Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War

by Robert Coram

“Not many people are defined by the courts-martial and investigations they faced,”

Boyd was more than a great stick-and-rudder man. He was that rarest of creatures—a thinking fighter pilot.

Remember you have something no one else in the class has. You have principle and integrity. That means you will be criticized and attacked. But in the end you will win. Don’t let it bother you.”

for the way to become men, Art Weibel was a magnetic figure. He was hard-nosed and rigidly disciplined, and believed that a man should give more than he gets.

The only part that didn’t fit her image of him as a “big jock” was that he read so much.

He considered himself ready for combat, and he believed that once the enemy pilots knew he was there, most of them would park their MiGs and go home.

You don’t fly a fucking capsule, you sit in it and watch the instruments. You’re a passenger. To hell with space. Fighter pilots wanted to get on an enemy’s six and hose the sonofabitch.

Boyd did not miss a beat. “General, I’d pull the wings off, install benches in the bomb bay, paint the goddamn thing yellow, and turn it into a high-speed line taxi.”

These were heady days for Boyd. His name was becoming known throughout the Air Force, and not just as a fighter pilot, but as a thinker, as a theoretician, as the man who developed a radical new theory. Even the Navy was using his E-M Theory. They took his name off it, and they did not call it E-M, but it was

Boyd was so intense in evaluating the air-to-air combat that he forgot he was in a movie. Finally he could take no more. He stood up, waved both arms, jabbed one hand toward the screen, and shouted at the top of his lungs, “You missed the goddamn shot! Hose him, you stupid bastard!” Christie shook his head in dismay. Not for Boyd, but for those in the Pentagon. They were bureaucrats. Boyd was a warrior.

Boyd was a man possessed.

smart juice

“Stroking the bishop. You’re just stroking the bishop.”

“You are the dumbest son of a bitch God ever made” or “You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about” or “You stupid fuck. That will never work.”

“I have found the dripping cock.”

He said the general in charge of Research and Development for the Air Force was so angry that he was about to transfer Boyd to Alaska.

“Major Boyd, I have just one question,” the general said. “Did you tell that colonel at Wright-Pat he was a lying fucker?”

“Tiger, I’ve got to have accurate information,”

“Goddamnit, general, you need more accidents,” he said. “You need to kill some pilots.”

But in every war there are bigger-than-life men whose exploits are so far beyond what most mortals can accomplish that they are in a separate category.

Razz says Boyd was the father of that great victory as surely as if he had led the mission.

“Goddamn F-4 is a Navy airplane; it’s not a fighter. They give us shit for airplanes and we win anyway.”

“Goddamn, Tiger, you should have been there. I hosed those sons of bitches. I stacked those goddamn generals up like cord wood.”

By 1968, people in the Building did not know if Boyd was a genius or a wild man.

While Boyd was within his rights to ask for written orders, his doing so infuriated generals. It clearly indicated he thought the general was wrong.

“I just thought of a new E-M iteration” or “Something just occurred to me” or “I just got the answer to something I’ve been working on for several weeks.”

“If you take off all the nonkill horseshit—everything not necessary to kill another aircraft—you can’t believe how the performance goes up.”

“Yes, Sir, we have. The Air Force does not believe a variable-geometry wing is the answer. In fact, we believe the fixed-wing aircraft is a superior design. The F-X will be a fixed-wing aircraft.”

Sprey was fascinated by Hans Rudel, the legendary tank-killing German pilot of World War II who still is considered the greatest CAS pilot of all time. Sprey insisted that everyone on the A-X project read Stuka Pilot, Rudel’s wartime biography that told how he flew 2,530 missions and destroyed 511 tanks.

Boyd laughed. “We don’t care what the Russians are doing. We only care about what the Navy is doing.”

Christie knew Boyd liked Wagner so he played “Ride of the Valkyries.” Boyd’s eyes widened, he stopped talking, and suddenly was transported.

But Boyd was about to prove that fortune indeed favors the bold.

People in Boyd’s office wondered what was going on with him. Several days a week for month after month he did not come to work until almost noon. He yawned and gulped smart juice, trying to awaken. And every time his boss asked why he was late, Boyd said, “I was doing the Lord’s work last night.” Then he took a big drink of coffee, lit a Dutch Master, looked around, and said, “And goddamned good work it was.”

“Tiger, we’re gonna do some good work.”

“If you insist on getting credit for the work you do, you’ll never get far in life. Don’t confuse yourself with the idea of getting credit.”

“No more goddamn memos. I don’t want you to write anybody about anything.”

“Fuck a wind tunnel,” Boyd roared. He pointed up. “The biggest wind tunnel in the world is up there. It’s called reality. This is not reality.”

“I had NASA check you people out. They can’t duplicate your performance claims.”

Boyd stood up and pointed to the door. “You people are lying to me. Get the fuck out of my office.”

Boyd loved to tell the story of what happened. He looked at the drag curves and shook his head in apparent awe. “This is amazing,” he said. “I just can’t believe this.”

“That means when it is on the ramp with all that thrust, even with the engine turned off, you got to tie the goddamn thing down or it will take off by itself.”

“Goddamn airplane is made out of balonium.”

“Take your best shot, you son of a bitch,”

Too risky, they said—a pilot can’t go from the cockpit of one new airplane to the cockpit of another. Boyd laughed.

Maybe you Edwards pukes can’t, he said, but fighter pilots can.

Boyd told Sprey, “Tiger, they are gonna use what they see as the lack of range to try to kill this airplane. Let ’em. Let that be their main focus. At the right time we will tell them otherwise and they will have nothing left. We will hose them.”

It would be several years before the Air Force realized that the lightweight fighter not only had greater range than the F-15 but had greater range than any other fighter in the Air Force. That knowledge would cause more than a dozen generals to explode in anger. Keeping secret the range of the lightweight fighter was one of Boyd’s greatest cape jobs.

“The most amazing thing just happened. I was with…”—he named the colonel—“… when he got a phone call. Then all at once he fell out of his chair and began foaming at the mouth. I thought he was dying.”

Afterward the incident became known as the “air-to-rug maneuver,” and the Acolytes shook their heads in amazement that even on the telephone Boyd could cause a Blue Suiter to fall out of his chair. The story of the air-to-rug maneuver became a favorite at happy hour, especially after the colonel became a four-star and then the Air Force chief of staff.

On the back is the pièce de résistance, a coiled, bright yellow garden hose and written underneath, also in bright yellow, THE HOSER.