Roaring Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age (29 page)

Schairer looked at his watch again—he checked it about every five minutes—and said, “Come along, Vance; we’ve got to get down to Ed’s office to work the B-47 problem some more.”

Tom and Harry left shortly thereafter, picked up Harry’s gear at the Windsor, and drove out the rainy highway to McChord.

“Weather doesn’t look too bad. Just look out for Mount Rainier after you take off—guys have been known to run right into it.”

“No, that’s the great thing about jets. I’ll be on top at about five thousand feet, and even I am not so dumb as to run into a rock in clear air.”

At Base Operations, they shook hands and Harry asked, “Is there anything I can do to help with Marie, Tom? Would it help if Anna came out to visit?”

“That might help, Harry. I’m willing to try anything, but I think time’s running out on me. Fly safe!”

Harry carried his gear into the flight planning room, musing on the blistering pace of the last few days and deeply troubled by the red lipstick he had seen on Tom’s collar as he got out of the car. He looked vainly for a good explanation for it—maybe Marie had smudged it when Tom was packing. But given the atmosphere at the Windsor, probably not.

July 2, 1948, Boeing Field, Seattle, Washington

“Those are bright boys, Vance! I can see why you are proud of them.”

“They’re good boys, too. Funny, how you always think of them as boys even though they are getting to be thirty!”

Schairer got up and carefully closed his office door.

“Vance, you’ve been invaluable on the B-47 program, and I have to say that Tom has helped a lot—I’m glad you finagled a way to bring him in on it. But we are making pretty good progress now, and I want to give you a parallel assignment. It will keep you here another six months or more, and I need to know if you have commitments that will prevent you from accepting.”

Schairer’s tone was as warm and friendly as it got, but Shannon could tell that he was very serious indeed by the way he leaned forward over his desk, his hands grasping a pencil, almost bending it to the breaking point.

“I told Dutch Kindelberger that I’d only be gone for four months. I do have some studies I need to clean up at North American, but I could do that if I commuted down there a couple of days every week or two. How would that work out?”

Schairer stood up and paced back and forth. “I don’t know. It’s not the amount of time you’d be away; I know you’d work night and day while you were here. But it’s the commercial security I’m worried about. If even one word leaks out on what I want you to do, it could cost us millions of dollars, maybe even cost us the company.”

Vance’s feelings were not hurt by Schairer’s concerns. Accidents happen; briefcases get left on trains, all sorts of things. He knew that his friend never exaggerated, nor did he ever understate—he was always clinically precise. This must be something crucially important for Boeing. But why would he want an outside contractor to handle it if it was?

“Look, Vance, here are the facts. Boeing is in economic trouble. We’ve lost money the last three years, and the only thing that keeps us going is the tax-recovery program, which gives us back some of the wartime taxes
we paid, just to help us through this transition process. You heard Leisy talk about the 377 program—he’s right; we’ll never break even there, not unless we can sell some tankers. And B-50 production will wind down soon. Boeing is coming to a fork in the road. If we pick the right one, we’ll survive; if we don’t, we’ll be out of business in two years, three at the most.”

Shannon understood. Douglas had its DC-4s and DC-6 transports coming along, and Lockheed was pumping out Constellations—there was no room for the expensive 377. And both competitors had military contracts as well, with Lockheed producing jets and Douglas building attack planes.

“Then we’ve got a labor problem. The way the contracts were written during the war, employees have seniority rights. We’re down from forty-five thousand people at the end of the war to about fifteen thousand, all senior people, all making good money. The labor force is about to strike for more wages—they want thirty-five cents an hour more across-the-board at a time when we need to slash costs.”

“This is quite a buildup, George. You must be setting me up for something big, or something difficult. You never spend this amount of time getting to the point.”

Schairer whirled, went to the easel, and tore the cover back. There, beautifully detailed, was a drawing of the most stunning airplane Vance had ever seen, a low-wing jet transport with four jet engines slung in pods as on the B-47.

“This is our jet transport plane. It is based on the B-47, as you see, and it is absolutely top secret. The only chance Boeing has to survive in the future is to build the first jet transport and get it in operation. But we can’t get a decision to go ahead because there are too many risks. And here is the biggest one.”

He turned the page and revealed another drawing, this one also of a stunningly beautiful jet transport, very
different in concept, but with a tail design that told Shannon that it had to be a de Havilland product.

“Wow—where did you get this?”

“There’s a term for it, Vance; it’s called industrial espionage. I got a call from a man you might know from your Lockheed days, Fritz Obermyer. He’s in the United States now, but he passed through England, and a friend got him past de Havilland security and onto the factory floor. He took these pictures.” Schairer tossed Vance a packet of eight-by-ten photos, obviously blown up from smaller images, and went on. “Obermyer claimed he worked for Bob Gross before and during the war. I called Bob, and he was embarrassed but confirmed it. Gross said that although all of Obermyer’s information had not always been useful, it was almost always correct. Well, this is very useful to us.”

Shannon had never heard of Obermyer but remembered Gross talking about foreign information sources that he had. He studied the photos carefully and compared them to the three-view drawing. “Not much sweepback, and broad-chord, thick wings. Good for short-field takeoffs. Putting the engines inside the wing looks good, but I think it would cause a lot of problems.”

“So do we. And you can’t tell it from the photos, but the airplane is too small for the United States. It looks like about thirty-six passengers would be the maximum. But it could be stretched, or scaled up.”

“What are you planning for your airplane to carry?”

“Maybe eighty. We’re thrust limited now. We want to use the same engines we’re using in the B-47. J47s, they are reliable; we’re familiar with them.”

“I cannot believe what you are saying, George! We just met yesterday on getting new Pratt & Whitney engines for the big bomber. If you use the same engine on the jet transport you can scale it up to carry maybe one hundred sixty passengers and have a trans-Atlantic range. This is your chance to think big.”

Schairer, usually impassive, paled. “You’re telling me to go in to the board of directors and tell them that I want to spend twice as much money as we’ve ever talked about, on a new jet transport, at a time when they are already worried about going broke?”

“Absolutely. If you make an eighty-passenger airplane, you’re inviting de Havilland to scale up their plane, to compete. And they’ve a few years’ head start on you.” He waved one of the photos and said, “I’d say this airplane will be flying in a year or less. You don’t have any time to lose.”

Schairer sat at his desk, his slide rule flying. Once he brightened and smiled at Vance. “A bigger airplane would be better as a tanker, too.” When he had finished jotting down a whole series of numbers, he said, “Let me sleep on this, Vance. It’s just so audacious that I cannot comment now. But I want you to go to Great Britain, and see if you can get a tour of the de Havilland plant. See it with your own eyes, then come back here and report. I want to know if we are right about the size, about de Havilland’s marketing plan, and especially about how much testing they are going to do before they put it in service. This airplane might just be a flying prototype for something bigger—you know they are building two gigantic airplanes over there, the Bristol Brabazon and the Saro Princess, a flying boat, of all things. Maybe de Havilland will just use this as a mail plane, and build a bigger one for hauling passengers. If they do, we might have a chance to be first.”

“No, George, this is an airliner. They never would have made the fuselage diameter so large, nor would they have stuck these strange square windows in it, if they were just going to fly mail in it. But it’s too small and you’ve got to think big. Mentioning the Bristol Brabazon gives me a point of departure. Stanley Hooker is an old friend, and he’s with Bristol, now. I’d have to be up-front and tell him I was looking for information, but he can probably get me a briefing at de Havilland.”

“Can you leave in the next few days? If you can get back to me in say three weeks, give or take a week, I’ll have time to prepare for the next board of directors meeting. In the meantime, we should hear something from Harry about the new engines from Pratt. They are the key; I wouldn’t dream of scaling up this project unless I knew we had the engine problem solved.”

August 2, 1948, Hartford, Connecticut

Harry liked being treated as visiting royalty. Perry Pratt had been very cordial, telling him, “The first thing you need is background. Pratt & Whitney has a glorious record, but nobody ever thinks about engines; they always think about airframes. You hear all about Thunderbolts and Corsairs and Wildcats and Liberators, but you never hear about the great Pratt & Whitney engines that made them possible. I’m assigning a bright young chap, right out of college, to take you around and show you what’s what.”

The bright young chap was Harvey Lippincott, and he had an encyclopedic knowledge of not only Pratt & Whitney but any aviation subject. Harvey knew all about Harry’s dad and his exploits and questioned him eagerly about flying the Massey Double Quad. But mostly Harvey lectured as they walked up and down the huge factory aisles. Many of them were idle now, with long rows of expensive machine tools, glistening with oil and obviously cared for tenderly, standing silent. Only in one section of the factory was there work going on, and even that section had none of the clangor and bang of a factory under pressure. Still, it was hard to imagine something as big, powerful, and greasy as an aircraft engine being manufactured in an environment as clinically clean as an operating room.

Lippincott knew most of the people on the floor, and
about every twenty feet he would introduce Harry to someone else. It wasn’t simple schmoozing, either. Harvey knew what they were working on and what they had worked on in the past, and he wove it into a fabric of manufacturing history that dazzled Harry.

“Pratt & Whitney shipped three hundred and sixty-three thousand, three hundred and nineteen engines during the war, with an equivalent horsepower of six hundred and three million, eight hundred and fourteen thousand, seven hundred and twenty-three. They powered fifty-one different kinds of aircraft, including trainers, transports, fighters, and bombers.”

After what seemed to Harry to be the fiftieth trip down long rows of expensive machinery, Lippincott came to a halt and said, “But all that is in the past. In the next building, I’m going to show you the future, and it is coming on strong.”

They walked another fifty feet to where a guard was obviously waiting for them. As they approached, he flipped a smart salute and opened the doors that held a big “Keep Out” sign.

Lippincott steered Harry to an engine test cell where white-coated technicians were swarming over a long, wasp-waisted jet engine.

“There, Colonel Shannon, is the future. It is the Pratt & Whitney X-176, a twin-spool turbojet. The military will call it the J57, and in commercial aircraft it will be the JT3. It will produce ten-thousand-shaft horsepower dry, and fifteen thousand with an afterburner. You’ll see thousands of these engines in the next ten years.”

He handed Harry sound-suppressing earmuffs, put on a pair himself, and nodded to the engineering team, who were crouched behind a huge instrument panel that was in turn shielded by a thick glass window. The X-176 engine started with a low roar, shooting a spear of flame out the rear, where it was channeled upward into a chimney that ran to the roof and beyond. The noise grew rapidly.
The engine did not vibrate as piston engines did, but as they pushed the throttle forward, increasing its thrust, there was an imposing sense of immense power, carefully controlled. After a ten-minute run, they slowly eased the engine back to idle and then to cutoff. The silence was deafening.

Harry was too moved to comment. This was the engine they needed for Boeing’s big bomber. With six or even eight of these, they could create a world-beater that would fly so high and so fast that Soviet interceptors could not counter it.

For the rest of the day, Lippincott continued to make a believer out of him, taking him through the administrative areas, leaving no stone unturned. He didn’t see Perry Pratt again until the next morning.

“Well, Colonel, did you learn anything?”

“I learned that you have a great historian giving tours. Harvey Lippincott is remarkable.”

“Don’t think I’m boasting, but I’ll have to correct you. Harvey is a typical Pratt & Whitney employee. Somehow we just attract the best, and that accounts for our success.”

“Forgive me for asking, but are you part of the original Pratt founding fathers of the company?”

“Absolutely not, no relation, but I have to say the name has helped me a lot here in Hartford. Luke Hobbs will be here in a minute. You saw the X-176.” It was not a question, just a statement.

“Yes, it was impressive.”

“Well, I have to tell you that Pratt & Whitney, like every other big wartime manufacturer, has been hit hard by peace. We’ve lost most of our workforce, and we’ve even had to sacrifice some really first-rate managers, just because there isn’t any work for them. It kills me, because I know they’ll be snapped up by rivals.”

Luke Hobbs walked in. Lippincott had told Harry how Hobbs had saved the company before the war, throwing out some engine designs that were ready for mass
production and insisting on the creation of the R-2800, probably the most successful American piston engine design of the war.