air.
At 9 P.M. they gathered in a large ready room on the second deck of the hangar’s office pod. The room was devoid of furnish- ings except for one portable blackboard and thirty or so folding chairs.
The meeting lasted until midnight Every aspect of tomorrow’s flight was gone over in detail Consolidated’s people approved the test profile and agreed on the performance envelope Rita would have to stay within on the first flight The route of the flight was laid out on a large map which was posted on one wall and briefed by Commander Les Richards. He pointed out the places where ground cameras would be posted. Real-time telemetry from the airplane would be supervised by Commander Dalton Harris. Smoke Judy would fly the chase plane, an F-14 borrowed from NAS Miramar, and a carefully briefed RIO would fihn the Consol- idated prototype in flight from the F-14’s backseat
After the meeting broke up, Jake Grafton spent another thirty minutes with his staff, then went down to the hangar deck. Only a dozen or so technicians were still on the job.
The overhead floods made little gleaming pinpoints where they reflected on the black surface of the Consolidated stealth plane. As he walked, the tiny pinpoints moved along the complex curved surfaces in an unpredictable way. With his face only a foot or so from the skin of the plane, he studied it The dark material seemed to have an infinite depth, or perhaps it was only his imagination.
The outer skin, he knew, was made of a composite that was virtually transparent to radar waves. Underneath, carrying the stresses, was a honeycomb radar-absorbent structure made of syn- thetic material formed into small hexagonal chambers. The honey- comb was bonded to inner skins of graphite and other strong com- posites. He touched the airplane’s skin. Smooth and cool.
No wonder the Consolidated people were so proud of their creation.
But how would it hold up aboard a ship? Could it stand the rough handling and sea air and the poundings of cat shots and traps? Thousands of them? Would it be easy to fly, within the capabilities of the average pilot — not just a superbly trained, gifted professional like Rita Moravia, but the average bright lad from Moline or Miami with only three hundred hours of flight time who would have to learn to use this Art Deco sculpture as a weapon?
Five nights. He needed a lot of answers in just a short time. Rita and Toad would have to get them.
He walked away musing about Rita’s lack of test experience and wondering if he had made a mistake giving her this ride.
Tomorrow. He would know then.
But the following day problems with the telemetry equipment kept the prototype firmly on the ground. The engineers were still labor- ing in the sun on a concrete mat where the temperature exceeded a hundred and ten when Jake glanced at his watch and ordered the plane towed back into the hangar. The Soviet satellite would soon be overhead. The hangar’s interior was shady and cool. And since the air force owned it, it was air- conditioned.
The next morning, Wednesday, the F-14 took off with a cracking roar that seemed to split the desert apart. Smoke Judy pulled the power off when he was safely airborne and made a dirty turn to the downwind leg. He came drifting down toward the earth paralleling the runway and stabilized at one hundred feet just as Rita began to roll.
The prototype was noticeably quieter, so quiet that its noise was barely audible above the howl of the Tomcafs engines as Smoke used his throttles to hang the heavy fighter just above the runway as the stealth bird accelerated. When Rita lifted off and retracted her gear. Smoke added power to stay with her and the sound of the stealth plane was entirely muflled.
“Damn quiet,” George Witeon remarked. “About like a Booing 767, maybe less.” The low noise level was a direct by-product of burying the exhaust nozzles and tailpipes in the fuselage, shielded from the underside, to reduce the plane’s infrared signature.
In the cockpit Rita concentrated on maintaining the selected test profile and getting the feel of the controls. She had spent hours sitting in the cockpit the last few weeks memorizing the position of every switch, knob, and gauge, learning which buttons she needed to press to place information where she wanted it on (he MFDa, and so even now, minutes into her first flight in the plane, it was familiar.
In the backseat Toad was busy with the system. He checked the inertial; it seemed okay. With ring laser gyros, it had not a single moving part and was more accurate than any conventional inertial using electromechanical gyros. It would need to be. To keep the stealth plane hidden, it would be necessary to fly with the radar off most of the time, and the ring laser inertial would have to keep a very accurate running tally of the plane’s position.
The computer was also functioning perfectly. He had encoded the waypoint and checkpoint information onto optical-electronic— optronic — cards on the ground and loaded them into the compufer after engine start. The two-million-dollar pocket calculator, he called it. It hummed right along, belching readouts of airspeed, groundspeed, altitude, wind direction and velocity, true course, magnetic course, drift angle, time to go to checkpoint, etc., over fifteen readouts simultaneously. He had this information on the right-hand MFD, roughly the location on the panel where it would be in an A-6E.
Some of the displays were not yet hooked up since development work was not yet complete. Consequently the three-dimensional information presentations on the pilot’s holographic Heads-Up Display could not be tested.
The phased-array radar in the nose received Toad’s attention next. The antenna was flat and fixed, it did not rotate or move. Actually it was made up of several hundred miniature antennas, individually varying their pulse frequencies to steer or focus the main beam. A conventional radar dish would have acted as a re- flector to send the enemy’s radar signals back to him. Toad tuned the radar to optimize the presentation and dictated his switch and dial positions on the ICS, which, like the radar presentation, was being recorded on tape for later study.
The next major pieces of gear he turned on and integrated into the system were, for him, the most interesting. Two new infrared search and tracking systems that were able to distinguish major targets as far away as a hundred miles, depending upon the air- craft’s altitude and the relative heat value of the target. One could be used for searching for enemy fighters while the other was used to navigate or locate a target on the ground. The range of these sensors was a tenfold improvement over the relatively primitive IR gear in the A-6E. Since a stealthy attack plane would fly most of its mission with its radar off, these new gizmos would literally be the eyes of the bombardier-navigator.
Toad took a second to glance to his left. Smoke had the F-14 about a hundred feet away in perfect formation. The backseater’s helmet was hidden behind his camera, which was pointed this way.
That videotape would show every twitch of the flight control sur- faces- Toad turned back to the task at hand.
He felt the plane yawing as Rita experimented with the controls and advanced and retarded each throttle independently. She was talking on the radio, telling Smoke what she was doing, reading the engine performance data to the people on the ground so it could be coordinated with the telemetry data, giving her impressions of the feel of the plane.
”Seems responsive and sensitive in all axes,” she said. “Engine response is good, automatic systems functioning as advertised, a hundred feet a minute more climb than I expected. Fuel flow fifty pounds per hour high. Oil pressure in the green, exhaust gas temps are a hundred high. I like it. A nice plane.”
She leveled the plane at Plight Level 240 at.72 Mach, 420 knots true. Toad checked the range and depression angles of the radar and IR sensors, and ran checks on the inertial and computer.
Thirty minutes later, after hitting three navigation checkpoints, Rita dropped the nose two degrees and began a power-on descent back toward Tonopah. She leveled at 5,000 feet at 550 knots and raced toward the field. Smoke Judy was a hundred feet away on the right side, immobile in relation to the stealth bird.
In the backseat Toad ran an attack. His target was the hangar that had housed the plane. The system gave Rita steering and time and distance to go to a laser-guided bomb release. Everything func- tioned as advertised. No weapon was released because the plane carried none, but a tone sounded on the radio and was captured on all the tapes, and it ceased abruptly at the weapons-release point, interrupted by the electronic pulse to the empty bomb rack cun- ningly faired into the airplane’s belly.
After three attacks at different altitudes, Rita slowed the plane with speed brakes and dropped the gear and flaps. She entered the landing pattern.
Two fleet Landing Signal Officers that Jake had borrowed from Miramar — they had flown the F-14 to Tonopah — stood on the end of the runway in a portable radio-equipped trailer that a truck had delivered. They had
