“_Barefoot Boy with Cheek_”
It was a sparkly clear spring day in the desert, about eight months
after I joined NACA at Edwards. When the Air Force B-29 mother
plane reached 8,000 feet, its pilot, Captain Pete Sellers, passed
that fact over the intercom. It was a signal to me: aft in the
bomb-bay compartment, converted to nest the X-1 in the bomber’s
belly, I climbed on the small elevator--a plank with aluminum-tubing
guard-rails--hitched up my chute, and waved to the launch operator,
Eddie Edwards. The elevator descended slowly through the bomb-bay,
and presently I found myself precariously suspended over the
wide-open spaces, battered by the slipstream. The vast, desolate
desert lay in unobscured view in all directions.
The X-1 “door” was on the side of the airplane. Thus it could not
be entered, like the Skyrocket, from the mother plane’s bomb-bay
compartment. The pilot had to go outside, below the mother plane.
The elevator, seemingly a crude way to get to the X-1, was actually
considered plush. In the early stages, back in 1947, Chuck Yeager had
to climb down a ladder into the whipping slipstream.
I eased into the cramped X-1 cockpit and waved my hand. The elevator
ascended and presently came down again, bearing the X-1 door, which
had been placed inside the bomb-bay compartment before take-off.
I set it in place and dogged the handles shut from the inside. In
preparation for my first flight in the X-1, I had practiced this
maneuver several times on the ground.
Actually, that day, the fitting of the door in place was much more
difficult than I have made it out to be. The reason was that I had
three broken ribs. This minor calamity had occurred several days
earlier in the hangar while I was skylarking with the mechanics. I
had playfully grabbed one by the seat of the pants and thrust him
through the stockroom window. As his head disappeared over the sill,
his feet came up and accidentally smacked me in the chest, cracking
three ribs at once. I had sworn him and the others to secrecy. I knew
that if Williams or Vensel found out, I would be grounded for a long
period.
There were two additional NACA pilots at Edwards then, Walt Jones
and Joe Walker. Walt Jones, about 25, had been hired about the time
John Griffith left NACA. A graduate of Purdue, he had served in the
Air Force with Griffith. A handsome man, the son of a minister, he
was short on flying hours but showed great potential. He later left
NACA and was killed test-flying for Northrop. Joe Walker, my age, was
an Air Force veteran of World War II, who had worked at NACA’s Lewis
Lab. A superb foul-weather pilot, Walker specialized in de-icing
experiments at Lewis. Walker was a Pennsylvanian, but he talked like
a West Virginian, and had a slow easy-going manner and a toothy
smile. But Jones and Walker were new to Edwards, and the demands on
NACA were increasing. So I had my chest taped and flew anyway.
My flight that day in the X-1, as planned, was nothing sensational;
simply a check-out flight. By then, not surprisingly, I had acquired
a reputation for encountering an emergency on first flight. I was
determined that the X-1 check-flight would go off without a hitch.
After I had dogged the X-1 door in place, there was still a long
and monotonous climb to our drop altitude of 30,000 feet. I snapped
my lap belt and shoulder harness and settled back, sweeping my
eyes across the instrument panel, checking the pressures in the
rocket-fuel tanks and other systems. Everything was normal, or as
near-normal as it is possible to come in a research airplane.
The X-1 was old then--going on six years--but she was still the
fastest and best research airplane at Edwards. The main reason for
this was the fact that the plane was a model of simplicity. When Bell
had been assigned the job of designing her in 1944, they had ably
and swiftly tamed a wide frontier of aerodynamic unknowns. They knew
that a .50 caliber bullet had been fired supersonically, so they
shaped the X-1 like a bullet. They stuck on a pair of thin, straight,
stubby wings and a Navy-sponsored rocket engine, built by Reaction
Motors, Inc., a small outfit working out of a garage in New Jersey.
From beginning to end, Bell’s Chief Engineer Robert Stanley insisted
on simplicity. The control system, instrument panel, landing gear,
everything about the plane, were deliberately and forcefully held to
a minimum of complexity.
Stanley’s approach to research airplanes had paid rich dividends a
hundred times over. After Yeager had cracked the sonic wall, and
Pete Everest had climbed to 73,000 feet in the X-1, a dozen other
test pilots had flown the ship during 1948, ’49, and ’50. _Glamorous
Glennis_ was in the Smithsonian, but our X-1 had already logged a
total of maybe forty-five flights. They had provided tons of data
without a single flight casualty. It would continue to fly off and on
over the next few years, providing data in the trans-sonic area and
a never-ending challenge for its pilots. In its day, the X-1 was the
king of the hot-rods.
Approaching launch altitude, I got set for my first X-1 drop, priming
the rocket engine, building up pressures in the fuel system. My
chase pilots that day were Air Force Majors Jack Ridley, an old X-1
hand, and Pete Everest. Tucked in close under the tail of the B-29,
they watched the puffs of vaporized fuel snaking out prime lines and
reported:
“Prime looks good.”
B-29 pilot Pete Sellers began the countdown. Suddenly I recalled a
humorous incident which had happened one time when Bob Champine, the
pilot I replaced at NACA, had reached this stage of an X-1 flight.
It had been no fault of the plane, just a simple language snafu.
An ex-Navy pilot, Bob always spoke in Navy terminology in the air.
Seconds before launch, the pressure gauges fell off, and he decided
to cancel the flight. From the cockpit of the X-1 he snapped on the
radio: “Secure the drop.”
Dick Payne, in the bomb-bay compartment, was then working loose the
pins in the shackles which held the X-1 in its belly nest. Accustomed
to working with Air Force pilots, Payne thought “secure the drop”
meant “go ahead and complete the drop.” Champine had loosened his
lap belt and was on the point of crawling out of the X-1 side door
to return to the bomb-bay when his plane suddenly fell away from
the bomber. Luckily he had time to snap himself down. From then on,
“secure the drop” was used to rib all of us ex-Navy types.
To achieve a good launch from the mother plane it is vital that
the research plane be in proper trim. This means that the plane’s
controls should be set for full fuel tanks. A pilot _could_ correct
the control trim after launch, but an overly nose-up or nose-down
setting at the moment of launch _could_ cause the plane to take off
on a wild gyration.
The X-1 stabilizer was always set on “trim” on the ground before
take-off. That morning I had watched the engineer working with a
template and inclinometer, attempting to align the stabilizer chord
with the wing chord. I had done this many times on models in wind
tunnels and knew it was quite easy to make a mistake. I had asked
a few questions but the engineer replied, in effect, that he knew
what he was doing. I was still feeling my way then with the ground
personnel. I let it go.
As it turned out, the engineer _had_ made a mistake. The X-1 was
launched with a full degree in excess of normal stabilizer trim. The
result was spectacular. When I dropped away from the mother plane,
the X-1 pitched, stalled, and flipped on its back.
Chase pilots Pete Everest and Jack Ridley, who had been flying
beside me, quickly searched the skies, wondering where I disappeared
to. When Pete spotted the X-1 below them, upside down, he was
dumbstruck. At last, he found his voice and, with the aplomb he could
always muster, spoke on the radio:
“Well, _that’s_ certainly a new way to launch!”
There was no use in blowing my stack, I thought. The launch was
hopelessly botched. It was now clear to me that on first flight of
any plane I was jinxed, and there was no reason to fight it. The
thing to do now, I thought, was to make a respectable recovery from
an impossible start. Get the plane right-side up, light off the
rockets, and go for broke.
I rolled out, cranking the stabilizer back to normal trim, and then
I fired all four rocket barrels. When they caught, the X-1 lurched
ahead, picking up speed. I held the nose steady and climbed. But
there was no chance for high speed on that flight. During the
unorthodox launch and recovery, the X-1 had fallen too far into the
thick atmosphere. Drinking fuel at better than a ton a minute, her
engine, I knew, would sputter and die in another eighty seconds. I
focused all my attention on maintaining a positive gravity (positive
G) pull on the airplane. If I porpoised and lost it, including
weightlessness (zero G)--that unusual sensation one sometimes
experiences in a fast-falling elevator--the fuel flow to the engine
would stop, closing it down prematurely. At least I would try to
avoid that.
I did. I was hitting about Mach .9 and going through 41,000 feet
when the last of the fuel whipped through the engines. The four
barrels of the rocket engine blew out almost simultaneously, each one
making a noise like a pop-gun. Following that, the X-1 was a tomb
of silence. Except for the crackle of static in my earphone, and a
gentle scrubbing of air on the fuselage skin, there was no earthly
sound. I was now flying a glider--one of the world’s heaviest and
fastest--which I would have to sail back to Rogers Dry Lake alongside
Edwards Base.
If misfortune had dogged my flight thus far, it was nothing compared
to what happened next. Quick as a wink, on base leg for landing,
the whole windshield was blanketed by a thick coating of ice. I was
sealed in--blind as a bat. This time the cause was not attributable
to the failure of machinery. The X-1 defogging system was simply too
weak. On humid days it was not unusual for considerable moisture to
collect inside the X-1 cockpit on the climb to pilot boarding-point
while the door was off. At high altitude this moisture turned to ice.
It was my first-flight luck to go aloft on a very humid day.
When I reported an iced windshield on the radio, I received little
sympathy from my fellow pilots. Jack Ridley laughed over the radio
and, in his strange, falsetto voice, cracked: “Funny, isn’t it? Same
thing happened to me the other day.” Both pilots joined me quickly,
however, and pulled their fighters close in to my wingtips, standing
by to guide me back to the lake-bed landing, if necessary. An old
hand with iced windshields by now, I banked around and, with help
from Ridley, lined up on the lake.
By Hollywood standards, by now I should have been overwhelmed by
fear. Beads of perspiration should have been popping out on my
forehead, and my hand should have been trembling on the stick. Alas,
such was not the case, nor have I ever known it to be amongst my
fellow test pilots.
So many people have asked me so many times whether I have ever
experienced “fear” in the air that I have been compelled to think
about this word and analyze it. My conclusions may be far from
complete and slightly inarticulate, since I believe this word falls
into the realm of philosophy, which is not my strong point. Fear, I
think, is something that a man feels when faced with an unknown--when
in spite of his background and experience he runs out of things
to do. In a mechanical device such as a fast-moving airplane, an
unexpected or unpredicted emergency often happens suddenly, and it
is startling. Perhaps it is comparable to walking up behind a child
and shouting “Boo!” The child is startled, and this is a better
word than “fear” to describe the initial moment, I believe. If the
circumstances are fairly routine, the child follows a pattern of
action. He turns to see what has startled him. Observing the cause,
he laughs away his concern. There are exceptions, of course--a
startled child in a strange or hostile environment, for example,
which may make a lasting impression.
Pilots are occasionally startled like everyone else. The normal
reaction to being startled, like the child’s, is to look for the
cause. The pilot learns from long experience to determine this cause
swiftly and positively. Then, in place of the child’s immature
laughter, he turns to action. There are set procedures to put matters
straight again. If, for example, a fire-warning light suddenly
flashes on the instrument panel of a propeller-driven airplane, there
are prescribed routines. The pilot shuts down the engine, cuts off
the fuel lines, dumps a fire-extinguisher foam into the cowling, and
feathers the propeller so that it does not cause unnecessary drag on
the surviving engines. Then, if necessary, he must look for a field
and land. If a pilot is certain of a bad fire in a jet, there is one
prescribed procedure: get out fast in the ejection seat.
When startled by an emergency, pilots whose minds dissolve into a
frenzy which delays, interferes with, or prohibits corrective steps
ought, I believe, to get into some other business. Beads of sweat on
the forehead should come only from hard work or too much clothing; a
trembling hand on the stick only from a hangover.
Men who climb mountains don’t experience fear when faced by
some crisis. They take the necessary steps to avoid the crisis.
Experienced divers don’t melt into a panic when they face an
aggressive shark underwater. They take the necessary counteraction.
Ship captains don’t give up in despair when their craft founder. They
launch the lifeboats.
These are cases where the emergency comes swiftly and in an
environment that seems to attract the purple-prose experts. But men
and women in other walks of life face grave, unheralded emergencies
every day of the week. Consider the ponderous emergencies big
financiers must slide into as they deal on the stock exchange day
by day. Or surgeons who probe the human body, or mothers who must
deal promptly with gagging children. We never think of these people
as dissolving into fits of fear, yet their responsibility may
outweigh the lone pilot in his craft by a factor of a thousand or ten
thousand. If something goes wrong, they take the necessary steps to
settle it favorably. The incident is rarely noted publicly, as are
the pilot’s emergencies.
I suppose there are many people who go through all of life beset by
a variety of fears. It could be fear of disease, of professional
failure; fear of love or of not being loved; fear of the neighbors;
fear of government, or their leaders, or fear of fear itself. All
these people, in my book, would fare better in this life if they
probed the cause of this fear, if they don’t know it already. Once
the cause were known, they could, or should, take the proper action
to right the situation, and rid themselves of it. This could even
apply to those people who live in slave nations, under a constant
so-called reign of fear of a different order. Witness the birth of
this nation.
I have been startled in an airplane many times. This, I may say, is
almost routine for the experimental test pilot. But I can honestly
say I have never experienced real fear in the air. The reason is that
I have never run out of things to do.
Some day I might. Conceivably, I might be locked helplessly in the
cockpit of a burning airplane in a death spiral, unable to take any
further action to save my life. Facing certain death which I was
powerless to forestall, I might very well be overcome by fear. But
for me this would be a very special kind of fear--a fear of coming
face-to-face with a strict God who might look askance on the ways of
a test pilot--and not be talked out of it. But so far I have been
spared that ultimate confrontation.
* * * * *
What concerned me that afternoon on my first flight in the X-1 was
the landing--the possibility I might wind up in the ever-growing
“Nose Wheel Club.” The X-1 had a most peculiar behavior pattern just
at the moment of touchdown. In the final flare-out, when the three
wheels were reaching for the ground, the plane sometimes bounced
skyward without warning. Ordinarily a pilot in a plane that behaved
thus would push forward on the stick and bring the nose down. If he
did this in the X-1, the nose slammed hard and caved in the nose
wheel. That master pilot, Yeager, had discovered by his native skill
that if the pilot were to violate all his instincts and pull _back_
on the stick, the plane would recover and grease on with no damage.
Only Yeager and a few other pilots had avoided the Nose Wheel Club.
It was no disgrace to prang a nose wheel, and to avoid it was a fine
point of flying indeed, but I intended, as a matter of pride, to stay
out of this club. The iced windshield, however, vastly complicated my
first X-1 landing and made my nomination almost certain.
As my altimeter unwound rapidly, I searched the X-1 cockpit for a
rag, a tool, anything I could use to rub off the coat of ice. There
was nothing. I had no handkerchief in my flying coveralls. But
wait....
I loosened my shoulder straps and bent over, pulling at the
shoestrings of the low-cut oxford shoe on my right foot, thanking my
lucky stars I hadn’t worn flying boots. In two seconds I had the shoe
off. Then I took off my right sock and replaced my bare foot on the
right rudder bar. The metal was frightfully cold. My foot clung to
the bar stickily, like one’s hand on the bottom of an ice tray just
out of the freezer. Using my cotton sock as a scraper, I rubbed hard
in one spot on the front windshield, just over the instrument panel.
By the time we had descended to 5000 feet--gliding like a brick--I
had worn a small hole in the ice, enough to permit me to see the
X-1’s nose and the long desert lake bed stretching ahead. I squinted
one eye and fixed the other on the small hole like a peep-sight,
lining up the parallel black lines painted on the dry-lake floor.
Ridley was droning off my decreasing altitude, but I didn’t need him.
I flared out at 135 miles an hour.
I brought the stick back slowly; the air speed got low and the right
wing dropped sharply, scraping the desert floor as I touched down. I
threw the stick to the left at just about the moment the nose wheel
touched. The X-1 rolled out straight and level, rumbling firmly
across the hard-packed silt. The nose wheel held.
The usual caravan of vehicles, trailing a huge rooster-tail of dust,
tore out across the lake and clustered around the small white bird.
When I undogged the X-1 door, a mechanic lowered it to the ground. I
climbed out--with my right foot bare as a baby’s behind.
Someone shouted: “Where is your right shoe?”
When I held it aloft for all to see, another voice cried: “Barefoot
boy with cheek.” Then they all broke into laughter. I knew that at
Edwards, at least, I had it made.
[Illustration: My maternal grandfather, Thomas A. Dwyer, my
grandmother, Paula, and their children. My mother, Lucia, is third
from right.]
[Illustration: My paternal grandfather, Judge Amasa Scott Crossfield.]
[Illustration: My mother, Lucia, just after her marriage.]
[Illustration: My father, Albert Scott Crossfield.]
[Illustration: Elena Ruth, Mary Ann, and I, 1928.]
[Illustration: Our home in Wilmington, the eucalyptus tree at right.]
[Illustration: Carl Lienesch.]
[Illustration: McNulty’s Inland Sportster and budding aviator, 1935.]
[Illustration: Farmer’s son, 1937.]
[Illustration: Showing prize Guernsey bull.]
[Illustration: With seaplane models, 1932.]
[Illustration: This gas-powered model logged over 1,000 flights.]
[Illustration: The radio-controlled model with geodetic construction.]
[Illustration: A corner of my shop on the second floor of the
farmhouse.]
[Illustration: High school graduate, 1939.]
[Illustration: The ill-fated Taylorcraft.]
[Illustration: Aspiring cadet, 1942.]
[Illustration: My home for almost two years, an SNJ over Corpus
Christi.]
[Illustration: Dive bombers in Jacksonville, 1944. Rear-seat men
kneeling, SBD airplane in background. I’m standing second from left.]
[Illustration: F6F fighter pilot, Pasco, Washington, 1945.]
[Illustration: Corsair pilot, 1946.]
[Illustration: A few of the veterans of the Denver fiasco returning
to Seattle, 1947, much subdued. I’m on extreme left.]
[Illustration: Alice and I visiting the farm in 1947. Our Dalmatian,
“Cadet,” in the center.]
[Illustration: Beginning a new circle. Tommy tries on the helmet. NAA
photo.]
[Illustration: My mother in 1947.]
[Illustration: My father in 1947.]
[Illustration: The family, 1960. Photo by John Bryson.]
[Illustration: The X-1, rocket engines ablaze, is tested on the
ground. Bell photo.]
[Illustration: Preparing to mate the X-1 to the mother plane. Bell
photo.]
[Illustration: The X-1 snugged into position. Bell photo.]
[Illustration: The X-1; straining for altitude. USAF photo.]
[Illustration: “Slick” Goodlin going down the elevator to enter the
X-1 cockpit. Bell photo.]
[Illustration: Three ... Two ... One. Drop! Bell photo.]
[Illustration: The X-1, rocket engines ablaze, is tested in the air.
Bell photo.]
[Illustration: The X-1 landing. USAF photo.]
[Illustration: Chuck Yeager climbing out of the X-1 cockpit. Bell
photo.]
[Illustration: John Griffith of NACA, my boss, after an X-1 flight in
1950. NASA photo.]
[Illustration: Bell’s Joe Cannon and the X-1 (No. 3) “Queenie,” at
Edwards, 1951. Bell photo.]
[Illustration: Sad demise of the “Queenie.” Cannon survived. Bell
photo.]
[Illustration: The mother plane was also damaged. Bell photo.]
[Illustration: Yeager, his linemen, and the support equipment for an
X-1-A flight. Bell photo.]
[Illustration: The second generation X-1s in parade formation. Bell
photo.]
[Illustration: Straining for altitude. Bell photo.]
[Illustration: The X-1-A; Three ... Two ... One. Drop! Bell photo.]
[Illustration: The X-1-B gliding home. USAF photo.]
[Illustration: Chuck Yeager surrounded by Edwards personnel
immediately following his record-breaking Mach 2.4 flight and violent
tumble. Note crewman at left inspecting cracked canopy. Bell photo.]
[Illustration: Mutual admiration society. Chuck Yeager and Kit Murray
wearing partial-pressure suits, and the history-making X-1-A in
background. USAF photo.]
[Illustration: X-1-B starts a new Nose Wheel Club. NASA photo.]
[Illustration: NASA’s modernized X-1-E joins the club. NASA photo.]
[Illustration: The price of progress. Remains of the X-1-D. Quick
action saved Everest. Bell photo.]
[Illustration: A similar demise for the X-1-A. NASA photo.]
[Illustration: The X-3; straining for altitude. Douglas photo.]
[Illustration: The X-4 in flight. USAF photo.]
[Illustration: The X-5 about to touch down on lake bed. USAF photo.]
[Illustration: The XF-92-A on Crossfield Pike. NASA photo.]
[Illustration: The nose wheel got tired. NASA photo.]
[Illustration: My stable of thoroughbreds, posed before the old NACA
hangar. From left: Skyrocket, Skystreak, X-5, X-1, XF-92-A, X-4. NASA
photo.]
[Illustration: Joe Vensel and NACA pilots. From left: Joe Walker,
Stan Butchart, Jack McKay, and a cigar-smoker. NASA photo.]
[Illustration: The sonic wall was Yeager’s, the hangar wall was mine.
NASA photo.]
[Illustration: The Skystreak in flight. NASA photo.]
[Illustration: The D-558-II Skyrocket, my loyal steed for four years.
Douglas photo.]
[Illustration: The faithful grooms: the Skyrocket ground crew. NASA
photo.]
[Illustration: Mating the Skyrocket. NASA photo.]
[Illustration: Straining for altitude. Douglas photo.]
[Illustration: Three ... Two ... One. Drop! NASA photo.]
[Illustration: Skyrocket in flight. Douglas photo.]
[Illustration: Gliding home again. Douglas photo.]
[Illustration: Touching down on the lake bed. Douglas photo.]
[Illustration: Walt Williams hears it first: Mach 2, Nov. 20, 1953.
NASA photo.]
[Illustration: The Skyrocket and her three record-holders. From left:
Bill Bridgeman, Colonel Marion Carl, and the farmer’s son. Douglas
photo.]
[Illustration: The X-2 and her Air Force team of jockeys. Clockwise
from center: Pete Everest, Iven Kincheloe, and Mel Apt. Bell photo.]
[Illustration: Ground-testing the X-2. Bell photo.]
[Illustration: The X-2 nested in the mother plane’s belly. Bell
photo.]
[Illustration: Straining for altitude. Bell photo.]
[Illustration: Three ... Two ... One. Drop! The X-2. Bell photo.]
[Illustration: The X-2 lands on the lake bed. NASA photo.]
[Illustration: Skip Ziegler joins the Nose Wheel Club. Bell photo.]
[Illustration: The X-2 and her record holders: Mel Apt in cockpit,
Iven Kincheloe on the ladder. Note scorched paint on the nose. Bell
photo.]
[Illustration: Mel Apt and the second X-2 died on the desert. Bell
photo.]