And pushing the envelope on hubris, while we were at it.
Author’s note: While this is a work of fiction, the concept of the Busemann biplane is real.
Let’s see now. How did it all begin?
A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute Saloon—no, that’s not right; actually it started in the cafeteria of the Anson Aerospace plant in Phoenix.
Okay, then, how about:
There are strange things done in the midnight sun by the men who moil for gold—well, yeah, but it was only a little after noon when Bob Wisdom plopped his loaded lunch tray on our table and sat down like a man disgusted with the universe. And anyway, engineers don’t moil for gold; they’re on salary.
I didn’t like the way they all looked down on me, but I certainly didn’t let it show. It wasn’t just that I was the newbie among them: I wasn’t even an engineer, just a recently-graduated MBA assigned to work with the Advanced Planning Team, aptly acronymed APT. As far as they were concerned I was either a useless appendage forced on them, or a snoop from management sent to provide info on which of them should get laid off.
Actually, my assignment was to get these geniuses to come up with a project that we could sell to somebody, anybody. Otherwise, we’d all be hit by the iron ball when the next wave of layoffs started, just before Christmas.
Six shopping weeks left, I knew.
«What’s with you Bob?» Ray Kurtz asked. «You look like you spent the morning sniffing around a manure pile.»
Wisdom was tall and lanky, with a round face that was normally cheerful, even in the face of Anson Aerospace’s coming wave of cutbacks and layoffs. Today he looked dark and pouchy-eyed.
«Last night I watched a TV documentary about the old SST.»
«The Concorde?» asked Kurtz. He wore a full bushy beard that made him look more like a dog-sled driver than a metallurgical engineer.
«Yeah. They just towed the last one out to the Smithsonian on a barge. A beautiful hunk of flying machine like that riding to its final resting place on a converted garbage scow.»
That’s engineers for you. Our careers were hanging by a hair and he’s upset over a piece of machinery.
«Beautiful, maybe,» said Tommy Rohr. «But it was never a practical commercial airliner. It could never fly efficiently enough to be economically viable.»
For an engineer, Rohr was unnervingly accurate in his economic analyses. He’d gotten out of the dot-com boom before it burst. Of the five of us at the lunch table, Tommy was the only one who wasn’t worried about losing his job—he had a much more immediate worry: his new trophy wife and her credit cards.
«It’s just a damned shame,» Wisdom grumbled. «The end of an era.»
Kurtz, our bushy-bearded metallurgist, shook his graying head. «The eco-nuts wouldn’t let it fly supersonic over populated areas. That ruined its chances of being practical.»
«The trouble is,» Wisdom muttered as he unwrapped a soggy sandwich, «you can build a supersonic aircraft that doesn’t produce a sonic boom.»
«No sonic boom?» I asked. Like I said, I was the newcomer to the APT group.
Bob Wisdom smiled like a sphinx.
«What’s the catch?» asked Richard Grand in his slightly Anglified accent. He’d been born in the Bronx, but he’d won a Rhodes scholarship and came back trying to talk like Sir Stafford Cripps.
The cafeteria was only half filled, but there was still a fair amount of clattering and yammering going on all around us. Outside the picture window I could see it was raining cats and elephants, a real monsoon downpour. Something to do with global warming, I’d been told.
«Catch?» Bob echoed, trying to look hurt. «Why should there be a catch?»
«Because if someone could build a supersonic aircraft that didn’t shatter one’s eardrums with its sonic boom, old boy, obviously someone could have done it long before this.»
«We could do it,» Bob said pleasantly. Then he bit it into his sandwich.
«Why aren’t we, then?» Kurtz asked, his brows knitting.
Bob shrugged elaborately as he chewed on his ham and five-grain bread.
Rohr waggled a finger at him. «What do you know that we don’t? Or is this a gag?»
Bob swallowed and replied, «It’s just simple aerodynamics.»
«What’s the go of it?» Grand asked. He got that phrase from reading a biography of James Clerk Maxwell.
«Well,» Bob said, putting down the limp remains of the sandwich, «there’s a type of wing that a German aerodynamicist named Adolph Busemann invented back in the nineteen-twenties. It’s a sort of biplane configuration, actually. The shock waves that cause a sonic boom are cancelled out between the two wings.»
«No sonic boom?»
«No sonic boom. Instead of flat wings, like normal, you need to wrap the wings around the fuselage, make a ringwing.»
«What’s a ringwing?» innocent li’l me asked.
Bob pulled a felt-tip pen from his shirt pocket and began sketching on his paper placemat.
«Here’s the fuselage of the plane.» He drew a narrow cigar shape. «Now we wrap the wing around it, like a sleeve. See?» He drew what looked to me like a tube wrapped around the cigar. «Actually it’s two wings, one inside the other, and all the shock waves that cause the sonic boom get cancelled out. No sonic boom.»
The rest of us looked at Bob, then down at the sketch, then up at Bob again. Rohr looked wary, like he was waiting for the punch line. Kurtz looked like a puzzled Karl Marx.
«I don’t know that much about aerodynamics,» Rohr said slowly, «but this is a Busemann biplane you’re talking about, isn’t it?»
«That’s right.»
«Uh-huh. And isn’t it true that a Busemann biplane’s wings produce no lift?»
«That’s right,» Bob admitted, breaking into a grin.
«No lift?» Kurtz snapped.
«Zero lift.»
«Then how the hell do you get it off the ground?»
«It won’t fly, Orville,» Bob Wisdom said, his grin widening. «That’s why nobody’s built one.»
The rest of us groaned while Bob laughed at us. An engineer’s joke, in the face of impending doom. We’d been had.
Until, that is, I blurted out, «So why don’t you fill it with helium?»
The guys spent the next few days laughing at me and the idea of a supersonic zeppelin. I have to admit, at that stage of the game I thought it was kind of silly, too. But yet …
Richard Grand could be pompous, but he wasn’t stupid. Before the week was out he just happened to pass by my phonebooth-sized cubicle and dropped in for a little chat, like the lord of the manor being gracious to a stable hand.
«That was rather clever of you, that supersonic zeppelin quip,» he said as he ensconced himself in a teeny wheeled chair he had to roll in from an empty cubicle.
«Thanks,» I noncommittalled, wondering why a senior engineer would give a compliment to a junior MBA.
«It might even be feasible,» Grand mused. «Technically, that is.»
I could see in his eyes the specter of Christmas-yet-to-come and the layoffs that were coming with it. If a senior guy like Grand was worried, I thought, I ought to be scared purple. Could I use the SSZ idea to move up Anson Aerospace’s hierarchical ladder? The guys at the bottom were the first ones scheduled for layoffs, I knew. I badly needed some altitude, and even though it sounded kind of wild, the supersonic zeppelin was the only foothold I had to get up off the floor.
«Still,» Grand went on, «it isn’t likely that management would go for the concept. Pity, isn’t it?»
I nodded agreement while my mind raced. If I could get management to take the SSZ seriously, I might save my job. Maybe even get a promotion. But I needed an engineer to propose the concept to management. Those suits upstairs wouldn’t listen to a newly-minted MBA; most of them were former engineers themselves who’d climbed a notch or two up the organization.