INGRID DOWS - AN ALTERNATE STORY PART 3 - THE SPACE AGE by Michel Poulin - HTML preview

CHAPTER 11 – TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS

14:09 (California Time)

Tuesday, July 17, 1951 ‘C’

Ingrid’s design office, Hughes prototype center

Grand Central Airport, Glendale, Los Angeles area

California, U.S.A.

Ingrid was reviewing the latest production numbers of the various aircraft, helicopters, missiles and radar systems designed and under production at Hughes when her telephone rang. Seeing that the call was coming from the reception desk of the prototype center, on the ground floor, she grabbed the handset and pressed the link button for the reception line.

‘’Ingrid speaking!’’

‘’Ingrid, I have here a Mister Sherman Fairchild and one of his engineers from the Fairchild Aviation Corporation, Mister Glen Brown. They wish to speak with you.’’

‘’Have them guided to my office right away, Janice.’’ replied at once Ingrid.

‘’Will do, Ingrid.’’ said the receptionist, who routinely called her by her first name, like all the other employees of the prototype center, before hanging up. Hanging up herself, Ingrid then used her intercom to call her executive secretary, whose office was adjacent to hers.

‘’Lisa, I am going to receive two important visitors in a few minutes. Could you please have a coffee service for three prepared? And make that coffee strong, please.’’

‘’On it, Ingrid!’’

Next, Ingrid took a minute to prepare her coffee corner, consisting of a round low table with six padded swivel chairs set around it, taking out of the small refrigerator sitting in a corner of her office a pitcher of cold water and putting it in the middle of her coffee table, along with three empty glasses and napkins.

Three minutes later, two mature men with gray hair were introduced into her office by one of the female security guards protecting her prototype center. Ingrid walked at once to the two men to shake hands with them, surprising them with the strength of her handgrip.

‘’Mister Fairchild, it is an honor for me to see you visit my offices here in Glendale. Mister Brown is one of your aircraft design engineers, I believe?’’

‘’Correct, Miss Dows.’’ answered Sherman Miles Fairchild, the founder and owner of Fairchild Aviation Corporation. ‘’He is in fact my chief designer for my cargo aircraft manufacturing division. We came to solicit your help for a truly tough challenge the Air Force presented to us.’’

‘’Then, let’s sit down at my coffee corner, so that we could discuss this, gentlemen. Aah, here comes the coffee service I requested for you. You may put your service tray on the coffee table, Lisa.’’

Letting first her secretary put down her service tray supporting a pot of hot coffee and three cups, Ingrid then sat down opposite Fairchild and Brown and served them, waiting until they had taken their first sip of coffee before speaking.

‘’So, what is that challenge the Air Force presented to you, Mister Fairchild?’’

‘’Basically, the Air Force just published a set of requirements for a jet-powered cargo aircraft destined to succeed my C-142 GLOBEMASTER, Miss Dows. It presented that set of requirements to me, Douglas, Boeing and Convair. When I asked why you were not also presented that set of requirements, the answer from General Spencer, the commander of Air Transport Command, was that you were already too busy filling the contracts for the mass emergency production of your F-9 fighter and B-12 bomber.’’

‘’That’s a fair enough reason, I must say: I am now working three shifts in Culver City in order to fill the Air Force needs, while my other airline manufacturing plant is also very busy producing my AIRBUS and AIRBUS 2 VTOL transports, which are presently selling like hot cakes.’’

Glen Brown rolled his eyes on hearing that.

‘’Don’t we know that, Miss Dows. Do you have any idea about how many other aircraft manufacturers and airline company executives are jealous about the success of your aircraft?’’

‘’Oh, I can easily guess that those jealous types must be in the few dozens, at the least. Are you part of them?’’ asked in a sneaky tone Ingrid, making Fairchild and Brown chuckle briefly.

‘’Maybe!’’ said Sherman Fairchild before becoming most serious. ‘’Miss Dows, if my company doesn’t get that Air Force contract for a new heavy cargo aircraft, then that could constitute a heavy blow to the future of Fairchild Aviation. I thus decided to come and see you in order to arrange some sort of cooperative arrangement between our two companies: you help us with the general design for that new cargo aircraft, while Fairchild would take charge of finalizing its detailed plans and of producing that cargo aircraft. If we do win that Air Force competition, then we could split the profits from that contract. That way, both of our companies would benefit, while your own production plants won’t get further clogged with more aircraft to be built and delivered and could continue to concentrate on building your F-9, B-12 and AIRBUS transports. So, what do you think, Miss Dows?’’

‘’That it sounds both equitable and interesting, Mister Fairchild. You did produce a superlative cargo aircraft with your C-142 as early as 1941, so how difficult are the Air Force requirements for that new cargo aircraft?’’

‘’Very difficult, miss.’’ answered Glen Brown. ‘’This projected cargo aircraft, to be named the C-152 GLOBEMASTER II, is to be a jet-powered heavy cargo aircraft able to carry across the Atlantic a military payload of fifty tons or more at subsonic speeds of at least 530 miles per hour. That payload requirement is centered on the need to be able to carry to Europe at least one M48 medium tank, a new model which is presently being tested. That tank weighs a minimum of 45 tons, so that requirement is an absolute minimum. Worse, the Air Force wishes for the XC-152 to be able to take off and land on short distances from unprepared tactical strips or, if possible at all, take off at the vertical.’’

‘’You were right, Mister Brown: those are indeed very stringent requirements. Do you know the dimensions of that new M48 tank, so that I could judge how large the cargo hold of the XC-152 will need to be?’’ In response, Brown took a file out of his

briefcase and handed it to Ingrid, who

opened it as Brown spoke.

‘’This is the specifications for the

M48, along with a number of pictures of the prototype and line drawings. As you can

see, it is quite a big beast.’’

‘’Indeed! With such a compact, heavy mass to carry, the cargo floor and the whole structure of the cargo hold will need to be immensely strong if it is to be able to sustain a rough tactical landing while carrying that tank.’’

‘’And I am pulling my hair out trying to figure out how to meet that specification, Miss Dows. Do you think that it is even possible to realize such an aircraft, short of producing some kind of gargantuan monster?’’

‘’It will be difficult but not impossible, in my opinion. For one thing, I can tell you right now what type of engine to use for the XC-152: the General Electric CF80E high-bypass turbofan. It has a bypass ratio of 5.3 and a maximum dry thrust of 72,000 pound-force, plus has a very low specific consumption of 0.35 pounds of fuel per pound-force per hour.’’

Both Fairchild and Brown opened wide both their mouths and their eyes on hearing those numbers.

‘’Holy shit!’’ exclaimed Brown. ‘’Those G.E. guys must be magicians! How did they manage that?’’

‘’By fully reverse-engineering an engine which existed in the year 2012 and whose specifications and pictures were brought to us by my adoptive mother, Nancy Laplante. It became available only a few months ago and I am planning to fit it to the latest model of my AIRBUS 2, something that will increase its payload capacity by twenty percent, while also increasing its operational range by more than fifty percent.’’

‘’Gee! This CF80E sure sounds like the engine of choice for our XC-152. That is indeed a very good first start for our project. What about the aircraft structural design?’’

‘’I will really need to think about it in depth before answering you, Mister Fairchild. I am debating right now in my mind if I should use my Verti-wing concept, as used by my AIRBUS and AIRBUS 2, or my diamond box wing concept, as used in my B-12 supersonic bomber. I will need some time to find out which concept would work best for the XC-152 before I could give you a firm answer.’’

‘’Just a basic concept would already help us tremendously, Miss Dows. With a starting design, my engineers will then be able to work out a more detailed design fairly quickly. We could then meet together again in order to show you what we ended up with as a basic configuration and specifications for the XC-152.’’

‘’That sounds like a plan, Mister Fairchild. Can I keep the specifications sheet for this M48 tank, plus the Air Force requirements for the C-152?’’

‘’Of course, miss! You will need both of them in order to be able to thinker about a basic aircraft design concept. Well, thank you for the excellent coffee and for having received us with an open ear.’’

‘’The pleasure was mine, Mister Fairchild.’’ replied Ingrid while rising from her chair and shaking hands with both of her visitors. She then accompanied them all the way down to the ground floor reception lounge, where she watched them get in a waiting chauffeured car, which then rolled away. By the time she was walking back to her office, an avalanche of ideas was already coming to her mind.

After reviewing again in detail the Air Force list of requirements for the future XC-152, Ingrid decided to call her two partners, who were working out of the Hughes Enterprises Corporation headquarters in Hollywood. The one who answered her call was Hedy Lamarr.

‘’Hedy here!’’

‘’Hedy, I just got a visit from the founder and owner of Fairchild Aviation, who wanted my counsels about how to design a new cargo aircraft for the Air Force. We agreed on what I think to be a fair and most satisfying deal on that subject and I would like to discuss that this afternoon with you, Kate and 10 Noah Dietrich. We could meet at Hughes headquarters at, say, two this afternoon, if possible?’’

‘’No problem, Ingrid! Kate is presently test-flying the latest AIRBUS 2 built in Culver City but I will advise her about our planned meeting. As for Noah, he is presently in the buildin g.’’

‘’Excellent! See you at two, then.’’ replied Ingrid before hanging up.

13:54 (California Time)

‘Triumvirate Office’, Hughes Enterprises Corporation headquarters

7000 Romaine Street, Hollywood

‘’So, Ingrid, what kind of deal did you make with Fairchild?’’ asked a smiling Noah Dietrich while shaking hands with her. While he never had said so out loud, Dietrich was most happy to work for Ingrid and her two female partners rather than under Howard Hughes. While he had always been loyal to the deceased billionaire, Howard Hughes had proven many times to be a difficult employer, with a tendency to take decisions on a

10 Noah Dietrich: Chief Executive Officer for Howard Hughes businesses for 32 years. Left Hughes Enterprises in 1957. Highly competent as a financial and business advisor. whim and then to be hard-headed about those decisions. Noah had also resented the repeated refusal by Howard Hughes to give him financial compensations in terms of stock shares, something that would have diminished greatly the crushing amount of income taxes the government took out of his executive salary. Reversing that decision and giving to Noah business shares had in fact been one of the first decisions taken by the female triumvirate now directing Hughes Enterprises once they had inherited Howard’s fortune and business empire after his death. Contrary to the vast majority of businessmen and financiers he knew, who poo-pooed the idea of women as good business persons and executives, Noah knew by now that the combined wits of Ingrid, Hedy and Katharine were easily the equal to that of the best businessmen he knew. Another thing he liked in the three women was their decency, generosity and sense of caring concerning the employees of Hughes Enterprises. Ingrid’s answer again proved that point to him.

‘’A deal that will cost us next to nothing, while bringing us more profits and avoiding our aircraft production lines to get clogged with yet more aircraft orders.’’

‘’Sounds like the perfect kind of deal to me, Ingrid.’’

‘’Then, let’s all sit down and discuss that deal between us.’’

Once Noah had sat with the three women around the round table used for informal discussions, Ingrid smiled at her three associates.

‘’Well, ladies and gentleman, I am happy to announce that I came to an understanding with Fairchild Aviation concerning a joint design for a new heavy cargo aircraft, which the Air Force wants developed and built to replace its faithful C-142 GLOBEMASTER, which dates from ten years ago. Its replacement will be called the C-152 GLOBEMASTER II and Fairchild was approached by the Air Force, along with Boeing, Douglas and Convair. When Mister Fairchild asked why the Air Force didn’t contact us for that proposed program, General Spencer, the boss of the Air Transport Command, answered that we were already swamped trying to produce as many F-9s and B-12s as possible on a priority basis and that the Air Force didn’t want to slow down our production lines by adding another aircraft to our production list. Personally, I found that reason to be most logical and reasonable: our production lines in Culver City, despite working now on three shifts, are barely able to keep up with the demands of the Air Force for the F-9 and B-12, while we certainly can’t afford to impede the production of our AIRBUS and AIRBUS 2 airliners, which are selling like hot cakes around the World.’’

‘’I agree on that, Ingrid.’’ said Katharine Hepburn. ‘’Our orders books for both the AIRBUS and AIRBUS 2 are full for at least the next eighteen months, with more customers showing up every week. While things are looking really great in terms of profit margins for my Air Fifinella and for TWA11, things are not looking very rosy for other airlines, like Pan Am, and for many of the big aircraft manufacturers, like Boeing, Douglas and Lockheed: we simply grabbed so many lucrative deals and airline business during the last couple of years that they now have to survive on the crumbs we left behind us.’’

‘’Tough!’’ was Ingrid’s response. ‘’It is up to them to prove that they can design good aircraft which would be at least equal to ours. As for airlines businesses, their obsession with either catering in priority to well-to-do travelers or to cram as many people as they could in ‘cattle’ class conditions made them less than favorites for the average American prospective air traveler.’’

‘’You know who else is becoming as well unhappy with our successes, Ingrid? The big shipping lines operating transatlantic liners. Their customership has fallen precipitously since the entering in service of our AIRBUS 2. Now that Americans see that they can travel from New York to Paris or from San Francisco to Hawaii in five percent of the time and half the price of a transatlantic passenger ship ticket, few people still want to travel by ship rather than by air...with us. The U.S.S. UNITED STATES, despite recording the fastest transatlantic crossing time between New York and France, is now traveling most of the time half-empty, or worse.’’ That was when Noah Dietrich added his first grain of salt to the conversation.

‘’And we should be careful about that, girls. The way you conduct your aircraft production and airliner business is most legit but all those aggrieved competitors are trying more and more to influence members of Congress through lobbyists, pushing them to investigate any imagined malfeasance they could think of about Hughes business. I even heard credible sources telling me about plans being pushed for industrial espionage and even sabotage against our aircraft plants.’’ Instead of dismissing his warning out of hand, all three women looked at him with most sober looks, with Hedy Lamarr then resuming their collective thoughts on that subject.

11 TWA: Trans World Airways, a rival of Pan American Airways (Pan Am). Howard Hughes held a majority holding in TWA.

‘’Of course we had to cheat in order to succeed, Noah! How could mere women like us outdo those misogynistic idiots at their own business? Frankly, I wouldn’t put them beneath the idea of hiring a professional assassin in order to get rid of Ingrid, our best asset for Hughes Aircraft. But enough about those sore losers! Tell us more about the deal you made with Fairchild, Ingrid.’’

‘’With pleasure, Hedy! Basically, I will draw the basic design of an aircraft able to fulfill the requirements of the Air Force for their planned C-152 heavy cargo aircraft. By the way, here are copies of the Air Force required specifications and performance they want the C-152 to fulfill. As you will see, Fairchild had good reasons to feel like they needed our advice and support on this.’’

Dietrich was the first to express his reactions on reading the copy handed to him by Ingrid.

‘’To carry a nearly fifty-ton tank across the Atlantic and land on a short tactical airstrip? Is that even possible, Ing rid?’’

‘’Yes, it is most possible, Noah. In Nancy’s world, the Air Force had two types of heavy cargo aircraft able to achieve such a feat. However, we presently have a type of turbofan engine with nearly fifty percent more thrust than the engines used on the future C5A and C17 and with a specific fuel consumption of about half of those other engines. At first, I was debating if I should concentrate on a design reusing our patented Verti-Wing concept, as used in our AIRBUS and AIRBUS 2, or to design a more classic aircraft with my patented diamond box wing, like the one used in our B-12. However, the more I am thinking about that, the more I am favoring a Verti-Wing design: it would have an immensely strong structure best able to handle such compact and heavy loads as this M48 tank. Kate, how useful to Air Fifinella would that C-152 be, if used by a new, cargo-only division?’’

‘’Very, Ingrid! Such an aircraft would be priceless for companies engaged in operations in isolated areas, like mining companies or oil drilling companies in Alaska, Northern Canada, Scandinavia and Australia, especially if it could land on short dirt strips. The need for such a rough strip-capable heavy cargo aircraft definitely exists but no existing aircraft could fit the bill. That C-152 should sell like hot cakes, especially if there are no known existing competitors for that market.’’

‘’Then, start thinking about how you would form a cargo division of Air Fifinella and what the market for it would be, Kate. Talking of Air Fifinella, how are you doing concerning its personnel recruitment?’’

‘’Unfortunately, too well, Ingrid. Many of our sisters serving in the Air Force are getting discouraged by how slow it is in implementing the new female-reserved positions and units the Air Force promised you to form. Also, the generally low pay scale for enlisted personnel and junior officers in the Air Force is not helping in the retention of female Air Force personnel, while sexist attitudes are hard, if not nearly impossible, to eliminate around the service. I will have plenty of available candidates for your planned PEGASUS supersonic airliner and for the C-152 once they will enter service. Talking of available candidates, I have one girl who recently presented a request for a transfer from our CH-4 short haul helicopter network to a transatlantic route on AIRBUS 2. I believe that you know her, Ingrid: I am talking about Norma Jean Mortenson. She is a very good girl, intelligent, dedicated and sweet. Our passengers love her as a cabin attendant...irrespective of her devastating good looks.’’

The group had a collective chuckle on that before Ingrid answered Katharine.

‘’Does she speak another language on top of English, Kate?’’

‘’She has been studying French on her own for two years now. I spoke to her on the phone and tested her French and, while she still is not fully fluent in French, she could easily get by on our New York – Paris flight. Norma is no simple dumb blond girl, Ingrid.’’

‘’I know! She also showed a lot of courage during the war and is a truly sweet girl. It is high time for her to climb the ladder in the Air Fifinella organization.’’

‘’Then, I will offer her to work as a cabin attendant on one of our AIRBUS 2 airliners working the New York – Paris route.’’

‘’Good! Noah, you are our point-person with Willis-Overland concerning my Hughes SPRINT. How are the sales of the SPRINT going?’’

‘’Can I use the word ‘explosive’ to characterize its success on the American market, Ingrid? Yours is presently the only American-made, true high-performance sports car in production and our Commerce City assembly line is barely able to keep up with the demand. On the other hand, the head of the California Highway Patrol just contacted me yesterday to express his interest in buying a batch of 300 police patrol variants of your SPRINT, the INTERCEPTOR. Apparently, its agents using motorcycles and regular sedan cars are more and more left behind in the dust by speeding drivers at the wheel of either a SPRINT or of some European-made sports cars, like Aston-Martins and Ferraris. Willis-Hughes dealers are even receiving orders from overseas customers who have grown tired of their present European-made ‘sport cars’.’’

‘’I am not surprised by that, Noah. Who would not be tired of driving a tiny, cramped car with little creature comforts, inflated price, abysmal reliability and so-so performances? Well, things are certainly looking up, business-wise. If there are no other things you would like us to discuss today, I then propose that we adjourn this meeting. Nothing? Then let’s break this meeting. Noah, could I speak with you in your office?’’

‘’Uh, sure, Ingrid!’’ replied Noah Dietrich, not sure about what she wanted to discuss about with him.

Once in private with Dietrich and with the door of his office closed, Ingrid gave a smile to the chief executive.

‘’Noah, I want to say that you have proved as loyal and competent with us than you were with Howard. I would like to further express my gratitude for your loyal services, now that I passed an agreement with Fairchild. Once Fairchild will have won that contract for the C-152 with the Air Force, I will then buy for 100,000 dollars of Fairchild Aviation stocks...with your name as owner of those stocks. You will thus be able to diversify your financial portfolio while avoiding the ruinous taxes you would otherwise pay on any pay bonus I could have given you. If the success of my SPRINT endures, then I will do the same with Willis-Overland’ stocks.’’ Joy appeared at once on the face of the executive, who then vigorously shook Ingrid’s hand.

‘’Ingrid, you must be the best boss I ever had. Thank you so much!’’

‘’You deserved it, Noah.’’ replied Ingrid, meaning it. ‘’I believe that now is a good time for you to take a well-earned two-week vacation with your family.’’