.

  Vance’s voice crackled through the headset, “What do you think, Son?”

  “I was just trying to guess who our American competitors will be. Douglas and Lockheed for sure. I think Convair has its hands full with the 880.”

  “No, I don’t think Douglas will be a factor. It’s having plenty of problems with the DC-8. But Lockheed will be in there swinging with everything they’ve got. We’ll really have to watch our p’s and q’s to make sure we don’t piss anyone off at either Boeing or Lockheed. Working for both of them like this is murder. I don’t think they would do it for any other firm.”

  “They wouldn’t do it for any other person, Dad. It’s you that they turn to.”

  Vance double-clicked the intercom to acknowledge the compliment. He knew Harry was right, and he knew that in time Harry would gain their confidence in the same way that he had.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  February 20, 1962

  Cape Canaveral, Florida

  Although the NASA officials had been utterly courteous, making sure that he had all the information he needed and providing him a host to guide him through the launch, Vance Shannon had never felt more superfluous. He tried to put himself into John Glenn’s frame of mind, but it was difficult. Shannon had made many test flights in some pretty exotic airplanes, but never had he been in Glenn’s position, stuffed into a pressure suit, strapped in a seat, lying on his back facing upward, mounted on a rocket, and, once launched, having almost no control over the vehicle.

  His host, Dennis Cunneen, was standing by him, and Shannon pleaded, “Talk me through this, will you, Dennis? It’s a little difficult for an old-timer like me to comprehend.”

  Cunneen, a veteran of the two previous Mercury launches, said, “Sure, I’ll try to tell you what is happening as it happens. Sometimes I’ll be shouting in your ear, but I’ll keep you posted.”

  Glenn was the third American scheduled to be sent into space, following Alan Shepard’s epic first suborbital flight and Gus Grissom’s eventful, if trouble-plagued, second suborbital flight. But Glenn was the first American who would attempt to orbit the Earth, a feat Yuri Gagarin had accomplished almost a year earlier, on April 12, 1961.

  Shannon had met the charismatic Glenn some months before in Washington, introduced by Shannon’s old friend James Webb, the NASA administrator. After President Kennedy’s announcement on May 25, 1961, that the United States was going to the moon, Webb had been NASA’s master politician, maneuvering through every congressional or political thicket to push the program forward, ensuring that funding for the lunar missions would be seamless. One of his chief devices was the brilliant use of the seven Mercury astronauts—M. Scott Carpenter, Leroy G. “Gordo” Cooper Jr., Glenn, Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Walter M. Schirra Jr., Shepard, and Donald K. “Deke” Slayton—as front men. When confronted with outstanding, dedicated men such as these, the average congressional staffers melted, willing to trade their members’ votes for photographs with the astronauts’ arms around their shoulders.

  It was an extraordinarily select group, and Glenn was one of the best at reaching out. He had a friendly grin, a sure grasp of the facts, and an impressive military background. Like Shannon’s own boys, Glenn was highly decorated, with 59 combat missions flying Marine Vought Corsairs in World War II and another 190 missions in Korea, 27 of them on exchange duty with the USAF flying the F-86. There he had shot down three MiG-15s in the last nine days of the fighting.

  Shannon listened to Cunneen as he watched the smooth operation of the center closely, forcing himself to think what Glenn had to be feeling, had to be thinking, as he prepared himself to be the third American in space, flying Friendship 7, the Mercury spacecraft that was now mounted on top of a
rocket modified from the Atlas intercontinental ballistic missile.

  Inside Friendship 7, Glenn had to muster all his patience and discipline. The flight had originally been scheduled for January 27, but bad weather had forced a cancellation. Bad weather would also cause scrubs on February 13, 14, and 16 before the flight was rescheduled for the twentieth. Now the Florida sky was a clear blue and the temperature a perfect seventy degrees, but the scheduled 7:30 A.M. liftoff was plagued by a series of minor delays. A bolt had broken when the spacecraft hatch was closed, causing a forty-minute delay. This delay caused another as more fuel was added. Then a valve in the system stuck, and it seemed like there might be a cancellation, and as soon as it was fixed, a tracking station went down. But now the countdown was on and Glenn thought once again about the funny but frightening astronaut joke— he was sitting on top of thousands of critical parts, all built by a low bidder.

  At 9:47 A.M. the countdown was completed and the Atlas belched forth its powerful flames, the vibrations pounding through the ground and air. Shannon felt them in his legs and arms and wondered what it must be like for Glenn strapped inside the very center of the movement.

  The room broke into cheers, people shouting, “Go, go, go,” when, after an interminable split second, the Atlas launched Glenn, his pulse rate 110 beats per minute, toward orbit. Inside the spacecraft, gripped by his pressure suit and slammed into his seat by g-forces, Glenn vibrated like a reed as the Atlas accelerated the Mercury spacecraft.

  Just as Cunnen said, “He’s about to reach his max-q—his maximum dynamic pressure,” Glenn called out, “It’s a little bumpy about here.”

  Shannon thought, I’ll bet it is, wondering at Glenn’s calm understatement.

  At two minutes and fourteen seconds after launch the controllers cheered and Cunneen said, “The booster engines have dropped. The escape tower will be next.”

  Sure enough, ten seconds later the escape tower, that fragile assembly designed to give the astronaut one last chance if the rocket malfunctioned, jettisoned.

  Cunneen said, “Glenn is pitched over now, and will be getting his first view of the horizon.”

  As if on cue, Glenn’s voice came on, saying, “It’s a beautiful sight looking eastward across the Atlantic.”

  Inside the control room, Shannon watched in awe as, only five minutes after launch, Friendship 7 was inserted into orbit, its speed more than 17,500 mph, at a maximum altitude of 162 miles. The controllers told Glenn that his trajectory was good for at least seven orbits, and Glenn gave only the standard reply, a short, “Roger.”

  Cunneen yelled, “Orbital speed is seventeen thousand, five hundred mph.”

  Shannon, who had once dove to 575 mph in a P-47, just shook his head.

  Cunneen edged over to a console that had been prepared for him and they sat down. Until then Shannon had been unaware of how badly his legs were aching. Now as he relaxed in the chair he realized that he had become as fully absorbed in the flight as the dozens of technicians and scientists manning consoles throughout the room. He watched them for a moment—it was like a gigantic human clock, with some of the figures permanently glued to their desks, while others moved from one console to the next. On the wall, the path of Friendship 7 was portrayed as a sinuous line arcing about the Earth, passing over the Atlantic, the Africa coastline, and, incredibly quickly, Africa itself.

  Time seemed to stand still for Shannon as Cunneen told him that Glenn was having some problems with his instruments. At that moment the astronaut opened his report of his first sunset in orbit with a single word, “Beautiful,” then went on to describe it at length. Shannon felt privileged to be there.

  The first orbit was almost trouble free, except for the instrument anomaly, with Glenn reporting seeing “fireflies” as he roared over Canton Island. As he passed over North America, Glenn reported that he had a yaw thruster causing attitude control problems.

  Someone brought water to Shannon’s table and he drank it greedily, not realizing until then just how parched his throat was. He wondered how Glenn was feeling.

  Glenn was feeling warm; the temperature in the space suit had climbed and a warning light told him that there was excess cabin humidity. Unknown to him, but apparent to the ground controllers, another problem, potentially fatal, had arisen. Still he was calm enough to joke with controllers about his flight time counting toward getting his flight pay this month. He was earning it for sure, as the autopilot had failed and he was controlling the Friendship 7 manually.

  Frowning, Cunneen said, “Vance, there may be trouble. The controls indicate that there is a problem with the retropack and it looks like the heat shield may be loose. They are telling him not to jettison the retropack as scheduled, but keep it in place to help hold the heat shield in position.”

  Shannon understood at once. A problem with the heat shield meant that Glenn would be incinerated on reentry. Shannon glanced at his watch and was shocked to see that four and one-half hours had passed since the launch.

  “He’s getting ready for reentry now.”

  Glenn fired his retrorockets, designed to slow him down for reentry, calling out, “Boy, feels like I’m going halfway back to Hawaii.”

  Six minutes later, Cuneen said, “He’s maneuvering the spacecraft for reentry, about fourteen degrees nose-up attitude.”

  Shannon watched the wall display, knowing that Glenn was descending over the United States, heading for splashdown in the Atlantic. As he passed over Canaveral, Glenn reported that he was flying the spacecraft manually and that there was, “a real fireball outside.”

  There was a general cheer as Glenn reported that he was deploying the drogue parachute at 35,000 feet. Minutes later he had splashed down in the Atlantic, about forty miles short of the planned spot. The destroyer USS Noa picked him up twenty-one minutes later.

  Shannon felt absolutely exhausted as Cunneen walked him through the crowd of cheering scientists and technicians.

  “I’ll tell you, Dennis, I’ve never been more impressed. What an achievement. Thanks so much for talking me through it.”

  “It’s just a start, Vance. You know if you’d been born twenty years later, you would have been an astronaut yourself.”

  Shannon shook his head, thinking, No, much as I admire Glenn and his comrades, I’d prefer to have my hand on a throttle and my feet on a rudder bar.

  But he just said, “Maybe so.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  April 26,1962

  Groom Lake, Nevada

  High-voltage tension crackled through the airfield, shorting good humor and fusing nerves. Every man in the gigantic organization on the field today was holding his breath for this first flight, the riskiest since Kitty Hawk. The revolutionary Lockheed A-12, its unpainted titanium structure gleaming like a modern sculpture in the early Nevada sunshine, not only was different from any previous plane; it also promised the greatest leap in aircraft performance in history—if this first genuine flight went off as planned.

  The day before, Lou Schalk’s taxi test caused some real worries. The plan was for him to lift off and fly for a mile or so no more than twenty feet off the ground. But as soon as the A-12 parted from the runway, it veered sharply to the right, and Schalk had to boot in left rudder. This set up a series of lateral oscillations that terrified him and everyone else watching. Chopping the throttles, he put the airplane back on the ground but disappeared from view in a cloud of dust. Hearts were pounding, sure that he had gone in, but in a few minutes the titanium nose came poking out of the dust cloud as Schalk taxied back.

  Everyone, especially Kelly Johnson, knew that the A-12 was going to be a dangerous airplane to fly—they just had not counted on it being this dangerous on its first hop. Danger was implicit in an aircraft that was going to fly higher and faster than any other and do it for sustained periods. This was no sprint airplane; it was a long-distance Mach 3.0 cruiser, and thanks to Kelly’s intuitive genius, the A-12 was intended to be almost invisible to radar. The radi
cal shape was dictated by the totally incompatible need for speed and stealth.

  Johnson maintained a notebook in which he entered events on a daily, sometimes hourly basis. Its closely spaced entries, so neatly written that they seemed typeset, were illuminated with his careful drawings. His very first vision of this incredible aircraft was the A-1, rejected by the CIA as too big and too visible to radar. There had been a series of alterations, and now they had the A-12, which, as Kelly noted to all, was almost an exact duplicate of the A-1, only larger.

  Kelly decided to use titanium in 85 percent of the A-12’s structure to withstand the extraordinary temperatures its skin would reach at a sustained high Mach numbers. Kelly knew that the high temperatures would actually stretch the aircraft more than two inches in flight and had designed the structure to expand and contract. Using titanium meant entirely new standards of quality control—there was only one supplier in the United States, and its product varied widely in quality from batch to batch. It meant new tools, new techniques, and lots of training, but there was no option—titanium kept the weight down. The remaining 15 percent of the aircraft was largely composite materials intended to reduce both the radar signature and the weight.

  There were thousands of problems to solve by inventing materials and methods that did not exist. Johnson jokingly announced a prize of fifty dollars for anyone who came up with an easy problem—it was never claimed. A special fuel—JP-7—was developed to handle the variations in heat as the plane went from ambient ground temperatures to more than a thousand degrees Fahrenheit. Aerial refueling presented a special problem—fuel cold-soaked to 60 degrees below 0 in the tanks of a KC-135 would plunge down the refueling boom into tanks where the temperature hovered at 350 degrees at cruise. Ordinary jet fuel, the standard JP-4, would simply have exploded.