With JFK gone, men like Senator William Proxmire rallied support for the cause that the U.S. government ought not to be funding it. There were Harvard scientists founding outfits like Citizens League Against the Sonic Boom. All over the country a rising hysteria grew ever stronger. The East Coast press printed every outlandish claim, that the great sound-barrier boom of the SSTs would obliterate houses, destroy the American wilderness, wipe out entire species of life on this planet: birds, insects, domestic pets, possibly even liberals.
By the mid-sixties, it was clear that Concorde was in front of the Boeing 2707-100 in its development, but most experts believed the great SST from Seattle would come in late, with a more realistic economic base, and take over the world’s most expensive passenger flights without much trouble. Poor little Concorde would be stampeded aside in the rush.
However the more pressing stampede was that of the abolitionists, and by the late sixties the tide had turned. Pan American and TWA, the two U.S. airlines that had been vociferous supporters of supersonic transport, canceled their orders for Concorde, and a shiver of apprehension was felt in Seattle.
And there was no help from the military, which had traditionally stood behind major aircraft development. In the old days, of the early fifties, any new American SST program would have been for the development of some huge Air Force-manned bomber, and money would have been made available from the defense budget. However, that game, too, was changing drastically, and big manned bombers were becoming obsolete in the new age of guided missiles.
Which left the Boeing Corporation in Seattle to fight a lone battle for its supersonic passenger jet, an aircraft totally impractical without government funding, an aerial wagon around which the Indians were already circling.
On the night of May 17, 1971, Congress finally finished it, voting 49–47 to discontinue funding the project. The men from Seattle were devastated. And three years later, they could only watch helplessly when a cheering crowd estimated at 250,000 surrounded Los Angeles Airport to witness the spectacular landing of Concorde prototype 02, as it came howling out of the skies on its triumphant American Pacific Coast tour to sell the concept of supersonic flight.
There were many designers, engineers, and test pilots at Boeing who never quite got over the political killing of the 2707-100, an aircraft equally as dramatic as Concorde, and probably many times more financially efficient. One of them was a twenty-eight-year-old design engineer named John Mulcahy, an ex — Boston College football star, with an engineering doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
On February 2, in the deep winter of the year 2006, the sixty-three-year-old John Mulcahy was president of the Boeing Corporation, and he sat at the head of the long table in the rarefied corporate conference room listening with unashamed satisfaction to the latest reports of the tests on Starstriker. This was indeed the aircraft to dominate the world in the field of high-speed business travel, transatlantic, transpacific, global. Concorde had proved conclusively there was a market for executives who need to move across the world in a big hurry, the hell with the expense. And the giant Boeing SST was ready to place the corporation right back in the driving seat of world aviation. Where, John Mulcahy fervently believed, it had always belonged.
Certainly, in the intervening years since Concorde had first taken flight, the Boeing Corporation had dominated the world of commercial aviation, the Boeing 707s, 727s, 737s, 747s and the rest had been unrivaled in their volume, their safety and efficiency. But Concorde, nothing like so commercially successful, and a financial failure on so many routes, remained the glittering flagship of air travel.
She was the capricious high-speed record holder of the airways, the passenger jet everyone loved to watch. She had always been to aviation what the Cowboys were to football, what the Yankees were to baseball, what Arnold Palmer was to golf, what the Princess of Wales was to fashion. Concorde was the supersonic jet everyone wanted to meet, preferably from a window seat, sipping champagne, transatlantic.
Which made many Boeing execs consider the world a cruel and unfair place. Because they had designed an SST just as glamorous, even more spectacular-looking, and considerably faster. And government officials, more than three thousand miles away—
But now things were going to be very different. Based on those long-shelved plans and designs, they had re- created it all thirty-five years later. They had advanced the systems, refined the engines, working in conjunction with Pratt and Whitney. From the old stillborn 2707-100 had sprung the twenty-first-century 2707-500, the Boeing Starstriker. Now the world’s hotshot travelers would see what American excellence really stood for. And in a sense the men from Boeing would stand vindicated for all the millions of millions of dollars they had spent back in the sixties, and all the thousands of man-hours they had expended.
Starstriker represented living, growling proof, that where politicians might be quite happy to squander colossal amounts of money, which was not theirs anyway, America’s heavy industry was not so inclined. Their knowledge, their research and development had been meticulously stored over the years, then distilled, cultivated, and improved. And the East Coast journalists who had gleefully added up the costs of the old 2707-100 and pronounced Boeing money managers “guilty of extravagance beyond words” throughout the first SST program… well…they could now go chew on their own long-dead, ill-thought-out feature articles. In the unlikely event they would ever be able to comprehend the depth of their misjudgments.
John Mulcahy beamed with good humor. He sat next to his chief engineer, longtime vice president Sam Boland, whom he had first met at MIT and subsequently lured from another major U.S. plane maker. To his left was the top test pilot in the United States, Bob “Scanner” Richards, Boeing’s near-mythical project manager whose instinct for the smooth running of a revolutionary design venture was fabled throughout the industry. Scanner had just declared the titanium-bodied Starstriker
John Mulcahy had also listened to a report by his public relations chief, Jay Herbert, who had described, in barely controlled excitement, the events that would unfold in Washington, right there at Dulles International Airport on February 9, when Scanner Richards would take Starstriker on her maiden transatlantic test flight in the company of all of the top Boeing technicians who had worked on her for so long. There would be no passengers, just the high-tech air crew and staff. The guest list at the celebrity breakfast and reception was as glamorous as anything seen in the nation’s capital since the Reagan years.
Ten minutes previously Jay had revealed that the President of the United States would arrive at Dulles, together with his wife and National Security Advisor Admiral Arnold Morgan, plus Secretary of Defense Bob MacPherson. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Scott Dunsmore had accepted, plus the heads of all the Armed Services. Leading senators, congressmen, governors, the titans of corporate America, media tycoons, Wall Street giants, and a smattering of show-business lightweights, actresses and singers, who would probably claim most of the headlines.
The maiden transatlantic flight of Starstriker had captured the attention of the press and television as few technological subjects ever do. Orders and inquiries from at least eight different airlines, four of them American, were being dealt with on an hourly basis by the marketing department. John Mulcahy had known some great days as the man at the helm of the world’s greatest aircraft production corporation. But February 9 promised to be his finest hour.
He was a tall, craggy man in appearance, inclined to look a bit disheveled even in a brand-new expensive suit. His much younger wife, Betsy, fought a losing battle to make him look like the president of the Boeing Corporation, but she could never persuade him to get his shoes shined. And no matter how many times she bought him a tie from Hermes he always managed to knot it badly, somehow too thin, and it rarely hid the top button of his shirt.
Nonetheless there was an aura of power about the man. He stood six feet three inches, and his hair was thick, iron grey in color. He laughed a lot, but he also frowned a lot, and he ruled the corporation in a stern, hands- on manner. Only his true friends understood that behind this forbidding, somewhat severe exterior there lurked a wild Irishman, dying to break cover. No one ever forgot John’s sixtieth birthday party in a private room at the most expensive hotel in Seattle…when he stood on a table at one in the morning and insisted on singing a succession of traditional Irish revolutionary battle hymns. Upset a few local matrons, but Senator Kennedy seemed wryly amused.
John Mulcahy’s grandparents were from County Kildare in Ireland, and he treasured his roots in the old country. Each year he and Betsy flew to Shannon and drove up to the family village of Kilcullen, where he stayed at the home of one of Ireland’s major industrialists, Brendan Sheehan. On the way, they stopped and played golf for two or three days at Mount Juliet in County Kilkenny. In Kildare they played Michael Smurfit’s magnificent golf
