Roaring Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age (5 page)

Shannon understood. Gross had received the material from his two engineers, and he was not going to tell them that he had someone outside the company look at it.

“I get it. Mum’s the word. But Bob, my two boys are home at the same time for once. Harry came in Friday. He’s ferrying a Curtiss P-40 up to Hamilton Field and has a three-day layover. Luckily, Tom could get the weekend off. He’ll be shoving off for Hawaii in a few days. I was planning to spend some time with them.”

“Too bad you didn’t have a third son, Vance—you could have named him Richard, and had Tom, Dick and Harry all in the family.” Surprised, Vance looked at him, and Gross, always the consummate gentleman, was immediately embarrassed—it was unlike him to make any kind of joking remark that might be interpreted as insensitive.

Then Vance grinned, easing the situation. “No, if we had a third son, it would have been Vance Junior. Tom and Harry are named for Margaret’s brothers—and they had already heard all the jokes.”

Yet as innocent as Gross’s remark had been, it triggered the dark, anxious feeling that had enveloped Vance for the last week. He was incredibly proud that both boys had done so well with their military flight training. But he wondered what the odds would be that both would survive the war that he knew was coming. Tom and Harry had always been friendly rivals, but in recent months their flying experience had put a hard edge on their competitiveness. They were not just rivals anymore, they were rival pilots, and Vance knew that led to accidents.

“Spend it with them looking at the jet project. They are both smart boys, and maybe they’ll get to fly one someday.”

“You mean it? That would be great, if you are serious.”

“I’m serious—get them to look at it with you, but tell them to keep their lips buttoned. They are young and might have some insight an old duffer like you wouldn’t have. And I know you value their opinions.”

It was true. Vance Shannon had brought his sons into the aviation business early, teaching them to fly in his open-cockpit Travel Air biplane in their early teens and later taking them with him on consulting trips in his maroon Beech Staggerwing. They both shared his passion for aviation—they were superb pilots, careful, able to wring the maximum performance from their aircraft. Both had a good grasp of both aeronautical engineering and business, but both were at the dangerous stage of flying, with enough experience to be very proficient but not enough to be cautious.

They shook hands, Gross clasping his arm around Shannon’s shoulder as he always did with old friends. They talked about the weather and sports on the way to the car, but Shannon’s thoughts were concentrated on the
contents of the briefcase and the hope that somehow he could use it to give his sons a little lesson in safety.

July 20, 1941, La Jolla, California

Tom’s rhythmic grunts echoed from the other room as he went through his daily weight-lifting routine, delayed by their perusal of the contents of Gross’s briefcase. In the background, Margaret’s old Victrola was wound up for the first time in years, as Tom played his latest record, “I Got It Bad and That Ain’t Good,” for the tenth time.

Still seated at the drafting table, Harry was deeply absorbed in the project books, his fingers stinging from the residual ammonia of the Ozalid process used to duplicate the reports and the fold-out drawings. As new military pilots, they were flattered to be in on the ground floor of what might be the future of aviation and readily pledged to keep the matter secret.

Vance Shannon watched them with his usual combination of affection and apprehension. He loved them both equally and wanted the best for them. As he had done every day since their birth, he worried about how life would treat them. He knew they were going to be successful, if they were cautious enough to stay alive. And, with Margaret gone, he felt doubly responsible.

He realized how contradictory his feelings were. What could he expect from them? They had grown up watching him fly some of the hottest, most dangerous airplanes in the country, even competing in the air races in Cleveland, where he had placed in both the Thompson and the Bendix races. Margaret was always brave and put a good face on things, but she could not have concealed her fears. He’d have to be careful when talking safety to them so that they didn’t think he was a complete hypocrite.

The two boys—they would always be that to him, his two boys, no matter how old they were—had always
gotten along well, keeping their competitive spirit in hand except when seeking their mother’s affection. Margaret had loved them equally, disciplined them fairly, and tried hard—but failed—to conceal her partiality for Harry.

Both boys were perfectly matched physically, just under six feet tall and weighing about 180. Vance Shannon in his youth had sandy hair, but it had darkened over the years. But Margaret was a pure blonde and the boys had inherited her hair and blue eyes. They were well-muscled, built up from swimming most of the year and daily workouts in the stark, functional exercise room Vance had built in the basement against Margaret’s protests. Tom had always been more outgoing and popular with the girls, while Harry had been the student, introspective, a little shy. Tom had been the first to walk and Harry the first to talk. In school, Harry was the natural student and Tom the natural athlete, but their competitive routine was so ingrained that each always managed to match and sometimes exceed the other in his specialty. In high school, Tom wound up with a higher grade point average while Harry earned one more letter than Tom.

It seemed to Vance that they had started to change after Margaret’s death, just before they had gone off to prepare for their respective service academies. God forbid that they would go to the same school! Vance had to scramble to get them appointments, working his industry connections with a senator and a local congressman. More than one friend had complained about Vance’s being greedy, and he knew they were right. But if the boys wanted to go to West Point and Annapolis, he was going to help them, no matter how greedy he seemed.

It was not the money. Vance had always made a good income from his test flying and his consulting, and his and Margaret’s only indulgence had been their house in La Jolla. They had not been able to swing beachfront property, but they were only a block away, and as outrageously
expensive as it seemed at the time, it had been a good investment. He could have sent the boys to Stanford or even to an Ivy League school and would have sold the house and his soul to do so, but they had been determined to go to a military academy, and then enter flight training.

Tom had whirled through Annapolis, graduating fifth in his class, while Harry had furnished a more gentlemanly thirty-ninth in his West Point class. Both had played football, Tom for three years at halfback and Harry for two as fullback, and as a parent with boys in both schools Vance was relieved when their teams happened to alternate winning in their seasonal match-ups. After graduation, they immediately went to flight school and did so well that they were now flying fighters. Tom had elected to go into the Marines, gladly accepting the basic infantry training as a challenge, and was now flying the Grumman F4F-3 Wildcat. Harry had checked out in the P-40 at Langley and was already on orders to go to work for Vance’s old friend Ben Kelsey as a test pilot at the Fighter Division at Wright Field.

It was everything he and Margaret could have dreamed of—as long as they didn’t kill themselves.

Harry snapped the last report shut. “Well, Dad, what do you think?”

“You tell me; you’re the newest engineer in the family.”

“At first I was put off. It didn’t make any sense to me at all until I saw these equations. . . .” Harry riffled through the report, pulling out a sheet showing that at 350 mph, a Spitfire with the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine had a thrust of 1,000 pounds. “Take a look at that—it’s the first time I’ve seen thrust calculated that way. And Mr. Price’s engine is supposed to have thirty-five hundred pounds of thrust! That’s three and one-half Spitfire engines! That’s impressive.”

Tom came back in the room. “I felt the same way. I’d never seen horse power expressed as thrust before.”

Their father said, “Well, it makes more sense than horsepower anyway—we’ve been clinging to that antiquated definition for years, even though an aircraft’s power varies continually with altitude, air density, and a variety of other factors. Using pounds of thrust certainly makes sense for jet engines.”

Vance went on. “You are exactly right, Harry; Price’s figures are impressive. I don’t know if he can make his engine work, but if he can, he’s got a world-beater. Tom, what did you think of the airplane Kelly Johnson has designed for it?”

Gross had put a specially made box with a small model of the proposed fighter in the briefcase—it had a flashy designation, L-133. Tom extracted it and held it up.

“It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen—canard surfaces, the wing and body all blended into one shape. It looks like it’s going six hundred mph just sitting in its box.”

“And there’s the problem, Son. The Army might let a little money loose to develop the engine, but the airframe will disturb them—just too radical. Wait and see. Kelly and Nate will walk this thing through the Pentagon and come back with their tails between their legs.”

Harry was pensive. “Can Lockheed develop it on its own?”

It had become a triangular conversation, both boys addressing their father, neither one talking to the other. He tried to change that, asking, “What do you think, Tom?”

“The airplane, sure, it looks different, but it’s still an airplane. The papers say it uses lots of stainless steel, and that might be a fabricating problem, but Lockheed could handle it. But the engine! That’s something else.”

Harry joined in. “The last year at the Point we had a field trip to Pratt & Whitney in Hartford. What a plant. Lockheed doesn’t have the room, and probably not the expertise, to get into engine building. It’s an entirely different industry, lots of heavy machinery, machinists with years of experience.”

Tom responded. “We had a similar deal but went to Curtiss-Wright. Same thing: huge plant, thousands of machine tools, big payroll. They gave us a forecast for the future for their engines, and it didn’t look like it was going to be easy. They can only have so many more cylinders, and the big limiting factor is the propellers, which they make a lot of, just like Hamilton Standard does up in Hartford.”

Vance swelled with pride listening to them. They were hitting exactly the right arguments, and they were doing it in a controlled fashion. A few years ago, Tom might have taken an extreme position, just to gin up an argument with Harry. Now they spoke like experienced engineers. Flying had done wonders for them.

Vance was silent for a while as the images of the pilots he had known flashed through his mind, reminding him of the depth and range of the people in this demanding business. He’d trained with Jimmy Doolittle, then seen him go on to become the king of race pilots—and an astute businessman. Wiley Post had asked him to work on the pressure suit he used in the
Winnie Mae
for his high-altitude flights. Not as well educated as Jimmy, Post had the same sort of intuitive engineering mind. There were so many more, and too many of them had lost their lives. . . .

Tom interrupted. “What are you thinking about, Dad?”

A little embarrassed to have let his attention wander, he came back with, “You are both right on the ball. Piston engines, even propellers for piston engines, have become way too expensive. If the jet engine works—and it will someday, if not Nate Price’s, then someone else’s—you’re going to see a revolution in the industry. And it won’t affect just airplanes, it will knock the propeller people out of business, and there will be a whole raft of old industries that will fold and new industries that will come in. If I had the brains to pick which ones, I’d go out and do a little investing, right now. Get in on the ground floor!”

The boys kidded him for a while on his investments of the past—the molded plywood trainer, the retractable high-heel shoe for women, the Japanese pinball machine—and he had to laugh, too; his investment record was pretty sorry.

Then he said, “Well, a jet engine is way too expensive to manufacture from scratch, and Lockheed is so loaded with military projects now that they wouldn’t be able to do more than make a mock-up. They’ll continue to work on the engine, though—Bob Gross thinks the world of Price and Kelly. It is so revolutionary that they may be able to get some investors to back it. Or they could form a subsidiary to handle it, or license it to a big engine firm. But the airplane—it is just too weird looking with those canard surfaces and the funny wing/fuselage business. General Arnold will probably have Kelly take it out to Wright Field, but they’ll never buy it. They can’t take the risk, not now, with the war looming.”

As he spoke, he realized that this was something he could use to talk safety to them without them resenting it—he’d wrap his safety lecture in a waving flag.

Harry was obviously intrigued by the L-133 design. “It’s weird, all right, straight out of Buck Rogers, but it looks right. It should fly well and be very fast.”

“Well, boys, let me make a prediction. Hap Arnold is going to get one of the jet engines from the RAF, and he’ll send it back to the United States for some big company to build. And he’ll pick some outfit that’s getting short on war work to build the plane for it. It won’t be Lockheed; they can’t do much more than they are doing right now.”

Harry was always the more empathetic. “That’s pretty tough on Lockheed, eh? And it’s tough on Mr. Price and Mr. Johnson, too.”

“Well, this is just the first olive out of the bottle. If jet engines work, they will revolutionize flying, and there
will be plenty of work to go around. But this is too radical to be the first American jet.”

Vance checked the papers as Harry handed them to him, carefully putting them back in and inserting the L-133 model in its case like a sword into a scabbard.

“Look, boys, you know I’m always talking flying safety—”

They groaned, and Tom said, “Lecture number twenty-nine.”