Flying in the Twilight Zone

In 1959, Rod Serling introduced on CBS a science-fiction series called "The Twilight Zone." Done in black and white, with a Hitchcockian touch of light-and-shadow effects to create a sense of sinister mystery, the show became popular for stories that brought science fiction into your living room. Sputnik had been launched into orbit just two years earlier, scaring us all half to death. Not long after the show started Yuri Gagarin became the first human in orbit, proving to Americans that we were sliding into a distant second place in the space race.

Russia and the U.S. were exploding H-bombs, and we all expected to be annihilated sooner or later. Rod’s show played on those frazzled nerves, with his stories of strange, inexplicable happenings to the neighbors who lived just up the street. His voice-overs would tell us, in chillingly unemotional tones, that what we were about to witness could not be explained, could only have happened because they had been drawn into...pause for dramatic effect...”the Twilight Zone.”

That expression became a part of our common culture. Anything we couldn’t explain must have been from “the Twilight Zone.” We would laugh about it, but of course nobody knew where the “Twilight Zone” was. Nobody knew, that is, until I had to calculate its location for Boeing Aircraft Company. I now have in my possession a mathematical analysis that accurately defines its beginning and ending latitudes, and how fast it moves across the face of our terra firma.

I related, in my story about little things having a large influence on our lives, how I got politely told by the Boeing personnel people in Wichita to go play with the other farm boys, the first summer we were married and I tried to get a job there. By the next summer I had switched my major to electrical engineering so I was now acceptable and got hired for the summer. It didn’t take long to learn a few more things about how the world works. That first episode, of being refused a job not because I was unqualified, but because I had the wrong major on my transcript, was my first lesson. It struck me as a form of “technical racism.”

I eventually understood the reasoning. They hired not because they needed the help, but because they wanted to recruit for career employment when you graduated. What I also came to understand, once I got hired, is that they really didn’t have anything for you to do. So they had to make up stuff, much of the time, or otherwise ignore you.

I didn’t mind that, most of the time, because it let me go down to the production line and watch B-52s being built before my eyes, or go out on the flight line and crawl around inside the ones that were being worked on. I found that all quite to my liking. I also watched B-47s practicing touch-and-go landings on the immense runway that was shared by Boeing and McConnell Airbase, next door.

But sooner or later, even that would get boring, so I would ask for jobs, or something to do. One particular day, my supervisor approached me, and said,

“Del, I’ve got a job for you. We need to know how to find the twilight zone.”

Well, he didn’t phrase it precisely that way. I came to jokingly refer to it that way as time went by. What he actually said was more along the lines of,

“Del, we’re moving the tail-gunner on the B-52 from the tail, up to the navigator/bombardier compartment. They get to feeling too isolated back there, on long flights. So, we’re installing a closed circuit TV link for him to see to aim his weapons. The Air Force requires as part of the acceptance testing of the TV system that it be tested during twilight conditions. We need to be able to know when we are in official twilight, given our altitude and location. Do you think you can do that?”

I had no idea if I could do it. I didn’t even know what “official twilight” meant. I just thought it was while you could still see well enough to play catch, without getting beaned by the ball. But I was never one to back down from what seemed to be an interesting challenge, and besides, I was bored. I told him that I’d sure give it a try. I then went to the Boeing library, and started looking through books to see if I could find any clue as to what to do.

Sometimes Fate smiles on us trusting chillun’s and protects us from ourselves. It took me not long to find a book—I’ve long since forgotten the title, but it was a green hardback—that was a Solid Geometry textbook. And guess what? Back in the back, where equations about the geometry of spheres were being presented, was an example of how to apply some of those equations. The example? How to calculate nautical twilight.

I have no recollection, if one was offered, of whether the book explained why one would have wanted to know how to calculate nautical twilight. Perhaps it used to be important to sailors. Regardless, there in a couple or three pages were all the equations I needed. It even included the definition of nautical twilight: that period of time from when the disk of the sun crossed the horizon to the time when it was six degrees below the horizon.

I had no idea whether that constituted “official twilight” as far as the Air Force was concerned, but it sounded very official and I figured no one would contest it. Besides, it was all I had to go on. Those equations weren’t all I needed, but they showed me how to do the hard parts.

I assumed a condition in which a simulated attacking jet fighter would approach the B-52 at a particular latitude and longitude, and at a given altitude. Those three parameters would, of course, affect when the sun would appear to be at the horizon. I also had to recognize that the speed of the B-52, and its direction, would affect how long the sun would take to disappear below the horizon.

That let me adjust the equations so that the B-52 would maximize the time it remained in “the twilight zone.” By flying high and fast, at westerly headings, the time required for the sun to sink six degrees below the visible horizon as viewed from 40,000 feet would be greatly extended. I got it all figured out, in reasonably short order. But then I had to check my equations to see if they actually worked. I wanted to find out whether the sun actually set at the azimuth angle my equations calculated, for a given day.

If I were doing it now, with years of experience and not being so naive, I would have gone to my supervisor and said,

“Boss, I’ve got the analyses done for calculating the twilight band, but I want to check them out for accuracy. I’d like approval to rent a theodolite for a couple of days so I can check them out.”

He would have probably asked how much it was going to cost, I would have told him whatever it was—a piddling amount, to be sure—and he would have said, “Okay, go to the purchasing department and get a purchase order,” and walked off.

If I had rented an actual surveying instrument, a theodolite, I could have gone out one night to an open field near the Boeing plant, sighted on Polaris, swung around to a large, fixed object such as a hangar, and taken a sight. That would have let me know the true bearing of that hangar. Then the next evening, I could have sighted on the hangar, then on the setting sun, and had the bearing of the sun as it set, to within a degree, or less. A quick comparison to my calculations would have told me if my equations were correct. But that is not what I did.

Being a farm boy, raised on a Depression-era farm, I was never inclined to pay for doing anything I could do myself. It never occurred to me that I might be able to get the company to let me rent a theodolite. Instead, I rigged up a Rube Goldberg contraption of boards with nails for sights, and tried to concoct a means of sighting on known objects and the sun. It was ridiculous on the face of it, but I believed I was doing the conscientious thing, what any good engineer would do—or, more aptly, what a Kansas farmer would have. Colleen came along, and tried to assist me as best she could. I don’t remember, but we probably got a bunch of chiggers for our effort. Somehow, in some manner, I arrived at bearings of the sun at sunset that seemed to confirm my calculations. I felt I had done the best I could to be responsible. I don’t recall where I got my scrap lumber to make my crude sighting instrument, or what I did with them afterward.

I wrote up my report, and included sample attack plans that would maximize the test time, and minimize the cost of flight time to and from the test zone. I handed it over to my supervisor, feeling quite proud of myself. He glanced at it, thanked me, tossed it on his desk and proceeded on with what he was doing.

I learned later that the Air Force scrapped the whole concept of moving the tail gunner forward and installing the TV circuit. In fact, they scrapped the tail guns. What they recognized, in the new era of air-to-air missiles, was that having twin-fifties on the tail of a B-52 was about as useful as having a caboose on the tail of a modern train. They did the same thing as the railroad companies, and got rid of them. No more tail guns on the B-52 meant no more tail-gunner, and no more TV circuit.

So it was, then, that my neat little analysis of the “twilight zone” became moot. I imagine that my report laid in a pile of unused papers on my supervisor’s desk, until the day came when he cleaned house and the thing got filed in File Thirteen. But I kept my copy. I’m probably the only surviving American with the means of finding the “twilight zone.” And who knows? Someday that may become crucial to national defense, and I’ll be a hero. Until then, I’ll just keep it to impress my grandkids.

There were several occasions when a similar sort of thing happened to me. I would have been assigned a rather intriguing and technically daunting problem to solve. I would have thrown myself into it quite diligently and got it solved, only to learn that the results were for naught because the program that had spawned the assignment had been scrapped. It happened to both the only two real tasks I was given at Boeing, and to all the work I did at Bell Labs because the Zeus missile program was scrapped. For that matter, I don’t know that any of the work that we did on the phased array program at Ohio State was ever used for anything much more important than complying with contractual requirements for submitting reports to the Air Force. Of course, it got me my thesis, so it was worth it all, to me.

That circumstance bothered me for a long time. I put a lot of myself into those tasks, and felt I had done a professional job of completing them. It seemed wrong, almost an insult, to just toss the effort in the wastebasket. But I came to realize, and accept, after some years that it really didn’t matter. I had been given a variety of tasks that proved to be technically difficult and challenging, and had successfully met the challenges. I did my job, and did it well. That is all that really matters to me, now.

I will confess, half a century after my twilight zone episode, that I stand in awe of this nation. When I was still attending Prairie Dell country school, I used to spend a lot of my time each spring plowing our fields. I would drone along on our little Farmall B, dragging a pair of 12-inch moldboard plows along behind me, and watch the Killdeer chase along in the freshly turned furrows gobbling up the worms who had just been kicked out of bed. The mind tends to wander off into some strange worlds while you are doing that.

I would daydream about all sorts of things. Nothing in particular, and everything in general. But I never imagined, while converting weed-covered fields into freshly plowed seed-beds, some of the things that a simple Kansas farm boy would wind up doing with his life in this land of opportunity.

How do you sit on the seat of a tractor as a twelve or fourteen year old boy, pulling a plow in the middle of a Kansas farm, and imagine solving complex vector analyses to find out why a supersonic missile should suddenly self-destruct? What would lead me to believe I would one day be developing equations to assist a B-52 bomber in defending itself against attack by an enemy jet fighter?

There is a lot about the direction our culture has taken in recent years that troubles me. Our country has changed, and is changing, in ways that I don’t especially care for. But we are still the land of opportunity for anyone who truly seeks those opportunities, and is willing to do what has to be done to avail himself of them. We are not bound by what our fathers were before us. We do not have to be what some tyrant would force us to be. We are still a free people, free to be what our God-given talents and intellect will let us be if we choose to apply them.

If I had wanted to stay in that tractor seat, and keep pulling those plows, I could have done so. There was no one to tell me nay, save my own sense of myself and what I wanted in my life. Nor did anyone tell me that I could not become the engineer I became. And for that I am grateful.

§

As a sort of “P.S.” to this piece, I was recently reminded of my “Twilight Zone” episode, when Colleen and I were flying back from a Florida visit of our then-new granddaughter, Lauren. We had a change of planes at Atlanta, and our flight into Dallas was an early evening one. Somewhere over Alabama, or perhaps Mississippi, the sun began to dip below the visible horizon. I had a window seat, and had a good view as the sky turned a band of brilliant orange just above the horizon, deepening into black, above.

It came to mind that I was watching what I had calculated for the B-52 “twilight” tests all those years ago, at Boeing. The sun had dipped just below the horizon, signaling the beginning of twilight. We were in a jet, flying at about 38,000 feet, headed west. I found it interesting, intriguing in some ill-defined way, that it took me all my career-life, and then some, to get to actually experience what my equations had told me would happen. We were chasing the setting sun westward, chasing the twilight zone.

I stared in silence out my window, watching my equations come true. The sky above turned a darker shade of black, and the orange band deepened in intensity. But that glowing band never dissipated, looking for all the world as though a celestial painter had swished one wide, orange band permanently across the black velvet of the sky, remaining virtually unchanged as Alabama turned into Mississippi turned into Arkansas turned into Texas.

I have no idea, had we continued our westward chase of the twilight zone, how long it would have lasted. I can calculate it, of course. I have the equations. But I haven’t done so. As soon as we began our descent into Dallas, we flew out of the twilight zone. Our orange band quickly faded into black nothingness, as the lights of DFW twinkled into view.

So, I know now, literally fifty years after I turned that report in to be tossed onto a scrap pile of papers, what the twilight zone looks like. It is, or at least it was that night, rather awe-inspiring. I would like to have seen it from the cockpit. The view is always better from the left seat.