'Yeah, somebody at MIT slipped a copy of her thesis to Dave Carlstrand, the electronics guy who was just then working with some venture capitalists to start Aeroworks.'
'Whatever happened to the YF-27?' Troy asked.
'It was stolen by a Russian,' Dehnland said. 'Spectacular caper… got shot down over Alaska. As far as I know, they never built a second one. Dr. Meyers went on to other things.'
'Including manned, solar-powered airplanes,' Troy said.
'Which brings us here today,' Dehnland said, gesturing for them to follow him.
She was in the Shakuru hangar, talking to some people and gesturing at a wing section as the three men approached.
'Dr. Meyers, I'd like to introduce your flight crew,' Dehnland said. 'This is Aron Arnold, and I guess you've met Troy Loensch.'
'Yes, we've met,' Dr. Meyers said, smiling at Troy. She was still wearing her oversize sweatshirt and still had her hair tied back, but without her owlish, Coke-bottle glasses, Troy could see that she had been, and was still, an attractive woman. 'You didn't tell me that you were going to be working on the Shakuru Project.'
'You didn't tell me you were the doctor who invented it,' Troy said, shaking her hand.
'As you gentlemen can see, there is a similarity between Shakuru and the NASA ERAST aircraft, especially Helios,' she began, gesturing at the aircraft.
'Yeah, we were talking about Helios yesterday,' Arnold said apprehensively.
'You're thinking about the crash,' she said knowingly.
'Yeah,' Arnold said warily, nodding at the huge wing. 'Um, I was hoping that you had figured out how to design it so it doesn't warp into a chronic high dihedral.'
'We learned a lot from what NASA did wrong.' Dr. Meyers chuckled. 'This one's a spanloader, not built with a wing that's got a point-loaded distribution of mass on the same structure.'
'So it bears the load evenly across the wing,' Troy added. 'Like the British Zephyr solar UAV.'
'Right, and it's bigger than Helios and a lot more robust,' she said. 'Helios had a 247-foot wing, bigger than a C-5 or a 747, but Shakuru spans 296 feet. Helios weighed only about 1,400 pounds — it was made out of Kevlar and Styrofoam — but Shakuru weighs more than three tons, mainly in the crew support module. Helios didn't need pressurized oxygen tanks, but you will when you get up to 130,000 feet. To keep weight down, Shakuru is not equipped with ejection seats, but if you have to egress, you'll be doing so at a speed slower than what you'll find with most skydiving planes.'
'That's a lot higher than Helios, isn't it?' Troy asked.
'The first two words in HAWX are 'High Altitude,'' Dr. Meyers said. 'That's what we do here. That was the mandate when they created HAWX. Helios set an unofficial world record altitude at 96,863 feet, and executed sustained flight above 96,000 feet for extended periods. We're here to top that.'
'But one-thirty is way over the ceiling of the SR-71, even,' Troy said, excited at the prospect of setting a world altitude record.
'With solar-powered electric motors, you don't need air for combustion like you do with jets or piston engines, so there's no limit,' Arnold said, emphasizing the obvious.
'And unlike rockets, which don't need air but run out of fuel in a few minutes, solar engines never run out of fuel,' Dr. Meyers added.
'Until the sun goes down,' Arnold replied.
'You just switch to your lithium sulfur battery.' She smiled.
'Doesn't that add a whole lot to the weight?' Arnold said, scrutinizing the huge airplane.
'Lithium sulfur has a high energy density because of the low atomic weight of lithium.'
'How high has it been flown to date?' Troy asked, thinking more and more about the idea of being part of a world record.
'It's only had three flights, just to prove it works,' Dr. Meyers said. 'They got it up to twenty-eight thousand, but that's all… so far.'
'Well, let's crank this baby up.' Troy smiled.
'We don't actually 'crank up' an aircraft with a top speed of ninety knots,' Dr. Meyers said, as though correcting a student.
'That's… all?'
'I know that you boys are used to fast jets, but as I said, the mandate under HAWX is high altitude, not necessarily high speed.'
'High altitude and high speed are not mutually exclusive,' Troy interjected.
'Certainly not,' Dr. Meyers agreed, nodding toward the razor wire — enclosed hangar that Troy had noticed that morning. 'The HAWX Program has some of the fastest… but ummm… enough on that topic.'
Troy and Aron Arnold exchanged glances. What was it about this high-speed aircraft that made her bite her tongue, about which a mere mention was saying too much?
After a change of subject, a walk-around, and a close-up look at one of the solar-powered engines, Dr. Meyers led the two pilots up the scaffolding for an inspection of the cockpit. Because the Shakuru was a massive flying wing, with essentially no fuselage, the cockpit was centered on the leading edge of the wing.
As she lit up the displays on the control panel and went through the various nuances of the operation of the aircraft, Troy noticed that the altimeter was calibrated to two hundred thousand feet.
Chapter 37
'Can't believe we're airborne,' Troy said as he felt the Shakuru lift lightly from the Cactus Flat runway.
When you're used to flying Mach 1—plus jet fighters, an aircraft with a takeoff speed below that of a highway speed limit can be a bit disconcerting. So too was the turn radius. Although a highly maneuverable F-16 couldn't exactly turn on a dime, the expansive wingspan of the Shakuru meant that it took the contents of a sizable number of piggy banks to make a left turn.
'Damn, this turn is slow,' Aron Arnold said.
'This is Shakuru control… you can't bank Shakuru like a fighter and maintain stability on a wing that size and that light.' The impatient voice of Dr. Elisa Meyers crackled in the headsets of Shakuru's two crewmen. 'But check your altitude.'
'Shakuru flight here, we're already at fifteen thousand.'
'That's what that big, oversize wing is good for, Shakuru flight.'
Shakuru spiraled quickly upward. The radius of their spiral was about eight miles, but for an aircraft so slow, the rate of climb amazed the two veteran pilots.
Outside the canopy, the darkening of the sky above them was perceptible as the atmosphere thinned. They passed effortlessly through forty thousand feet, higher than most airliners routinely travel — not that there were any airliners in the controlled skies over the Nellis Air Force Base Test Range.
'This is a real astronaut view from up here,' Troy said. 'Level out at eighty thousand and set a course due west,' Dr. Meyers ordered.
As they emerged from the spiral, both pilots were at an altitude higher than either of them, or most pilots, had ever experienced. The sky above was black, and the curvature of the earth below was clearly visible. The Pacific Ocean could be seen in the distance, even though the California coast was more than three hundred miles away.
'I feel like an old man,' Troy said to the crew chief as he emerged from the Shakuru. It was nearly dark as they touched down after the long flight. 'Guess I'm not used to sitting in one place for eleven hours.'
'That's part of what we're evaluating in these flights,' Dr. Meyers said as she approached the aircraft.
'You're evaluating joint pain?' Arnold said calmly.
'We're evaluating the exposure of long-duration flights on the human body. With its solar power, Shakuru can stay aloft for a week. Pilots have a greater fatigue factor than the aircraft.'
