Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 03 (14 page)

           
The underside of the B-2 was like a
huge dark thundercloud—it seemed to stretch out forever, sucking up every
particle of light. Patrick was surprised by what he found— two cavernous weapon
bays. “It’s a hell of a lot bigger than I thought, General,” he said.

           
“Each bomb bay carries one Common
Strategic Rotary Launcher filled with eight SRAM short-range attack missiles,”
Ormack replied. “Sixteen SRAM missiles—it packs quite a wallop. Putting B61 or
B83 gravity nuclear bombs on board is still possible as well, although using
standoff-type weapons instead of gravity bombs makes the B-2 a much greater
threat. The Black Knight can only carry four cruise missiles, so there are no
plans to include AGM-129A cruise missiles although we modified the
weapon-delivery software to do so.”

           
“It’ll make a great battleship escort,”
McLanahan said. “I think the boss is right—it’s a waste to have these babies
sitting on the sidelines with nukes on board while we’re getting hammered in
some non-nuclear dogfight. Air Force talks about ‘global reach, global power,’
but they don’t talk much about how long-range bombers can defend themselves in
a hostile environment without an initial nuclear laydown. They talk about
sending B-52s from
Guam
, Diego Garcia, or Loring to anywhere else
in the world in twelve hours, but they don’t explain how the bomber is supposed
to survive its attack. With the Black Knight configured as a counterradar
escort, it can do it. It has the range to fly just as deep as the strike
bombers, and it carries as much firepower as a B-52. We’ll put that new PACER
SKY satellite data stuff on it, maybe an ISAR radar, smart bombs ...”

           
“We’ve tested every possible weapon
on a B-2,” Ormack acknowledged, “from AGM-130 Striker glide-bombs—your personal
favorite, I know—Harpoon antiship missiles, sea mines, MK 82 iron bombs, AMRAAM
missiles, Sidewinder missiles, the TACIT RAINBOW antiradar cruise missiles,
Durandal runaway-cratering bombs, AGM-84 SLAM TV- guided missiles, hell, even
photoreconnaissance pods. At half a billion dollars a pop, Congress didn’t want
to buy a nuclear-only plane, so we’re going to demonstrate that the B-2 could
be flexible enough for any mission.” Ormack shrugged, then added, “Pm not
convinced myself that the B-2 can make a good defensive escort plane. If a
fighter or ground missile site gets a visual on this thing, you’re dead.” “I
don’t know about that,” Patrick said. “I think it’d be tough to kill in a
tactical battle.”

           
“Yeah? Most of the Air Force would
disagree,” Ormack replied. “Look at these wings—this thing is huge, even when
seen from several thousand feet up. It’s subsonic, which makes it a more
inviting target and less elusive. No, I think the Air Force would forgo risking
B-2 on a conventional raid.” He looked at McLanahan for feedback and was
surprised when the young navigator gave him an unsure shrug in reply. “You
still disagree?”

           
“I haven’t flown fighters as long as
you, sir,” McLanahan said, “but I have a tough time finding an airport from
five thousand feet in the air, much less a single plane. At five thousand feet,
a pilot is looking at almost four hundred square miles of ground. If he’s
flying, say, eight miles per minute on a low combat-air patrol, forty square
miles zip under his wings every ten seconds—twenty on each side of his cockpit.
If he can’t use a radar to at least get himself in the vicinity, his detection
problem is pretty complicated.” “If a combat air patrol always had that wide an
area to search, I might agree with you,” Ormack said. “But the field of battle
narrows down rapidly. One lucky sighting, one squeak of a radar detector or one
blip on a radar screen, and suddenly the whole pack’s on top of you.”

           
“But I might have my missiles in the
air by then,” Patrick said. “If not, I sure as heck will not stay high over a
target area. I’ve got an infrared camera that can see the ground, and the
pilots have windows—those boys better be flying in the dirt with fighters on my
tail. Even the F-23 advanced tactical fighter can’t fight close to the
ground—they have to rely on taking ‘look-down’ shots from higher altitudes.
That’s where a stealthy plane has the advantage.”

           
Ormack didn’t have a reply right
away—he was thinking hard about McLanahan’s arguments. “You bring up a few good
points, Patrick,” Ormack admitted. “You know what this calls for, don’t you?”

           
“RED FLAG,” McLanahan replied.
“No—better yet, the
Strategic
Warfare
Center
. General Jarrel’s little playland up in
South Dakota
.”

           
“You got it,” Ormack said. “We’ll
have to put an EB-2 up against a few fighters on Jarrel’s range and see what
happens. Maybe even have them fly along with other aircraft on the range to see
if our escorts can be effective with other strike aircraft.” He smiled at
McLanahan and added, “I think that can be arranged. We can send you out to the
Strategic
Warfare
Center
for some operational test flights when the
393rd Bomb Squadron goes to the SWC in a few months. I’ll bring it up to
General Elliott, but I think he’ll go for it. You might have just found
yourself a new job, Patrick—developing penetration and attack techniques for
Black Knight stealth escort crews.”

           
“Throw me in the briar patch,”
McLanahan said as they moved forward to the entry hatch.

           
McLanahan’s new bird was AF SAC
90-007, the seventh B-2 bomber built. He found the plane’s nickname, “License
to Kill,” stenciled on the entry hatch as he and Ormack walked to it and opened
it up to climb inside—it was a perfect nickname. Patrick checked that the
“Alert Start” switch was off and safed—the B-2 had a button in the entry hatch
that would start the bomber’s internal power unit and turn on power and air
before the pilots reached the cockpit. With this system, the B-2 could have
engine started, the inertial navigation system aligned, and the plane taxiing
for takeoff in less than three minutes, without any external power carts or
crew chiefs standing by. Ormack did activate the “Int Power” switch in the
entry way, which activated internal power on the plane.

           
Unlike the B-l bomber, whose
offensive and defensive stations seemed to have been put in reluctantly, almost
haphazardly, the B-2’s cockpit was massive. There was almost enough room for
McLanahan to stand up straight as he slid into the right seat and began to
strap in.

           
Ormack looked at the young navigator
with amusement as he set his seat and even put on a pair of flying gloves.
“Going somewhere?”

           
“You want a redesigned cockpit, sir,
then you gotta do it with the crew dog strapped into position,” McLanahan
replied. “The reach is much different. If I had a helmet, I’d put it on.”
Ormack nodded his agreement and smiled—as usual, McLanahan was getting right
down to business.

           
The bomber’s left instrument panel
was like a television director’s console. Four color MFDs, or multi-function
displays, dominated the instrument panel; each MFD was encircled with buttons
that would change the screen’s function, allowing hundreds of different
displays on each screen. The bomber used small sidestick controllers, like a
fighter plane, with throttle quadrants to the left of each seat and the
button-festooned control stick to the right. Each seat also had a wide,
oval-shaped heads-up display, or HUD, that would project flight and attack
information on the windscreen.

           
“Where’re all the instruments?”
McLanahan exclaimed with obvious surprise. “There’s hardly anything installed
in here. Did they give us a stripped-down test article or what?”

           
“This
is
a fully functional production model, Patrick,” Ormack replied.
“Everything is done on the MFDs or using switches on the throttles and control
stick. The screens show menu choices for selecting options for each piece of
equipment, and you just push a button to select it or use the set button on the
stick.”

           
“But I don’t see any flight-control
system switches,” McLanahan persisted. “What about a flap lever? Gear handle?
How do you raise the landing gear—haul it up with a rope?”

           
“This is almost the twenty-first
century, my friend,” Ormack replied. “We don’t move levers—we tell the plane
what to do and it takes care of it.” He pointed to the right- hand MFD at each
station, which showed a simple five-line menu:
BATT POWER, APU POWER, ALERT START,
NORMAL
START,
and
EMER START.
Each item was located next
to a corresponding button on the screen. -

           
“To start engines, you simply press
the button and advance the throttles to idle,” Ormack explained. “The computer
takes care of everything else. Start engines, and up comes a different menu of
items. Select
TAKEOFF.
The computer
configures the plane for takeoff and continues to configure the plane during
the climbout and all the way to level off—it’ll raise the gear and flaps, monitor
the power settings, everything. Once at cruise altitude, you select
CRUISE
and it’ll fly the plane, manage
the fuel, and report any errors. It has several different modes, including
LANDING, LOW LEVEL, GUST
for bad
weather conditions,
GO AROUND,
and
ATTACK
modes.”

           
“Computerized flying, huh?”
McLanahan muttered. “Pretty slick. You almost think they could do away with the
pilot and nav.”

           
“It’s advance hardware, but not
totally foolproof,” Ormack said. “The pilot in the loop is still important.”

           
“And the nav in the loop as well,”
McLanahan said with a smile, examining the right-hand seat. “Or should I say,
‘mission commander’? I like the sound of that.”

           
The right-hand instrument panel had
boles and slots for the same size and number of color MFDs as the pilot’s side,
but technicians had already removed the monitors themselves. “This looks like a
duplicate of the pilot’s side,” McLanahan observed.

           
“I think it is,” Ormack said. “The
original idea was to have two pilots, remember. They decided it—” As Ormack
watched, Patrick suddenly reached down to an awkwardly mounted keyboard on the
right bulkhead and pulled it out of its slot. “Hey—!”

           
“Sir, having these nice color MFDs
on the right side for the nav would be fine,” McLanahan said, “but it would
also be a huge waste. Small MFDs are nice, but they’re old technology ...”

           
“Old technology? These MFDs are the
latest thing—high-resolution, high-speed,
one twenty-eight K
RAM per pixel, the whole nine yards . . .”

           
“Compare it with pilot’s side,”
McLanahan said. “Look here. The pilot can sit back, set up a scan, and fly his
plane with complete ease and confidence. What does the nav have? The nav has
got to focus on one screen at a time to do his job. His eyes lock on one
screen—they
have
to, because you got
one screen that displays only one set of information. What happens then? He
loses track of what’s going on around him. He loses situational awareness.
Something important might be happening on one of the other screens, but he
doesn’t know that because he’s got to stare at this screen for several seconds.
The setup forces him to divert his attention in several different directions at
once, and by doing so you make him
less
effective, not more.”

           
“These are the best MFDs available,”
Ormack said wryly. “You can swap displays around on each screen, split the
screens and have two displays on one screen, even have the computer shift
displays for you—sort of an autoscan. What’s wrong with all that?”

           
“They’re great, but they’re
outdated,” McLanahan repeated. “We can get something better.” He shook the
keyboard at Ormack, then tossed it over his shoulder. “And no important
keyboards on the side instrument panels. If the nav has to take his eyes off
the scope on the bomb run, it’s no good and it shouldn’t be in the plane. That’s
what gets crews killed.”

           
“We can rig up a swivel arm for the
keyboard . . Ormack began, but McLanahan was clearly unimpressed. “I don’t know
exactly what you have in mind, Patrick, but I don’t think you can just decide
to replace the
entire
avionics suite
...”

           
“You want my recommendations, you’ll
get them,” McLanahan said. “You didn’t mention any restrictions or
specifications, so I’ll build you the best cockpit I can think of.” He paused
for a moment, then said, “And we’ll start with the Armstrong Aerospace Medical
Research Laboratory at Wright-Pat.”