‘’AND CUT! PERFECT! IT’S IN THE BAG,
GIRLS!’
Nancy and the four girl members of her band, ‘The D.C.
Five’, shouted out their happiness at that announcement from the sound engineer of the Quad Recording Studios, where they had just officially finished recording their latest song. Nancy took off her pair of headphones and switched off her sound synthesizer, then exchanged hugs with her band members.
‘’This was great, girls! We should be able to smoke the radio charts with this new song. Once I will have written another new song and have it recorded, then we will be able to launch our third album.’
Nancy then went out of the sound-proofed recording booth where they had just played and sung and went to see the studio manager, who grinned to her.
‘’That was a truly fantastic song you just made, Nancy. I predict that it will take it only weeks before shooting up to the top of the charts. I must say that my Quad Recording Studios was well inspired when we accepted to deal with your band: The D.C.
Five is quickly becoming one of the most popular bands on the airwave. What I particularly like about your band is that your wide variety of types of songs and music you produce, from Pop to Ballads and all the way to historical music, makes your band popular with a wider swath of the audience than, say, a group that plays only Pop or Hard Rock. This also tells me that your band’s popularity will be no flash in the pan, contrary to many past ‘one hit wonders’.’
‘’Thank you, Mister Moore. We appreciate a lot the willingness of your studios to have given us a chance to break through as a band. We should have another new song
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ready to record in about a month, time for me to write it and compose the music with my friends.’
‘’Are you planning to make a pop song, an adaptation from one of the songs from the future you got from your mother, or another song using historical music?’
‘’I intend to write something completely new which could be described as pop music, with emphasis on using to the utmost my vocal range.’
Jack Moore grinned on hearing that: Nancy Dows’ fantastic voice was a big part of the popularity of her band, even though her four band partners were no slouch either in the musical department. That popularity had also meant nice profits for his recording studios.
‘’Nice! I can’t wait to hear your new song. Well, we should be able to officially launch today’s song on the air next week. I will call you to confirm to you when your band will be able to come and do the official announcement for the launch.’
‘’And we will be awaiting your call eagerly, Mister Moore. Thank you again for supporting our band.’
‘’My pleasure, Nancy.’ said Moore, who then had a thought as Nancy walked back into the recording booth in order to pack her instruments. ‘God, what a beautiful girl! I would give everything to bed her.’
Nancy and her four band members quickly but carefully packed away their instruments, then left the recording studio and, using a cargo plate to carry their instruments down to the internal garage of the building housing the Quad Recording Studios, loaded them up in the extended chassis minivan used by the band to go around to clubs and other musical venues. With their drummer, Erika Lang, at the wheel, they rolled out of the underground garage and onto Seventh Avenue.
‘’Back to Washington, Nancy?’ asked Erika, who was a bit of a blond tomboy.
‘’Let’s pass first by my Windermere project, Erika: I would like to go check on it quickly before we return home.’
‘’The Windermere Community Home Project it is!’ replied Erika, who then headed westward along Seventh Avenue. As they drove through the dense Manhattan traffic, Lucy, Nancy’s sister by adoption and the band’s dedicated violonist, looked at the latter.
‘’And how is your project doing lately, Nancy?’
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‘’Quite well, I must say. The legal penalties that the Hudson County Hospital was hit with after they lost their ill-fated lawsuit against me were finally paid off two weeks ago. That in turn allowed me to launch another renovation phase for my project. This will allow me to soon add an extra 94 new, renovated apartments to my Windermere Home project. This will in turn mean that more homeless people in New York will be able to get some decent lodging before the coming of next Winter.’
‘’Nancy, you are a saint!’ said Carmen Estrada, the flute, guitar player and support singer of the band. Nancy smiled at that while shaking her head.
‘’Wrong, Carmen! I am a half-angel, not a saint.’
‘’There’s a difference?’ sneakily asked Sarah Weissman, who mostly played the piano, the synthesizer, the violin and the bass.
‘’Yes, there is, and a big one, Sarah: saints don’t have the power to vaporize bad people with thrown plasma energy balls.’
‘’I stand corrected.’ said the Jewish young woman while making a face, making the others chuckle. ‘’By the way, have you heard from your mother Ingrid lately?’
‘’I talked to her by phone yesterday. She told me that she loves her new place in Port Angeles and that she was about to start working on a new aircraft design project there.’
‘’What kind of aircraft? A military one?’
‘’No! She is now concentrating on purely civilian types of aircraft. What she has in mind is a multi-role vertical takeoff and landing transport. However, she still has not fixed for good the basic parameters of that project. She promised me to keep me informed about it in the future.’
‘’Hey, maybe we could try to arrange a tour of our band in the Northwestern states in the future? That would be a nice excuse to go visit Ingrid then.’
‘’That, Lucy, is a wonderful idea. I will think about it.’
Some fifteen minutes later, they
arrived within sight of a big, squarish
building made out of brown bricks that had obviously been built many decades ago.
Erika was about to search for a parking spot
along the West 57th Street when Nancy
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pointed at the entrance of an underground garage near one corner of the building.
‘’Go into that underground parking lot, Erika: it is reserved for the service vehicles of my project and I have a pass for it.’
‘’Good! Parking on the street in this area and hour is always a bitch.’
Erika turned onto the ramp leading to the entrance of the underground garage, with Erika then making the garage door open by pressing Nancy’s magnetic parking pass against the card reader fixed on the left side of the entrance. Once the door rose open, Erika drove inside a relatively small garage with forty parking spots, sixteen of which were occupied by either delivery vans, minibuses or private cars. Once their own minivan was parked, Nancy turned around in her front passenger seat and spoke to her band members.
‘’I know that you all visited this place many times before and, since I will just go get a quick update from the manager, you can either wait here for me to return or go upstairs and wait in the communal cafeteria. What do you prefer?’
‘’Well, we still need a few hours of driving before we could get to our home in Washington.’ replied Carmen. ‘’I will wait for you here.’
‘’Me too!’ said Lucy, then imitated by Sarah and Erika. Nodding in acknowledgement, Nancy stepped out of the minivan and went to a nearby bank of elevators, calling a cabin and then going up in it.
As promised, Nancy was back in less than fifteen minutes and climbed back in the band’s minivan, where she spoke to her friends while buckling up her safety belt.
‘’Everything is going fine here. The new apartment units should be ready for new occupants in about a month.’
‘’And how many ex-homeless people will then be living in your community home project, Nancy?’ asked Sarah.
‘’If all the new units get taken:160, on top of the 46 low-income families lodging in my project. I was also able to recently add a few more services and facilities in the building for my tenants, including an in-house doctor to support the community nurse who already works here.’
‘’I wish that more people could show the kind of generosity and compassion you are showing towards people in need, Nancy.’
‘’I wish so too, Sarah. Thankfully, a couple of very rich philanthropists are giving me some precious financial support for my community home project, while my example
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are shaming the municipal authorities into doing more to help the homeless people in New York.’
‘’Maybe you could start other similar projects in other cities, using the support of more philanthropists, or someone else could imitate you.’ suggested Lucy, making Nancy nod her head slowly.
‘’That would be truly nice, Lucy, but right now I want to concentrate on developing this building to its utmost possibilities. If things continue as they are, my project will be fully operational in a couple of years or so. Well, time to go home! Let’s roll, Erika!’
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CHAPTER 4 – STARTING A NEW PROJECT
10:04 (West Coast Time)
Tuesday, July 27, 1999 ‘C’
Aircraft design section, Hiller aircraft production plant Fairchild International Airport, Port Angeles
Clallam County, Washington State, U.S.A.
‘’We’re here, Ingrid!’ announced out loud Jeff Hiller, the present CEO and owner of the Hiller Aircraft Corporation, as he entered the wide-open work room of the design section with his ageing father, Stanley Hiller, the founder of the company and now a retired 75-year-old man. Ingrid, who had been waiting for them, quickly walked to them to shake hands with the two men.
‘’Welcome to Port Angeles! How was your trip from California?’
‘’Fine!’ answered Jeff Hiller. ‘’There is a bit of a grey sky right now but it didn’t affect our flight.’
‘’Well, grey skies are rather common around here. Mister Steve Miller, the plant’s aircraft production manager, and Misses Roberta Smith, the plant’s administrative manager, are here with me, so they will be able to listen on as we discuss my proposed project.’
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‘’Then, let’s start right away, Ingrid.’ replied the elder Hiller. ‘’I am impatient to see what kind of idea you came up with this time. Mind you, I am confident that it will be worth looking at: your past ideas and designs basically brought new life to this company and turned me and my son into multi-millionaires. Hiller Aircraft owes a lot to you.’
‘’Thank you, Stanley! If you will follow me, please.’
The two men eagerly followed her to Ingrid’s private office, which was attached to the design office and had a view of it through a large internal window. There, Ingrid invited the Hillers and the two plant managers to sit in a pair of sofas and then sat in an easy chair facing them.
‘’While things are going very well for our company, I am still very conscious that we are a rather small aeronautical company, compared with such giants as Boeing, Lockheed or Douglas. Our success during the last ten years was due mostly to the production of small to medium aircraft designs which played on their VTOL1 capabilities to fill new customer niches. Hiller has not produced yet larger aircraft, like airliners and military bombers, and I am very conscious of the limited capacities of our production plants, including this new one. Right now, this plant’s first aircraft to be produced is a PELICAN, part of an order from the Navy for eight extra PELICANs to beef up their inventory. This however leaves us enough available space to build a prototype aircraft of a new design which will be the largest aircraft to be produced by Hiller…if you approve my project, of course.’
‘’And we are anxious to see what you will propose to us, Ingrid.’ said Jeff Hiller.
‘’So, tell us about your projected design.’
Ingrid nodded once before going to her desk and grabbing four thin files, then distributing them to the Hillers and to the two managers before sitting back in her easy chair.
‘’What I have in mind will be totally revolutionary, yet relatively simple and economical to build. Most of the main components, like the turboshaft engines, ducted propellers and landing gear, are existing ones either made by Hiller or by other aeronautical companies. The real novelty will be in the aircraft structure. I made a few preliminary sketches to show what I have in mind. If approved by you, the Hiller SKYTRUCK will be a medium-sized VTOL multi-role transport aircraft with quick-switch role capabilities. Another thing that I would like to emphasize right now is that the Hiller 1 VTOL : Vertical Takeoff and Landing.
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SKYTRUCK will be primarily targeting the international markets, rather than initially aiming solely at the American military or civilian markets. This way, and with its quick multi-role switching capabilities, our SKYTRUCK will be a very tempting bird all across the World, especially if we succeed in keeping its acquisition and operating costs as low as possible. I will thus make my best during its design to adhere to the KISS Principle: Keep It Simple, Stupid. The novelty will be in its basic design, not in its subparts.’
Stanley Hiller, who had opened wide his eyes after a first look at the sketches in his file, looked up at her, frankly surprised.
‘’Where did you get such an idea for an aircraft design, Ingrid? I have never seen anything like this.’
‘’Don’t laugh, Stanley, but I got the basic idea from an animated TV series from Nancy Laplante’s timeline. That TV series was called ‘The Thunderbirds’ and featured a private family group which secretly operated a number of one-of-a-kind aircraft and vehicles used by what they called ‘The International Rescue’. One of their aircraft, a big transport type, used quick-change mission pods which carried rescue equipment geared towards specific operations. If, say, the International Rescue needed to save people trapped in some underground complex, like a large underground garage, then their cargo aircraft would select and load a cargo pod containing the equipment most relevant for that operation. While my proposed design will be a lot smaller than the THUNDERBIRD 2 in that TV series, it will have a basic airframe able to carry a variety of specialized mission pods. Those specialized mission pods could include a basic cargo pod with aft ramp for the carrying of cargo or vehicles, a passenger transport pod, a search and rescue mission pod, a waterbomber pod and a sea container holding pod, which would allow our SKYTRUCK to pick up vertically a sea container or a truck container of up to 45 feet in length, then transport it across our country and put it down at the vertical at the final delivery point wanted by the customers. The main beauty of this design is that, if some customer wants to use our SKYTRUCK for some other role, then we will only need to design and build a new specialized pod for that role, while not touching the basic aircraft airframe. If, for example, the Coast Guard wishes to acquire our new aircraft in order to conduct maritime patrol and search and rescue missions, then we could quickly produce such a mission pod, as long as we keep its dimensions and shape compatible with the basic airframe of the AIRTRUCK. Oh, I nearly forgot: our SKYTRUCK will be amphibious and will be able to securely float on water. That should
25
make it an invaluable asset for countries with many islands and underdeveloped transport networks.’
‘’This, this is positively brilliant, Ingrid!’ said Stanley Hiller, who had himself been a brilliant aircraft designer. ‘’If you could really come up with a viable and economical design for this, then dozens of countries will run to us with contracts in their hands.
Another argument which we could use with those international clients, especially in the smaller, poorer countries, is that they could buy a number of our aircraft and add to them a choice of mission pods which would allow them to be used in a range of roles, thus avoiding the necessity for them to buy additional airframes. This could really work, Ingrid.’
‘’I certainly hope so, Stanley. So, do I have your green light to start the detailed design of our future SKYTRUCK?’
‘’Hell yes!’ exclaimed Jeff Hiller, enthusiastic. ‘’Go for it, Ingrid! How long do you expect that you will need to make and finalize your design?’
‘’Give me ten to twelve months and I will then be able to present to you production blueprints for a prototype, Jeff.’
‘’Excellent! If you need anything during the design phase, just tell me.’
‘’I do have a requirement right now, Jeff.’ said Ingrid, now looking sober. ‘’That is absolute discretion about our project. No preliminary press releases and no official announcements. I want our prototype to come as a complete surprise to other aircraft producers when it will roll out of its hangar for its first flight.’
‘’That I can understand and agree with, Ingrid. We will keep our mouths shut about the SKYTRUCK.’
Jeff Hiller then looked again at the sketches in his file docket and smiled.
‘’I can already see this selling like hot cakes.’
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CHAPTER 5 – A NEW PRESIDENT
21:02 (Standard Eastern Time)
Tuesday, November 7, 2000 ‘C’
6th Marines regiment’s NCOs’ singles quarters
Camp Lejeune, North Carolina
