“Nope.” He looked at Rita and grinned. “Captains have to obey orders, of course, but George Ludlow and Royce Caplinger shoved me out in front on this one. They want me to make a recommenda- tion and take the heat, so they sort of have to let me do it my way.” He shrugged. “Generally speaking, doing it your way is not very good for your career, but I’ve been to the mat once too often anyway. That’s why I got this job. Ludlow’s a pretty good SECNAV. He understands the navy and the people in it. He wouldn’t send a guy with a shot at flag over to Capitol Hill to get his balls cut off, not if he had any other choice.”
Rita looked dubious.
“Are you right about this. Miss Moravia?”
“Yes, sir. I am.”
“I think so too. So that’s the way well do it. As long as I’m in charge.”
When Adele DeCrescentis returned, she agreed with Jake. Ap- parently the president of the company could also read tea leaves.
“Go find that Consolidated test pilot,” Jake told Rita when they were alone. “Take him over to the club and buy him a drink. Find out everything he knows about stalling this invisible airplane off the record.”
“Aye aye, sir,” Rita said, and marched off.
Cumulus clouds and rain squalls moving through the area from the west delayed the second flight another day, but when she finally got the plane to altitude, Rita attacked the performance envelope with vigor while Smoke Judy in the F-14 hung like glue on first one wing, then the other.
Stalls were first.
They were almost last. With the nose at ten degrees above the horizon and the power at 70 percent, she let the plane coast into the first one, but didn’t get there because the pitty-pat thumping began in the intakes and increased in intensity to a drumming rat- a-tat-tat played by a drunk. The EOT rose dramatically and RPMs dropped on both engines. She could feel vibrations reaching her through the seat and throttles and rudder pedals.
Compressor stalls! Well, that mousy little test pilot for Consoli- dated hadn’t been lying. She pushed the nose over, which inciden- tally worsened the thumping from behind the cockpit, and held it there while her speed increased and the noise finally abated, all the while reading the numbers from the engine instruments over the radio.
With the engines back to normal, she had another thought. If a pilot got slow and lost power in the landing pattern, on final, this thing could pancake into the ground short of the runway. Aboard ship the technical phrase for that turn of events was “ramp strike.”
She smoothly pulled the nose to twenty degrees above the hori- zon and as her speed dropped began feeding in power until she had the throttles forward against the stops. The airspeed continued to decay. This was “the back side of the power curve,” that flight regime where drag increased so dramatically as the airspeed bled off that the engines lacked sufficient power to accelerate the plane.
The onset of compressor stall was instantaneous and dramatic, a violent hammering from the intakes behind the cockpit that caused the whole plane to quiver. Before she could recover, the plane stalled. It broke crisply and fell straight forward until the nose was fifteen degrees below the horizon, then the canard authority re- turned. Still the engine compressors were stalled, with EGT going to the red lines and RPM dropping below 85 percent.
Rita smartly retarded the throttles to keep the engines from overtemping. The pounding continued.
Throttles to idle. EGT above red line.
She chopped the throttles to cutoff, securing the flow of fuel to the engines.
The pounding ceased. The cockpit was very quiet.
Toad remarked later that all he could hear as Rita worked to restart the engines “was God laughing.”
This time as Rita approached touchdown, she flared the plane and pulled the throttles aft. Sure enough, the pounding of turbu- lent air in the intakes began just before the main wheels kissed the runway. She held the nose off and watched the EGT tapes twitch as the plane decelerated. When she was losing stabilator authority, she lowered the nose to the runway and smoothly applied the brakes.
“Another day, another dollar,” Toad told her on the ICS.
Removing the engines from the airplane, inspecting them, inspect- ing the intakes and reinstalling the engines took three days, mainly because Jake Grafton demanded that a factory rep look at the compressor and turbine blades with a microscope, which had to be flown in.
Consolidated’s chief engineer was livid. He was so furious that he didn’t trust himself to speak, and turned away when anyone in uniform approached him. Adele DeCrescentis was equally out- raged, but she hid it better. She listened to Rita and reviewed the telemetry and videotapes and grunted when Jake Grafton spoke to her.
The navy personnel left the Consolidated employees to their mis- ery.
“We’re wasting our time flying that bird again,” Les Richards and George Wilson told Jake. “It’s unsat and there is no possible fix that would cure the problem. The whole design sucks.”
“How do you know they can’t fix it?”
“Well, look at it. At high angles of attack the intakes are blanked off by the cockpit and the shape of the fuselage, that aerodynamic shape. How could they fix it?”
“Goddamn, I’m not an aeronautical engineer! How the hell would I know?”
“Well, I am,” Wilson said, “and they can’t.”
“Never say never. Regardless, we’re going to fly this bird five times. I don’t want anyone to say that we didn’t give Consolidated a fair chance.”
“We’re wasting our time and the navy’s money.”
“What’s a few million?” Jake asked rhetorically. The real objec- tive was to get money for an acceptable airplane from Congress. So he was philosophical.
Toad Tarkington slipped down the hall to his wife’s room when he thought everyone else was in bed. They had been running a low- profile romance since they arrived in Tonopah.
“Tell me again,” Toad said, “just what that Consolidated test pilot said about stalls when you pumped him. What’s his name?”
“Stu Vinich. He just said they had had some compressor-stall problems at high angles of attack.”
“Nothing else? Nothing about how serious they were?”
“He couldn’t. Toad. The company was downplaying the whole subject. People who talk out of school draw unemployment checks.”
“We were damned lucky that thing didn’t spin. And we were lucky the engines relit.”
“Luck is a part of the job,” Rita told him.
“Yeah. If we had punched and our chutes hadn’t opened, Vinich would have just stood at our graves and shook his head.”
“He said enough- I knew what to expect.”
Toad turned out the light and snuggled down beside her.
Jake Grafton was poking and prodding the plane, trying to stay out of the technicians’ way. when he noticed Adele DeCrescentis watching him. He walked over- ”You know,” he said, “this thing reminds me of a twelve-ton Swiss watch.”
“A quartz watch,” the vice president said.
“Yeah. Anyway, I was wondering. Just how hard would it be for your folks to put a twenty-millimeter cannon on this plane?”
“A gun?” She appeared dumbfounded, as if the idea had never occurred to her.
“Uh-huh. A gun. A little Gatling, snuggled inside the fuselage with five hundred rounds or so. What do you think?”
“When we were designing this plane, not a single, solitary air force officer ever even breathed the word ‘gun.’ “
“Somehow that doesn’t surprise me. But would it be feasible?”
“With some fairly major design changes, which will cost a good deal of money, I suppose it might be. It would take a full-blown engineering study to determine that for sure. But why? A machine like this? You want it down in the weeds dueling with antiaircraft guns? Shooting at tanks?”
“When tanks are the threat, Ms. DeCrescentis, we won’t be able to shoot million-dollar missiles at all of ‘em. The Warsaw Pact has over fifty thousand tanks. A nice little twenty-millimeter with ar- mor-piercing shells would be just the right prescription.”
