Roaring Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age (41 page)

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

December 25, 1953, Palos Verdes, California

Strangely enough, in the nightmare of the business being destroyed, several financial bright spots had emerged. Tom and Harry had never sold the La Jolla house, renting it to a succession of Convair executives over the years, men who needed a comfortable place to stay while their own homes were being built in the constantly expanding San Diego suburbs. Its value had quadrupled and it was free and clear. They hated to sell it now, but if that was necessary, it would bring in a huge sum.

Madeline’s other real-estate investments had done almost equally well, although it was impossible to beat the returns that the La Jolla location generated. The stock portfolios had gained a little, not much, but there was enough money available from selling off some of the smaller, less desirable real-estate parcels that Vance was able to live comfortably and continue to pay Harry and Tom the salaries they had agreed upon. But as far as Aviation Consultants, Incorporated, went, business was kaput. The boys picked up an occasional test-flying job, usually with some local outfit that had all of its money
tied up in a prototype that was never going anywhere. It was fun, slightly dangerous, but had no real long-term potential. Without business from major companies, Aviation Consultants was dead in the water.

All three men were driven by a desire to work, not for the financial return but for the sheer pleasure of achieving new goals—and of course for the pleasure of flying. Despite the hard evidence that new aircraft, whether would-be Piper Cubs or would-be DC-3s, were almost impossible to certify and promote, all three dreamed of designing and manufacturing their own aircraft.

They explored a range of possibilities, but Tom had come up with the most provocative suggestion at one of their stand-up lunches in the kitchen, where Jill would put out a spread of goodies—Parma ham, thin sliced roast beef, provolone, onions, roast peppers, sardines, tomatoes, the works—and they would make big, wet dripping sandwiches that they ate over the sink. The impromptu lunches were among the few times that Vance rose up out of his depression to joke a bit.

“Come on, Tom, swallow; don’t talk with your mouth full. I’ve been telling you that for thirty years now.” Vance’s voice was slightly less dispirited than usual, and his sons took it as a good sign, shooting each other a quick glance.

Tom chewed, swallowed, took a drink of his Coke, and said, “What is the one thing missing in the airplane market today?”

Harry answered, “An inexpensive new plane?”

“Come on; be serious. We’ve got little Cessnas, bigger Beeches, and a whole raft of military conversions, Lodestars, B-25s, what have you. They are all piston engine airplanes, and this is the jet age. Why don’t we design and build a jet transport for executives? Something about the size of the Twin Bonanza, or the Cessna 310, but maybe a little bigger, carry two pilots and maybe four to six passengers.”

Neither Harry nor Vance responded at once, meaning they accepted it as a serious suggestion, worth an answer instead of the usual put-down wisecrack.

Vance said, “What engine would you use? That’s the key, getting an engine that will deliver the performance but not be so expensive that you can’t afford to fly it.”

Harry said, “I’ve been following the various companies. You know that little stint I had up with Pratt & Whitney, back in the old days, sort of intrigued me with engines. Problem is, everybody keeps building bigger engines; not much market out there for a little one.”

Tom came back swiftly. “Except General Electric. I know a man there, Jack Parker, and he’s heading up what he calls the ‘Small Aircraft Engine Department.’ Catchy name, eh? But he’s talking about building an engine for an Air Force decoy, the Quail.”

“What’s a decoy?”

“I think the bombers are supposed to carry them; they drop them when they get near the anti-aircraft belts, and the decoy flies ahead of them to confuse the radar. Anyway, the engine he’s developing will have about twenty-five hundred pounds of thrust at the start. That will build over time, of course.”

“Remember Nate Price’s old equation? That means about twenty-five hundred horsepower when it is at cruise—that’s pretty powerful stuff. And you need two engines, for safety.”

Vance spoke, his voice vibrant, sounding like himself. “We’d have to keep it small, under twelve thousand, five hundred pounds, so that the government will certify it for single-pilot operation.”

Harry chimed in, “This would have to be a luxury item, the best interiors, sleek paint jobs, something that would appeal to the movie stars.”

Vance nodded. “There’s a long tradition of that—Wallace Beery always had an airplane, and Robert Taylor, Bob Cummings, and a bunch of them fly. I’ll bet we
could get one of them to come in, not so much for finances, but as a name to hang it on.”

Tom walked over and put his arm around Vance’s shoulder, his sandwich dripping on his shirt, and kissed him on the forehead. “Dad, we’re going to name this airplane after the best damn pilot, engineer, and father in the business. This is going to be the Shannon Jet, and you are going to be the front man. We don’t need a movie star; we’ve got you.”

They moved from the kitchen into the office, where Vance shoved aside papers that had not been touched for weeks. He put down a clean sheet of drafting paper, sat down, and began a freehand pencil sketch of a needle-nosed twin jet, with swept wings and tail.

“Looks good, Dad, but you’ve got the engines on the wings—on a plane that size they’d be scraping the ground, sucking up every rock in a quarter-mile area.” Reaching down, Harry rubbed out the low-slung engines, hung much as those on the Messerschmitt 262 had been. Then with a few pencil strokes, not so neatly or as accurately as his father, Harry put the engines on little pylons on top of the wing. “There—you see—they’ll be up where they won’t get any foreign object damage.”

Tom laughed and said, “All wrong, brother dear, all wrong. You’ll deafen the passengers with the engines there, and ruin their view, too. Here’s where the engines go.” He rubbed out Harry’s poorly drawn examples and then very neatly attached the engines on the fuselage, high and to the rear. “Voilà! Mount them here, they are behind the pressure cabin, the wing is clean, you don’t have much noise, and you don’t get the stuff from the tarmac sucked into them.”

Vance was excited now. “Yeah, and it looks good, too. Nothing like it on the market. Never thought pusher engines would come back, but there they are!”

Vance looked at his two sons, saw their expressions, and knew what they had done—conspired together to
snap him out of his malaise, to give him a project he could sink his teeth in. Well, they’d done it.

“OK, boys, let’s think about this a bit. I know we don’t have anywhere near the capital to swing this by ourselves, and I don’t want to get a partner so big that he’ll tell us what to do. Maybe we can sell some stock, but I hate to do that, because this will be one risky project.”

Tom said, “Here’s what I think. Let’s go on like we’re doing, trying to build Aviation Consultants back up, bit by bit, and keep working on this idea. We can look around for a factory site, maybe pick up a few guys with ability that might want to invest with us. The main thing is to keep it small.”

Vance nodded agreement. “There is still a whole raft of work to do, on the engineering side and the business side. We’ve got to figure out what airfoil to use, how the airplane sizes out, what it weighs, and so on. Then we have to figure out its operating economics. I think we can find a place to build it, when we are ready to go, and we’ll have no problem hiring people.”

Half an hour later, the two boys left, walking down the curving steps that led to their cars.

“Well, that worked pretty well, Tom. Good idea.”

“Sure. Even if it is totally impractical, and I’m sure it is, it will get him fired up until a real project comes along. He just needs something to apply all his knowledge in a positive way.”

Inside the house, Jill was cleaning up, moaning about the messy floor. “I thought you were going to eat your sandwiches over the sink. Don’t make those wet sandwiches and then walk around—we’ve got a table and chairs, you know.”

Vance picked up a towel and began doing his own mopping up. “They’re really something, aren’t they? Trying to cheer me up, feeding me this pie-in-the sky idea about a private jet airliner. God love them, they mean well, trying to get their old man back on track.”

He stood looking out their kitchen window over the immaculate backyard, idly rubbing the counter with the towel.

“Still, a private jet airliner would really be something, wouldn’t it? And they wanted to call it the Shannon Jet! That’s pretty good. I’d like that.”

February 2, 1954, Palos Verdes, California

It was V.R.’s first birthday, and Jill had decorated the house to celebrate. Though she had never had any children herself, she was the quintessential grandmother to young Vance Robert, babysitting at every opportunity.

Everyone was coming to dinner, everyone except Anna, who was at yet another clinic, still trying—or appearing to try—to shed the ravaging burden of alcohol that had consumed her beauty even as it consumed Harry’s life.

Vance came in from the garage, where he had spent the morning changing the oil in his old De Soto, their second car. “What are we having? Turkey, roast beef?”

Jill looked at him sadly and put her arm around his neck. Vance’s question was pro forma. His appetite was gone; he no longer exercised and spent most of his time in his office, supposedly reading, but most often staring at the wall. Changing the oil was the most positive thing he had done in weeks.

“It’s your favorite, beef Stroganoff. And you had a call while you were in the garage. I didn’t want to disturb you just when you were draining the oil, so I took the number.”

“Who was it?”

“He said he was an old friend of yours, Bill Lear. Sounded like a real nice person, laughing and kidding.”

“Well, if it’s the Bill Lear I think it is, he is a son of a bitch, a no-good bastard. We were at a party over at North American about twenty years ago and he made a
pass at Margaret! I decked him, just belted him without thinking, knocked him ass-backward over a table. He’s a big guy, too.”

“You actually hit him?”

“Well, I’d had a couple of drinks, and that was not usual for me. But he was always romancing everybody. There was actually a round of applause when I slugged him.”

Jill laughed and kissed him. “Always a knight in shining armor! I hope you’d do the same for me.”

He kissed her back and said, “But he is one smart guy as well. He’s the guy who invented the first practical car radio, plus a lot of stuff for aviation—direction-finding gear, autopilots, and so on. Won the Collier Trophy one year, 1947, I think, and that’s really something. Right now he’s in the modification business, taking old clunker Lodestars and cleaning them up so that they are fast, long-ranged executive aircraft. Calls them Learstars.”

“Well, go ahead and call him.”

“I’ll go into the office, where it’s quiet.”

“The hell you will! I want to hear this.”

Smiling, Vance dialed the number she gave him. A big booming voice answered, “Lear here.”

“Bill, this is Vance Shannon. You called me?”

“Absolutely, Vance, and thanks for calling back. I need your help. Can you spare me a few months of your time?”

Vance would have liked to have said, “Not on your life, you fanny-patting bastard.” But economics intervened, and he said, “Maybe; what’s it all about?”

Lear went into a lengthy explanation. He was taking war surplus Lockheed Lodestars and putting them through a modification process that included bigger engines, new instruments, ultra-deluxe passenger cabins, and so on, but the whole enterprise depended on increased speed for sales.

“Vance, here it is in a nutshell. My guys have slicked this buggy up as much as they know how, and we are still
twenty miles per hour below our guaranteed top speed and fifteen below our economy cruise speed. If we don’t get that fixed, I’ll lose a sale of about twenty airplanes to an importer in South America. I want you to come in and see if you can squeeze a lot more speed out of it. I’d like to exceed the specs, if I could, but I need to at least meet them.”