WINGLESS FLIGHT

Reviewed 3/17/2003

WINGLESS FLIGHT: The Lifting Body Story R. Dale Reed with Darlene Lister Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2002				Rating: 5.0 High
ISBN-13 978-0-8131-9026-6
ISBN 0-8131-9026-6	226pp.	SC/BWI	$29.95

As much as the story of the creation of a revolutionary class of maneuvering, piloted reentry vehicles, this is the story of Dale Reed. At the age of twelve, he was smitten with a love for airplanes when John Robinson came to his home town of Ketchum, Idaho to compete in a sailplane contest. Reed loved to watch the plane soar above the Sawtooth Mountains, and soon was helping Robinson retrieve its dolly, which parachuted to the ground just after the plane was towed aloft. In four years he had his pilot's license and was soaring above the Sawtooth Mountains himself.

Six years after that, mechanical engineering degree in hand, he reported to the NACA High Speed Flight Research Station in February 1953. There he became the driving force behind the lifting body program. This book, then, documents Dale Reed's work on lifting bodies in his own words. Of course, it was a team of engineers, technicians and pilots who built and tested them. Reed is well aware of this, and I doubt there is anyone involved with his own projects that he fails to credit by name. In those days, the whole culture was one of "get it done, soonest, at minimum cost. Cut corners on official channels, but never on the engineering." Reed sums it up well in this passage from his introduction (page x):

In 1963, the lifting body program began, circumventing the normal bureaucratic process by launching itself as a bottom-up program. It began when an enthusiastic engineer drew together a band of engineers, technicians and pilots—all volunteers, of course—and then moved ahead, bypassing the ponderous amount of paperwork and delays of months or even years typically involved in officially initiating approved and funded aerospace programs in that era.

Besides tapping into the volunteer spirit present in the 1960s at the NASA Flight Research Center, the unofficial lifting body program also used creative methods to locate funds. Shortly before his death in January 1991, Paul Bikle explained how that was done, saying "it was a real shoestring operation. We didn't get any money from anybody. We just built it out of money we were supposed to use to maintain the facility." As the program grew over the years to involve flight-testing eight different configurations, it became more disciplined and organized. Even then, however, it was still individuals—not organizations—that made things happen.

The director of the Flight Research Station, Paul Bikle, comes in for particular praise throughout the book — understandably, as Reed admits he lacks the management skills needed for such a role. Indeed, I think the key to the success of Reed's lifting-body work, as well as higher-priority programs like the X-15, was that Bikle was an excellent manager but not a bureaucrat. Perhaps the best description of Bikle's quality comes in Reed's account of a particular decision the director made that literally got the lifting-body project off the ground (page 48):

What Bikle did was an act of the kind of courage that I had never before seen in a manager. Essentially, he risked his career to support something he believed in. There are basically two kinds of courage in the aerospace industry: the courage of test pilots who risk their lives, and the courage of managers who risk their careers to support decisions they believe are right, even when others disagree strongly. In his book The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe was correct to immortalize pilots as heroes. On the other hand, program managers are responsible not only for pilots who have "the right stuff" but also for the people involved in the program who have "the real stuff", as I have called it. When test pilots pay the ultimate price while risking their lives to test new aircraft, history remembers them as heroes who gave their all to aeronautical research. However, when program managers make a challenging decision simply because they believe it is the right thing to do, they risk being labeled failures or going down in history as bumbling idiots.

Today's program managers rarely encounter such risk, many of them using the bureaucratic process to build up walls that protect their careers. Today's manager can avoid risk by having decisions made by committees or by dividing programs into enough parts that it's not clear who is responsible for what. Another strategy that some program managers use to avoid risk is to be involved only with low-risk portions of a program, handing off high-risk portions to other managers who, if the program fails, can always defend themselves from blame by saying they were ordered to do the job. If the program succeeds, then the original program manager can step back into the picture and take credit for the successful program by claiming it was his or her idea all along.

Paul Bikle would not have done well in today's managerial environment. He lacked the political imperative needed to work the system in his favor. He was so open and honest that everyone knew exactly what he was thinking—except when he was playing cards with the crew during lunch. That he was so open and "readable" was a trait that worked well for those working under him, for they knew where he stood. But it wasn't a trait that helped him in dealing with the hierarchy that developed gradually over him at NASA Headquarters.

Descriptions of this kind, IMHO, are one of the two reasons that this book is worthy of inclusion in this section. Quite simply, they are indicative of the kind of culture in which the focus is on hardware-building rather than empire-building. That is the kind of culture aerospace needs more of.

The other reason for including it is the chronology of lifting-body development it presents. While not primarily a technical document1, it includes plenty of technical detail. And, as mentioned, it covers the cast of characters very completely, with pictures as well as words. It does all this in a well-written and entertaining narrative. There are even a few humorous anecdotes, although I suspect that Reed is a bit uncomfortable about telling jokes. There are tables listing the flights of the various designs, and a complete lifting-body flight log is presented in an appendix. There are also a glossary, a bibliography, and a thorough index. In summary, it is an excellent introduction to a poorly known chapter of aerospace history and a spacecraft technology that was partly developed, abandoned, and may be revived in the future. About that possible future, Dale Reed has this to say (page 192):

Wingless flight—both in and out of Earth's atmosphere—is now a firm and substantiated technology, thanks to the hard work and dedication of the men and women involved with the lifting-body concept during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Most of us who were involved at that time are today retired or nearing retirement, passing the legacy of wingless flight on to the next generation of engineers, scientists, technicians, pilots, and astronauts. Our legacy exists in detail for this generation, recorded in numerous technical reports and flight-test records. The young engineers of today, who will carry flight innovation into the 21st century, can make solid and informed decisions in considering a wingless configuration for future space systems.

Finally, in looking back, he avoids hubris and recognizes that risk was an ever-present companion on his journey (page 192):

When I recall the very high risks we sometimes took during the twelve years of initial lifting-body history, I know for certain that we could have spilled much more blood than we did. I prefer to think that even as we were pushing things to the edge, we were smart enough not to fall off and needed only a little luck to protect us from ourselves.

Truly, one thing that came across very clearly when I read this book was the many ways you can get bit by the technology when you push the outside of the envelope as Reed and his colleagues did. Of course, it also demonstrates that by sticking to the strategy of "build a little, test a little", it was possible to meet these challenges. Wingless Flight is a proud testament to the vision of Dale Reed and the men and women2 he worked with at the Flight Research Center. It is also gives us a glimpse of the "other NASA" — the one with the engineers and innovators. It still exists. We in the larger world can easily forget that when listening only to "the media". We should not let that happen.

The book is not perfect. I found Reed's repetition of sentence structure slightly annoying. In one or two places, I would differ with his interpretation of some event. He mentions the Cooper-Harper Pilot Rating Scale in a couple of places, but never explains it. Once, I got the impression that he soft-pedaled a case where someone "washed out" of the test-pilot ranks.3 But as far as outright errors, the only ones I found are typographical. I list those in a separate errata page, linked below.

1 For those interested in the full technical story, the citations provided both inline and as footnotes will make that available. Reed is very scrupulous (to the point that I found it a little distracting) about giving the source of every fact or quotation.

2 Yes, there were women in aerospace engineering in those days. Two of them figure prominently in Reed's account.

3 I may be wrong. But see his comment regarding Hugh Johnson, on page 161.

Errata for Wingless Flight