A combat aircraft is a peculiar combination of design, avionics, and power plant. Prudent designers usually make significant
technological advances in only one of the three categories when they plan a new aircraft. But the F-111 was a high-tech wonder
with two bold innovations, both of which were later to cause enormous problems. The F-111 was the first combat airplane to
have an afterburning turbofan engine. Until then, combat aircraft used turbojet engines. The primary difference is that all
of the air entering a turbojet engine goes through the engine core, while the airflow of a turbofan engine is split between
the engine core and a duct that bypasses the engine and goes straight to the afterburner. The split airflow means back pressure
from the afterburner affects the compressors at the front of the engine. The turbofan is very sensitive to airflow distortion.
The second innovation was the wing. The F-111 was the first combat aircraft to have a variable-geometry wing, commonly called
the “swing wing.” The small narrow wings extended straight out for takeoff and slow-speed flight, then folded back for high-speed
runs.
The F-111—Harry Hillaker’s baby—was the pride of the Air Force. More than five thousand people at General Dynamics worked
on the airplane, and the Air Force had more than two hundred people monitoring development and construction. So Hillaker can
be forgiven if he was a bit full of himself that night when he visited the Officers Club at Eglin. He and an Air Force officer
were at a table having a quiet drink, talking of the wonders of the F-111, how the British had ordered a large number, how
the Navy was going to cover its carrier decks with the airplane, and how the F-111 was on the way to becoming the greatest
airplane in the history of the Air Force, the envy of the world. Hillaker found he was constantly being distracted by noise
from the bar. A group of young fighter pilots clustered around an older guy who was holding court, talking in a voice heard
all over the bar and waving a cigar as he described various fighter maneuvers. Occasionally the young pilots broke out in
uproarious laughter.
Hillaker tilted his head toward the bar and said, “Now there’s a man who thinks he’s the greatest fighter pilot in the world.”
His host looked toward the bar, then turned back to Hillaker and smiled. “He might well be. That’s John Boyd.”
Hillaker shrugged. “Never heard of him.”
“I’ll introduce you.”
“No thanks. I don’t like loudmouths.”
But the officer had already moved toward the bar and was talking to Boyd, telling him about the VIP, and asking Boyd to meet
him. The two men were walking back to the table. Hillaker took a deep breath and hoped that after the introduction Boyd would
return to his cronies. Before Hillaker could say a word, Boyd made a head-on attack. The first words out of his mouth were,
“My name is John Boyd and I’m a fighter pilot and I understand you work on the F-111 and what I want to know is why you guys
built a goddamn eighty-five-thousand-pound airplane and called it a fighter.”
“It’s a fighter-bomber,” Hillaker said, somewhat taken aback. Boyd poked Hillaker in the chest three or four times, took a
puff off his cigar, and said, “Yeah, well last time I looked, an F in front of an airplane meant it was a fighter. That thing
is a piece of shit. It’s too big to be a fighter and that goddamn little wing it’s got, it must take two states to turn the
thing around. I’ll tell you something else. The pilot can’t see behind and he can’t see out the right window. He has to depend
on his copilot to tell him what’s out there.”
Hillaker gritted his teeth. The project manager for the F-111 did not have to listen to this from a loudmouthed fighter pilot.
Before he could reply, Boyd was off again.
“It’s too goddamn big, too goddamn expensive, too goddamn underpowered. It’s just not worth a good goddamn.” He moved closer
to Hillaker. His voice rose. “How much extra weight does that swing wing add to the airplane? Twenty percent?”
Boyd didn’t wait for an answer. He poked Hillaker in the chest again. “The entire weight of the wing goes through that pivot
pin and you hide it all in that big glove. You’ll be getting fatigue and stress cracks in that fucker before it’s got five
hundred hours on it. And the amount of drag you’ve created is aerodynamic bullshit. That pivot adds weight and degrades performance,
plus you can’t sweep the wing back fast enough in combat to make a difference. The low-speed performance is lousy, the high-speed
performance is worse, and the goddamn thing won’t maneuver.”
Hillaker stared at Boyd. Fighter pilots usually talk in generalities when they criticize an airplane; they say it is a “pig”
or that it needs five miles of runway to get off the ground, but they don’t know enough to hone in on design specifics. An
engineer trying to get hard information out of a fighter pilot is like a man trying to nail Jell-O to a tree. Thus, Hillaker
was more than a little shocked to hear the loud-mouth pilot ask about the things that were only beginning to be whispered
about in the back rooms of General Dynamics.
Hillaker did not know he was looking at the only man in the world who knew more about the capabilities of the F-111 than he
did. Boyd had done some preliminary E-M calculations on the F-111 and knew what a terrible mistake the Air Force was making.
Boyd knew that, left to its own devices, the bureaucracy always came up with an aircraft such as the F-111. The Air Force
looked at technology
rather than the mission. And if they did consider the mission, it was always the fashionable mission of the day.
Hillaker pulled out a chair. “Sit down, John.”
Hillaker was supervising construction of what would turn out to be one of the most scandal-ridden aircraft in U.S. history.
Boyd was the first to publicly say what in a few years everyone would know. The Air Force was seduced by swing-wing technology,
a technology that ultimately would ruin two generations of airplanes. (The under-powered Navy F-14 Tomcat is a swing wing
and the performance is so poor that pilots call it the “Tom Turkey.” The B-1 Bomber, one of the most trouble-plagued aircraft
in the Air Force inventory, is a swing wing. And the U.S. version of the SST, which Boyd and his friends managed to have cancelled,
would have been a swing wing.)
After only a few minutes of a highly technical engineering discussion, Boyd and Hillaker had cleaned off the table and began
writing on cocktail napkins and passing them back and forth, covering them with engineering data, formulae, drag polars, and
lift coefficients. They exchanged ideas about fighter aircraft, about what each considered the
ultimate
fighter aircraft, a nimble little fighter such as the world had never seen, about the fighter that, if they had no restraints,
they would build.
Hillaker was a company man who hewed to the company line. But that did not mean he did not have a dream of his own. A few
years later he and Boyd would have their chance to build the ideal fighter aircraft. They would join together in the most
audacious plot ever conceived against the U.S. Air Force.
The engineering data from Wright-Pat dribbled into Eglin. Boyd was not confident of the numbers, but at least he had something
to work with. Now his second problem in developing E-M—how to present it to Air Force brass—was becoming paramount.
About 4:30
P.M
. each day he went to Christie’s office, sat down, and leaned back. He gripped a pencil between his thumb and forefinger,
then held the pencil at arm’s length, staring at the eraser. As he stared at the eraser, it became a pipper. He twirled in
his chair as if maneuvering to get a tracking solution on an enemy fighter. Then one day he stopped twirling and tossed the
pencil on the desk. He had the answer; he knew how to translate the reams of charts and formulas
and engineering data from Wright-Pat into a simple form. He would show graphs of the
differences
between each American fighter’s energy rate and the energy rate of its Soviet counterpart. Blue areas represented where the
differences favored the American fighter, red where the Soviet fighter had the advantage.
Blue is good.
Red is bad.
Even a goddamn general can understand that.
It is a matter of delicious irony that one of Boyd’s duties at Eglin was supervising the graphics shop. The purpose of the
graphics shop was to provide services for every harried officer who wanted briefing charts or lettering placed on photographic
slides or a fancy graph. Managing the graphics shop was one of those menial and embarrassing jobs no pilot wanted, but for
Boyd it would pay off.
Boyd put two people to work doing nothing but E-M briefing charts. To say he was a perfectionist is an understatement of epic
dimensions. Far into the night he pored over every detail on every slide. Each letter had to be exactly right. Every line
in the cross-hatched performance chart had to be shaded correctly. Each slide had to be cropped precisely so. And if at 1:00
A.M
. or 2:00
A.M
. he found the slightest imperfection, something that no one else would have noticed, he called one of the technicians to
come down and correct the slide. Not later during normal working hours. Now.
After one such all-night session, he told the female technician he would approve the overtime on her time sheet. But the colonel
who was the base comptroller not only denied the overtime, he chewed out the young woman in front of her coworkers and told
her that whatever it was Major Boyd was working on was unauthorized and the Air Force had no money to pay overtime for unauthorized
projects.
When the young woman reported her humiliation to Boyd, he steamed over to the base commander’s office. The base commander
was not only the comptroller’s boss, but unbeknownst to everyone he was a friend of Boyd’s from the Nellis years. Boyd told
the base commander what happened and said, “I want this taken care of.”
The base commander called in the comptroller. “If there is no money in the account, find it, even if you have to pay it out
of your own pocket,” he ordered. He ordered the comptroller to apologize to
the technician in front of the same people who had been present when he criticized her.
“I hosed that son of a bitch,” Boyd gloated to Christie.
But the price of his victory would be high. Boyd made an enemy not only of the comptroller but of the comptroller’s friends.
And there would be a day of reckoning.
When the Air Force believes enough in an officer’s potential to admit him to the AFIT program, it is an acknowledgment both
that the officer intends to make a career of the military and that the officer is a bit special. The officer’s first ER after
AFIT should reflect this. But Boyd’s first ER at Eglin was mediocre. He had bounced around too many jobs. There was a vague
reference to Boyd’s E-M work, though it was not called that. The rating officer said Boyd had “developed a qualitative-quantitative
analysis in which energy considerations can be effectively applied to fighter tactics…” that “… for the first time will provide
a valid basis for designing tactics against hostile fighters.”
Generals rarely become involved in ERs of majors. But, luckily for Boyd, Brigadier General A.T. Culbertson added an indorsement
that contradicted the rating. Boyd, Culbertson said, “represents the sort of productive, creative thinker that is so critically
needed in this Command and the Air Force. I rate him as truly outstanding and worthy of rapid promotion.” As had happened
again and again in Boyd’s career, his immediate supervisor gave him a poor or mediocre rating, one that signaled it was time
to get out of the Air Force, and again and again a general officer rescued him.
By the summer of 1963, when Boyd received his first ER at Eglin, the E-M charts were beginning to come together. At the same
time the Air Force was pressing for a report that went beyond briefings, a comprehensive document that told all there was
to tell about E-M. Christie wanted Boyd to prepare the report, but Boyd wanted to begin briefing.
Boyd’s briefing charts were things of beauty, pieces of art, clean and elegant and simple; they had enough data to inform
but not enough to overwhelm, and were creative in appearance but not so creative as to detract from the information being
presented. As Boyd honed and refined the charts, he realized something was wrong. The people at Wright-Pat had not given him
the correct data.
He went back to the general who had helped him with the overtime problem and told him he was going up to Wright-Pat and straighten
them out. “You might get a phone call,” he said.
The general looked at Boyd and shook his head. “Try to be diplomatic, John.”
But Boyd rarely was diplomatic. And when he arrived at WrightPat, his arm waving and profanity and accusations of incompetence
quickly broke up the meeting. The colonel who chaired the meeting stalked off in a huff to call Boyd’s superiors at Eglin.
The colonel did not get a sympathetic ear. The general told him to give Boyd the correct data or he—the Eglin general—would
call the general who commanded the Flight Dynamics Lab and ask why he was not getting any cooperation. After all, they were
all in the same Air Force.
The colonel knew not to give reason to one general to call another and complain. The fraternity of generals is tight and closed.
A colonel who wants to be promoted does not fare well by confronting a general.
Boyd got the data, and this time it was correct. He also created another enemy in the colonel at Wright-Pat.
Boyd flew his T-33 back to Eglin. As he approached, he heard a B-52 pilot talking to the control tower. Fighter pilots called
the B-52 the “BUFF”—big ugly fat fucker. Boyd knew the BUFF pilot was returning from a lengthy mission and that the crew was
doubtless exhausted. He decided to show the B-52 pilot what to expect in a real shooting war. He swung wide, eased forward
on the stick, and lined up on the nose of the huge bomber—it was the size of a barn door—then pushed the throttle forward.
The B-52 pilot was cleared for the final approach. He knew his aircraft could be seen for miles and probably was thinking
of landing, plodding through the debrief, and having a good meal and ten or twelve hours of blessed sleep. What he got was
a window filled with a T-33 and a fiendish voice on the radio shouting, “Guns, guns, guns!” and the blur of the T-33 rolling
inverted and passing under him so closely he could count rivets on the belly. Then a raucous cackle on the radio and a triumphant
voice saying, “I hosed you.”