_A Sense of Urgency_
A harsh, bitterly cold December wind, gathering momentum over miles
of flat desert, lashed the ramp behind the NACA hangar. I buttoned
my jacket close and bowed my head as I pushed against it toward the
airplane. Here and there I saw that the small puddles were frozen to
solid ice. The desert warms up during the day, but on a winter night
it is like the North Pole. Sometimes it snows at Edwards.
I climbed into the cockpit and pulled on my crash helmet, grateful
to be shielded at last from the frigid blast. Ralph Sparks, who,
on that blue-cold morning, looked as though he was born before the
Wright brothers, closed the canopy and removed the aluminum boarding
ladder. I smiled and waved my hand sharply. Sparks claimed personal
authorship of most of aviation’s achievements, but there were few
mechanics at NACA, or anywhere for that matter, more able than he. He
stood by while I wound up the engines. They caught, and I taxied out
for my first X-4 flight, the first of a series of hurried checkouts
in NACA’s stable of thoroughbreds.
My first six months at Edwards had been a tumultuous time of hurry
and change. Walt Williams, as a matter of routine, kept a fast pace.
When the Korean War broke out, our outfit, like all of the aviation
world, worked with a new sense of urgency. At the climax of the
dramatic shift, NACA’s top pilot, John Griffith, resigned to take a
job at Chance-Vought. In the new climate of the industry, journeyman
test pilots were desperately needed. I checked out in a couple of
jets, the F-84 and the Douglas Skystreak. Then, in the final days
before Griffith’s departure, I gathered what information I could
about the foibles of our temperamental champions. Suddenly, then, I
was completely on my own. The entire NACA Edwards test program was
dumped in my lap.
Actually, I couldn’t have been more pleased. Looking back, I believe
now that the months that followed were, professionally speaking, the
happiest days of my life. I was then too new and too young to concern
my mind seriously with government and industry politics. My approach
to the job was completely starry-eyed. I could move at my own pace,
always fast. I flew morning, noon, and afternoon in the strangest and
most unpredictable airplanes man had ever devised. These flights were
never long. Experimental airplanes are like powerful rockets. They
blaze furiously for a few moments, during which the pilots strive
to probe an unknown area, and then they sputter and die. The one
big difference between the manned plane and the missile is that the
pilot brings the multi-million-dollar plane back to earth for another
flight. Usually.
Before my flight in the X-4 that morning, Walt Williams and Joe
Vensel clucked around the hangar like two old maids grooming their
niece for a grand debut. I had read all the flight reports on the X-4
and had picked Griffith’s brain thoroughly. I knew the weak points
of the airplane: its two engines were erratic above 30,000 feet; at
Mach .88 the plane became unstable; it broke into a steady porpoising
motion, like an automobile cushioning over a washboard road. Beyond
that, nearer the speed of sound, no one knew what would happen. The
X-4 had never been flown there. Williams and Vensel added a fact I
knew quite well: the plane was equipped with barn-door-sized speed
brakes. If popped in flight they would slow the X-4 abruptly and
allow her to withdraw from any zone of trouble.
The X-4, by then, was a veteran of Edwards. The plane was conceived
in the postwar years by Jack Northrop, an imaginative inventor and
an unyielding advocate of the “tailless” concept. The X-4 was first
flown by Northrop’s renowned test pilot, Charlie Tucker, in 1949.
After considerable modification, it had been turned over to the Air
Force. Chuck Yeager, Pete Everest, Colonel Richard Johnson, and Al
Boyd flew it. Thirty flights later, NACA inherited the plane and its
mechanic, Ralph Sparks, who had been with the project from the outset.
I pushed the twin throttles forward and as the fuel surged into the
burning chambers, the X-4 leaped toward the runway. In the distance
I could see a plane leaving Air Force Fighter Ops, headquarters for
the military test-pilot group. Pete Everest was the pilot of the Air
Force craft, an early-model F-86. He would join me to fly “chase,”
observing the performance of the X-4 and watching for danger signals
from close quarters.
Officially, no rivalry existed between the pilots of the Air Force
and the NACA group. As Williams had said, the two jobs were poles
apart. Once contractor pilots, such as Tucker, had demonstrated that
the plane could fly, the Air Force flew it to evaluate military
applications. Then NACA pilots put the plane through an exhaustive
aerodynamic dissection, learning every new fact possible.
In fact, there was a natural rivalry between the test pilots. Each
day at Edwards, the pilots played out a kind of small-scale Olympic
Games of the air. Occasionally these were major battles to break
records, staged by rival Navy and Air Force. More often, they were
small but significant demonstrations of a new flying technique or a
daring maneuver into the unknown, a step beyond the previous pilot of
the airplane. For example, some of the planes had vicious weaknesses.
If, on a given flight, the pilot was able to skirt these, he had
achieved a minor triumph, worth a toast at Pancho’s. Edwards was not
the place to attract non-competitive pilots.
Some of the reason for the keen rivalry lay in the Air Force’s
approach to flight test. Along with its triumphs in the X-1, the
Air Force, first at Wright Field, later at Edwards, had set out to
create a cadre of schooled engineering test pilots on a par with the
best in NACA and industry. For example, Yeager was not an educated
engineer. He was an intuitive engineer, one of the best. He could
feel in an instant a deficiency in an airplane and come close to
pin-pointing its fault technically. A rare pilot, born to fly, like a
figure-skater born to skate, Yeager set standards of conduct in the
air that were emulated for years afterward at Edwards. The pilots
adopted even his understated West Virginia drawl, and ever afterward
the radio talk at Edwards reflected this. The pilots at Edwards--to
judge by the radio talk--were raised on hominy grits and corn
fritters.
But Yeagers are rare. Later the Air Force sent vast numbers of its
pilots back to college to study aeronautical engineering and, still
later, founded a full-blown test-pilot school at Edwards, which in
recent years has graduated a fine group of young, educated test
pilots. But before this ambitious, challenging program, many Air
Force pilots, resisting the engineering approach, died needlessly. We
gave them little reverence: “Hell, he was dead before he took off.”
I was not a member of the “inner circle” that morning in early
December. I had met Yeager, Everest, Jack Ridley, Boyd, and the rest,
but I had yet to prove my ability in the air. I knew that the moment
Everest locked wingtips, he would be watching every move. He had
flown the X-4. He would know when I goofed, and the word would soon
get back to the others. Conceivably, some leeway might be allowed for
the first flight, but it was not likely. Yeager gave little quarter
in the air. On his first flight in the X-1, he says, he had been
tempted to roll the ship in front of the Edwards tower, scant feet
above the ground.
When I received radio permission to take off, I firewalled the
throttles. As the X-4 wobbled down the long, bumpy runway, I gingerly
felt out the controls. Then the churning jets took hold, and the
small X-4 abruptly lunged into the air. Backing off the stall point,
I nosed her over gently and leveled out. Then I eased back on the
stick and the tiny, tailless craft zoomed skyward like a winged
rocket. Behind me, Everest had opened his F-86 wide, trailing a long,
black snake of soot, but he could not keep up. I waited for him at
altitude, rolling and stalling the plane, getting to know its special
strengths and weaknesses. When Everest locked wingtips, I opened
the throttle wide, once again leaving him far behind. As predicted,
at Mach .88 the X-4 broke into its gentle but potentially dangerous
porpoising motion. I opened the air brakes, and the X-4 slowed
instantly, throwing me forward against my shoulder restraint straps.
Everest hurtled by, chortling on the radio.
The Edwards base now lay far below us, nearly obscured in the vast
wilderness of the Mojave wastes. Here and there on the desert floor
I could make out the mottled outlines of the curiously shaped “dry
lakes.” These “lakes” are stretches of fine, closely packed silt,
left behind eons ago by the retreating seas and bleached almost white
by the hot desert sun. The soil of the lakes is quite unusual. When
mixed with water, it becomes slimy like oil. Industrialists mined the
soil as a lubricant for well drills. When the lakes are completely
dry, the surface is hard and flat, like concrete, and thus ideal
natural landing areas for airplanes.
When it rains in the desert, the lake beds are temporarily put out
of commission. The water, unable to penetrate the fine, self-sealing
surface soil, collects on top in small pools, or sometimes, after a
hard rain, in vast, shallow, real-life lakes. This water is swept
back and forth by the brisk desert winds until it evaporates. The
gentle movement of the water smooths the surface of the lake beds,
eliminating bumps and ruts. During this “re-paving” process, the
surface becomes mushy and slick, dangerous for a heavy airplane.
There is sometimes a little rain in July which temporarily closes
the lakes. But the hard rainy season usually begins in mid-December.
Frequently, but not always, the intermittent rains keep the lake beds
either flooded or soft until March or April. No one can predict the
capricious desert weather.
The Edwards base was set directly alongside one of these
lakes--Rogers Dry Lake--which in earlier times, appropriately enough,
had, like the great salt flats of Utah, been an automobile race
track. During the rainy season, at times, I have seen the water on
the lake so deep that it was lapping at the edge of the parking
ramps, and so penetrating that shrimp eggs of some prehistoric age
worked loose from the soil and came to life, mysteriously attracting
sea gulls from the distant California coast. To maintain year-round
operations, the Air Force had built a normal concrete runway at the
base, butting against the dry lake. In the dry season, if required,
the lake bed, marked by parallel black lines, could be used as an
extension of the concrete runway. For the rocket planes, which
required long take-off and landing areas, another runway, lying in
the opposite direction and seven miles long, had been painted on the
lake bed. Still other nearby lakes--Rosamond, Harper, Three Sisters,
Cuddeback--were designated emergency landing areas. When flying
experimental planes at Edwards, the pilots always kept within easy
reach of one of the dry lakes.
After about fifteen minutes in the air, I felt at home in the X-4.
The plane responded so well, in fact, that it was hard for me to
keep in mind that I was piloting a marginally stable, experimental
race horse. Had all that talk of danger been the product of some
public relations mill? I was beginning to feel my oats now, and a
determination that hardly struck me as daring at the time seized me.
I would loop the X-4.
Heading back toward Edwards, the check-out virtually complete, flying
wing to wing with Everest, without warning I pulled back hard on the
stick. The X-4 climbed rapidly, leaving Everest far below. The desert
disappeared from my windshield, replaced by the deep blue of the
clear sky. In a few seconds the X-4 was flat on its back at 27,000
feet. Suddenly all hell broke loose. A noise like the sound of a
fifty-caliber machine-gun exploded through the cockpit.
My maneuver had disrupted the smooth flow of air into the two engine
intakes. Starved for air, and sensitive anyway at my altitude, the
engines had rebelled, and after a flash of uneven running they gave
up completely. I righted the plane and sheepishly called Pete Everest
on the radio.
“Lost both engines.”
“Rog,” he said. Then I heard him calling Edwards Tower to report an
emergency. I could visualize the reaction there: sirens screeching,
fire trucks racing out to the runway, NACA’s Walt Williams and Joe
Vensel perched on the edge of their chairs. Now working desperately
to restart the engines in the air, and mentally locating the position
of the emergency dry lakes, I silently cursed my boldness. I could
imagine the talk that night: “That new fellow, Crossfield, down at
NACA. Pretty green....”
I managed at last to win half the battle. One engine coughed to life.
If it kept running (a big if, indeed, at that point), I would have
sufficient power, at least, to reach the Edwards base runway. Without
the engines the X-4 would come in with a low lift over drag (L over
D)--in other words, it would glide like a brick, but I would be
spared the ignominy of landing on a lake remote from the base. Vensel
was taking no chances. By radio he ordered me to land on the lake.
As we lined up for the approach, I could see the emergency trucks
parked along the edge of the lake; quite embarrassing. The X-4,
already sluggish, began to settle toward earth. As we descended, I
was further chagrined when Everest began to call altitude readings,
interspersed with occasional helpful hints on how to fly a plane. He
was ribbing and I had it coming, so when, finally, the X-4’s tires
screeched on the lake, I switched off the radio receiver.
Joe Vensel was waiting anxiously on the NACA ramp when I rolled to a
stop in front of the hangar. I climbed down the ladder.
“Well,” Vensel said, “what happened?”
“I looped it and lost both engines,” I said. “Got an air start on one
and stop-cocked the other.”
“Damn,” Vensel muttered. He stalked back to his office.