The Minotaur (36 page)

“Looks better,” the junior LSO told Jake. “I think the boards
give her more control.”

“Six-hundred-feet-a-minute sink rate,” Rita reported. Once
again the main mounts smacked in with puffs of fried rubber from
each tire as it rotated up to speed. The main oleos compressed and
the nose slapped down, then she was adding power and pulling the
nose right back up into the sky.

After the sixth pass she pulled the throttles back to idle and the
plane stayed on the deck. The engine noise was really subdued.

“Quiet bugger, ain’t it?” one LSO said, grinning. “We’ll have to
call this one the Burglar. First we had the Intruder, now the Bur-
glar.”

“I think it ought to be called the Penetrator,” the senior man
said. ” ‘Yeah, baby, I’m a Penetrator pilot’” He cackled at his
own wit.

When Rita cleared the runway. Smoke Judy called the LSOs.
“Since you guys are all set up, how about giving me a couple?”

“If you got the gas, you get the pass,” the LSO radioed.

The debriefing took until 9 P.M. with an hour break for dinner. The
telemetry data and the videotapes were played and studied. Rita
and Toad were each carefully debriefed as a dozen engineers gath-
ered around and the naval officers hovered in the background.

The plane was then thoroughly inspected by a team of structural
engineers. The simulated carrier landings had placed stresses on
the structure that the air force had never anticipated when it devel-
oped the specifications for this prototype. No one expected visible
damage, and there was none, but if the plane were to be put into
production, strengthening would inevitably be needed. Just where
and how much was the concern, and the telemetry data would
pinpoint these locations.

And some minor equipment problems had surfaced. The Consol-
idated technicians would work all night to fix those as navy main-
tenance specialists watched and took notes. The intake rumble m
the landing pattern was the most serious problem, and Adele
DeCrescentis discussed it on the phone with the people at the Con-
solidated factory in Burbank for over an hour.

All in all, it had been a fine day. Rita and Toad were still going a
mile a minute when Jake loaded them all into the vans at 9 P.M. for
the two-mile trip to the VOQ, the Visiting Officers’ Quarters.

Jake and his department heads gathered in his room that evening.
Someone produced a cold six-pack of beer and they each took a
bottle.

“The day after tomorrow. It’ll all be decided then,” Les Rich-
ards, the A-6 bombardier, told the assembled group. “Day after
tomorrow we pull some Gs. and I don’t think we can live with a
five-G limitation. I don’t think the navy needs an attack plane for a
low-level mission that is that G-limited. It’ll get bounced around
too much down low, and if a fighter ever spots it or someone pops
an IR or optically guided missile, this thing is dead meat.”

“What if they beef it up?” someone asked. “Strengthen the spars
and so on?”

“Cut performance too much. More weight. We don’t have a
whole lot of performance to begin with. And what if the compres-
sors stall?”

“Could they enlarge the automatic flaps on the intakes that raise
up and scoop more air in when the engines need it?”

“It’d be turbulent air. We learned today that those two engines
like a diet of smooth, undisturbed air.”

“Oh no we didn’t.”

So it went. Jake ran them all out at midnight and collapsed into
bed.

The following day was spent in further intensive review of the
videotapes and telemetry data, and planning the second flight.

Glitches developed. Under the usual ground rules for op-eval
fly-offs, the manufacturer cleared various areas of the flight perfor-
mance envelope for the navy test pilots to explore. Rita wanted to
examine the slow-flight characteristics of the aircraft before she
proceeded to high-angle-of-attack/high-G maneuvers. Consolidat-
ed’s chief engineer did not want her below 200 knots clean and 120
knots dirty.

When Jake joined the conversation, Rita was saying, “I flew the
plane at 124 knots yesterday, three o’clock angle of attack. Now, is
that 1.3 times the stall speed or isn’t it? How are we supposed to
verify the stall speed if we can’t stall it?”

Jake merely stood and listened.

“We’ve told you what the stall speed is,” the engineer explained
patiently, “at every weight and every altitude and every configura-
tion. Those speeds were established by experimental test pilots.”

“Well, I’m an engineering test pilot—all navy test pilots are
trained to that standard—but I can’t see how we can do a proper
operational evaluation of your airplane if we don’t explore the left
side of the envelope.”

The civilian appealed to Jake. “Listen, Captain. This is the only
prototype we have. If she drills a deep hole with it, we have big
problems. It’ll be goddamn hard to sell an airplane when all we
have is the wreckage.”

“What makes you think,” Jake asked, “that she can’t safely re-
cover from a stall?”

“I didn’t say that. You’re putting words into my mouth.”

“Get DeCrescentis over here.” The chief engineer went off to
find her.

“We have to stall that plane. Captain,” Rita told him. “If those
rumbles in the landing pattern yesterday were incipient compressor
stalls, we’ll get some real ones if we get her slowed down enough. I
think that’s what Consolidated doesn’t want us into.”

Adele DeCrescentis backed her engineer. Jake heard her out,
then said, “I don’t think you people really want to sell this plane to
the navy.”

The vice president set her jaw- “We sure as hell want it in one
piece to sell to somebody.”

“Well, I’ll tell you this. We’re going to fly that plane the way I
want it flown or we’ll stop this show right now. The navy isn’t
spending ten million bucks for a fly-off if all we can do is cruise the
damn thing down the interstate at fifty-five. We’re trying to find
out if that plane can be used to fight with, Ms. DeCrescentis, not
profile around the Paris Air Snow.”

She opened her mouth, but Jake didn’t give her a chance. “I
mean it. We’ll fly it my way or we won’t fly it. Your choice.”

She looked about her, opened her mouth, then closed it again.
Finally she said, “I’ll have to think about it for a bit.” She wheeled
and made a beeline for the Consolidated offices and the phones, the
chief engineer trailing after her.

“Maybe you had better make a phone call too,” Rita suggested.

“Nope.” He looked at Rita and grinned. “Captains have to obey
orders, of course, but George Ludlow and Royce Caplinger shoved
me out in front on this one. They want me to make a recommenda-
tion and take the heat, so they sort of have to let me do it my way.”
He shrugged. “Generally speaking, doing it your way is not very
good for your career, but I’ve been to the mat once too often
anyway. That’s why I got this job. Ludlow’s a pretty good
SECNAV. He understands the navy and the people in it. He
wouldn’t send a guy with a shot at flag over to Capitol Hill to get
his balls cut off, not if he had any other choice.”

Rita looked dubious.

“Are you right about this. Miss Moravia?”

“Yes, sir. I am.”

“I think so too. So that’s the way well do it. As long as I’m in
charge.”

When Adele DeCrescentis returned, she agreed with Jake. Ap-
parently the president of the company could also read tea leaves.

“Go find that Consolidated test pilot,” Jake told Rita when they
were alone. “Take him over to the club and buy him a drink. Find
out everything he knows about stalling this invisible airplane off
the record.”

“Aye aye, sir,” Rita said, and marched off.

Cumulus clouds and rain squalls moving through the area from the
west delayed the second flight another day, but when she finally
got the plane to altitude, Rita attacked the performance envelope
with vigor while Smoke Judy in the F-14 hung like glue on first one
wing, then the other.

Stalls were first.

They were almost last. With the nose at ten degrees above the
horizon and the power at 70 percent, she let the plane coast into
the first one, but didn’t get there because the pitty-pat thumping
began in the intakes and increased in intensity to a drumming rat-
a-tat-tat played by a drunk. The EOT rose dramatically and RPMs
dropped on both engines. She could feel vibrations reaching her
through the seat and throttles and rudder pedals.

Compressor stalls! Well, that mousy little test pilot for Consoli-
dated hadn’t been lying. She pushed the nose over, which inciden-
tally worsened the thumping from behind the cockpit, and held it
there while her speed increased and the noise finally abated, all the
while reading the numbers from the engine instruments over the
radio.

With the engines back to normal, she had another thought. If a
pilot got slow and lost power in the landing pattern, on final, this
thing could pancake into the ground short of the runway. Aboard
ship the technical phrase for that turn of events was “ramp strike.”

She smoothly pulled the nose to twenty degrees above the hori-
zon and as her speed dropped began feeding in power until she had
the throttles forward against the stops. The airspeed continued to
decay. This was “the back side of the power curve,” that flight
regime where drag increased so dramatically as the airspeed bled
off that the engines lacked sufficient power to accelerate the plane.

The onset of compressor stall was instantaneous and dramatic, a
violent hammering from the intakes behind the cockpit that caused
the whole plane to quiver. Before she could recover, the plane
stalled. It broke crisply and fell straight forward until the nose was
fifteen degrees below the horizon, then the canard authority re-
turned. Still the engine compressors were stalled, with EGT going
to the red lines and RPM dropping below 85 percent.

Rita smartly retarded the throttles to keep the engines from
overtemping. The pounding continued.

Throttles to idle. EGT above red line.

She chopped the throttles to cutoff, securing the flow of fuel to
the engines.

The pounding ceased. The cockpit was very quiet.

Toad remarked later that all he could hear as Rita worked to
restart the engines “was God laughing.”

This time as Rita approached touchdown, she flared the plane
and pulled the throttles aft. Sure enough, the pounding of turbu-
lent air in the intakes began just before the main wheels kissed the
runway. She held the nose off and watched the EGT tapes twitch
as the plane decelerated. When she was losing stabilator authority,
she lowered the nose to the runway and smoothly applied the
brakes.

“Another day, another dollar,” Toad told her on the ICS.

Removing the engines from the airplane, inspecting them, inspect-
ing the intakes and reinstalling the engines took three days, mainly
because Jake Grafton demanded that a factory rep look at the
compressor and turbine blades with a microscope, which had to be
flown in.

Consolidated’s chief engineer was livid. He was so furious that
he didn’t trust himself to speak, and turned away when anyone in
uniform approached him. Adele DeCrescentis was equally out-
raged, but she hid it better. She listened to Rita and reviewed the
telemetry and videotapes and grunted when Jake Grafton spoke to
her.

The navy personnel left the Consolidated employees to their mis-
ery.

“We’re wasting our time flying that bird again,” Les Richards
and George Wilson told Jake. “It’s unsat and there is no possible
fix that would cure the problem. The whole design sucks.”

“How do you know they can’t fix it?”

“Well, look at it. At high angles of attack the intakes are blanked
off by the cockpit and the shape of the fuselage, that aerodynamic
shape. How could they fix it?”

“Goddamn, I’m not an aeronautical engineer! How the hell
would I know?”

“Well, I am,” Wilson said, “and they can’t.”

“Never say never. Regardless, we’re going to fly this bird five
times. I don’t want anyone to say that we didn’t give Consolidated
a fair chance.”

“We’re wasting our time and the navy’s money.”

“What’s a few million?” Jake asked rhetorically. The real objec-
tive was to get money for an acceptable airplane from Congress. So
he was philosophical.

Toad Tarkington slipped down the hall to his wife’s room when he
thought everyone else was in bed. They had been running a low-
profile romance since they arrived in Tonopah.

“Tell me again,” Toad said, “just what that Consolidated test
pilot said about stalls when you pumped him. What’s his name?”

“Stu Vinich. He just said they had had some compressor-stall
problems at high angles of attack.”

“Nothing else? Nothing about how serious they were?”

“He couldn’t. Toad. The company was downplaying the whole
subject. People who talk out of school draw unemployment
checks.”

“We were damned lucky that thing didn’t spin. And we were
lucky the engines relit.”

“Luck is a part of the job,” Rita told him.

“Yeah. If we had punched and our chutes hadn’t opened, Vinich
would have just stood at our graves and shook his head.”

“He said enough- I knew what to expect.”

Toad turned out the light and snuggled down beside her.

Jake Grafton was poking and prodding the plane, trying to stay
out of the technicians’ way. when he noticed Adele DeCrescentis
watching him. He walked over- ”You know,” he said, “this thing
reminds me of a twelve-ton Swiss watch.”

“A quartz watch,” the vice president said.

“Yeah. Anyway, I was wondering. Just how hard would it be for
your folks to put a twenty-millimeter cannon on this plane?”

“A gun?” She appeared dumbfounded, as if the idea had never
occurred to her.

“Uh-huh. A gun. A little Gatling, snuggled inside the fuselage
with five hundred rounds or so. What do you think?”