“No sonic boom?”
“No sonic boom. Instead of flat wings, like normal, you need to wrap the wings around the fuselage, make a ringwing.”
“What’s a ringwing?” asked innocent lil me.
Bob pulled a felt-tip pen from his shirt pocket and began sketching on his paper placemat.
“Here’s the fuselage of the plane.” He drew a narrow cigar shape. “Now we wrap the wing around it, like a sleeve. See?” He drew what looked to me like a tube wrapped around the cigar. “Actually, it’s two wings, one inside the other, and all the shock waves that cause the sonic boom get canceled out. No sonic boom.”
The rest of us looked at Bob, then down at the sketch, then up at Bob again. Rohr looked wary, like he was waiting for the punch line. Kurtz looked like a puzzled Karl Marx.
“I don’t know that much about aerodynamics,” Rohr said slowly, “but this is a Busemann biplane you’re talking about, isn’t it?”
“That’s right.”
“Uh-huh. And isn’t it true that a Busemann biplane’s wings produce no lift?”
“That’s right,” Bob admitted, breaking into a grin.
“No lift?” Kurtz snapped.
“Zero lift.”
“Then how the hell do you get it off the ground?”
“It won’t fly, Orville,” Bob Wisdom said, his grin widening. “That’s why nobody’s built one.”
The rest of us groaned while Bob laughed at us. An engineer’s joke, in the face of impending doom. We’d been had.
Until, that is, I blurted out, “So why don’t you fill it with helium?”
The guys spent the next few days laughing at me and the idea of a supersonic zeppelin. I have to admit, at that stage of the game, I thought it was kind of silly too. But yet . . .
Richard Grand could be pompous, but he wasn’t stupid. Before the week was out, he just happened to pass by my phonebooth-sized cubicle and dropped in for a little chat, like the lord of the manor being gracious to a stable hand.
“That was rather clever of you, that supersonic zeppelin quip,” he said as he ensconced himself on a teeny wheeled chair he had to roll in from the empty cubicle next door.
“Thanks,” I said noncommittally, wondering why a senior engineer would give a compliment to a junior MBA.
“It might even be feasible,” Grand mused. “Technically, that is.”
I could see in his eyes the specter of Christmas-yet-to-come and the layoffs that were coming with it. If a senior guy like Grand was worried, I thought, I ought to be scared purple. Could I use the SSZ idea to move up Anson Aerospace’s hierarchical ladder? The guys at the bottom were the first ones scheduled for layoffs, I knew. I badly needed some altitude, and even though it sounded kind of wild, the supersonic zeppelin was the only foothold I had to get up off the floor.
“Still,” Grand went on, “it isn’t likely that management would go for the concept. Pity, isn’t it?”
I nodded agreement while my mind raced. If I could get management to take the SSZ seriously, I might save my job. Maybe even get a promotion. But I needed an engineer to propose the concept to management. Those suits upstairs wouldn’t listen to a newly-minted MBA; most of them were former engineers themselves who’d climbed a notch or two up the organization.
Grand sat there in that squeaky little chair and philosophized about the plight of the aerospace industry in general and the bleak prospects for Anson Aerospace in particular.
“Not the best of times to approach management with a bold, innovative concept,” he concluded.
Oh my God, I thought. He’s talked himself out of it! He was starting to get up and leave my cubicle.
“You know,” I said, literally grabbing his sleeve, “Winston Churchill backed a lot of bold, innovative ideas, didn’t he? Like, he pushed the development of tanks in World War I, even though he was in the navy, not the army.”
Grand gave me a strange look.
“And radar, in World War II,” I added.
“And the atomic bomb,” Grand replied. “Very few people realize it was Sir Winston who started the atomic bomb work, long before the Yanks got into it.”
The Yanks? I thought. This from a Jewish engineer from the Bronx High School for Science.
I sighed longingly. “If Churchill were here today, I bet he’d push the SSZ for all it’s worth. He had the courage of his convictions, Churchill did.”
Grand nodded but said nothing and left me at my desk. The next morning, though, he came to my cubicle and told me to follow him.
Glad to get away from my claustrophobic workstation, I headed after him, asking, “Where are we going?”
“Upstairs.”
Management territory!
“What for?”
“To broach the concept of the supersonic zeppelin,” said Grand, sticking out his lower lip in imitation of Churchillian pugnaciousness.
“The SSZ? For real?”
“Listen, my boy, and learn. The way this industry works is this: you grab onto an idea and ride it for all it’s worth. I’ve decided to hitch my wagon to the supersonic zeppelin, and you should too.”
I should too? Hell, I thought of it first!
John Driver had a whole office to himself and a luscious, sweet-tempered executive assistant of Greek-Italian ancestry, with almond-shaped dark eyes and lustrous hair even darker. Her name was Lisa, and half the male employees of Anson Aerospace fantasized about her, including me.
Driver’s desk was big enough to land a helicopter on, and he kept it immaculately clean, mainly because he seldom did anything except sit behind it and try to look important. Driver was head of several engineering sections, including APT. Like so many others in Anson, he had been promoted to his level of incompetency: a perfect example of the Peter Principle. Under his less-then-brilliant leadership, APT had managed to avoid developing anything more advanced than a short-range drone aircraft that ran on ethanol. It didn’t fly very well, but the ground crew used the
