_Light in the Open_
“What’s the situation on the X-1-A?” Williams asked. I had just come
from an inspection of the ship, which was being readied for flight in
the Edwards Air Force hangar.
“There are some technical difficulties in the airplane, some of them
critical, I think. I’ll give it to you in a report,” I said.
“Is Yeager going to go?” Williams asked.
“All out, that’s for sure. He was trying to feel me out a little,
find out what we were doing with the Skyrocket. I didn’t tell him,
although I let drop it was a pretty high Mach number. They’re going
to get this flight in before the Wright Brothers Memorial dinner if
it kills them.”
“Don’t say that.”
“I didn’t mean it that way, Walt.” I said. “But everything indicates
that this airplane is going to go directionally unstable at Mach 1.8
and above. I’m sorry to see they have pulled Yeager back especially
for this. Something might happen. He is going to Mach 2 or faster if
he can.”
“How about giving me a written report on the inspection? At least
we can show we were trying to make this thing as nearly safe as
possible. I’ve already put in one objection and gotten my ears
pinned. Don’t get into the flight operations aspects, just confine
the report to the systems inspection.”
“Okay, Walt.” I turned to leave.
“By the way,” Williams said, “we’re supposed to get some stuff
together for this proposed advanced research airplane. I’ve got
a report here prepared by O’Sullivan, Brown, and Zimmerman from
Langley.”
My heart skipped a beat or two.
“What do they recommend?” I asked.
“It’s not a recommendation for a specific airplane configuration.
They think some more study should be given. They want to run a
lot more wind-tunnel studies on shapes. They especially want to
investigate aerodynamic heating. They’ve sent the report to all
NACA facilities for general comment, and in some cases for specific
engineering studies. Most of the technical work will be done down
at Langley--the aerodynamic heating phase. They’ve rigged up a
shotgun-type wind tunnel that will give them a micro-second blast as
high as Mach 16. Miniature stuff, but a start.”
“What can we do to keep this thing rolling, Walt?” I asked.
“_Keep_ it rolling? You mean _get_ it rolling good and fast, don’t
you? This thing could die on the vine right quick if the right people
don’t push it.”
“All right, _get_ it rolling.”
“What I’d like _you_ to do, Scotty, is prepare a report--take your
time, a couple of weeks, if need be--outlining the operational phase
of the proposed advanced research airplane. Make this a real positive
report. Write it as though the airplane were a definite thing and
don’t overstress the problems. Show them that for us the flight
program of this airplane would be strictly no sweat.”
“I can do that because I believe it will be no sweat,” I said. “What
kind of guide-lines have they given us on speed and altitude?”
“The numbers they’re kicking around now are Mach 6 and 75 miles
altitude, close to 400,000 feet.”
I got up and walked to a map which covered one part of the wall in
Williams’ office. I made some mental calculations and spaced off some
distances with my thumb and little finger stretched to maximum.
“I think you’ll probably have to launch some place over Salt Lake to
make a powered flight and land at Edwards,” I said.
Williams got up and joined me before the map.
“How about this area around Las Vegas?” he said.
We stared at the patches on the map which outlined the many dry
lakes. There was a long string of them between Edwards and Salt Lake,
forming almost a straight line. Any of the lakes along the route
could serve as an emergency strip if something went wrong.
“How far is it from here to Salt Lake?” Williams asked.
“About four hundred miles,” I said.
He sat down and doodled on a scratch pad. He slammed open his desk
drawer and pulled out a slide-rule. He figured swiftly for several
minutes, scratched his closely cropped, stiff hair. I noticed that it
was beginning to gray.
“I think that’s it,” he said. “If the mother plane is fast enough,
you can take off from here, fly to Salt Lake in an hour or so and
launch. The research plane would be back here on the ground in half
an hour more.”
“Our first aircraft in space,” I said. In NACA’s vernacular we called
it “extra-atmospheric flight.”
That afternoon I began my report: “Operational techniques for a
research airplane of the type proposed in reference (a) will _not_
present difficult problems if operational people have a strong voice
in the philosophy of the design and function of the airplane and its
parts....”
I went on to discuss some of the technical details of the mother
plane, the launch speed and altitude and recovery phases,
recommending the Salt Lake area as a launch point. Then I digressed
into a discussion of the pilot safety and escape mechanisms,
emphasizing that all could be performed adequately by following known
procedures and making use of existing techniques. I expressed doubt
that cosmic radiation or zero G weightlessness would prove a problem,
although at that time, typically, there were experts in these fields
who had made a federal case of each.
I concluded my report: “Directly proportional to operational
problems, and hence of vital importance, is the complication of
the airplane devices and over-engineering of the systems. From the
inflight point of view, the pilot-protection items lose their value
if reliability and airplane performance are sacrificed.”
In short, let’s not botch up the airplane like the X-2 and X-3. Keep
it simple, always realizing that performance means pilot safety and
performance comes in this sense from reliability.
I completed the report on the following day and forwarded it to Walt
Williams. Thus, little by little, and much too slowly for our money,
the X-15 was taking shape in people’s minds.
* * * * *
They had towed the XF-92-A far down on the lake bed. It was sensitive
to crosswind and the more the take-off run was directly into the
wind, the better. Pete Everest was ready to make the last Air Force
test flight before turning the plane over to NACA. After the plane
was in place, the wind changed slightly. But that was enough to
cancel the flight. I was in Williams’ office with Everest.
“Well, Scotty,” he said, “you’re going to fly the plane next week.
Why don’t you go down to the lake and get it? You can taxi it back
and lift it off the lake, just to get the feel of it.”
I grabbed my flight gear and drove down to the airplane.
The XF-92-A was the worst-flying airplane built in modern times that
I know of. It was a delta-wing plane, the first modern delta job
manufactured in the country. Originally the plane was designed for a
ram-jet engine. When that engine fell by the wayside, the XF-92-A was
fitted with first one jet engine and then another. It was a hopeless
mess, a patchwork quilt of fixes upon fixes. It was underpowered,
under-geared, under-braked, and overweight. It was a nightmare. When
it first arrived at Edwards in the early days, Chuck Yeager washed
out the gear on take-off. After company demonstration, and Al Boyd’s
flight, by Air Force order only three Edwards pilots were permitted
to fly the plane: Yeager, Everest, and Crossfield. The Air Force was
not sorry to turn it over to me.
I climbed into the cockpit, pulled the canopy shut, and got set for a
fast taxi, and shallow lift-off, back toward the base area. I gunned
the engine, and the plane, heavy with fuel, wobbled into the air. I
had read the manual and talked at length with Pete Everest. I knew
the plane was weak on brakes. One way to stop the roll was to hold
the plane nose-high--very high. With the lake bed running out on me,
I horsed back on the stick and brought the nose up. My speed fell off
only slightly. I pulled back hard on the stick and nearly stood the
beast on her tail. She plopped down on the lake but continued to roll
like a Ferrari.
I was in trouble. The lake was all but gone. I was barreling toward
a cluster of sand dunes, unable to stop the plane. Well, Crossfield,
I thought, the old first-flight jinx is working hard, and this time
you’re going to wrap this plane up in a ball. It would be a mess,
too. The plane was fully fueled, all the tanks around the engine and
wheel-wells were brimming. Even under the best of circumstances, she
was a fire-trap.
I figured a way to save my own hide. I could see that a small bluff
lay ahead directly across my path. I would let the plane roll on
until an instant before it smashed into the bluff. At that second I
would retract the gear, turn on all the fire-extinguishers, blow off
the canopy, and, as the belly skidded onto the bluff, jump out and
run. I stop-cocked the engine and shut down all the circuit breakers
and pumped what little brake I had, first left then right, to dodge a
couple of sand islands in my path.
As the plane raced on toward the bluff, I suddenly noticed a narrow
dirt road going off to my left. Could I make that? I jammed on the
left brake with all my might. The small brake seized for a split
second, then fell off on the lake floor, a molten mass of metal.
But the plane had turned slightly toward the rutted dirt road and I
turned it still more by sheer will power. When I hit the road, the
tires blew and burned. But the plane stayed straight and level. A
hundred yards up the road, it finally ground to a halt. I pulled the
fire-extinguishers and jumped out.
After that the dirt road was facetiously renamed the Crossfield Pike
in my honor. Everest cracked: “You know, Scotty, you’re the only
pilot still alive at Edwards who has a road named after him.”
One of the weakest points of the XF-92-A was the engine installation.
During the early phase of the program before I flew it, we burned
out an engine on almost every other flight, laying the ship up for
repairs for weeks on end. In fact, it took eighteen months to log
eighteen flights. We made many changes in the installation and
operational procedures, so that by the time I flew it we fortunately
never lost another engine. But every time I took off in that plane
I held my breath until I reached sufficient altitude to use the
ejection seat, if necessary. The pilot never really flew that
airplane, he corralled it.
I made twenty-five flights in her during the summer and fall of 1953.
On the last one, in October, she collapsed on the lake bed while
taxiing after landing. The nose wheel simply got tired and buckled.
The plane ground-looped and came to rest, teetering on the nose and
one wingtip. After I was sure that it would not fall over on me, I
crawled out.
The plane never flew again after that. It was finished and no one
shed any tears. Some mechanics patched it up, and for a while it was
used for publicity purposes as a static exhibit at air shows, Rose
Bowl parades, and so on.
From an engineering standpoint I should not be overly harsh on
the XF-92-A. Actually, the combined Air Force-NACA flight program
produced a great deal of information which ultimately made the
Convair F-102 delta-wing fighter and its newer sister-ship, the
F-106, feasible airplanes. The data we accumulated from the XF-92-A
enabled the F-102 and F-106 to achieve an acceptable stability in
flight, and thus the darned thing had accomplished its purpose.
* * * * *
Not long after the final demise of the XF-92-A, I visited the office
of “Perk” Perkins, the Navy liaison civilian stationed at Edwards.
He was the very valuable contact for NACA when we needed something
from the Navy. He had been in the thick of the Marion Carl altitude
and speed attempts in the Skyrocket. He was a good friend.
“Perk,” I said, “I can’t be here officially. Dr. Dryden has ordered
me not to take the Skyrocket to Mach 2. But this is a Navy-sponsored
plane and I thought I would kick around some possibilities with you.
Something that the Navy would think beneficial.”
Perkins caught on fast. My case made sense. Yeager was going to
take the X-1-A to Mach 2, come hell or high water. The X-1-A was
a new bird. We knew it would be unstable above Mach 1.8. Yeager
had already encountered instability above that speed on a practice
run. Knowing Yeager, though, the chances were he would make it. The
Wright Brothers dinner was coming up. We could achieve Mach 2 in the
Skyrocket because after scores of flights we had learned to live
with its instability. I knew the plane well. I could fly it. “U. S.
Navy” was stamped all over the project. The Navy would get the credit
without risking a failure. If I failed, no one would be the wiser.
“The only thing is,” I said, “the pressure for this flight must come
from the Navy direct to Dr. Dryden on the highest levels. It’s going
to be tough because Dryden does not want to challenge the Air Force.
He’ll be caught in the middle but it ought to be interesting.”
I left Perkins’ office wondering if I had not slipped a cog. Imagine
Crossfield proposing a record attempt. Imagine Dr. Dryden approving
it!
In the best Navy tradition, Perkins was a resourceful and decisive
man. Right off, he found out that the Navy’s Chief of the Bureau of
Aeronautics, Rear Admiral Apollo Soucek, was visiting on the West
Coast. Perkins tracked him down. Soucek had no objections, provided
the matter had been cleared through the Chief of Naval Operations in
the Pentagon. Perkins got on the wire to the Pentagon and talked with
our old friend Marion Carl. Carl knew just how to do it, apparently,
because a week later Dryden sent word to Walt Williams to say that
the Mach 2 restriction on the Skyrocket had been lifted. Williams was
dumbfounded and for some reason suspicious of my role in this caper.
“It’s up to you now, Scotty,” said Perkins. “The Pentagon says we
can have one try at it. If we miss, we have to step aside for Chuck
Yeager.”
“I won’t miss,” I said.
* * * * *
The timing was splendid. I was not aware of it then, but a change was
taking place within NACA. The cost of operating its laboratories was
mounting in direct proportion to the increasing complexity of modern
airplanes. NACA urgently required advanced tools to probe new areas
of flight. These had to be in place in a hurry if they were to do any
good. But money was hard to come by. The administration, in general,
had taken a dim view of “research,” and NACA’s contributions were not
easy to explain in lay language. NACA was about to bring its light
into the open. The Mach 2 proposal must have fitted very neatly with
NACA’s new plans.
In fact, a few days later, to my astonishment Dr. Dryden’s able
assistant, Walter Bonney, arrived at Edwards. Bonney, a good-natured
man then a few years my senior, had worked for Bell Aircraft for
years as a public relations man. In 1949 Bonney had joined NACA in
Washington, where he soon discovered that his talents as a flack were
not so appealing as his talent for writing history. In the prevailing
atmosphere Bonney went underground and began preparing the most
thorough and objective history of aviation yet conceived. For years
my hobby had been aviation history. During the years Bonney and I had
spent many hours together on this subject. I had turned over to him
my collection of research.
“Walt!” I said. “What brings you to Edwards? We’re not doing anything
out here an aviation historian would be interested in.”
“Son,” Bonney said, tossing me a quizzical smile, “I’m not a
historian on this mission.” Bonney called everyone younger than he
“son.”
I knew then that Bonney had come out to handle “press relations” in
the event I was successful in reaching Mach 2. What was happening to
staid old NACA, anyway?