When contractors said some of Boyd’s engineering specifications could not be met or that a fighter could not do what Boyd
wanted it to do, he listened, chewed on his hand, and stared unblinkingly at the contractor. When he had enough he stopped
chewing, spit out pieces of skin, jabbed the contractor in the chest, and exploded. “You are the dumbest son of a bitch God
ever made” or “You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about” or “You stupid fuck. That will never work.”
Defense contractors are not used to being talked to in such a fashion. Often they sat there a moment in shock. Boyd moved
even closer and shouted louder, “Do you get my meaning?” or “Do you hear what I’m saying to you?”
Almost every time a defense contractor left his office, Boyd turned around and said to all in hearing, sometimes before the
contractor was through the door, “The one thing you can always expect from a contractor is that he will hand you a load of
shit.” If he suspected a contractor was trying to deceive him, he looked for evidence. He prepared for a confrontation. When
he found the evidence, he did not say he had found the proverbial smoking gun. Instead he walked into his office, threw his
arms wide, and trumpeted, “I have found the dripping cock.”
Secretaries wept at Boyd’s language. Several threatened to quit. When generals complained about Boyd’s language, he said he
did not mean to sound disrespectful. “I’m just a dumb fighter pilot. I don’t know any better. I had an IQ test in high school
and they gave me a ninety.” For several months Boyd was not allowed to brief generals and members of Congress. But the Air
Force had to have the F-X and no one else preached the gospel as convincingly as Boyd. Soon he was back-briefing VIPs. And
his language was the same.
Boyd was impatient and wanted to get a fixed design and see it move into production and into the air. All these needless requirements
and senseless questions he saw as part of the conspiracy at Wright-Pat to foul up his airplane. It was the same conspiracy
that
had kept him from being promoted below the zone to lieutenant colonel.
Wright-Pat was a constant barrier to Boyd. An early and continuing roadblock in the F-X design was the presentation of drag
polars. Drag polars—or polars, as they are commonly known—show estimates of the total drag of the airplane as a function of
the airplane’s angle of attack (i.e., how high the nose is relative to the airstream). Accurate polars are a critical part
of the design process and vital to EM calculations. It is almost a given in aircraft design that an aircraft never has the
thrust the contractor says it will have and always has more drag than the contractor predicts. Wright-Pat sent Boyd a collection
of polars for the new design that simply looked too good to be true. He began calling the engineers at Wright-Pat to question
their estimates, and with each call they grew more patronizing. They had been estimating polars for years on all sorts of
aircraft and no one else had complained. To them Boyd was a Pentagon desk jockey who simply did not understand polars.
Finally Boyd demanded a meeting. He checked out a T-33 and flew to Dayton. A group of lieutenant colonels and full colonels,
along with several high-ranking civilians, were sitting around a conference table in the Flight Dynamics Lab when Boyd walked
in. He got straight to the point. He said the data he had been given was wrong and that this time he wanted good data. He
cited chapter and verse. From his briefcase he pulled the drag polars Wright-Pat had derived. Their polars showed that the
smaller the wing, the greater the lift. This is dumb, Boyd said. People in the Flight Dynamics Lab need to get on the ball.
The senior colonel stared at Boyd, then made it clear that data from the Flight Dynamics Lab was Air Force gospel. The lab
was not at fault if the major could not understand. The level of acrimony escalated. The lieutenant colonels joined the fray
and then the civilians.
Finally an exasperated Boyd jerked his wallet from his hip pocket and threw it onto the middle of the conference table. It
skidded to a stop in front of the colonel. The conversation stopped and everyone stared at Boyd. He looked around the table,
staring each man in the eye. Then he pointed at the wallet. “Everything in there says you fuckers are lying.”
When Boyd returned to the Pentagon, a full colonel was waiting. He chewed Boyd out for insulting a senior officer. He said
the general in charge of Research and Development for the Air Force was so angry that he was about to transfer Boyd to Alaska.
The two men marched down the hall to the general’s office. Boyd was still carrying the briefcase he had taken to Wright-Pat.
“Major Boyd, I have just one question,” the general said. “Did you tell that colonel at Wright-Pat he was a lying fucker?”
“Yes, Sir, I did.”
“You are out of here. You are being transferred.” The general launched his own chewing-out session about respecting senior
officers and insubordination and how lucky Boyd was that he was only being transferred. When he paused, Boyd said, “Sir, do
you want to know why I said that?”
“No.”
“I think you do. Give me one minute.” He opened his briefcase.
Reluctantly, the general looked at the drag polars. “Know how to read these, General?”
“Yes.”
The general moved his finger over the polars. “They’re saying…”
“Yes, Sir, they are saying the smaller the wing, the greater the lift.”
“That means…”
“Yes, Sir, that means the greatest lift would come if there were no wing at all.”
The general picked up his telephone and called Wright-Pat. And Boyd swears that as the general picked up the phone, he muttered,
“They
are
lying fuckers.”
Once again Boyd was protected by a benevolent general. And his list of enemies grew longer.
Even Sprey suggested that perhaps Boyd was a bit confrontational. “Tiger, I’ve got to have accurate information,” Boyd responded.
“There is no such thing as being too careful about information. I need the right information to separate the wheat from the
chaff. Those who can’t separate the wheat from the chaff don’t matter.”
Trade-offs are the heart and soul of aircraft design. If an engineer wanted greater range, he knew acceleration would be diminished.
If he wanted greater speed, the wings would have to be smaller, and
that, in turn, would decrease turning ability. If he wanted a small airplane, the engine, wings, or range would shrink. All
things have to be wrapped inside the skin of a fighter. Design discipline is the key. The engineer must remember the mission.
By using E-M and ever more sophisticated computers, Boyd was able to consider a virtually limitless number of variables. His
tradeoffs were orders of magnitude more complicated than had ever been done before. He was going through thousands of designs.
The slightest variation in one performance area had an impact all across the design spectrum.
Boyd’s trade-offs using E-M and computers were a turning point in aviation design and aviation history. He was working with
the entire maneuvering envelope of a proposed fighter, something that had never been done before. Sprey was there every step
of the way. Soon he would have the chance to put into practice all he was learning from Boyd.
Boyd’s first ER in the Pentagon covered the period from September 8, 1966, through June 9, 1967. Rarely has there been an
ER with such disagreements between the reviewing officer and the indorsing officer. On the front side the colonel who wrote
the ER gave Boyd less than top marks in four categories. The colonel dwelled on Boyd’s scientific and research contributions
to the F-X program and said, “If Major Boyd were evaluated solely on technical competence, he would be rated absolutely superior.”
This sounds complimentary. But the ER of a major being considered for promotion should not talk about technical competence;
rather it should talk about his ability to lead, to obtain the maximum work from his subordinates, to show a potential for
higher rank and greater responsibilities. Talking about a major’s technical competence is a signal to the promotion board
that this officer is not qualified for further advancement. The colonel who wrote the indorsement ended by saying, “Maj. Boyd
is very opinionated and at times tends to be argumentative.” It is a damning, career-stopping ER.
But once again a superior comes to Boyd’s aid. The officer writing the additional indorsement says that Boyd is not opinionated
and argumentative but is advocating a new advanced fighter, that there are many designs and systems, and that Boyd usually
is right in what he wants. “He has made himself an authority on the subject and is
more knowledgeable and informed in this field than his rating officials.” Adding heft to the colonel’s additional indorsement
is still another indorsement from a major general. The general says Boyd is a “promising officer, strongly motivated and one
who gives his best effort toward any assignment.” He says Boyd “… should be promoted to Lt. Colonel immediately.”
Not being promoted below the zone to lieutenant colonel still weighed on Boyd. He brought up the subject in conversation,
sometimes in an unusual fashion. In the summer of 1967 he went to Europe and the Pacific to brief top commanders on the F-X.
During one briefing in Europe to a four-star general, the general mused on how this new aircraft would require intensive pilot
training. The general then boasted about the safety record of fighter pilots under his command and told how he had had no
training accidents for several years.
“General, if you’re not having accidents, your training program is not what it should be,” Boyd said. He told the general
of Nellis and how realistic the training was—and how it resulted in a ten-to-one exchange ratio in Korea. “Goddamnit, general,
you need more accidents,” he said. “You need to kill some pilots.”
The general stared at Boyd, horrified at what a training accident would do to his career. The general made it clear that Boyd
was not only flirting with insubordination but advocating dangerous and irresponsible ideas. He hinted of disciplinary action.
“I don’t know what you can do, General,” Boyd said. “I was only responding to what you said.”
“Promotion boards can be influenced,” the general said.
“I’ve been passed over,” Boyd said.
But he became a lieutenant colonel soon after.
If there was a turning point, a time when even the most jingoistic Air Force general at last understood that Communist forces
could build fighter aircraft superior to anything that America put in the air, it was Vietnam in 1967, the worst year of the
war for the Air Force. It finally sank in that, as Boyd had said for years, the Air Force had no true airto-air fighter. It
is said that combat is the ultimate and unkindest judge of fighter aircraft. That was certainly true in Vietnam. The long-boasted-about
ten-to-one exchange ratio from Korea sank close
to parity in North Vietnam; at one time it even favored the North Vietnamese. When the war finally ended, one Air Force pilot
would be an ace. North Vietnam would have sixteen.
While 1967 was a dismal year for the Air Force, it was also the year that two of Boyd’s former students from the Fighter Weapons
School at Nellis proved that while America might not have superior aircraft, it had superior pilots.
When old fighter pilots gather to retell the stories of their glory days, they sometimes forget who declared mechanical problems
and aborted the mission, and they sometimes forget who led the great missions, and they sometimes make themselves gunfighters
when they were actually wingmen. But in every war there are bigger-than-life men whose exploits are so far beyond what most
mortals can accomplish that they are in a separate category. Merely to fly with such men is enough glory for most pilots.
Every maneuver and every detail of certain missions flown by these men are told and retold, are taught to young pilots, and
are held out as the pinnacle of what a fighter pilot can accomplish.
Two of Boyd’s former FWS students, Everett “Razz” Raspberry and Ron Catton, wrote their names large in the history of aerial
combat in 1967. For different reasons, both became legends in the fighter-pilot community. And for as long as old fighter
pilots gather to tell and retell the stories of the long-ago days when they strapped on jet aircraft to do battle in the heavens,
they will talk of what Razz and Catton did that year.
It is the way of fighter pilots that Razz and Catton rarely talk of the events of 1967. But when they do, they always talk
of Boyd’s influence on what happened. Razz was first. He found glory on what would be the most celebrated date of the Vietnam
War for the Air Force: January 2, 1967—the day of Mission Bolo.
At the time, the North Vietnamese Air Force was shredding the ranks of F-105 drivers. So many F-105s were shot down along
a mountain range near Hanoi that the pilots called it “Thud Ridge.” The North Vietnamese knew the refueling corridors flown
by Thuds, the electronic signatures, radio frequencies, and the peculiar idiom of Thud drivers. Most of all they knew how
vulnerable the heavily laden Thuds were as they approached the target. But again
and again the Thuds went up North loaded with bombs, sluggish, barely maneuverable, and found MiGs waiting.
The legendary Robin Olds, commander of the “Wolfpack”—the 8th Tactical Fighter Wing at Ubon, Thailand—grew weary with the
F-105 mortality rate and came up with the plan for Mission Bolo. Like most great battle plans, it was simple in the extreme:
his F-4s would pretend to be F-105s. Their target (via the heart of the infamous Route Pack VI, the deadliest collection of
AAA, missiles, and enemy fighters the world has ever known) was the North Vietnamese air base at Phuc Yen. They would fly
the same refueling tracks flown by Thuds, use the radio frequencies, automobile call signs, and even the specialized lingo
of Thud drivers. They would attach electronic countermeasure pods to the F-4s so they could send out an electronic signature
like that of the Thud. And if the gods of war smiled upon them, MiG pilots would be waiting. But instead of finding F-105s
wallowing around trying to escape, they would confront Phantom drivers anxious for payback.