some of them and come back with one.
I stayed in America for two months, traveling from place to place on buses and in trains, sleeping in cheap motels, washing my own underwear and socks. In the morning I went for the meetings I had arranged, wearing the one suit I had pressed the night before, sporting my only tie. I met people and visited companies. I collected and read the materials they gave me, and made synopses. I tried to reject forty-nine thoughts and select the right one for me. Gradually I began to see some light.
The Israeli Air Force and the defense of Israel still flowed in my veins. At that time I didn’t know yet how to build houses, run farms, develop and market computer programs, write novels, initiate ecological research, or join political struggles for national sanity. In 1984 I was focused on the future of aerial warfare.
AMONG OTHER THINGS, helicopters interested me most. The military uses of the vertical-takeoff-and-landing vehicle had captured my imagination for a long time, since I took part in the establishment of the air force commando battalion, which since then became an established fighting unit in blue berets. I knew that the old problem of the helicopters’ flight instrumentation hadn’t changed. When I returned to military service, and after my two-year F-16 venture, I became commander of Tel Nof Air Base. There I met the helicopters again. In the next three years I fell in love with the large CH-53 Petrels, their pilots and mechanics, and the intoxicating operational possibilities they hid.
I liked to spend long hours with them (a helicopter operation is a process that takes days and nights). After years of flying solo on the limits—the way fighter pilots fly—I found the teamwork of the helicopter crews interesting and fun. Their crews were less arrogant, perhaps because in the first place they were seen as second- class pilots. Their society was not so structured, and they had a better sense of humor. There was always humor in their cockpits, sometimes a little stupid, but I enjoyed it, anyway. Most of all I liked their special vocabulary: where fighter pilots confirm with “roger,” the helicopter pilots used the word “straight,” a wonderful idiom that has special meaning in Hebrew.
In those three years commanding Tel Nof I learned to fly those complicated machines and joined in their operations, and I still have several stones I collected in dark, remote fields, in places with foreign and strange names. I flew helicopters in training, in war games, and on the battlefield, and I experienced the great variety of helicopters’ activities: the winding, clandestine penetration into enemy areas, to insert men and supplies in various places, on mountains, in deserts, and onto various vehicles; hovering to rescue wounded and dead people, pulling them up out of canyons, floods, and every other place. I caught a parachute that carried valuable equipment while still in the air; transported heavy loads by a hook under the craft’s belly and deposited them gently on the summit of a high mountain, with the rotor blades clawing at the thin air at the limit of their power. And more.
Helicopter work was amazingly diversified. They penetrated and emerged, sometimes under fire, carrying soldiers, vehicles, and weapons. They attacked, collected intelligence, and chased terrorists in small wars. Gradually I perceived that helicopters went to the limit no less than fighter aircraft, although in different ways. There was enormous combat potential in helicopters, but their flight was complicated and problematic, very different from the beautiful, geometric clarity of a fighter’s movements. Helicopters moved in their secret ways as in a thicket of uncertainties, as in the depths of a jungle. They had to orientate in difficult situations and react quickly to survive.
I was surprised again by the kind of instruments helicopter pilots had. A powerful helicopter such as the CH- 53 took dozens of soldiers with their weapons and vehicles great distances by night and at low altitude, crossing hot battlefields, and winding in complex topographical areas. These were difficult and dangerous flights, and the pilots had to navigate flying low and fast and safely in the darkness among many threats without triggering any of them. The crew had to navigate with perfect accuracy, and to keep spatially oriented all the time. As a fighter pilot myself, I was expecting a serious instrumentation system for what this task required, but the instruments at the disposal of the helicopters’ pilots were years behind the times.
In the three years I flew with helicopters I waited for somebody to propose new instrumentation, but in vain. Salesmen and marketers showed up, but they proposed just gadgets, pieces of instrumentation that dealt with parts of the general problem but not the whole. The modern fighters were sporting integrated flight systems for their less-complicated missions, but helicopters had nothing. And the helicopter pilots themselves didn’t take any interest in avionic instrumentation. They didn’t understand the concept of integration at all. This is why there was no market for real systems for helicopters—no one had thought much about it.
I believed that the time of the helicopter had arrived. Somebody with imagination was needed to create new associations. The helicopter’s problem was very different from the fighters’, and the idea was stimulating intellectually. I thought, Perhaps it could be me? Perhaps just because of my strangeness to their world I might come out with a fresh look at the problem and devise an avionic solution that might answer their questions and resolve those difficulties.
GENERAL PARKER, THE vice commander of U.S. Army aviation, received me at Fort Rucker as if I were a king. Right after a first meeting in his office he drove me to the officers’ quarters. I was housed in a villa with white rugs. For breakfast I sat alone at a table for ten, and a servant, looking like a captain of an ocean liner, wearing a white uniform with shiny gold buttons, served me, passing plates over my shoulders.
For two long days I got an educational tour. I saw helicopters—lots of different kinds of helicopters. There were long rows with hundreds of them. I conversed with the commanders of various units. Then I had meetings with pilots, flight instructors, simulator instructors, chiefs, technicians, and instrumentation people. I looked into their flight profiles and the instruments they were using. At night General Parker and I flew together in a helicopter, simulating combat flight. I observed the way Americans did things and the different tools they used. At the end of those two days at Rucker, which came after visiting the main industries that produced instrumentation and weapons systems for helicopters, I summed it up this way: “All over the world people cook with the same water.” That meant that their problems were identical to ours. I proposed to Parker that I present my impressions to him and his staff.
Some ten officers sat before me in Parker’s briefing room. On the wall hung a white board. I got up and wrote on it a group of sentences in red marker, and at the end of each I put a question mark.
“Well, gentlemen?”
A colonel raised his hand. “General Spector, all these are well-known things. You’ve written a list of our troubles.”
Parker nodded to me to go on.
I added a few more sentences, this time in black. In fact, what I wrote there was an initial characterization, first lines for a full avionic system for military helicopters, but nobody knew it yet. The officers looked at each other and began grinning. These were just empty words, hollow promises. Nothing existed yet in the real world.
“Gentlemen” I asked, “suppose there could be something that does all this. What then?”
I didn’t know how those problems could be solved, but at least now I knew for sure and formulated what was needed.
“If you have such a thing, bring it to me,” said General Parker, “and I’ll buy it. There’s nobody in the world who would pass it up.”
THERE WAS NOTHING MORE to do in the United States. My time abroad was over, and I flew home. On the airliner to Israel the general definitions of the first integrated avionic system for helicopters took shape. I required the system to combine night vision, spatial awareness, navigation, communication, battlefield orientation, and direction of weapons systems. The year was 1985, and combined systems were operational only in the most modern fighter aircraft, such as the F-16, and those systems didn’t even come near to supplying the services I intended. Had General Parker been a less open-minded person, he certainly would have suggested I join George Lucas in producing science fiction films.
I called the avionic system I designed Hila, a woman’s name. In English it translated to Halo. Besides the outstanding operational requirements, my Halo had some serious material difficulties that designers of fighter systems didn’t face. The first was price: air forces that were ready to invest five million dollars in avionic systems for an F-15 fighter wouldn’t invest anything over a hundred thousand to buy avionic systems for a helicopter. Why? I could tell them how wrong they were—a helicopter mishap involves human life, more lives than the crew of a fighter. But what difference would that have that made? Thus I decided that for my final presentation the price tag
