The Great Cruise Race

The time is mid-1983. Minutes after early-warning satellites pick up the launching of enemy missiles against the U.S., the Pentagon 's National Military Command Center flashes out the presidential order for a counter strike. The aging squadrons of B-52s from bases in North and South Dakota roar into the air. Later, while flying over North Pole ice sheets approximately 1,500 miles from their objectives, each bomber drops a deadly load of up to 20 cruise missiles. Like oversize model aircraft, these small unmanned jets skim at 500 m.p.h. only 50ft. above the ocean. Finally, hedgehopping their way under air defenses, the cruises' nuclear warheads explode in mushroom clouds on their targets, Soviet air and naval bases near Murmansk and Archangel.

It would be a Boeing-made missile that would carry out such an Armageddon mission. But the Seattle company's victory in the Great Cruise Race came only after a long dogfight with rival defense contractor General Dynamics. The Air Force in November 1977 asked both companies to build prototype weapons and then to conduct an unusual, eight-month-long fly-off that deliberately pushed the two designs to--and occasionally beyond--their limits.

The two entries were surprisingly similar.

General Dynamics' version was cigar-shaped and very slightly shorter than Boeing's 20-ft.-9-in.-long trapezoidal model, with its almost triangular cross section. Both missiles are also launched in the same manner. Immediately after being dropped from either wing pylons or out of the B-52's underbelly, air-intake scoops for the rear-mounted engine pop open, wings slam out with enough force to cut a man in half, and the engine begins to whine.

At this point, the missile's brain or guidance system wakes up. The cruise follows a preprogrammed course until it crosses a coastline. Then the missile can fly as low as 50 ft. in flatlands and over water, and up to about 500 ft. in more contoured country. When the brain says that there is a barrier or hills ahead, the missile flies over or around the obstacle. In wartime, this low altitude dash and the missile's small size make it virtually untrackable and unstoppable. On enemy radar screens, the cruise is almost impossible to spot, and Mach2 fighters and surface-to-air missiles are not effective that close to the ground. The strategic theory: one cruise missile might be shot down but hundreds would overwhelm even the best and most sophisticated air defenses.

Starting last July, Boeing and General Dynamics each made ten test flights. Most were held over the bleak wastelands of the Utah Test and Training Range, near Dugway, Utah. The missiles were programmed to sprint at 500 m.p.h. round and round an aerial race course 100 miles long by 30 miles wide. In later tests some cruises were dropped from B-52s 60 miles out into the Pacific and programmed to fly back over California and Nevada to Utah. Air Force F-4 Phantom chase planes closely followed to observe and take over the missiles by radio control if anything went wrong. During one General Dynamics flight, TIME Correspondent Jerry Hannifin watched the missile belting along at 500 m.p.h. across the desert about 10 ft. above the ground.

The flights were not without their hair-raising moments.

As the military looked on, the two companies' project managers pushed the weapons to fly tighter and tighter maneuvers, lower and lower in order to test the equipment. Both suffered four crashes, but General Dynamics clearly came out the worse. Two of its missiles slammed into some isolated California scrubland during overland flights, and one started a small fire. On another faulty flight, the wings failed to unfold and the missile plunged into the Pacific like a rock. Boeing's flops were far less dramatic: two stemmed from communications foul-ups with the chase planes, one from programming errors and one from engine failure after 2 1/2 hours of intricate maneuvering.

The rivalry between Boeing

and General Dynamics also involved executive-suite maneuvering. Last December, in the middle of the competitive fly-offs, Oliver C. Boileau, president of Boeing's aerospace division and the official directly responsible for the missile, resigned to become president of General Dynamics. He thus ended up on both sides of the race. One of the first congratulatory calls received at Boeing headquarters last week after the contract winner was announced was from the versatile Boileau.

Boeing fundamentally won the contest on the basis of superior engineering. The Boeing missile was able to fly closer to rough terrain without any loss of target accuracy than its competitor. It had a better aerodynamic design for air launchings than the torpedo-like General Dynamics entry, which was a modification of a submarine-launched missile that the company had already made for the U.S. Navy. The Air Force wanted its own source for its missile.

The Boeing missile offers a cheap, quick way for the Administration to beef up the nation's nuclear strike force. Each missile will cost only about $1 million, about one-quarter the price of a Trident submarine-launched ICBM. The use of available technology means that the first missiles will be delivered next September.

Boeing, of course, is the big winner of the cruise competition.

It will earn perhaps $2 billion from the new weapons system.

The contract is also important because it gives the giant commercial planemaker a larger share of defense business, where it has been less important than either McDonnell Douglas or General Dynamics. But other companies are also victors. McDonnell Douglas and Litton Industries together will earn about $1.4 billion making the new weapon's navigational electronics. Teledyne and Williams Research Corp., a small private firm located in Walled Lake, Mich., will divide an estimated $1 billion spent for turbine engines. Some 20 other defense contractors will also win smaller parts of this aerospace business bonanza.

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