Boyd (22 page)

“You should have him brief you on what he is doing now,” the officer said, and offered to bring Boyd over.

A moment later Boyd sat down at Christie’s table, leaned forward until he was nose to nose with him, and began talking as
if Christie were across the flight line. His Dutch Master described circles in the air as he told Christie about his ideas
regarding the trade-off in kinetic and potential energy and how he believed new tactics could be developed from this “excess
power” theory.

Christie nodded in agreement. “That makes sense,” he said.

Boyd talked of the equations he was developing, equations that would quantify his theory, equations that would define a jet
aircraft’s performance at various altitudes and various G-loads, equations that would reduce the entire performance envelope
to a set of graphs.

“I think you are right,” Christie said.

Boyd said everyone told him that there was nothing new about his work, that it had been done before or it was not important.
But goddammit he knew it was fresh and innovative. “I can’t get anybody else to go along with it,” he said. “I’ve been all
over this base and they think I am nuts.”

Christie sipped his beer and chewed on a handful of munchies. In his soft voice he said, “I haven’t heard anything like it
before.”

Boyd was surprised. He had found someone who not only understood what he was trying to do, but agreed with him about its importance.
He leaned closer to Christie and asked, “Just what is it that you do here at Eglin?”

Christie explained how he worked with tactical aircraft-performance data to prepare bombing charts and how he developed maneuvers
for pilots to deliver nuclear bombs and then escape the blast. He worked in ballistics, studying bullets and bombs. He told
Boyd of his collection of aircraft-thrust data, angle of attack data, computations about fuel and altitude and airspeed, and
all the other variables of aircraft performance. It was the greatest collection of such information anywhere in the Air Force.

Boyd nodded. “Falling bombs and active bullets. Ballistically they’re not that much different from an airplane in flight,
are they?”

Christie agreed. Bombs, bullets, and airplanes have only two kinds of energy: kinetic energy, the
ooomph
due to speed and motion, and potential energy, the
ooomph
due to altitude. “They’re pretty much the same,” Christie said.

Boyd’s eyes widened. “Goddamn,” he said.

Then Christie told how he was using computers to develop even more sophisticated aircraft-performance data. For him, an aircraft
held no secrets. The computers revealed all.

“Goddamn,” Boyd repeated.

As Boyd remembered later, “I cleaned the shit off the tablecloth and began writing all over it. This was happening just like
in the movies. I started laying out these equations and shit.” He wrote formulas and diagrams and charts on cocktail napkins
and gave them to Christie. He insisted Christie hold on to them.

Christie listened attentively. He knew nothing of air-to-air maneuvers. This could be the challenge he sought. The odds were
insuperable, but that made it all the more interesting. And this Major John Boyd might be on to something. He appeared a wild
man. His reputation was like the shock wave in front of an aircraft; it rode ahead of him and disturbed everyone it washed
over. It left people rolling in its wake, confused and often angry. Boyd’s methods were the very antithesis of how Christie
operated. And yet… there was something about him. Boyd was a man possessed. He had an idea bigger than himself—a cause. And
that was what Christie wanted. A cause.

“Why don’t I come by your office Monday morning?” Boyd said. “We’ll see what we can do.”

“Come on by.”

Boyd stood up and pointed at Christie. He nodded and a smile beamed across his face. “Tiger, we’re gonna do some goddamn good
work.”

Rarely in the Air Force has an introduction resulted in such a productive, long-term, synergistic explosion of creative thought
as when the Mad Major met the Finagler. The Air Force would never be the same. It was more than ambition and the desire to
do good and significant work that bound these two men together. Neither man talked about personal or family matters, yet each
must have sensed at some level the parallels in their childhoods: the embarrassing poverty, the dysfunctional families, the
athletic prowess, the overpowering desire to get up and get out and to be somebody. Christie, though eight years younger than
Boyd, would be more of an indulgent older brother.

Boyd was a fighter pilot and operating with a fighter pilot’s passion and aggression and desire to do battle. His primary
form of social
intercourse was confrontation. He had not yet acquired subtlety and bureaucratic skills. He needed a protector, someone to—in
Air Force parlance—fly top cover. Christie was that man. The friendship that began that night in the Officers Club lasted
until the day Boyd died.

It is impossible to separate the contributions of the two men to the work they were about to do—work that would, in the end,
do just what Boyd predicted: change people’s fundamental understanding of aviation. The idea was Boyd’s. But Christie’s background
in advanced math and his skill with computers, along with his skills in handling the bureaucracy, made possible Boyd’s great
and lasting contribution to aviation. Boyd simply could not have done what he did had it not been for Christie—not at that
time and not at that place.

In the beginning they talked of pursuit curves. How many Gs would a pilot have to pull to get the correct angle to shoot an
enemy aircraft and how much would aircraft performance be degraded by pulling those Gs? Christie listened to Boyd, asked questions,
and began developing new equations. Boyd was a reasonably good mathematician, but he was not in the same league with Christie.
Yet he insisted on understanding every equation. “I don’t understand,” he said. “Tell me one more time. I’m a dumb shit.”
Christie patiently walked through the equation again. “Do it again,” Boyd said. It almost drove Christie mad. He believed
time could be better spent simply by plowing the equations into the small Wang computer in his office, seeing where the equations
led, developing new equations, and always moving ahead. But Boyd wanted to go over the math, dissect each equation, and explore
the full range of every theorem until he was as familiar with it as was Christie. Hour after hour Christie stood at a blackboard
with Boyd and walked him through the equations.

Boyd’s ideas changed every day. “Let’s look at this,” he would say. Or “Let’s try it this way.” He was never satisfied. For
months there was not even a name for what the two men were working on. Then one day Boyd walked in and said to Christie, “I’m
calling it the Energy-Maneuverability Theory.’”

Christie nodded. He didn’t care what Boyd called it, as long as he would move ahead. Christie wanted a pamphlet, a briefing,
a book,
something codified that he could hold in his hand, something that could be presented to the Air Force. But Boyd was such a
perfectionist that he would not write anything. What was the use of writing it if it was going to be changed five minutes
later?

Over and over, day and night, Saturdays and Sundays, they pushed data through Christie’s computer until the Wang was overwhelmed
and it became obvious a bigger computer was needed. If the Wang was overwhelmed, so was Christie. Because the E-M Theory had
nothing to do with Boyd’s assigned job, all the work had to be done in the evenings and on the weekends. Christie lived forty
miles away in Pensacola and came to work in a carpool. If he was driving, he had to go to Pensacola, then return to Eglin
and work late into the evening. And chances are when he walked into his house at 2:00
A.M
., the phone would be ringing. It was always Boyd.

Christie was in effect working two jobs—his regular job and the Boyd job. Saturdays and Sundays he spent in his office with
Boyd. His fiancée did not look with favor on this after-hours work.

The biggest computer on base was an IBM 704. To use it, one had to come to the computer shop as a supplicant. The proper way
to obtain computer time, the Air Force way, the only way, was first to have a project that met all the criteria for computer
usage. Then whoever was in charge of the project delegated someone to take the data to the computer office. There a program
was written and the information placed on punch cards, which then were fed to the computer. The printouts were returned to
the supplicant. Boyd wrote letter after letter asking permission to test his E-M data. The civilian in charge refused each
request. Boyd again went to see the civilian. “This thing I’m working on will benefit the Air Force,” he said. “It will enable
fighter pilots to devise new tactics. It will enable America to dominate air combat.”

The civilian reminded Boyd that he was only a major, a man being bounced from job to job, someone whose job description had
nothing to do with computers. Computer time was too valuable to waste on some harebrained idea. Besides, Eglin was a weapons-testing
base. Theories about energy-maneuverability, or whatever the hell Boyd’s idea was called, came from Wright-Patterson AFB.

Again, Boyd was at an impasse.

“I have an idea,” Christie said. “Let me see if I can work it out.”

Almost half of the computer work done by the IBM 740 was done for Christie. He went to his boss and said he had some ideas
he wanted to run through the base computer. He was somewhat vague about these ideas, but his boss did not press the issue.
Whatever Christie wanted was okay. His work was important and it had the attention of Air Force generals. If he wanted to
run some ideas through a computer, fine.

Christie and Boyd worked out long lists of equations and then Christie took the equations to the computer shop. “These are
my inputs,” he said. “This is what I want my outputs to look like.” He was asked for an authorization code. His office had
dozens of such codes, one for each project. He picked a number. The computer technician checked a long list of approved project
codes and, yes, there it was. He ran the equations and by the next day Christie had a stack of printouts a foot tall, row
after row of data, pages and pages of nothing but numbers. (An E-M chart is a state condition, a snapshot of an aircraft state
at a given moment.)

When Boyd saw them, he reacted as if he had been handed the Ten Commandments. He sat down and reverently turned the pages.
Christie realized that Boyd had the ability to look at pages of numbers and visualize their meaning. He could look at what
to most people would be a confusing jumble of arcane math and see an airplane with the variables of altitude, airspeed, temperature,
angle of bank, and G-load. As Boyd sat at the table, his head moved and his shoulders rolled and his fist pulled back on the
stick and he mumbled as he flew the numbers. He said to Christie, “The charts sing to me. I hear music when I read them.”

Boyd had begun working out at the gym again and had returned to his habit of chewing calluses on his hands. People in Christie’s
office were horrified. They were working on what sort of blasts are generated by bombs of a given size, what sort of damage
bomb fragments might do to given targets, how many bombs of a given weight must be dropped to destroy, say, a bridge, and
over in the corner was Major Boyd, working on an unauthorized project that could get the entire office in trouble, mumbling
and chewing on his hand and spitting skin across the office.

Boyd scanned page after page of numbers and missed nothing. When a computer operator hit the wrong key and a printout had
one
wrong number, Boyd erupted. The slightest anomaly, the slightest perturbation on one of maybe five hundred pages, he instantly
picked out. “Goddammit, Christie, they fucked up over there in the computer shop,” he yelled. “I’m going over there and kick
that civilian’s ass.”

“Now, John,” Christie said in his soft conciliatory voice. “Let me handle it.” Above all else Christie had to keep Boyd out
of the computer shop. Each new collection of data led to more iterations that were integrated with earlier work and then sent
back to the computer shop. Now Boyd was making progress.

Reduced to its basics, Boyd’s work hinged on thrust and drag ratios. An airplane at a given altitude, given G, and given speed
has a defined drag. The engine has a maximum potential thrust at that altitude and that temperature. If the engine puts out
enough energy to match the drag, the aircraft’s total energy is unchanging—the energy rate is zero. All is balanced. But Boyd
wanted to know how fast a pilot could gain energy when he fire walled the throttle. At a given altitude, given speed, and
pulling a given amount of Gs, how much
ooomph
did he have in reserve? And the answer he sought had to be normalized so every aircraft could be seen in an equal light,
independent of its weight. That is why Boyd chose to look at how fast a fighter gained or lost
specific
energy, not total energy.

A B-52 and a Piper Cub, both flying at the same speed and same altitude, have the same specific energy—that is, total energy
divided by weight. How fast either aircraft gains or loses specific energy depends on the difference between the engine’s
available thrust and the airplane’s drag. For example, an aircraft in level flight is pulling one G. Say the aircraft has
2,000 pounds of drag. If the pilot racks the aircraft up in a tight bank and pulls hard on the stick, he might pull six Gs.
Now the aircraft is generating 12,000 pounds of drag. As the G-load increases, drag becomes enormous—much greater than thrust—and
airspeed bleeds off rapidly. Tactically, the ability to quickly slow down is as important as the ability to quickly speed
up.

The E-M Theory, at its simplest, is a method to determine the specific energy rate of an aircraft. This is what every fighter
pilot wants to know.
If I am at
30
,
000
feet and
450
knots and pull six Gs, how fast am I gaining or losing energy? Can my adversary gain or lose energy faster than I can?
In an equation, specific energy rate is denoted by “P
_s
” (pronounced “p sub s”). The state of any aircraft in any flight regime can be
defined with Boyd’s simple equation:
V, or thrust minus drag over weight, multiplied by velocity. This is the
core of E-M.