Air Force FIFTY
TWO DAY INTERNATIONAL AIRPOWER SYMPOSIUM
April 23-24, 1997...Las Vegas, Nevada

Mr. Phil Condit
President and CEO, Boeing

I want to start by congratulating the Air Force Association and the U.S. Air Force on 50 amazing years. You, as an organization, you as individuals embody courage and commitment and vision. You have often been pioneers. You are willing to take risks. You are willing to learn and you have been willing to lead the way. I believe you have in fact proved that by working together, no one flies alone.

I'd like to focus this afternoon briefly on what I believe we can accomplish by working together to imagine and to create a different future. I do believe very strongly that by working together as customer and suppliers we can do some miraculous things. But I'd like to start this journey into the future by going back to our past. I'd like to argue that history, the history of aviation, is marked by points at which the technology gathered, and then we made huge steps.

Let me begin. Imagine an important Thursday morning. The date happens to be December 17, 1903 and the place, Kitty Hawk, N.C. It is not the kind of weather one would pick for flying. There are 30 mile per hour gusts, rainy, a rather poor day in all. Two bicycle mechanics with a lot of imagination and that day they pushed the envelope. They gathered the technology that has been developing around the world and changed the world forever.

To carry that on a little bit, it was Orvilles turn at the controls that day. And, in case you dont know it, the reason was that Wilbur had blown his chance and dinged the airplane three days earlier. So now it was Orvilles turn. A 12 horse power engine at full power, Wilbur released the restraining wire, the airplane slid about 40 feet and became airborne. That first flight lasted 12 seconds, covered 120 feet. Now, just so you can feel better, Orville was not the only one to fly that day. Wilbur, like all good test pilots, had to get his shot in and in fact flew the airplane for almost a minute and covered 852 feet. That night the two brothers sent the following telegram to Reverend Milton Wright: Success. Four flights. Thursday morning. All against 21 mile wind. Started from level with engine power alone. Average speed through air 31 miles. Longest, 59 seconds. Inform press. Home Christmas.

They did understand PR, even at that point in time. What generally is not known is that on that particular day they also defined a spectacular learning curve. In that one day, range was boosted by more than 700 percent. Time aloft by 500 percent. The quest for higher, further and faster had begun.

Now I want to jump ahead about 50 years and look at a very brief time period, about a five year time period that I think defined the next major step. At the end of World War II, George Shirer, a Boeing engineer, went with a team to Germany and in their search found the equations and descriptions of flow over a swept wing. In 1947, Boeing flew the prototype for the B-47, a very thin, 116 foot long wing was extraordinarily flexible and swept back at a 35 degree angle. Hanging beneath it were engines in pods that contained six GEJ-35 jet engines. It was clearly a radical departure from traditional aircraft design. That aircraft was capable of reaching a speed of over 600 miles per hour. It still had some range deficiencies because those early engines were anything but efficient. But the imagination that created that B-47, with its swept wings and podded engines, changed aviation again. In one very brief leap, it took us to high altitude and high speed. In that same year, Harry Truman signed a national security act on July 26 to create the U.S. Air Force.

I'd like to look at another imaginative Thursday morning. It is now 1948, one year after the creation of the U.S. Air Force, and, interestingly, we are in Dayton, Ohio, home of the Wright Brothers. That same engineer George Shirer, and three other Boeing people, have just walked into a conference room at Wright Field to meet with Air Force Col. Pete Warden. That Boeing group was in town to present their plans for a bigger, longer-leg, faster bomber that Gen. LeMay, head of Strategic Air Command wanted. They were armed with a proposal for a straight wing, prop jet bomber with counter rotating propellers. Just for historys sake, they might just as well have brought plans for a bi-plane. What they did not know was that Col. Warden had been talking to a number of people and was convinced that the time for change had arrived and that Boeing should build a swept-wing bomber and not a turbo prop. The best quote I can get from Col. Warden is the following: "If you stick to that design, I am going back to the Pentagon and recommend that the Air Force reject it."

The good news, at least for me, is that Boeing did not go away defeated. Instead, on that Thursday, Shirer, Art Carlson of production, Eric Namasus, Ron Blumenthal, headed back to their temporary headquarters in the Van Clive Hotel in Dayton. Shirer called his boss Ed Wells, who probably was one of the great aerodynamacists, who headed out of Seattle for Dayton. There happened to be two other Boeing employees in Dayton, Bob Widdington and Maynard Penell who were there for completely other reasons. They went to work to create something different. Shirer went to a local hobby store, bought balsa wood, glue, and a knife and in Wells hotel room they fashioned a swept-wing bomber. Ed Wells carved engine nascells, Carlson, Blumenthal and Widdington did performance calculations based on dated they had brought from Seattle. On the following Monday, October 25, the team returned to Wright Field, they submitted their latest creation, sought approval and got it. A few short years later, April 15, 1952, the B-52 flew for the first time, 45 years ago. From that five-day effort in a hotel room in Dayton, air power changed dramatically.

Why did that team succeed? I believe several things were critical. One, they listened. They listened to the customer. Two, they understood. Three, they learned. And four, they imagined. They thought about what could be and used that imagination to change the world. They didn't have a lot of paper. They had a ruler, a pencil, some rough drawings, balsa wood, glue and a knife and their own imagination and expertise. Within five short years, we went from what are now relatively slow, relatively low altitude airplanes to high speed, high altitude, swept wing jet aircraft.

Interestingly, over the next 45 years, not an awful lot has changed. Weve made a lot of refinements. Things have clearly gotten a lot better. There are new innovations, but that major step was spectacular. I believe that we are at one of those same points in history today. I just heard Dr. Toffler talk about some of those pieces. But imagine, for a moment, what it really means to be able to take data, from satellites, from aircraft, to merge them together to form a vivid picture, a picture of everything that is going on. Think about how that changes the fundamental view of warfare or potential warfare. And then, with the imagination that created the Wright flier, the B-47 and the B-52, I believe we can and will revolutionize the command and control of future battlespace.

I like big round numbers. In just six and one-half years, we will celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Wright Brothers first powered flight. Today, we have the power to do what was completely impossible only a few years ago. I believe that now is the time to imagine, to create a vision, to work together and do some radical things. I think it is time for another Thursday morning.