New Nest for Hughes Whirlybirds

In the rugged Arizona desert, thirty miles east of Phoenix, far from city skyscrapers and congested roadways, five white rectangular buildings rise from creosote and saguaro-covered terrain. It's from this isolated cocoon - the Hughes Helicopters plant in northeast Mesa that the fearsome Apache attack helicopter emerges for a test run. Squat and olive-drab, the mean war machine Swoops across the desert, dark cousin of "white knight" rescue helicopters. Hovering above the assembly plant, its 14,694-pound body held aloft by four rotating blades, it casts a long lizard-like shadow across the desert floor. Suddenly the agile gunship darts from side to side like a dragonfly, then dips, whirls, and pauses momentarily before whizzing away at 190 miles per hour. Sensors in its wide snout serve as nighttime eyes. Stout legs can contain sixteen Hellfire anti-tank missiles and seventy-six air-to-ground missiles.

Cradled in an electric-blue cart, a gunship's shell moves along the Hughes assembly line. The shell looks helpless as a grasshopper without wings. Methodically, workers install wires, engines, wheels, fuel tanks, landing gear, hydraulics, and other vital parts. The transformation takes place in a cavernous 247,800square-foot building the size of five football fields.

It's to this 334-acre Apache Assembly and Flight Test Center that the fifty one-year-old Hughes Company is in the process of moving its corporate headquarters and most of its manufacturing operation from Culver City, California.

By the end of 1986, the Hughes facility is expected to triple in size to 1.9 million square feet. New structures will include an engineering/administration building, warehouse, light helicopter assembly and flight test complex, and Advanced Development Center, which will be dedicated to the Army's LHX program, developing a family of light helicopters, advanced versions of the Apache, and research and development projects. These will be added to the current 570,000 square-foot Assembly and Flight Test Center, consisting of an assembly building, central plant, flight hangars, paint facility, and warehouse. Hughes' ordnance program will remain in Culver City.

The Hughes plant occupies an area produced from a palette of dusty desert browns and yellows, with occasional splashes of green from citrus groves dotting the area. The jagged outline of the Superstition Mountains looms ominously to the east of the facility, which has a northern view of the gray, sloping McDowell Mountains. Red Mountain juts into the northeastern horizon and, just north of the Hughes plant, the Salt River snakes across desert Indian reservations and private property. Directly to the south stretches Falcon Field, Mesa's municipal airport. Southeast of the plant, retirement communities prosper, and large chunks of land await the hand of the residential developer. Citrus fields and scattered housing exist to the southwest.

By the end of the decade, Hughes, which joined ranks as a subsidiary with McDonnell Douglas Corporation in early 1984, will top the charts as one of Arizona's larger employers. The work force in Mesa is predicted to grow from 1500 to about 7400 by early 1987, spawning more development. Two elementary schools now are planned near the Hughes area. Construction already has begun on two communities that eventually will house more than 12,000 people. Moving to Mesa represents a major change for the ambitious helicopter company. The late Howard Hughes chose Culver City as the site for his then-fledgling company back in 1940, one year after Igor Sikorsky's helicopter made its first flight. It Light years from Leonardo DaVinci's early vertical lift flying machine (RIGHT), Hughes Helicopters, Inc.'s twenty-first century multi-purpose ship. (INSET, ABOVE) Designed for the Army's new "Family of Helicopters" program, the light helicopters will use the same engines, drive trains, and other dynamic components. These Space Age machines will replace four of the Army's nine outdated models currently equipped with 1950s technology. The new birds are expected to be less expensive to operate and maintain in the field. Drawing courtesy of Hughes Helicopters, Inc. Leonardo Da Vinci drawings from Art Resource, New York

WHIRLYBIRDS

It was at Culver City that the XH-17 Flying Crane heavy lift helicopter, the first chopper produced by Hughes, made its debut in 1952. Since, the company has produced a long line of commercial and military helicopters.

But Hughes Helicopters' newest bird - which won the 1983 Robert J. Collier Trophy, aviation's highest honor - did not hatch at the Culver City oceanfront facility on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Rather, assembly of the first Apache advanced attack helicopter happened in the Arizona desert. On September 30, 1983, hundreds of aviation officials gathered in the largest of Hughes Helicopters' white rectangular buildings the assembly plant to witness the unveiling of the first production Apache. U.S. Army Secretary John O. Marsh, Jr. christened the newly formed whirlybird before a gathering of generals, chief executives, state representatives,Hughes employees, and international media. A rifle-waving, bare-chested Apache warrior sat atop a rearing white stallion. Champagne. Clinking glasses. Patriotic speeches. It was a proud moment for those who had been working on the Apache since 1973, when the U.S. Army was authorized to begin a development program for an advanced attack helicop-ter. The Army awarded contracts to Bell Helicopter Co. and Hughes Helicopters to develop two flight test prototypes that would be evaluated in a competitive fly-off.

The first prototypes were flown in September, 1975. In December, 1976, the Army chose the Hughes version. One month later, Hughes received a contract to begin a fifty-six month research and development program for the AH-64A. In 1981, Hughes began a six-month search for a location for its assembly and test facility. At Culver City, expansion was constrained by high-density residential neighborhoods. Hughes studied twenty-four cities, narrowed it down to three, and finally selected Mesa as the site for its forty-million-dollar assembly plant. March 8, 1982, marked the official ground breaking of the Mesa facility. By December of that year production began. The first machine rolled off the assembly line two months ahead of schedule and was delivered to the Army in January, 1984, one month early.

The Army has requested Congress fund the purchase of 675 Apaches through the end of the decade, and Hughes plans to produce them at a rate of twelve aircraft per month by 1986. Each Apache costs 7.8 million dollars. When spare parts, trainers, and research and development costs are included, the total increases to fourteen million dollars each.

Components of the Apache are produced by forty major contractors who ship them to Mesa for assembly. Landing gear arrive from California, Hellfire missile control equipment originates in lowa, and turbine engines come from Massachusetts.

The fuselage is produced at Teledyne Ryan Aeronautical in San Diego. At Mesa, each fuselage is fastened to a bright blue transport cart bolted to a semitrailer.

When the cart reaches the assembly plant, it becomes an assembly fixture that is wheeled into place at the first of twenty stations. Once the 'copter receives its landing gear, it can be moved through the assembly stations on its own wheels.

The vast plant echoes with clanging and hissing sounds. A large American flag hovers above one doorway. Flanked by electric-blue assembly planks and yellow stripes painted onto the floor, olivedrab fuselages arranged in two rows of ten sit at various stages of construction.

By the time each ship leaves the assembly area for painting and flight testing, it will be outfitted with ten miles of wire, a target acquisition system, night vision system, and electronic black boxes. Then the Army will outfit each jet turbine-powered helicopter with sixteen Hellfire laser-guided anti-tank missiles, seventy-six air-toground rockets, and a thirty-millimeter automatic cannon. It will fly at low alti-tudes, at night, in all weather conditions, and launch missiles out of range of anti-aircraft fire. Yet, with all these futuristic, high-technology advances, Hughes along with the U.S. Army -wants more.

On July 27, 1984, company president Jack Real flew to Mesa to unveil the company's expansion and relocation plans. Those include establishing a high-technology helicopter engineering facility at the Mesa plant.

Hughes, along with three other companies, is competing to win development and production contracts for the Army's futuristic LHX family of scout, attack, and utility helicopters. Plans for the thirty-billion-dollar program include the purchase of about 6000 helicopters, the Army's largest aircraft order in history. The LHX would replace four helicopter types the UH-1, AH-1, OH-58, and OH-6A.

Engineers from the LHX development team started moving into temporary quarters in nearby Tempe in September, 1984. Several hundred engineers will continue working in the leased offices until permanent facilities are completed in Mesa in 1986.

"We're looking at this to be the major helicopter company in the U.S., right here in Mesa," Real said during his July announcement.

The LHX contract will be awarded in the next couple of years. If Hughes wins the contract, the Mesa plant will attract even more employees, stimulating development that will alter the face of the desert.

BOOKSHELF A NEW REVIEWER JOINS HIGHWAYS' RANKS

For the many of us who love place and print, I shall try each month to bring the readers of "Bookshelf" the feeling of both. The editor of this publication, who for thirty years has dealt me some difficulty, prefers we focus on nonfiction, books about Arizona, the Southwest, and, lastly, the American West. A large and fertile field to plow. This of course would eliminate any second-comings of such fine works as Arnold's The Time of the Gringo, Waters' The Man Who Killed the Deer, and Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop. To those who love fine fiction, don't worry, from time to time I will slip something by him. It won't be my maiden voyage. Good reading.

Growing Old at Willie Nelson's Picnic And Other Sketches of Life in the Southwest.

Edited by Ronald B. Querry. Texas A&M University Press, Drawer C, College Station, Texas 77843. 1983. 277 pages. $18.50 hardcover. $10.95 softcover.

The word "classic," like "emergency," is all too often misused when one is beset by excitement and the adrenaline, released, floods the system. This book creates that kind of excitement. There are few good anthologies focusing on the Southwest. This one, published by one of the more progresIncisive university presses, is a genuine classic. Unlike Southwest Classics, edited by Lawrence Clark Powell and published by The Ward Ritchie Press in 1974, Growing Old at Willie Nelson's Picnic for the most part concentrates on contemporary writers, while not ignoring past masters. The book is a sort of wide-angle lens, sampling twenty diverse writers, from D.H. Lawrence to Larry McMurtry, Frank Waters to Kirk Purcell. The title piece is written by William C.

ARIZONA'S RED ROCK COUNTRY: Seasons in Oak Creek Canyon and Sedona.

By Larry Russell. Photographs by Dick Canby. Northland Press, P.O. Box N, Flagstaff, AZ 86002. 1984.76 pages. 40 color photographs, map. $8.95 softcover.

To the thousands of people all over the world who have experienced theMartin, who lives in Houston and teaches sociology at Rice University. Martin, mature and mortgaged, reports on a three-day redneck rock festival held on a 160-acre barren bit of Texas south of College Station in July.

As if that wasn't enough to induce a terminal case of culture shock, some 25,000 members of various subcultures littered what would never be a lawn. Martin observed: "Even the American Legion picnics I went to when I was a boy, nobody would come close to drinking that much beer except oil field workers and Catholics." Martin's essay on this seamy yet symbolic event is remindful of Machado de Assis in "Epitaph of a Small Winner." I wrote with the pen of mirth and the ink of melancholy.

A selection, "The Old Man" by Larry L. King, is included in the anthology. King, born in Putnum, Texas, writes of the complete circle of relationship between father and son. He tells of the time in early childhood when the father possessed all "the natural qualities of Santa Claus, Superman, and the senior saints." As he moved from child to juvenile, the flaws in father began to appear. While the old man was not totally successful in instilling his Bible Belt values into the son, as the boy matured and the old man mellowed, reverse roles began to appear in the relationship. The old man's life spanned eightytwo years, most of which were spent feeding his family by any honest means. King offered the tribute: "He died owing no man and knowing the satisfaction of having built his own house."

The various offerings are classified into seven sections: "Legacies," "Borderlines," "Livestock," "Ceremonies," "Diversions,""Art" and "Tales." Each offers a graphic insight into the subject they survey, and together they compose the soul of the Southwest. From D.H. Lawrence's concise account of the Hopi Snake Dance, first published in 1927; to Gary Cartwright's "The Rites of Autumn", dealing with the orgy-like before and aftermath of the Texas-Oklahoma football game; each is a part of what and where we are the Southwest. Neither the Hopi Snake Dance nor the Texas-Oklahoma football weekend have changed much. In a world so willing to tamper with tradition, this may well be a bright spot.

Growing Old at Willie Nelson's Picnic is a delightful book to read at one sitting or sip from time to time the many facets of a region. The editor, Ronald B. Querry, has chosen the selections with discrimination to include the ethnic pillars of the land he celebrates: Indian, Hispanic, Anglo. They cover a literary period of half a century. All have a flavor of their own with no artificial additives. This is a book to save and savor, over and over again.

The sensory delights of Arizona's Oak Creek Canyon and Sedona, this colorful little book will serve as an extension of that experience. To those who have yet to view the bold colors and dramatic monoliths of that area, it will create an undeniable thirst to do so. Forty color photographs capture the seasonal moods of that magnificent canyon, and a prose-like text details the natural and social history. Russell came to the canyon as a child. Canby, a second generation professional photographer, knows not only the landmarks of the area but the sequestered, secret grottoes. Their combined knowledge and talent have created a lovely little book.

Start the adventures...

with Arizona Highways' 60th Anniversary Issue. Coming in April, this special full color issue will combine the magazine's traditional photographic splendor with classic articles from Arizona Highways' past.

Celebrate our diamond jubilee with us. Order gift subscriptions or start a subscription for yourself. Each new order will receive the April Anniversary Issue. This special issue promises to become a collector's item, so reserve your copy now ... mail the attached order form today.

If the order form is missing, call or write:

It is 1963. L.B.J. takes the oath of office at Dallas Love Field. The movie Cleopatra goes over budget thirty-seven million dollars. Joe Valachi redefines singing. Liston ushers Patterson to the canvas in the first round. The MoscowWashington “hot line” is plugged in. And one Major L. Gordon Cooper, Jr. writes the final chapter for Project Mercury, taking Faith 7 around the planet twenty-two times.

During these same months, men from the Arizona Power Authority hunker down on the edge of Buck Farm Point, at Mile thirty-nine-and-a-half on the Colorado River, to punch test holes in the crumbly Redwall limestone for a proposed Marble Canyon Dam. The dam and its counterpart, the Bridge Canyon Dam, almost 200 miles downstream, are considered foregone conclusions. But before the final word arrives for pick and shovel work to begin, an archeological survey is necessary to comply with the Federal Antiquities Act.

Robert C. Euler, a professor from Prescott College, is selected for the task. To expedite matters, he's given use of the Authority's bubble-domed B-1 Bell helicopter and a pilot. It is a new approach to an old science for Euler, whose former archeological survey work in the Canyon was undertaken on foot, horseback, and river raft. In the ensuing two weeks of flying up and down rawboned Marble Canyon from Nankoweap to Glen Canyon Euler and his team discover and record some sixty ruins, most dating back to the ancient Anasazi. Helicopter archeology in the Grand Canyon is born. The Marble Canyon Dam Project, however, is drowned beneath waves of support to “save the Grand Canyon from being flooded for profit.” The Grand Canyon Enlargement Act becomes Public Law 90-536, and the 1963 archeological survey is now the starting point for the massive challenge of surveying all of the new 1892 square mile Grand Canyon National Park. The proven helicopter sounds like the best bet to do the job, which falls to Dr. Euler, recipient of a National Science Foundation grant for the Grand Canyon archeological survey.

“Flying at a very slow speed, forty to fifty feet above the ground...we could get far enough above the surface of the ground to see archeological sites that, from the ground, might be obscured by low bushes. Instead of starting at the mouth of a canyon and trying to climb up it, we would go to the head of a canyon and fly down it,” Euler reports. White knuckle flights are many, but with “outstanding pilots like Wayne Learn of Kingman and Dave Mathiesen of Madison Aviation,” Euler flies up and down most of the side canyons, from Nankoweap to Havasu Creek before his grant money runs out. In the process, he and his workers identify approximately 250 ruins, of which “200 were new to the scientific record,” in fiftyfive hours of flight time, all during 1966 — a record for archeological survey work in the Canyon.

Helicopter Sherlocks Track Grand Canyon Prehistory

In 1984, at an age when most think retirement, Euler leaves the Grand Canyon to accept two new posts at the University of Arizona: research anthropologist for the National Park Service and research associate for the Arizona State Museum.

After twenty years and an estimated 1000 hours of helicopter flight time, Euler and his staff discovered over 1000 prehistoric sites, the majority Anasazi. Others are those of ancient hunters known as the Pinto Basin Culture, who may have been responsible for creating delicate split-twig figurines of deer and sheep, perhaps effigies for successful hunts. Still other sites are those of Southern Paiute Indians, ancestors of the Hualapai and Havasupai Indians. They settled along the South Rim and utilized portions of the inner canyon, south of the Colorado River. A host of additional sites are those of prospectors, who scoured the Grand Canyon during the 1800s looking for pay dirt.

Now, even after twenty years of surveying the Canyon, by what has proven to be the fastest, cheapest, and most efficient means possible, the archeological gum-shoeing still is far from complete. Euler, again: “...there's close to 500,000 acres, mostly in the west end of the Canyon, that have not been walked on or studied from the air.” Who will carry on the archeological survey work is yet to be determined. Assuredly though, it will be done by helicopter.

CLING ING TO A CRACK ON THE COMPETITIVE EDGE

As the Red Queen said to Alice, "Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place."

If there is something inherently unnatural about man flying, then there is something far more peculiar about flying in a helicopter. What sets a helicopter totally apart from a fixed-wing aircraft is its seemingly fairy tale ability to fly straight up or straight down - or, if need be, "to keep in the same place." I thought about that as the four of us skimmed across Monument Valley

CLING ING

beneath a ceiling of cold, gray clouds that blanketed much of Northern Arizona and the Navajo Indian Reservation. It was January 24, the dead of winter in these parts. The outside air temperature was eighteen degrees; the ship's Plexiglas windows were clouded with a gray layer of frost; and the deteriorating weather was about to shut down this operation completely.

That was fine with me. Because, if flying in a turbine-powered eggbeater beneath a celestial layer of Cool Whip that threatened to avalanche on us at any moment seemed strange, the mission we'd embarked on was even stranger.

You've seen those automobile commercials where someone (read unemployed actors, journalists between assignments, and fledgling stuntmen out to make a name for themselves) put an automobile atop what looks like an unscalable summit? A helicopter put it there, of course. Well, some prescient ad man had an even better idea for an IBM commercial. (One of those "Let's see if we can top that" ideas). Put a 250pound office desk, an IBM Model 85 electronic-memory typewriter, and a secretary atop the Totem Pole in Monument Valley.

Now Monument Valley has long been the setting for movies like My Darling Clementine, How the West Was Won, Cheyenne Autumn, The Eiger Sanction, Return of the Lone Ranger, to name but a few. So the precedent had already been set for using 29,817-acre Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park as the premier location for a variety of entertaining scenarios. But staging a commercial atop the Totem Pole was a bit trickier than running stagecoaches across the floor of Monument Valley. Totem Pole is 600 feet high and fourteen feet across.

"Fourteen feet across? Sure, no problem."

That's what Arizona Outdoor Institute Director Dave Ganci and I said to one another only twenty-four hours earlier, when we met Independent Artists Producer Paul Rosen to view a Polaroid snapshot of its summit. At that time, the two of us had our feet firmly planted in the warm, thick carpet of Film Producer's Warehouse in Phoenix while a satchel full of $500 traveler's checks was being waved in front of our faces. Of course, "Sure, no problem," was the answer. But the cold reality of our decision was about to smack each of us squarely on the cheek the moment we touched down on the summit of the Totem Pole. Assuming, that is, the weather held.

Whoever decided on Monument Valley as the ideal winter location must have gotten their wires crossed. True, Monument Valley is technically a desert, situated as it is on the southeastern periphery of the Great Basin Desert. But at an elevation of 5020 feet, it has a lot more in common with some of the other high deserts of the world.

The winter sun casts a long shadow of the 600-foot tall Totem Pole in Monument Valley. The sandstone spire was the film site for IBM's memory-writer commercial. In wintertime, it snows.

Independent Artists had its pressures. It had been contracted to shoot, edit, and deliver a thirty-second spot for the Winds of War television miniseries that would debut in less than ten days. Airtime had already been purchased at something like $350,000 a minute, so if the commercial didn't fly, some heads would definitely roll.

Although weather was bad and time short, we at least had the best chopper pilot any of us had ever flown with. Enter Jimmie L. Jones of Rocky Mountain Helicopters. A Vietnam combat veteran brought in especially for this shoot, he handled the Alouette II Lama we were in as if it were a mere extension of his thoughts. If our assignment was a success, there was no doubt in any of our minds it would be attributable to his superb flying skills and the Lama.

A Lama isn't just some souped-up version of the chopper on the evening news; it's a 870 shaft horsepower workhorse which distinguished itself from all other French, Italian, and American rotorcraft on June 21, 1972, by climbing to 40,820 feet.

'An anchor bolt, right in front of my face ...'

There comes a moment in this 600-foot-high story by John Annerino when the entire mission and perhaps John's own survival desperately requires a solid connection to Mother Earth. In his split second of ultimate need John found it: an anchor bolt, right in front of my face. He clipped his safety line into it, a bolt likely dating from the first successful ascent of the Totem Pole in 1957. (See photo page 29, by William Feuerer, retouched by Bill Flynn.) As Steve Roper reported: "Over a period of several days, (Mark) Powell, (Don) Wilson, and Bill Feuerer worked at fixing ropes up the pinnacle. The climbing was almost exclusively artificial; special wide aluminum channel pitons (the forerunner of the bong-bong), made by Feuerer, were used over and over again. Tiny belay ledges appeared where needed. (Jerry) Gallwas drove hard from California to join the team and lead the last pitch, all bolts. On the final day great winds swirled the prusikers (climbers using a special piece of equipment) back and forth above the sand, at times blowing them halfway around the 40-foot thick pinnacle.

But the team prevailed, to the everlasting gratitude of another daredevil, twenty-five years later.