Airborne (1997) (38 page)

The C-17 was designed to combine the intercontinental range and heavy-lift capability of the C-5 Galaxy or C-141 Starlifter with the short- /rough-field performance of the C-130 Hercules. The original Air Force specification for the C-X (“Cargo-Experimental”) ran to hundreds of pages, but the key requirement was brutally simple: take off carrying a 70-ton M1 Abrams main battle tank and land on an unimproved runway no more than 3,000 feet/915 meters long and 60 feet/18 meters wide. It was a big order, and when the C-X program started, nobody was entirely certain that such an aircraft could be created. Read on, and I’ll try and tell you one hell of a story about this amazing bird.

The C-17’s official nickname, “Globemaster,” recalls the Douglas C-124, the USAF’s last piston-engined heavy transport, which served from 1949 to 1961, with a total of 447 airframes being built. But the true ancestry of the C-17 can be traced directly from an experimental cargo jet, the Douglas YC-15, of which only two were built in the 1970s to an Air Force requirement called the Advanced Medium Short Takeoff and Landing Transport (AMST). The original intention was to develop a replacement for the C-130, but the program was never funded due to post-Vietnam budget cuts, as well as the excellent cost and performance of the Hercules. Like the C-17, the YC-15 had four-turbofan engines carried in pylons on a high-mounted wing, and a massive slab of T-tail, but the wings were not swept and the aircraft was considerably smaller than the Globemaster.
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The YC-15 utilized a set of special externally blown flaps to generate tremendous lift for short takeoffs. The engine exhaust nozzles were close to the underside of the wing, which was equipped with large two-segment slotted flaps along most of the trailing edge. When the flaps were fully extended, much of the thrust was deflected downward, causing an equal and opposite upward lift force (thank you, Mr. Newton). The flaps had to be made of titanium, to withstand the heat, but this was a small price to pay for a significant performance improvement.

The competing YC-14 prototype developed by Boeing used a somewhat different principle called “upper surface blowing” in which the engines were mounted well forward and above the wing. The engine exhaust created a low-pressure region across the wing’s upper surface, and the relatively higher pressure below the wing translated into increased lift.
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It was this extra lift that made the short-field requirement of the C-X aircraft even possible, though it takes a bit more looking to understand why it was even needed.

One of the many unpleasant effects of the Vietnam War was to greatly increase the wear and tear on the Air Force’s fleet of Lockheed C-141 and C-5 long-range airlifters. By the late 1970s it was clear that sometime in the not too distant future, these aircraft would have to be replaced before their wings fell off from sheer metal fatigue.

However, the C-X program managers had a concept for the new airlifter strategic airlift overseas that was very different from the way it had been done previously. The concept of operations for military airlifts until the 1980s was a “hub and spoke” model, in which heavy (strategic) airlifters would deliver masses of troops, equipment, and supplies from the continental United States to large regional airports (like the great Rhein-Main complex near Frankfurt, Germany, or the magnificent airports and bases of Saudi Arabia), where they would be split out into smaller “tactical” packets that would be shuttled to small forward airfields by medium transport aircraft (C-130s). This was (and is) an efficient model, and is the basis for the current American civil air transport system. However, if you had to operate into an area where big airfields didn’t exist, or where the runways and supporting facilities had just been cratered by an enemy airstrike or “slimed” by a chemical warhead from a SCUD missile, then you were going to be out of luck.

This was how the idea was born of the C-X flying a cargo/equipment /personnel load directly to where it was going to be needed, without the need to stop at an intermediate hub. This was, and is, a great idea, though one that would cause the USAF and McDonnell Douglas no end of pain, and the taxpayers a good-sized mountain of money.

The start of the C-X program came at a time of crisis for the U.S., with the taking of our embassy in Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan still fresh in the minds of Department of Defense leaders. The shortage of heavy airlift aircraft was enough to make some folks wish they had bought more C-5s. For others, it was the impetus to build an even better airlifter. The original C-X requirement envisioned production of a total of 210 airframes: 120 to replace the fleet of C-141 B Starlifters, and the remaining 90 to replace the force of C-5s when they wore out. All three large airframe manufacturers in the U.S. (Boeing, Lockheed, and McDonnell Douglas) submitted proposals based, as you might expect, upon their most recent military transport experience. Of the three, the McDonnell Douglas design based on the YC-15 scored the highest, and they were awarded a contract for what became known as the C-17 in August of 1981. Unfortunately, this would be the last good thing that would happen in the C-X program for a very long time. Almost immediately, politics and necessity began to exert a strong influence on the C-17.

The political element arrived with the coming of President Ronald W Reagan in 1981. His Administration began an almost immediate program of increasing military spending to reverse the decline in our forces that had occurred after Vietnam and during the Administration of President Jimmy Carter. While the Carter Administration had increased military spending at the end of their tenure as a result of the Iran crisis, the Reagan Administration ramped up the money machine even further. One of their first areas of increased spending was for increased strategic airlift capacity.

While the C-17 contract had been awarded the previous year, it would do nothing to increase the number of tankers and transports for some years to come. In addition, the awarding of the C-17 contract to McDonnell Douglas had angered the powerful senator from Georgia, Sam Nunn, who was the protector of Lockheed down in Marietta. So in one of those moves that defines politics as “the art of the possible,” the Reagan Administration came up with a clever compromise. The funding for C-17 was reduced and the program schedule stretched out into the late 1980s. Then, a huge buy of tanker/transports was authorized, based upon existing designs.

In January of 1982, Lockheed, Senator Nunn, and the state of Georgia got an order for a second production run of the Galaxy, designated the C-5B. Along with this came the sixty-aircraft buy of KC-10A Extenders, which would be built by McDonnell Douglas. This left the folks at Long Beach in a strange position. Their new transport aircraft program had just been drained of funds and stretched out, but they now had a huge multi-year contract to build tankers on an existing production line. One senior Douglas official described it like finding out the beautiful, rich girl you are dating is a blood relative. She will probably share the wealth eventually, but that will be the extent of the relationship!

For Jim Worshem, the legendary president of the Douglas Aircraft Company, these events forced him to make a number of pragmatic and common-sense moves. He shifted almost all the skilled engineers and technicians he had hired to work on the C-17 over to KC-10A tanker and commercial transport work, and adjusted the program schedule to reflect the new, stretched-out funding profile dictated by the USAF and Reagan Administration. In the short term, it was a good thing for Douglas, which was able to hire even more production and support personnel to deal with the existing workload.

Meanwhile, design work on the C-17 continued for some years to come, gradually transforming the old YC-15 prototype design into a larger, more powerful production design. The actual design process went well and generally on schedule and budget, but a chill was beginning to come over the C-17 program, and it almost killed the new airlifter. The change came as a result of something completely unrelated to the Globemaster program: a Justice Department/DoD investigation of contractor insider-information trading known as Operation III Wind. Ill Wind was a wide-ranging probe of Administration/contractor relationships in which government personnel would sell “insider” programmatic and technical information to contractors for a price. By the time the probe was completed, a number of DoD officials and senior contractor executives, including Undersecretary of the Navy Melvin Pasily, had been sent to jail, and huge fines had been exacted from a number of contractors.

Ill Wind had one other unpleasant effect, in that it caused almost all the military and civilian personnel assigned to manage procurement programs to take on a hostile, even adversarial, relationship against the “money-grubbing” defense contractors and their perceived “obscene” profits. Now, anyone who thinks that an 8 to 12 percent profit margin on a program as risky as the C-17 is obscene clearly is lacking some knowledge of the business world, but that was the atmosphere in the late 1980s. Then, in 1989, the wheels really fell off.

The year started in a promising fashion, with fabrication of the prototype C-17A going along, albeit with some problems. Part of these difficulties were due to the business realities of the aerospace industry at that time. Finding qualified technicians and engineers in Southern California in the late 1980s was tough, and this led to some poorly qualified personnel being brought onto the Douglas payroll at higher salaries than had been planned. This led to cost escalations which caused future acrimony between the USAF program offices and Douglas. There were problems with weight growth on the Globemaster, which is not unusual in today’s military aircraft programs. The difficulty here was that the USAF program managers were completely inflexible on
any
modifications to the C-17 contract on either technical or financial grounds.

On top of all of this, those same program managers failed to inform the Office of the Secretary of Defense (Dick Cheney at the time) of the cost and engineering difficulties when his staff did a review of major aircraft programs (F-22, F-18, C-17, V-22, A-12, etc.). Only
after
Cheney had presented his report to the Congress, and canceled the V-22 as a cost-cutting measure, did the problems on the other programs come out. It turned out that Navy’s A-12 managers had actually lied to OSD about critical problems, and their program was canceled outright.

The difficulties on C-17 took a bit longer to come out, but when they did, a firestorm erupted. Initially these took the form of financial claims by Douglas against the USAF about mandated changes that had cost them money. The Air Force came back with claims against Douglas for shortfalls in contract progress and performance, and design shortcomings. What resulted was a virtual war between the management at Douglas and the C-17 program office which just got worse and worse.

The final straw came over a required structural test of the wing. As part of the USAF-mandated weight reduction program, Douglas designers had removed several structural members from the wing to help make the goal. Unfortunately, when the engineers went back and ran their computer structural models, they discovered that the software was predicting a wing failure during a coming overload test of the wing. The test was designed to verify that the wing could sustain a 150 percent stress overload over the design requirement. Unfortunately, the engineers knew that the wing would fail at one of the “thinned out” spots at 129 percent. When Douglas reported this to the Air Force program office, they were refused permission to fix the problem prior to the test. In particular, the government program manager felt that allowing them to make the change would somehow show USAF “weakness” towards the contractor. He ordered that the test go forward, whatever the results. It did, and the wing broke precisely where the engineers had predicted, at exactly the 129 percent load. This was a patently stupid act, and it was the proverbial “straw that broke the camel’s back.”

By this time, the OSD had enough of the problems and decided to act. For starters, they fired the USAF program management team, and then called the executives of McDonnell Douglas in for a talk. To this day nobody on either side will say exactly what happened, but when the meetings were done, there was a completely new management team running the C-17 program at Douglas. Both sides withdrew their claims against each other, and got to work to solve the problems of the C-17. They also let the Douglas engineers fix the wing!

Now, nothing goes wrong overnight, and neither are engineering and financial problems as bad as those faced by the C-17 team solved quickly. Nevertheless, by early 1993, things were beginning to turn around for the Globemaster, though you would have been hard pressed to know it. A new Democratic Administration had taken over in Washington, and all parties involved knew that the C-17 would come under a new and uncomfortable scrutiny.

The man who drew the duty of deciding life or death for the Globemaster program was John Deutch, the Undersecretary of Defense for Procurement.
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His decision for the future of the C-17 was anything but easy, though. When he took over the OSD procurement office, there was immense pressure to cut the defense budget so that the money could be applied to other priorities of the Clinton Administration. On the other hand, you did not have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that the need for the C-17 was greater than ever. If any event had validated the vision of the original C-X program specification and requirement, the 1991 Persian Gulf War had been it. Desert Storm had used up over half of the C-141 fleet’s remaining fatigue life in less than six months of operations, and airframes were already being flown to the boneyard in Arizona.