Special Ops: Four Accounts of the Military's Elite Forces

by Orr Kelly

  Despite its aid in helping design the twin-engined A-7, GE was never caught up in this controversy. One reason is that the company strongly supported the F/A-18, reminding members of Congress from districts where GE plants were located of the importance of this program to the company.

  The F/A-18, powered by GE engines, made its first flight on 18 November 1978, and, by the fall of 1980, all reports from the test site at Patuxent River Naval Air Station indicated that GE had a real winner on its hands. The test pilots were most impressed by the fact that there were no restrictions on their use of the engine, no matter what kind of maneuver they attempted.

  The afterburner lighted instantly, and it did so without the puff of smoke that signals a plane’s presence or tells a hostile pilot the afterburner has been ignited. When the Blue Angels adopted the F/A-18 for their spectacular demonstration flights, they were especially impressed with the performance of the afterburner. In one maneuver, five planes dive in front of the audience in very tight formation, then ignite their afterburners and accelerate straight up. One plane could veer into another if all ten afterburners don’t light at exactly the same moment; but they always do.

  In two respects, the engine fell slightly short of the goals set by the navy: It burns a little more fuel while cruising than the navy would have liked, and it is a little slower accelerating than specified. In both cases, it would have been possible to bring the engine up to the mark. But improving the fuel consumption would have involved tampering with the air inlets to the engine, increasing the likelihood of an engine stall. And acceleration could have been improved by making the engine operate at a higher temperature. In tests, the plane accelerated from .8 Mach to 1.6 Mach in 143 seconds, rather than the 110 seconds set as a goal. But “turning up the wick” on the engine would have made it less reliable and reduced its service life. In both cases the navy decided the cure was worse than the problem.

  The F/A-18 was also knowingly made slightly slower in its top speed than planes such as the F-4 Phantom, built a generation before. The Hornet can fly almost twice the speed of sound. To push its speed up above that mark to match the top speed of the Phantom and the F-14 Tomcat would have required a more complex variable inlet on the engine. Again, it was decided to stick with the simpler fixed inlet and forgo the additional speed.

  By the time the F/A-18 was far enough along in its tests for everyone to begin to feel comfortable about the engine, Burt Riemer had been living in a pressure cooker for eight years and felt he had earned a vacation. He chose a bed-and-breakfast hostelry in the peaceful countryside in England’s Cotswold district. No television. Nothing louder than the songs of the meadowlarks and the baaing of the sheep. He didn’t even read the newspapers.

  Then one morning at breakfast, another guest casually mentioned the crash of some new type of military aircraft with two engines. With a sudden knot in the pit of his stomach, Riemer called Lynn to learn that the F/A-18 dedicated to testing of the engine had crashed a couple of days earlier, on 8 September 1980, only a few miles from where he was staying. Thus began the most frustrating, traumatic few days of his life. The folks back in Lynn said there was no sense going to the crash site and no sense hurrying home because there was nothing to be done until parts of the engines had been recovered. Riemer stayed in the Cotswolds for a few more days and worried.

  The crash occurred shortly after Jack Krings, chief McDonnell Douglas test pilot and the first man to fly the F/A-18, and marine Lt. Gary Post had taken off to fly to Spain after demonstrating the plane for the first time to an international audience at the Farnborough Air Show.

  Suddenly, there was a loud explosion, followed by a rapid rise in temperature in the right engine. Krings pushed the other engine to full power and headed for the nearby Royal Air Force Test Center at Boscombe Down. But both the flight controls and the controls for the left engine had apparently been damaged in the explosion. He fought the controls for about five minutes and was within five or six miles of his goal when the plane began bucking like a bronco. With the plane down to 4,000 feet, Krings and Post ejected while flying at about 400 knots. Krings suffered a broken shoulder and sprained neck. Post broke his leg.

  As soon as Krings reported in, it was obvious that the loss of the plane had been caused by engine failure and that GE had a very serious problem on its hands. The first job was to find the offending part. The company offered rewards and spent thousands of dollars hiring Boy and Girl Scout troops and church groups to scour the landscape. They found two-thirds of the turbine disk that had failed—but not the portion that had come apart and caused the crash. Riemer assumes that, someday, a farmer will hear a “clunk” as his plow hits a piece of metal and will come up with the missing piece. But that will be years too late.

  Using deductive reasoning, the GE engineers decided that the failure was the result of a new manufacturing process in which a metal alloy is reduced to a fine powder and then pressed together to form the turbine wheel. They immediately switched back to a type of material that had been used earlier. And since then, an improved material has been developed.

  Even though the plane lost in England was the one dedicated to engine testing, the crash and subsequent effort to find the cause and make sure it didn’t happen again caused only a relatively small disruption of the F/A-18 test program. Riemer, looking back on the incident, called it a “burble that we got over quickly.” Everyone at GE was pleased that, if they had to have a problem, it occurred when only a few engines had been delivered, rather than later with hundreds or thousands of engines in service. That would cause far more than a mere “burble.”

  The early engine failure did, however, serve to introduce a new and very important player to the drama of the F/A-18. Two months after the Cotswolds crash, Ronald Reagan became president; and early in 1981 a forceful young man named John F. Lehman, Jr., managed, by pulling as many strings as he could find, to have himself named secretary of the navy when he was only thirty-eight years old.

  Lehman, who had served as an aide to Henry Kissinger when he was President Nixon’s national security adviser, was firmly anchored in the conservative wing of the Republican party. He also held a naval reserve commission as a bombardier navigator in an A-6 and had served five brief tours of duty in Vietnam, including one mission over the north, while working at the White House. Although he had inherited a love of the sea from his father, who commanded an amphibious assault ship in the Pacific in World War II, Lehman loved airplanes even more than ships.

  Lehman was a supremely self-assured and ambitious man, and he had ambitious plans for a major buildup of American naval strength. While Reagan’s new secretaries of the army and air force were quietly learning how to find the men’s rooms, Lehman quickly set out to create a 600-ship navy, reinvigorate the navy as a fighting force, and reform the way it procured weapons. To do this, he needed both to establish his credibility on Capitol Hill as manager of an often unwieldy bureaucracy and to let the major defense contractors with whom the navy dealt know who was boss. The loss of the plane following the Farnborough show was just the opportunity he needed.

  Almost as soon as he settled into his office on the Pentagon’s fourth floor, he sent word to McDonnell Douglas that, since the plane was on loan to the company for the airshow, he expected McDonnell Douglas to provide the navy with a new plane—free.

  For company officials, this was a rude shock. To provide a replacement for the lost plane this early in the production run would cost an estimated $38 million dollars. When the officials objected to paying for the plane, Lehman accused them, in a speech, of trying to “rip off” the navy. Their lawyers told them they could make a good case that the navy should bear the cost, even though McDonnell Douglas had borrowed the plane to show it off at Farnborough, because there was a military pilot aboard.

  Harvey Wilcox, who was general counsel for NAVAIR, agreed that the company had a strong argument and might win if the issue went to court. But in this, Lehman’s first showdown with a maj
or contractor, it was McDonnell Douglas that blinked. J. C. Waldner, who was then general manager of the company’s F/A-18 program, says: “We didn’t agree that was the way it should be done, but the other choice was a debate that would have antagonized both sides. That is not the way you treat one of your best customers.”

  Lehman’s victory identified him, very early in his time in office, as a tough cookie, a force to be reckoned with by the companies, by Congress—and by the navy. In a book he wrote after leaving office, Lehman included a picture of the replacement Hornet, gleefully labeling it “the only navy aircraft that was never paid for.”

  Even though it was the engine that had caused the loss of the plane, Lehman quickly became a big fan of the F-404 engine. As a flier, he was familiar with the many problems the navy had experienced with the engines in other planes, especially what he termed “just a terrible engine” in the F-14. His enthusiasm for the engine in the F/A-18 was universally shared by pilots and mechanics as the number of Hornets in service increased.

  For GE, the F-404 engine held promise of a huge commercial success. Not only did it power the Hornet, but the same basic engine was being adapted for use in other American bombers and fighters and in combat planes in France, Sweden, India, and Singapore.

  Then came two bad shocks.

  On 20 September 1984, Lehman sent a memo to the chief of naval operations, instructing him to set up Pratt & Whitney as a second source for production of GE’s F-404 engine.

  Such an action was virtually unprecedented. At least since World War II, there had been an understanding between the Pentagon and the major defense contractors that, once a company won the competition to build a weapon or an important component such as an engine, it would have a monopoly on production of that item. In this case, GE had spent years and as much as a billion dollars to develop a winning engine, and it looked forward to revenues of more than $6 billion from sales of that engine in the next decade. Now, it was suddenly being ordered not only to hand over its blueprints to its deadly rival, but actually help its competitor set up shop, as Lehman put it, “in minimum time, at minimum cost to the navy, and with minimum risk.”

  Vice Adm. Robert F. (“Dutch”) Schoultz, who was just finishing up a tour of duty as deputy chief of naval operations for air warfare—Houser’s old post—sat in on some of the meetings with angry GE officials.

  “There was some real arm waving and name calling. It was really a bloodbath. But by God, he pulled it off,” Schoultz recalls.

  Lehman’s most convincing argument was that the navy owned the blueprints, and he would simply give them to Pratt & Whitney if GE refused to cooperate. In fact he did order a new engine trucked from GE to the Pratt plant so engineers could study it.

  General Electric was in a somewhat awkward position to resist Lehman’s decision to create a second source. Only a few months earlier, the air force had awarded GE a contract to provide engines for its F-15 and F-16 fighter planes, which had been a Pratt & Whitney monopoly. There was a vital difference between the two actions, however. The engine the air force bought from GE was a new design, based on the powerplant for the F/A-18, so it wasn’t a matter of taking Pratt & Whitney secrets and giving them to GE. In the case of the navy decision, GE was expected to help Pratt & Whitney produce an engine identical to those coming off the production line at Lynn. Since the two companies were direct competitors for both military and civilian contracts, GE had good cause to worry that it might lose some of its competitive edge.

  Lehman had two reasons for his decision. One was to make sure Pratt remained in the military jet engine business so its plants would be available in the event of war. The company, a division of United Technologies, was still a major player in the jet engine business. But it had lost the dominant position it had once enjoyed as a result of faulty business decisions by its corporate masters, failure to keep up quality and service on its engines, and GE’s aggressive marketing strategy. The idea that Pratt might drop out of the military jet engine business seemed farfetched, especially to angry GE executives, but that possibility did exist.

  Lehman’s other reason was to keep a lid on the cost of engines by forcing two manufacturers, both capable of making the same engine, to compete for production contracts each year. He was worried that, if there was only one source, “they’d take you to the cleaners on price,” as Schoultz put it.

  Whether the decision to create a second source for the F-404 engine was a wise one is debatable. Certainly officials of GE do not think so. They argue that, even without the F-404 contract, Pratt remains very much a major force in the manufacture of military jet engines. And, they say, the navy not only had to pay to set up Pratt’s production line but had to pay to support two production lines, with their associated overhead costs, rather than one more efficient line. Whether GE would have taken advantage of its monopoly to jack up the price of the engine remains a matter of speculation. But company officials say that, until the contract was split, the price of engines was going down—to about $1.5 million apiece. But since then, the price has grown to about $2 million.

  In 1989, GE edged out Pratt when it won a contract to provide all of the F-404 engines to be purchased in 1990, as well as the option to provide all the engines for the F/A-18 for the six-year period beginning in 1991. Company officials said the contract was potentially worth more than $2 billion.

  General Electric had barely recovered from the shock of losing a portion of its engine business when it suffered another severe jolt.

  In 1987, reports began coming in from the fleet of a few scattered engine failures.

  One of the early ones occurred on 4 June 1987. About 1:30 that afternoon, four marine pilots took off from Beaufort Marine Corps Air Station, South Carolina, and headed for the Townsend Target Complex in a forested area about forty miles southwest of Savannah, Georgia. All four planes carried twelve practice bombs.

  On the second bombing run, Captain S. T. (“Perk”) Perkins had just dropped his bomb and leveled off at 2,500 feet when he was startled by a loud explosion that seemed to be behind and below his plane. Perkins heard a somber recorded voice intone: “Engine right!” A red fire-warning light flashed on. Moments later, he heard “Engine left!” Another warning light came on.

  The engines in an F/A-18 are located in a compartment behind and below the pilot, so Perkins couldn’t see anything wrong. But about five seconds after the explosion, Perkins’s wingman radioed he could see flames streaming from the back of the plane. Three seconds later, he reported the fire was out. Then, a moment later, he again saw flames. Perkins, struggling to understand the problem and get the plane under control, told the other pilots to shut up. Watching from a tower nearby, the range controllers saw Perkins’s plane roll uncontrollably and nose up almost vertically. Then they saw the bright flames of the rocket propelling the ejection seat away from the plane.

  Perkins floated to earth with only minor injuries. The plane crashed into a wooded area and then burned for sixteen hours.

  When General Electric investigators arrived, they were unable to determine how much damage had been caused by the fire in flight and how much by the intense fire on the ground. But every part of every engine is stamped with a number so that even widely scattered parts can be reassembled. The investigators were able to determine that four blades of the compressor in the right engine had broken loose, severely damaged the engine, and caused a fire burning at a temperature of 3,100 degrees F. It was that intense heat that had set off the fire alarm in the undamaged left engine.

  Safety investigators concluded that Perkins might have been able to save the plane if he had pulled the left engine back to idle, watched to see the fire warning light go out, and then increased power again. In a similar incident in Nevada, the pilot had been high enough so he had time to determine that, despite the warning lights, only one engine was on fire, and he was able to land safely. But Perkins didn’t have the altitude or the time for that kind of experiment. The investigators agreed he w
as right to get out when he did.

  Were the loss of the plane in Georgia and a few other reports of engine problems just isolated events? GE didn’t treat them that way.

  Fred Larson tells of his reaction when the engine failures were reported: “If you have a problem and someone says, ‘that’s an isolated event,’ you say: ‘Oh, no. There’s going to be another one. There is no such thing as an isolated event.’ Gerhard Newman [a legendary engine designer and manager at Lynn] used to say: ‘The engine is talking to you. Listen to it. Don’t say, “say it again.” ’ ”

  This was clearly not a burble like the engine failure that had cost a plane in 1980. By the time these problems turned up, the engine had racked up more than a million flying hours and there were some 1,700 engines in service. If there was a basic problem, it would cost a great deal of money to fix it.

  As General Electric began to analyze the reports of engine failures, it soon became apparent that it didn’t have one problem. It had three problems.

  The first problem, and the cause of the fire in Perkins’s plane, was high-frequency vibrations inside the engine that caused the compressor blades to crack and eventually break loose. Such a failure is especially troublesome because the compressor is located up front, right behind the fan. When a blade breaks off, it may go rattling down the full length of the engine, tearing off pieces as it goes through the combustor and the two turbines and out the afterburner. The problem was serious enough to require a redesigned compressor with thicker blades.

  The second problem was a real surprise. The engine is designed with a tough titanium casing so that, if a part breaks off inside the engine, it will not tear through the side of the engine and cause other damage to the plane. The investigators found that the heat of an engine fire is so intense that it could ignite the titanium itself, so the casing, far from controlling the damage, actually contributed to it. This forced the design of a new type of liner.