Some officers who knew Boyd during the Nellis years say he was obsessed. Others say he was “a little crazy.” Spradling might
have agreed with both.
Boyd had so much nervous energy that he began chewing his fingernails down to the quick, gnawing them until it looked as if
he had stuck his fingertips into a blender. Someone told him he should take up smoking, that if he had something in his mouth
he would not chew his fingernails. Boyd did not like the smell of cigarettes, so he began smoking cigars. He favored Dutch
Masters and began smoking four or five a day. Now he presented a new danger to those he engaged in conversation. When he moved
in close and began waving his arms with a lighted cigar in his hand, he trailed fire and ashes in big circles as he talked.
To relieve his tension, Boyd began working out in the base gymnasium. His mother had been unable to afford that Charles Atlas
course when he was eight years old, but the government provided everything he wanted for free. He lifted weights almost every
day and soon developed large callouses on his palms. His tension unabated, he constantly spread the fingers of his hand, jammed
the flap of skin between his thumb and forefinger into his mouth, and chewed off pieces of callus before spitting them out.
It was about this time that Boyd’s affection for the telephone began to manifest itself. Three or four nights a week, always
after midnight, Spradling’s phone rang. He reached over to the bedside table, picked up the phone, and the conversation went
something like this.
“Spradling residence.”
“Sprad? John.”
“Hey, John. What is it?”
“Sprad, I’ve had a breakthrough.”
“What time is it?”
“Sprad, remember that equation I was telling you about this morning?”
“John, tomorrow might be a better—”
“Now I know what was missing. I figured it out.”
And off he would go for an hour or two talking about a calculus equation, ignoring all Spradling’s efforts to postpone the
conversation. Spradling’s contribution was an occasional grunt or noncommital “Uh huh.” Initially he thought that if he didn’t
respond to Boyd’s conversation that Boyd would hang up. But after several months of these late-night calls, Spradling realized
that Boyd did not want a conversation; Boyd simply wanted to talk. He talked to learn: as he went through his monologues,
his thoughts bounced around, various theses were tried and rejected until finally he had gained a better understanding of
whatever it was that was on his mind. After an hour or two, Boyd would say, “Thanks for helping me out, Sprad. You’ve been
a big help.” And he would hang up.
Spradling’s wife did not like these late-night calls. But Spradling tolerated them for two reasons. First, he had monitored
so many lectures at the FWS that he had an excellent overall knowledge of the classes and could on occasion offer advice to
Boyd. Second, Boyd not only was a close friend, he was the hottest pilot in the FWS and was developing radical new tactics
and techniques for aerial combat. In fact, Captain John Boyd was becoming a legend in the fighter-pilot community. Spradling
wanted to help. The early-morning calls were a small price to pay.
Boyd’s fame as a fighter pilot came on the wings of one of the most quirky and treacherous fighter planes in the history of
the Air Force, the F-100—the first operational aircraft to reach the speed of sound in level flight.
The F-100 was built by North American and was the first of the most fabled series of aircraft ever to see service in the Air
Force—the Century Series. Designed and built as a day air-superiority aircraft
—a fighter—it was turned into an air-to-mud aircraft by the bomber generals.
The F-100 was called the “Hun,” as in “hundred.” There would be other glorious aircraft in the Century Series: the F-101,
an escort for SAC bombers; the F-102, an interceptor; the F-104 “Starfighter,” a fighter with such short wings it was called
a “missile with a man in it;” the F-105 “Thud,” a tactical nuclear aircraft; and the F-106 all-weather interceptor. But they
were all sequels. None had the cachet of the Hun.
The Hun, particularly the A model, was a lieutenant-killer, a widow-maker with a fearsome reputation. One quarter of all the
F-100s ever produced were lost in accidents. A forgiving aircraft tolerates mistakes by the pilot; it will not, as pilots
say, “rise up and bite you in the ass.” The Hun was one of the most unforgiving airplanes ever built. It had to be flown every
second; one wrong control move, one moment of inattention, and the F-100 would “depart flight”; that is, it quit flying and
assumed the aeronautical attributes of a brick. The departure usually was violent—a sixty-degree pitch-up followed by a hard
roll that quickly turned into an out-of-control spin.
The Hun had a number of quirks that pilots found new and troublesome. The least serious problem was the gyroscopic effect
of the engine. When the aircraft took off, or when it accelerated out of a slow-speed maneuver, the engine’s rotating mass
caused a gyroscopic effect that pulled the nose of the aircraft to the side. It could be controlled with authoritative use
of the rudders, but it was disconcerting.
There were other annoyances. Hard maneuvering distorted the airflow to the engine. The airflow, rather than going smoothly
into the snout of the aircraft, flowed turbulently across the intake and caused the compressor to stall. Fire and smoke belched
from both the intake and the exhaust and the aircraft shuddered as an explosive
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
shook it with such force that the pilot’s feet often were knocked from the rudder pedals. Jets were still new enough that
the full dimension of compressor stalls was unknown. For a while there was some apprehension that if the aircraft did not
recover quickly enough, it might explode midair. Even after flight tests showed compressor stalls were relatively harmless,
they still terrified new F-100 pilots. From the time a pilot taxied out on the runway and advanced the throttle—which caused
the engine to
begin “chugging”—until he landed, the F-100 was trouble waiting to happen.
Another problem with the Hun was that many mechanical secrets were hidden in its bowels. It came into service when the Air
Force was still slicing personnel. Ten tactical fighter wings were deactivated in the years after Korea. This meant some of
the most skilled jet mechanics in the Air Force were being forced out of the service at a time when the most complicated fighter
the Air Force had ever seen was coming into service. Maintenance problems with the F-100 were chronic.
But the most serious problem with the Hun was adverse yaw. When the F-100 came along in the mid-50s, ailerons were used to
increase or decrease the bank angle. But there was a point—and no one knew quite where it was—when an additional touch of
aileron caused the F-100 to roll violently in the opposite direction, frequently into a uncontrollable and nonrecoverable
spin. The traditional way to counter an unexpected roll was to apply opposite stick. In the F-100, this only aggravated an
already-dangerous situation.
Simply put, at low airspeeds and high angle of attack, the down aileron produced more drag than it did lift. As one F-100
pilot said, “If you wanted to go right and the aircraft wanted to go left, the aircraft always won.” Suddenly the pilot was
out of altitude, airspeed, and ideas—all at the same time. At low altitude, where FWS pilots worked much of the time, there
was no room to recover. It was adverse yaw that killed so many pilots and gave the F-100 its fearsome reputation.
Boyd loved the airplane’s evil quirks. “It bites back,” he said. He thought the F-100 was a great aircraft for students; if
they could fly the Hun, they could fly anything. And pilots fell in love with the airplane’s ability to reach the speed of
sound in level flight. They liked to get out on the Nellis Range, ease the throttle forward until they jostled up through
the sound barrier and a thunderous sonic boom trailed them, then stick the nose of the aircraft up over Sunrise Mountain and
“boom” Las Vegas.
“There I was, going severely supersonic” became the new phrase among Hun drivers. (No Hun pilot was happy simply announcing
he had been going supersonic; it had to be “severely supersonic.”) The comment was delivered casually because Hun drivers
knew no other
pilots in the Air Force could say the same thing and there was no need to remind those lesser mortals of where they fit into
the cosmic scheme of things.
In the months after the F-100 came to Nellis, it was not unusual for people in Las Vegas to be sitting quietly at home when
suddenly the windows shattered and they were hammered by a sound wave that caused them to think it was the end of the world.
One pilot—it was said he was traveling at 815 mph at an altitude of forty feet—boomed a small town out in the desert so vigorously
that the main structural wall in the local hospital cracked and the base commander had to go out and apologize and the Air
Force had to pay more than $20,000 in damages.
As damage claims rolled in, senior officers cracked down. Supersonic flight was limited to the heart of the Nellis Range,
far from civilization, and it became a serious offense to boom a populated area. But since the F-100 was so much faster than
its predecessors and took so much room to maneuver, the Air Force also asked for and received air rights over another 750,000
acres of land in southern Nevada.
The edict did not affect Sherrie’s—the brothel at the Green Spot—and F-100 drivers liked to point the nose of their aircraft
at the whorehouse in the cottonwoods and go booming. For that, it seems, there were few complaints.
The idea that an airplane could outrun its sound startled America. People stood on street corners and talked of how the airplane
could fly over and be gone before people on the ground ever heard it. They shook their heads in amazement. And they knew that
SAC notwithstanding, as long as America had the F-100, the Communists would think twice before attacking America.
By now the Strategic Air Command was in its full glory. The B-47 Stratojet was the pride of SAC; its wings swept back thirty-six
degrees and it could fly almost 600 mph. Curtis LeMay had boasted many times that no fighter could climb high enough or fast
enough to reach his bombers. Then one day a B-47 pilot looked out the cockpit and watched a Hun driver do a barrel roll around
his aircraft.
The Hun ruled.
And John Boyd was the best Hun driver in America.
Boyd had demonstrated in primary flight training that he had no fear of aircraft. He muscled them around and showed he was
in complete
control. And the treacherous F-100 was no exception. Most fighter pilots consider the term “heavy-handed” to be a critical
commentary about a pilot’s skills; it is very close to “ham-fisted,” which describes a pilot with no feel for the airplane.
But Boyd was heavy-handed in another sense. He was not afraid to muscle the F-100 around. He pushed it to the published limit
and then beyond. He had to find out what the airplane would really do, not what the book said it would do.
North American was unable to find a cure for the deadly adverse yaw problem. And there are streets at Edwards named for golden
arms who died trying to tame the F-100. The problem was so bad that the standard admonition for F-100 pilots at the end of
a preflight briefing was “DBYA”—
don’t bust your ass
.
F-100 pilots believed the safest way to fly the Hun was at high speed. But one of the many idiosyncrasies of the F-100 was,
as Boyd said, “It will fly slower faster than any other airplane.” Not only would it decelerate at an amazing rate, it would
keep flying even when the airspeed indicator was at zero. It might be falling at an extremely high rate, but a skillful pilot
could pump the rudders and maintain control.
Boyd is the only known Hun driver who liked to work in the dangerous low-speed end of the airplane’s envelope. And that was
how he solved the adverse yaw problem. He found the solution from a maneuver he developed when teaching tactics to FWS students.
In his article in the
Fighter Weapons Newsletter
Boyd preached that one of the first teaching tools is to have a student get on the six-o’clock position of the instructor
and stay there as the instructor goes through every evasive maneuver known to aviators. And this is how he began his air-to-air
training with new students. He was patient with most students, beginning slowly, sensing their level of skill and degree of
confidence. If they wanted to learn, he taught them everything he knew. But occasionally there came a student with what Boyd
called “an obstruction”—that is, one who thought he was a great pilot and needed no tutelage. Such a student needed to have
the obstruction removed so he could fully understand the genius of the man teaching him.
“The only way to get a fighter pilot’s attention is to whip his ass,” Boyd said.
A student with an obstruction would be put on Boyd’s six and then, after one or two maneuvers (during which the student was
lulled into a sense of overconfidence), Boyd would demonstrate with one abrupt move why he was considered the best Hun driver
in the Air Force. He would seize the stick with both hands, jerk it full aft, and hold it there. This maneuver he called “flat-plating
the bird.” The maneuver turned the bottom of the aircraft, the wings, and the bottom of the tail surfaces into one enormous
speed brake and slowed the Hun from 400 knots to 150 knots in seconds. It was as if a manhole cover were sailing through the
air and suddenly flipped ninety degrees to the airstream. Then Boyd, still holding the stick full aft and not moving it a
quarter inch in either direction, would stomp hard on the rudder and corkscrew the aircraft violently around in a tight roll.
The maneuver spit the student out in front and left Boyd on the student’s six. He had set the hook and there was no escape.
It happened so fast that students never knew what happened. One minute they were in a perfect kill position, tight on Boyd’s
tail, pipper locked on his cockpit, and about to shout, “Guns! Guns! Guns!” into the radio. All they needed was sixteen frames
of guncamera film, the equivalent of a half-second burst, to have a kill. But, as one student remembered, “All at once he
did a double outside rat’s ass and a two-tone trick fuck and I was a movie star. He had me in his gun camera.”