was wearing must be mighty uncomfortable on the rungs of that ladder. “Each intake has a flap that is raised hydraulically to funnel more air into the intake when the FCC — Flight Control Computer-senses an in- crease in G or angle of attack which correlates with a decrease in compressor inlet pressure, but those flaps can only do so much. The concept is angle-of-attack-limited, so it made sense to design to a five-G limit. That enabled us to lighten the airframe and in- crease the use of honeycomb composites, which made it even more stealthy. And we achieved better fuel economy.”
“I bet spins will be exciting.”
“The engines will compressor-stall in an upright spin and have to be shut down, but they can be restarted once a normal angle of attack is achieved. Inverted spins shouldn’t be a problem.”
“Hmmm.” Jake moved the control handle experimentally. It looked like the joystick for a computer game. “Fly by wire?”
“Of course.”
“Ms. DeCrescentis, I appreciate all you folks taking the time this morning to show me this plane, but what say I sort of look it over with my staff? They’ve been involved in this project for quite a while and no doubt can answer any questions I know enough to ask.”
“I suppose,” she said reluctantly, glancing again at the crowd below. She maneuvered her way down the ladder and two men below reached up to help her to the floor.
Fritsche scrambled up and seated himself on the cockpit coam- ing. Commander Rob Knight, the project coordinator, came up behind him and stood on the ladder. “What d’ya think?” Dr. Fritsche asked.
“Pretty stealthy, I guess.”
“About the same RCS as a bird.”
“How big a bird?”
“You aren’t impressed, are you?”
Jake Grafton took his time answering. He examined the panels on each side of the seat, then fingered the switches experimentally. “You guys tell me if I’m wrong: what we have here is one of the air force stealth-fighter prototypes, a version the blue-sky boys decided not to buy. It’s subsonic, shoots only smart weapons, has limited maneuverability and carries a nonstealthy belly tank for training purposes that can’t be carried in combat. Combat radius un- refueled is about six hundred nautical miles. Now, that is. To make this plane carrier-suitable it needs a beefed-up structure, tail-hook and folding wings, all of which will add at least a thousand pounds of weight — probably fifteen hundred pounds — and cost us speed and range- This killing machine will lighten Uncle Sugar’s wallet to the tune of about sixty-two million bucks a pop. If, and only if, it can be acquired on the most economic — the optimum — production schedule. Is that right?”
“Well, the cost factors are a lot more complicated than you’ve indicated, but your summary is fair.”
“Due to the likelihood that the five-G limit will be routinely exceeded by fleet aircrews in training situations, the design needs further modification to prevent compressor stalls. That involves more structural strengthening, computer-operated secondary intakes, loss of some stealthiness. That will cost an addi- tional…?”
“Five million a plane, assuming an optimum production sched- ule. Ten million more per plane if we buy new engines.”
“Five million a plane,” Jake continued. “And if we don’t buy that mod, we’ll have the compressor-stall problem that plagued the F-14 the first ten years of its life, which will mean a higher attrition rate than we would experience otherwise.” Attrition meant crashes, planes lost in training accidents. “Yet to go the new-engine route will take ten years because the engines don’t even exist; all we have is an engineers’ proposal saying they could build them sooner or later for about so many dollars apiece, subject to all the usual caveats about buy rates, research, inflation, etc.”
“Hiram Duquesne likes this plane.”
“Ah yes. Senator Duquesne, Another great American.”
“We didn’t get the senior vice president this morning because she likes your nose,” Knight shot back. “Consolidated has about two hundred million dollars of their own funds tied up in this prototype. They employ twenty thousand people. Consolidated is big business. They’ve bet their company on getting a stealth con- tract.”
“Yeah. Stock options and bonuses and company cars for the executives, jobs for the little people, and votes for the big people in Washington. I got the picture.”
“Don’t be so damned cynical,” Rob Knight said. “Listen, Jake, it may well come down to buying this plane to replace the A-6 or doing without. Ludlow and Royce Caplinger have to be goddamn sure they have the votes in Congress before they go up to Capitol Hill with their hats in their hands.”
“That’s their problem, not mine. I’m just a worn-out, washed-up attack pilot. I didn’t understand two words that DeCrescentis woman said.” He twiddled some knobs. “I didn’t ask for this job,” he roared. “I’m not going to be responsible for whether twenty thousand people keep their jobs! Don’t lay that crap on me!”
Knight retreated down the ladder. Fritsche followed, his face averted. Jake sat alone in the cockpit. He tried to imagine how this plane would feel to fly. With his right arm in the rest and his hand on the stick and his left curved over the throttles, he thought about how it would feel to look through the HUD at a Soviet ship. This plane had to be able to take on Soviet ships in the Med and the Indian Ocean and the Arctic in winter. But it also had to be able to fight in brushfire wars in places like Lebanon and North Africa, Afghanistan, Iran, Korea, Vietnam. Maybe China. Could it? With million-dollar missiles and a five-G restriction?
When he had recovered his temper, he motioned to Knight and Fritsche, who ascended the ladder again. “What would Sam Dodg- ers’ gizmo do for this plane?”
“Lower the RCS from a bird to a June bug.” Fritsche frowned. “It’s so stealthy now that making it more so wouldn’t be cost- effective, at least not in the lifetime of this machine. That’s just my opinion, of course.”
“On the other hand,” Knight said, “this plane wouldn’t be junk if Dodgers’ suppressor can’t be made to work in a real airplane. Dodgers knows the reflective characteristics of that tabernacle wall precisely when viewed from the old outhouse by one radar. Pro- tecting a shape as complex as an aircraft from numerous transmit- ters and God knows how many receivers situated in ail three di- mensions — that’s another thing altogether.”
“Tell me what all this stuff is,” Jake said. “This doesn’t look like any cockpit I ever saw.”
“Both prototypes have exactly the same layout. This is all the stuff that was going into the A-6G. What these television-screen things are are Multifunction Displays. This lower middle one is a map that moves as the plane moves. The plane always stays in the center. This should do away with the necessity for the crew to always carry awkward charts in the cockpit.
“Now these upper two MFDs present literally all the informa- tion the pilot might wish to know, or the info can be presented on the HUD. A touch of the button calls up engine information, an- other button calls up the radar presentation from the rear cockpit, still another the presentation from either one of the two IR sensors, and so on. Then there’s a variety of tactical displays…” He droned on.
Jake was astounded. This was several generations beyond the A-6 cockpit. It was technically as far beyond an A-6 as an A-6 was from a World War II B-17. “I had no idea,” he muttered, awed.
Knight showed him the rear cockpit. It was equally futuristic. Instead of the HUD control panel, it possessed a third MFD, so three of them were arranged in a row right across the panel. Under the center one was the map display. “This moving map — didn’t James Bond have one like this in one of the movies?”
“Yep. But this is better.”
“Mamma Mia!”
The BN in an A-6 had one cursor control stick. The BN in this plane had two, one on each side panel, and instead of just a couple of buttons sticking out, each stick was festooned with buttons, like warts. “The idea is that the BN won’t have to reach for controls. Everything he needs is on those control sticks.”
After Jake spent another half hour walking around the airplane and looking at every inch, he asked each of the commanders what they thought. One complained about range and payload, another about the intake problems, a third about the difficulty of mainte- nance. All were aghast at the cost. “But five years from now we’ll all probably think sixty-two million dollars for a plane was a hell of a buy,” Smoke Judy commented.
“You know,” Jake said later as he stood in the doorway with Helmut Fritsche and looked back at the all-black airplane, “I had an uncle who went to the car dealer one morning to buy a station wagon for the family, and that evening he went home with a little red convertible coupe.”
“High tech is sexy.”
