Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War

by Robert Coram

Boyd and Christie went over the calculations again and again and the numbers came out the same. Perhaps the data from Foreign Tech was wrong. U.S. aircraft could not be inferior to Soviet aircraft in so many areas. Boyd returned to Wright-Pat and went over the data with intelligence specialists. A few corrections were made, but Soviet aircraft were still superior. “If I brief this and someone calls you to check it out, will you stand by this data?” Boyd asked. “Of course,” the officer said. Boyd and Christie rewrote the computer program at Eglin and recomputed the data. Still the Soviet aircraft were superior. They brought in an outsider, a mathematician who had no connection to E-M, and said, “Find where we made mistakes.” The outsider crunched the numbers, checked them, recrunched them, and announced he could find no mistakes.