_Bright Light Under a Bush_
I eyed the new ship skeptically. White as a lily, it was the X-5,
another product from Bell. The ship was powered by a single jet
engine, and from a distance it appeared fairly conventional. What
was vastly different about the X-5 was that its wings could be swept
to several different angles in flight. Two X-5s had been built. One
was turned over to the Air Force; NACA got the other. Joe Walker was
project pilot and had gotten our program off the ground. I was to
make my first check-out flight.
“What do you want on this flight?” I asked Thomas Finch, an NACA
engineer.
“The flight plan calls for aggravated stalls,” he said. These would
help define the safe low-speed limits of the airplane.
“What do you mean, aggravated stalls?” I said. “How far?”
“Use your own judgment,” Finch said. “But if you can take her well
into the stall region, that’ll be fine.”
The wings were to be swept to sixty degrees that flight. I cooled
down the runway, followed by an Air Force chase, and climbed rapidly
to altitude. I had read the manual on the airplane and all of the
early flight reports, which had been prepared by Skip Ziegler before
he died over Lake Ontario; I had also been briefed by Joe Walker.
The X-5 handled in the air like a three-wheeled automobile. It was
loose and danced crazily. Even so, we thought it would make a fine
research tool. With its high sustained speed just under Mach 1, and
its variable sweep, NACA could explore a wide variety of unknowns. It
was like having a whole stable of swept-wing airplanes in one.
I climbed to 25,000 feet and reported to chase that I would make
several aggravated stalls. I pulled back on the throttle and eased
back the stick. As the X-5 slowed, she began to buffet; slower and
slower, more and more buffet. Suddenly her nose veered sharply to the
left. In a split second, the X-5 turned 180 degrees. Then she dropped
precipitously into a spin. My first-flight jinx was back.
A kaleidoscope of brown desert, blue sky, and white clouds passed
dizzily in review in my windshield as the X-5 wound up steadily
toward the desert floor. I pushed the stick hard to forward left
and bent on full right rudder--the prescribed spin-recovery-control
maneuver--but the X-5 stubbornly refused to conform. Then I tried
every trick in the book, pretty thick by now, after those years of
flying unstable airplanes at Edwards. After a drop of over 10,000
feet, the X-5 pulled out.
Walker had run into the same thing. This slow-spin-recovery was a
dangerous weakness of that airplane. Since the Edwards area was 2500
or more feet above sea level, we made a careful note on the plane’s
flight handbook _never_ to perform maneuvers which could result in a
spin below 20,000 feet.
* * * * *
“Did you get the word on Popson?” Joe Walker asked. Popson was an Air
Force pilot assigned to fly the Air Force’s X-5.
“No,” I said. “What happened?” I had just come in from a trip to the
East Coast.
“He was assigned to do aggravated stalls at 12,000 feet. He spun in.”
I was sick. We had somehow failed in a basic NACA mission--getting
information to the right place in time.
Popson was a well-qualified pilot. If there had been better
coordination between Air Force and NACA, he might be alive today; his
flight plan was his death warrant, as so often happened. He was dead
before he took off, the thirteenth pilot to die at Edwards. Following
custom, a street was named in his honor.
* * * * *
Bell’s Bob Woods was a tremendous man. He’s dead now, so there is no
way to check, but I think he weighed at least three hundred pounds.
He was the last of the Great Guns of an era at Bell. In spite of the
X-1 and X-2 difficulties, Wood carried on in the grand old style. You
had to admire his vision and political guts.
Woods had a talent for hypnotizing a crowd--or anyway _me_, at least.
And so it was in the spring of 1952, during a semiannual meeting
of the full NACA Aerodynamics Subcommittee at the Ames Laboratory,
Woods stood before a blackboard. From my inconspicuous seat in
the background, I stared at his girth and the vast outpouring of
enthusiasm as he made a case which, to me, was as fascinating as his
size.
“As I see it,” Woods went on before the large meeting of industry
designers, “this would essentially be a research aircraft and come
under NACA jurisdiction. The information it returned would be made
available to all. The craft would be mounted on top of a vertical
booster, in effect a ballistic missile. Launch speed would be 4,000
or 5,000 feet a second. The booster would fall away. The vehicle
would continue a climb to about eighty miles. On descent, recovery
would be effected by a deployed parachute. The booster vehicle could
essentially be a V-2 type missile.
“This vehicle would enable us to probe a number of unexplored areas.
Aerodynamic heating at hypersonic speed. Weightlessness for the pilot
and research airplane machinery.” As he talked, a lieutenant stood by
to flip through a set of expertly drafted drawings demonstrating each
point.
“Gentlemen,” Woods concluded, “I don’t think I have to stress the
need for an advanced research vehicle. The best thing we have in
the hopper now is the X-2 and we all know the limitations of this
aircraft, which has not even flown yet. We must face up to the fact
that we are going to do something about this or sit back and let the
Russians take the lead.”
I listened eagerly while the brass kicked around Woods’ proposal.
There were many pros and cons from a technical standpoint.
As I say, Bob Woods had something of a magnetic personality. After
the meeting at Ames, he paid us a visit at Edwards. Then, I suppose,
he went on to NACA headquarters in Washington and probably on down to
talk to John Stack at NACA’s Langley Lab in Virginia. In any case,
all at once, all the somnolent parts of NACA were suddenly awake and
chirping simultaneously about a new advanced research airplane. One
reason was that the timing was good. The other rocket planes were in
trouble or dropping far behind schedule. The missile engineers were
then beginning to squeeze enormous thrust out of a single rocket
barrel, more than twice the power of the V-2 rocket engine developed
by the Nazis. The Army’s Redstone missile generated 75,000 pounds
thrust, about ten times the thrust of the engine in the Douglas
Skyrocket. It was clearly time to take advantage of this rapid
technological advance.
Walt Williams came alive with enthusiasm. He called in Drake and
Carmen and asked them to pull out their advanced report which had
been pigeon-holed the year before.
“Damn it,” said Williams, “if Woods can get up before a meeting of
the Aerodynamics Subcommittee and propose shooting a man eighty miles
into space in a missile, I guess we can propose the five-engine
monster.” The Drake-Carmen report, with Williams’ endorsement, was
sent on to the Langley Laboratory for serious study.
None of this produced any immediate results in terms of hardware. The
Drake-Carmen proposal was rejected out of hand. The Woods proposal,
because it came from industry, got the full NACA treatment--that
is to say, a rejection, complete with technical data attached.
Basically, no one at that time was in favor of the “ballistic”
approach, although the U. S., and NACA, specifically, would return
to exactly that same approach for Project Mercury some five or six
years later. However, all this activity set NACA planning toward
a more or less “conventional” advanced research airplane in the
range of Mach 6 and 100-mile altitude. As everyone knows, once the
ponderous machinery of a government agency is set in motion toward an
objective, it can hardly be stopped.
During the weeks that followed, I paid this paper-study airplane
more than casual attention. From exactly this kind of start, I knew,
eight years earlier Kotcher, Stack, and Woods had given birth to the
X-1 and ushered in a new dimension in aviation. With rocket engines
now ten times more powerful, were we on the threshold, were we in
the very act of conceiving a new generation that would make the X-1
pale by comparison? Man had yet to fly at Mach 2 and we were talking
of Mach 6 and altitudes of 100 and 200 miles. This was Buck Rogers
stuff, space flight. This was it!
I knew instinctively that my future lay in that paper airplane.
It was then no more than a column of figures together with NACA’s
resolution to investigate its possibilities. But in my mind it was a
thing of steel, or titanium, or whatever material it would be built
of--a sleek, perfectly engineered object, a thing of marvelous beauty
and near-perfection, a boyhood dream in real life.
The X-15 had been born. The name of the game was to get aboard it
somehow, and at the right time.
* * * * *
The months rolled by at NACA. I flew sometimes two or three flights
a day in the X-4, X-5, and other craft. But my biggest effort was
reserved for the Douglas Skyrocket. Lacking other high-speed rocket
airplanes for data purposes, I gradually pushed the Skyrocket to
Bridgeman’s record of Mach 1.8 and beyond. In fact, during the
spring of 1953 after I had logged some thirty flights in the bird,
I regularly flew to Mach 1.8 and frequently to Mach 1.9 or a little
more. Since we had no real technical reasons to exceed it, I kept
below Bridgeman’s altitude record of 79,000 feet. My speed in the
Skyrocket was, of course, a world’s record. Typical of NACA we
hid this bright light under a bush, and Dr. Dryden ordered me to
stay below Mach 2. It mattered only a little to me. I had grown
up professionally within NACA and had come to accept urgency in
record-making as childish.
The military thought otherwise. That year, 1953, the world was
celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of flight, and the publicists
were casting around for a sensational drum-beat in memory of the
Wright brothers. In short, a new speed or altitude record. That
summer the long-awaited Bell X-1-A, a sister-ship of the ill-fated
X-1-D, arrived at Edwards. With it came the Air Force’s star, Chuck
Yeager, temporarily released from another assignment. We knew what
he would be shooting for: Mach 2. If he made it, he would go down
in history as the first man to fly Mach 1 and then Mach 2. It was
a publicity agent’s dream, a perfect unveiling for the fiftieth
anniversary of flight.
The Navy had not the slightest intention of letting the Air Force
pluck this plum without a stiff fight. One day in the summer of 1953
Marine Colonel Marion Carl arrived at NACA. Carl is one of the most
fabulous aviators in history. A leading ace in World War II, Carl had
set a speed record in the original D-558-I back in 1947. Since that
time he had been engaged in other assignments in Washington and was
top pilot for the Naval Air Test Center, Patuxent River, Maryland,
the Navy’s counterpart of Edwards. Carl had never flown a rocket
airplane. But Walt Williams called all of us into the office to
announce that the Navy was “borrowing” the Skyrocket for a few days.
Colonel Carl would try to beat Bridgeman’s altitude record of 79,000
feet and set a speed record of Mach 2.
“That will really make Yeager’s job tougher,” Williams said.
I threw myself into the venture as enthusiastically as if the flight
had been planned for me. One reason was that Carl, a big lanky guy,
was immensely likable and a superb aviator, in my book. I had to
admire his guts. There weren’t many pilots in the world who would
deliberately jump in the Skyrocket and go for broke. We stayed up
late at night. I told him every detail of the Skyrocket, all her
quirks and strong points, what to beware of, just how to balance on
that knife-edge high in the thin air, how to avoid the dangerous
Supersonic Yaw that had bothered Bridgeman and myself. In many ways
this was superfluous: he had done considerable cramming before he
came.
Carl had one advantage over most beginning rocket-plane pilots. The
NACA Skyrocket team was unbeatable. The plane was by now almost
completely debugged. He could count on efficiency and competence up
to the moment of launch, and a mechanically near-perfect bird in
flight. The rest was up to him.
The first two flights were failures--he never launched. On the
first I flew chase. Carl experienced some difficulty in the strange
Skyrocket cockpit and I was too far away to help. Thus on the second
flight I rode in the mother-ship bomb-bay compartment. I helped
Carl suit up and strapped him in the Skyrocket cockpit. Then, up
until the moment of launch, I helped Jack Russell operate the mother
plane’s manual Lox top-off system, pumping Lox into the tanks of the
Skyrocket to replace boil-off. Since liquid oxygen (Lox) “boils away”
at altitude, we had equipped the mother plane with a Lox “top-off
system,” which keeps pumping Lox into the research airplane until a
few moments before launch. Full Lox tanks also mean a longer rocket
flight, always a prime objective. Carl would need every ounce we
could squeeze in to break an altitude record. The second flight
ended much like the first. Frankly, I was amazed at the limitless
competence of the man in a brand-new and, to him, hostile environment.
On the third flight and first launch Carl made it. After a perfect
light-off he stood the Skyrocket on its tail and blazed to 85,000
feet, beating Bridgeman’s record by a healthy 6,000 feet. His
recovery in that thin air was adroit, and he landed the ship
dead-stick on the lake, beaming with pride. Now he was ready to
tackle the speed record, to rack up Mach 2 for the Navy.
This would be tough, I knew. My top speed in the Skyrocket, and
Carl had to exceed this first, was Mach 1.96. I had achieved that
speed only after months of flying in the ship, of learning to tread
the knife-edge with extreme care and skill. In that airplane even
the slightest over-pressure on the stick would cut the speed back
drastically and botch a flight. It would be tougher in summer, when
the air was warmer. The Skyrocket performed best when it was cold.
Colonel Carl made two unsuccessful tries for Mach 2. Then, under
pressure from some conservative elements in Navy headquarters, he
gave up the attempt, after failing to come close. Ever since, I have
held Carl in highest regard. In five brief Skyrocket flights he had
shattered the world altitude record. His record is usually omitted
from most aviation-record summaries. I think that is because he was a
Marine. But Carl, in no sense a small man, had never raised the point
himself.
Carl’s performance made a lasting impact on me. After he left
Edwards I began to think hard about records. The names of the
famous rocket pilots hummed through my mind: Yeager, Boyd, Ridley,
Everest, Bridgeman, Carl. I had seen enough of these men to know
that when they spoke they commanded the attention of four-star
generals and admirals, even Dr. Dryden. Although only one (Ridley)
was an engineer, when they made a suggestion about an airplane it
was considered a command, and millions were spent on their intuitive
say-so. Their authority had been built not only on a foundation of
tens of thousands of data points wrung from research airplanes, but
mainly from singular, spectacular bursts--records.
With the right man at the controls I knew the Skyrocket could reach
Mach 2, though not easily. Scott Crossfield might be the man, the
first man to fly at Mach 2. If so, who knew what the future held?