_The Gypsy Caravan_
In the spring of 1950, a few months before Commencement, I began
to lay final plans for my move into the aviation world. The way
the deck was stacked, it did not appear a ripe time for aspiring
aeronautical engineers. The Pentagon’s post-World War II economy
drive had severely deflated the giant aviation industry. There were
a few jets in production--Boeing’s B-47, North American’s F-86,
Lockheed’s F-80, Republic’s F-84, McDonnell’s “Banshee”--and many
others in the experimental test stage. Crack aeronautical engineers
were, as usual, rare; but new graduates were a dime a dozen, breaking
into the industry at less than $300 a month. Many able experimental
test pilots were killing time in routine jobs. But as the cards
were played out, my timing couldn’t have been better. No one could
then foresee the outbreak of the Korean War. In a few months this
war changed the atmosphere in the aviation industry one hundred and
eighty degrees. This change provided me with my great opportunity.
That spring, as I reviewed the chances open to me, I concluded the
best stepping stone was a Civil Service job with the government as an
“aeronautical research pilot” for the National Advisory Committee
for Aeronautics (NACA). Unknown to the general public, NACA had for
years been the vital cauldron in which new ideas in aeronautical
engineering were brewed and sampled. The agency was founded in 1915
by President Wilson, after the U. S. had lagged considerably behind
Europe in the exploitation of the airplane for civilian and military
purposes. The members of the committee, then the grandees of the
U. S. aviation world, were charged with keeping close tabs on all
domestic and foreign aviation developments, and to serve as a kind
of clearing house for U. S. engineers. The committee was supposed
to encourage officially any U. S. aviation development which held
promise.
As the airplane grew in importance and complexity, NACA grew in size.
Langley Laboratory was founded at Hampton, Virginia, to test seaplane
hulls, new propeller designs, and important air foils. It was soon
equipped with wind tunnels and other tools of the aeronautical
engineers. Much later, in 1940, NACA founded a second aeronautical
research laboratory--Ames--at Moffett Field, near San Francisco.
Shortly before World War II, a third laboratory, Lewis, was built
in Cleveland, Ohio, to work on problems of propulsion. While some
NACA engineers dealt with hardware, much new basic theory--some of
it sound, some of it impractical--emanated from the ivy-covered,
college-like atmosphere of its laboratories. This theory, combined
with that from universities such as Washington, and considerably more
theory generated by the highly competitive aviation industry, served
to keep the U. S. abreast.
The X-1 rocket plane was, in a way, a product of NACA. During World
War II, NACA was frantically busy “fixing” design shortcomings on
production military airplanes. In 1944, when the country stood on
the threshold of the jet age, NACA engineers came face-to-face with
the problem of the suspect data provided by wind tunnels near the
speed of sound. Seeking a substitute solution, the Air Force’s Ezra
Kotcher and a few NACA engineers, including Hartley Soule and John
Stack, together with Bell engineer Robert Woods, conceived the idea
of building a full-scale rocket-powered research plane that could
actually be _flown_ through the speed of sound to get the necessary
data. It was a bold--indeed, daring--move for the conservative
agency, and it paid handsome dividends in the long run.
During the course of modern aviation history, NACA has been
alternately praised and damned. In 1935 the British _Journal of the
Royal Aeronautical Society_ huffed: “It is notorious that many of our
most capable design staffs prefer to base their technical work on the
results of the NACA.” After World War II, when the complete picture
of the astounding Nazi achievements in the field of aeronautics came
to light, NACA was severely criticized for the U. S. lag. Much later
it was blamed for permitting the U. S. to fall behind in the field
of ballistic missiles. These shortcomings, I believe, were more the
result of a national attitude than a specific research or policy
failure on NACA’s part. By and large, considering its shoestring
budget, NACA had performed ably. With only occasional exceptions,
the U. S. aviation industry has held NACA in high regard. One reason
is that the agency served as a training ground for many U. S.
aeronautical engineers. For example, my childhood hero, Eddie Allen,
was one of NACA’s first and best test pilots.
From my point of view in 1950, NACA seemed a likely starting point.
I knew that NACA kept a small stable of test pilots at each of its
three major laboratories. Most of them were engineers, too--able
to translate a deficiency encountered in the air into precise
engineering terminology. A close association with these men for a
period would be valuable experience. Thus, without knowledge of a
specific vacancy, I mailed off a general application form to the
government.
There were no openings, the government replied. I wrote again and
again without results. When graduation exercises were only a few
weeks away, I felt I had to take some land of direct action. I
decided to pay an unannounced visit to Laurence Clousing, NACA’s
chief test pilot at Ames. Clousing, I knew, was one of the best in
the business. If he did not know of a job, his advice alone would
make my trip worth while.
I remember everything about that day. It was remarkable not only
because it was a turning point in my life, but also because it was
filled with coincidences, minor but eerie. The first of the latter
happened the moment I walked into Clousing’s office--unexpectedly, so
I thought.
“Hello, Crossfield,” Clousing said. He was a tall man with a
deceptively shy manner. He seemed to me more like a college professor
than a test pilot. He thrust a friendly hand toward me. “We’ve been
waiting for you. Your wife called a few minutes ago.”
I was very surprised by his greeting. I had told Alice only that I
was going to see a “guy named Clousing down near San Francisco.” That
she had been able to track me down to his office at the big NACA
facility amazed me. This feeling soon gave way to concern. I was sure
Alice would not call unless there was urgent news.
“Is somebody ill?” I asked Clousing.
“No,” he said. “She wanted to pass along the word that you received a
reply this morning to your civil service application. You’re invited
to Edwards for an interview. We have no openings here at all.” The
most surprising fact of all in this news was that Alice had opened
the letter. Not in seven years of marriage had she so much as touched
a letter addressed to me. Well, I thought, it’s lucky she did. I
turned to Clousing.
“Edwards?” I asked. “Isn’t that Air Force?” At that time I knew only
that Edwards was a desert test center for experimental airplanes in
Southern California. It was at Edwards that Chuck Yeager had flown
the X-1 through the sonic barrier. Industry test pilots from the Los
Angeles area used the base for first flights of new planes.
“NACA has a small experimental test group at Edwards,” Clousing said.
“Two or three pilots and a few engineers and mechanics. They came out
with the X-1 back in ’46. They’re doing some work there with other
planes. It was supposed to be a temporary group but they’ve made it
a permanent station now. Walt Williams runs the unit. The chief test
pilot is John Griffith. Do you want to go down and see them?”
I wasn’t too keen on Edwards. Clousing’s brief comments brought to
mind a picture of a gypsy caravan from NACA camping in tents on
the edge of the Air Force base. What a contrast to the scholarly
atmosphere of the massive Ames installation! To me Ames was a known
quantity but Edwards a big question. But Clousing had made it clear
he was not hiring. Edwards, at least, was a foot in the door. I
thought it might be worth a gamble.
When I said yes, Clousing put through a call to Walt Williams to
arrange a rendezvous. Soon I was on a train, chuffing slowly over the
coastal mountains toward the great, desolate Mojave Desert.
Today Edwards, like the rest of Southern California, has grown to
spectacular proportions. It is a well-organized military base, manned
by some 10,000 men, with a neat base-housing area, cross-hatched
by streets named for pilots who have died in the course of duty at
Edwards. It has a Base Exchange, an Officers’ Club, gigantic hangars,
and all the rest. But on that day when I saw it for the first time,
it was little more than a runway scratched out of the desert. The
handful of pilots lived in “tarpaper” shacks and drank whiskey in a
roadhouse run by an aging but colorful aviatrix named Pancho Barnes.
John Griffith met my train in Mojave, a frontier town not far from
Death Valley, once a stopping-off place for the famous twenty-mule
teams which labored across the desert hauling borax. The brown wastes
of the desert were harsh to my eyes, which had looked for so long on
the green of the Northwest. I was not sure Alice would like it. Even
in May the heat was stifling.
Griffith, a stocky, powerfully built man about thirty-one years old,
was appropriately dressed for the climate--slacks, sport shirt, dark
glasses. I felt out of place in my blue serge suit, but John quickly
put me at ease with his friendly smile and easy manner. We climbed
into his car and drove along an arrow-straight, black-top road toward
the base. It was hard to believe that this primeval environment was
the center of aviation’s most advanced flying.
On the way to the field I learned a little of the history of the
NACA pilots at Edwards. The original group had consisted of Herbert
Hoover, and Howard Lilly, both fine pilots. Lilly was killed when an
experimental plane blew up on take-off. Hoover was killed later, when
a B-45 jet exploded in the air; his co-pilot, John Harper, escaped.
He subsequently went to work for Lear, Inc. To replace them, Griffith
came from Lewis Lab and Bob Champine from the Langley Lab to be
number two man. An able, sharp-eyed pilot, but not a very experienced
one, Champine soon developed a distaste for experimental flight
tests. He transferred back to Langley, leaving the opening for which
I was to be interviewed. Griffith was the sole pilot, a World War II
veteran. He flew for the Air Force in the Solomons and later joined
NACA. Superior to him was Joe Vensel, chief of Flight Operations,
then came Walt Williams, chief of the station.
The NACA High Speed Flight Test Station occupied one of two small
hangars in the sand bordering the runway. As we drew close, I saw
there was just one building, a combination hangar and office. I
was soon to learn that the NACA operation was, as I had envisioned
it, completely parasitic. It leaned on the Air Force for water,
communications, fuel, fire protection--everything but salaries,
pilots, and engineers. But the primitive façade was deceptive. Inside
there was a highly contagious, pioneering spirit. The NACA group at
Edwards was ready to perform big deeds; even more spectacular plans
were in the works.
The principal reason for this spirit, I soon found, was the boss,
Walt Williams, a thirty-one-year-old engineer from New Orleans. A
cocky, hard-working operator, Williams had cut his teeth in NACA’s
Langley Laboratory during the war. In 1946 he had come to Edwards
with twelve men under his command, to supervise the research phase
of the X-1 program. The plan then was that when Bell had finished
the initial flight tests of the plane, Williams and his group would
move in. They would fit the ship with instruments and begin recording
scientific data on each flight. This scheme had been unavoidably
delayed when Goodlin bowed out.
After Chuck Yeager flew the plane through the sound barrier, other
Air Force pilots moved in to take the controls and set new records.
One of these was Major Frank K. (“Pete”) Everest, who zoomed to an
altitude of 73,000 feet. Others followed: Captain Jack Ridley and
Colonel Albert Boyd, who was then commander of the Edwards outpost,
and the epitome of a service test pilot. Herbert Hoover of NACA flew
the X-1 and became the first civilian to penetrate the sound barrier.
There were actually _three_ X-1s, I discovered. The first, Yeager’s
plane, which he nicknamed _Glamorous Glennis_ after his beautiful
wife, had been shipped off to the Smithsonian Institution. The second
X-1 had been turned over to NACA. The third X-1 was still at the Bell
plant in Buffalo, New York, being fitted with a new low-pressure fuel
system which would enable it to go higher and faster. But many, many
months would pass before X-1 number three was ready for flight. It
held a grim surprise.
I talked first with Joe Vensel, chief of Flight Operations. He was a
man cautious in decision but quick in physical movement. He bore the
scars of a rough life of flying: shattered sinuses. At 40, he wore a
hearing aid. Vensel had little to say or to ask.
Griffith then took me directly to Williams’ office, a make-shift
area in one end of the hangar. Williams met me with a firm and
enthusiastic handshake. He bounced around the room impatiently,
pausing frequently to run his hand through his crew-cut brown hair,
or to doodle violently on a scratch pad. It was immediately clear
that Williams was a man of action. I liked him on first sight. He and
Griffith probed my background.
“How is it you have so much single-engine time?” Griffith asked.
“I like to fly,” I said. “I got my private license before the war.
During the war I was an instructor at Corpus Christi, Texas. We were
very busy. Lot of students. Lot of hours. I took extra students when
I could. After the war I was active in the Naval Reserve.”
“What about this stunt team?” Williams asked.
And so it went. As the interview progressed, I learned there were
two other pilots being considered for the opening, each with about
half my flying experience. This competition, unsuspected until then,
sharpened my senses. I talked earnestly about my desire to make a
serious contribution to aeronautical science. Before the session drew
to a close, Williams made it clear that the job was mine--if I wanted
it. I didn’t want to appear overly eager. I parried for a while,
seeking answers to a few questions of my own.
“What kind of flying would I be doing here?” I asked. “It looks to
me as though Chuck Yeager and Pete Everest and the other Air Force
pilots have a corner on the market.” It was a deliberate needle and
it obviously touched Williams on a sore spot. He responded with a
spiel which sounded as though it had been drafted for a Congressional
committee.
“The research airplane was conceived at NACA’s Langley Laboratory.
The funds are provided principally by the Air Force and the Navy.
NACA has technical jurisdiction over the flight programs, which are
designed to provide maximum data within a given time. Under the new
concept, civilian test pilots of the companies concerned in the
design and construction of the research airplanes make initial test
flights, verifying established design and structural points, engine
reliability, and so on. The Air Force pilots then take over and fly
them with an eye to military application, under NACA cognizance.
After that, so the plan goes, the ships are turned over to us here at
NACA for detailed flight research. The ... ah ... the Air Force has
been somewhat slow in turning over the planes, that’s true, but we
have encountered one unpredicted technical problem after the other
...”
“I suppose--” I broke in. But Williams had not finished. He lunged
out of his chair and paced back and forth, warming to his subject.
“We are blazing new trails in aeronautical science out here. The data
we are producing are fed directly into the aviation industry through
NACA reports available to all. Industry engineers are applying the
data to concepts for the next generation of jet fighters--a family
of supersonic fighters. We’re testing everything here: straight
wing, swept wing, tailless jobs. We’re running into all kinds of
phenomena. Some of them have been predicted in theory and tunnel
test; some are brand-new.”
“What planes are you working with now?” I asked.
“We’ve got an X-1 out there in the hangar now, and the X-4. Hell,
come on out and I’ll show you.”
Williams boomed out of the office into the hangar space. I followed,
looking in detail for the first time at the collection of weird and
fascinating planes. The hangar was busy. Mechanics swarmed over the
little hot-rods, removing plates, pulling long snarls of wire from
their insides, shoving calibration carts here and there. The whine of
a pneumatic drill, accompanied by the staccato of a rivet gun, echoed
through the high-beamed, arched ceiling. The scene reminded me of
the feverishly busy pits at the Indianapolis race track a few hours
before the 500-mile Speedway race on Memorial Day. The analogy is not
far-fetched. These planes were nearly comparable to temperamental,
overpowered, dangerous, finely-tuned racing cars. Edwards, in
reality, was an Indianapolis of the air.
A few of the planes, such as the X-1, were familiar to me; others
were new. We stopped alongside the X-4, a tailless plane powered by
two jet engines. It had just been turned over to NACA by the Air
Force, Williams said, patting the side of the ship. It was a metallic
white, like an icebox.
“She was supposed to go Mach 1,” he said. “But she can’t make it.
It’s a little tricky to fly. The engines flame out at altitude.
She pitches a bit at Mach .9. British lost a couple of DeHavilland
Swallows of similar design. Mystery why they crashed. Maybe we can
find out with this baby.” Williams rattled on in this fashion as
we moved about the hangar. We came to another beautiful ship which
looked somewhat like the X-1.
“This is the Douglas Skystreak, the D-558-I,” Williams said. “It’s a
Navy project.”
“Oh, yes,” I said. This was the model that killed Lilly. I recalled
a few of the details of the program. “Gene May also flew that one,
didn’t he?” May was a Douglas test pilot.
“That’s right,” Williams said. “We have two of these left. This one
is just like the X-1 only it has a jet instead of a rocket engine. We
had another D-558 version here, swept wing with a jet using JATO for
take-off, called the Skyrocket. Then there also is another swept-wing
version with a jet engine and a rocket engine. It’s back at the
Douglas plant now being modified to an all-rocket version. We’ll
air-launch it from a mother plane like we do the X-1.”
_All-rocket, air-launch, swept-wing._ I turned these phrases over
briefly in my mind, little realizing then the impact this airplane
would have on my future.
“What do you expect from that?” I asked.
“Well, the figures are classified, frankly. But in round numbers and
stretching, we think she might reach Mach 2, and maybe 90,000 or
100,000 feet,” Williams said. He spoke in a low, confidential tone.
“Who is the pilot going to be?” I asked. “Gene May?”
“No.” Williams said. “Douglas has a new pilot, an ex-Navy type named
Bill Bridgeman.”
“The Air Force doesn’t get this one?”
“No. This is a Navy project. They do it differently. They’d just as
soon have the manufacturer establish the limits of the airplane.
Good, sharp outfit to do business with. They don’t mind racking up a
few records, but it is not their first order of business.”
The way Williams spoke of “records,” he conveyed clearly the
impression that at NACA records per se were unimportant, if not
frowned upon. We wandered back to his office and sat down.
“Now,” he said, “there are about four other types in the works.
Bell’s got a souped-up version of the X-1 coming out which will
easily exceed Mach 2, or better. They also have a swept-wing rocket
plane, the X-2, which is designed for nearly Mach 3 and about 150,000
feet. Then there’s the X-3, a straight-wing job by Douglas. It is way
behind schedule and very complicated. It might turn out to be a dud.
Then we’ll have the Bell X-5, a jet-powered ship with an inflight
variable-sweep capability.”
My head was swimming with figures and visions of these fantastic
airplanes. My top speed in an airplane then was maybe five hundred
miles an hour, clocked in a dive in a Corsair. Williams talked of
1500 and 2000 miles an hour as if those speeds were routine. I was
sold.
“I would have a shot at those airplanes?” I asked.
“If everything works out,” Williams said.
“The X-2 as well?”
“If everything works out,” Williams repeated.
“When do I start?”
“We’ll let you know,” Williams said. He glanced at his watch. “You
going back into Mojave to catch a train? Why don’t you hitch a ride
with Drake and Carmen?”
Hubert M. Drake and L. Robert Carmen together made up the “advance
design” group at NACA’s Edwards installation. They were the
“dreamers,” paid to look far into the future and scheme new ways
to fly higher and faster. I didn’t know it then--and they didn’t
discuss it--but Drake and Carmen were doing work at night in their
homes on an airplane to put the best of dreamers to shame. It was a
rocket-powered craft that would fly four thousand miles an hour and
to an altitude of 500,000 feet. Five years later, after a tortuous
journey through a jungle of bureaucracy, and endless modification,
this craft became the X-15. Looking back now, I regard the fact that
these two men were picked to give me a lift to Mojave as something of
a coincidence.
Of pressing concern to me at that moment was the fact that I was
almost flat broke. I had hitch-hiked down to the Ames Laboratory on
a Navy airplane and had intended to return to Seattle that same day
by the same means. The plane had long since returned; I was stranded
in the desert without nearly enough cash for a train ticket to
Seattle. There was no money in my checking account. However, by the
time I climbed out of Drake’s car at the bleak, dusty Mojave railroad
station and bid my hosts farewell, I had a plan.
I checked with the station master. There was a north-bound train
scheduled to pass through Mojave at midnight. The daycoach fare to
Seattle, via San Francisco, was about $20, and this was about $10
more than I had.
“What’s the next stop beyond Mojave?” I asked.
“Martinez,” the station master said. He eyed me curiously.
“Okay,” I said, “give me a ticket to Martinez.” It was about $7.00.
I then placed a telephone call, collect, to my sister, Elena Ruth
(“Babe”) Brown, who lived in Sierra Madre, just outside Los Angeles.
When she answered, considerably surprised to hear from me, I told her
I was taking the midnight train to Martinez and asked her to wire me
$25 in care of the station master there. I had not often borrowed
money in my life, but I didn’t mind asking her. Many years before,
when she was a student at Berkeley, I had hocked my camera in order
to lend her $40 for flying lessons, for which my father refused to
pay.
After Babe assured me the money would be sent immediately, I hung
up and retired to a corner to count my remaining fortune. I spent
another dollar at the Silver Dollar Cafe for dinner, then blew the
rest on a ticket to the local movie. By still another coincidence,
the picture was about a test pilot and Humphrey Bogart was the star.
I plumped into a seat and watched while he wrestled with a rattling
control stick, braving the frontiers of flight.
Hours later I was still deeply absorbed, not in that turkey of a
movie but in what I had seen and heard that day, when I felt a hand
on my shoulder. A voice spoke:
“Are you Mr. Crossfield?”
Startled, I broke out of my supersonic reverie and spun around. It
was the theater usher.
“Yeah. I’m Crossfield.”
“There’s a gentleman out front to see you.”
I followed the usher up the aisle wondering who it could be. No one
on earth knows where I am, I thought.
To my astonishment, I found Babe’s husband, Claude, and behind
him, my mother, Lucia, waiting in the lobby. My mother had been
visiting my sister when I called. After I hung up she talked my
brother-in-law into making the three-hour drive to Mojave to surprise
me.
“But how did you know I was in there?” I asked.
“Well, I cased every bar in town first, while your mother waited in
the car. I didn’t see you in any of them so I figured in a town of
this size the only place left was the movie.”
We laughed and made our way to a nearby restaurant. At midnight, $25
richer, I boarded a daycoach on the train.
Back in Seattle, I collected my Master’s degree in aeronautical
engineering, resigned from my Naval Reserve unit, packed up the
family--Alice, Becky, age two, and our new addition, Tommy--traded my
1941 Ford for a ’49 Ford, and drove to the desert to begin a new life.
Three weeks later many of my Naval Reserve comrades were mobilized
and shipped off to Korea.