“_Fastest Man on Earth_”
November 20, 1953, was a cold, blustery day on the desert. I arrived
at the ramp before daybreak, shivering from the frigid wind and weak
from a bad dose of influenza. I had slept only a few hours. But it
mattered little how _I_ felt. My mind and body would be called upon
to perform full-bore for only four critical minutes. I had no doubt
that both could be summoned to peak at the proper time. The important
thing was how the Skyrocket shaped up.
She was snugged under the belly of the B-29 mother plane, almost lost
in a swirl of liquid oxygen fog, which boiled out of a vent. Pipes,
wires, and hoses leading from the ground-equipment carts and fuel
trucks were plugged into her top and sides. A swarm of mechanics,
heavily bundled against the cold, fretted about. In the background
was a steady, eerie, high-pitched whistle caused by pressure dumping
overboard through a relief valve, signifying to all that the
Skyrocket was ready for action. It was a falsetto call to arms.
In truth, the Skyrocket was being called upon to perform a minor
miracle. She was not designed for supersonic flight in the first
place. In concept she was old, years old, and even at Mach 1.8 we
were pressing her far beyond rational limits. One simple fact made
her go fast: the 200-second blast of her enormously powerful rocket
engine lighted off in mid-air at 35,000 feet, where we could take
advantage of the thin air. If the Skyrocket took off from the ground,
which she was not designed to do, even with her rocket engine going
she would not exceed the speed of sound. Too much time would be lost,
too much fuel consumed, leaving the ground and climbing through the
thick air that lies between the earth and 35,000 feet. The secret lay
in the air-launch. And even with an air-launch, the best any ordinary
team could hope for, with luck, was a speed of Mach 1.9. Bridgeman
and I had already crowded her limits. This speed was achieved in the
thin air above 50,000 feet, where at any instant the Skyrocket, not
designed for flight in those regions, could skid slightly and then
tumble wildly out of control.
After months of working together, the NACA Skyrocket team had learned
many little tricks to save time and gain an edge on the unknown. Take
the prime, for example, when we squirted a preliminary shot of Lox
through the engine, to chill it down for the big start. The prime
exhausted through a tube in the rear of the bird. As soon as the
prime flowed smoothly, we launched. If we delayed, we wasted valuable
Lox-energy. Jim Newman, an observer in the B-29, had learned to
anticipate the prime. He could tell on the first puff if it was going
to be good. As another example, I had perfected a rhythmatic method
of lighting off the four rocket barrels so that each tube gave us
every ounce of impulse it was capable of exerting.
All else being equal, in the final analysis the speed we achieved
depended directly on how much fuel we could carry. Here, too, we had
tried a trick. If we pumped the frigid, unstable, boiling liquid
oxygen into the Skyrocket about four or five hours before flight
time, giving it time to “settle down,” we knew we could squeeze
in a few more pounds. Storing the freezing liquid in the airplane
for so long a period caused the ship to transform into a gigantic
deep-freeze. Because of this, we called the procedure “cold-soaking”
the airplane. We also chilled the alcohol fuel for higher density.
The way our orders read, we had only one chance to crack Mach 2.
There could be no mistakes and thus we did everything possible to
grease the ship, hoping to gain a knot of speed or save an ounce of
weight. Everyone scoffed, but I had the crew wax the glistening white
wings and fuselage. We placed masking tape over every aperture and
crack. We replaced the stainless-steel prime and jettison tubes, used
only in an emergency fuel-dump, with lightweight aluminum tubing.
We carefully bent these tubes so they curved into the blast of the
rocket engine. Once I had lighted off and no longer required them,
they would burn away and fall off, shedding another few pounds of
drag from the Skyrocket.
* * * * *
“How’s everything, Jack?” Jack Moise, one of the B-29 launch-panel
operators, had, along with the whole crew, been awake most of the
night nursing the Skyrocket. He was an able mechanic and a cool
head in the air at launch time. He often operated the liquid oxygen
top-off system in the mother plane, pumping in the last bit of fuel
before launch.
“She looks real good, Scotty,” Jack said. “We’re ready to load
hydrogen peroxide.” We used peroxide as a fuel for the Skyrocket’s
fuel and Lox pumps that supplied the rocket engines with the
high-pressure propellants at tremendous rates. The peroxide
solution--ninety per cent--was so strong that a rag doused in the
liquid would spontaneously burst into flames.
“Go ahead,” I said. I tightened my jacket against the cold desert
wind.
Moise gave the signal and the peroxide flowed from a truck into the
Skyrocket. But a calamity was in the making--one of those unfortunate
“accidents” that always seem to haunt the record-breakers at
Edwards. The long “cold-soak” had frozen shut a hydrogen-peroxide
vent fitting. The dangerous liquid, pumped in under pressure, sought
an escape route. It overflowed into a manifold, rushed through a
pipe, and suddenly burst out of an untaped port near the rear of the
Skyrocket, showering Jack Moise. He yelled and covered his face with
his hands.
A quick-thinking mechanic, Kinkaid, grabbed a fire hose and brutally
splashed Moise full in the face with water. Without a second’s
delay we hurried Moise to the flight-line emergency dispensary.
There they carefully rinsed his face and eyes and stripped off his
peroxide-soaked clothing. His face was blotched white in a few spots,
but fortunately these disappeared within a few days.
Coming out of the doctor’s office, I saw Kinkaid sitting on a bench,
waiting for a check-up. He was soaking wet.
“You better get out of those wet clothes,” I said.
“No, Scotty, it’s okay. I’m warm,” he said.
I was about to leave when a question flashed into my mind. Why would
Kinkaid, wet as he was, be “warm” on so cold a day? The answer came
quickly: he, too, was soaked with peroxide, a thermite bomb, ready to
burst into flames.
I’m sure Kinkaid thought I had lost my mind. I ran to him and began
peeling off his many layers of clothing--two pairs of trousers, long
underwear, a jacket, sweater, and shirt. When at last he stood before
us completely nude and looking sheepish, I saw that his arms and
legs were bleached white. We had saved him from serious injury and
possibly a consuming peroxide fire.
This near-disaster delayed our preparations, but not much. Back at
the ship another mechanic thawed the peroxide fitting with a hot-air
gun, and soon the Skyrocket was loaded, ready to go.
Herman Ankenbruk, the project engineer, had spent many hours
working out a flight plan that would give the Skyrocket maximum
performance--and then some. Usually after drop I flew the plane on a
giant parabolic course, going uphill and then pushing over, achieving
maximum speed in a mild dive. Everything was timed to the split
second. Too much climb would rob me of rocket-engine burning time on
the descent. A sloppy pushover would leave the Skyrocket at too low
or too high an altitude at burn-out. The high-speed dive lasted only
a few seconds. Plunging earthward, the Skyrocket soon encountered
thick air, building up a dragging shock-wave on the nose. When
the drag equaled the thrust of the rockets, they shut off and the
Skyrocket slowed like a truck hitting a brick wall.
After a brain-numbing analysis of all previous flight data and
endless conferences with me, Herman advised me to climb to 72,000
feet. The winds aloft that day blew from the east. A launch in the
western end of the valley, heading east, might add a few miles per
hour, we thought. The cold temperature that day suited the Skyrocket
fine.
* * * * *
The success of the flight to a large extent depended on the
performance of the mother-ship crew. On this day especially, the
Lox top-off had to be perfect. Each drop of Lox pumped in at the
last moment added precious micro-seconds to the burning time. I
was completely confident. Jim Newman, I knew, would anticipate the
prime and call it right. The mother-plane pilot, Stan Butchart, an
old friend from the war and the University whom I had recruited for
NACA, would drop at precisely the right point at the best speed and
altitude. He had done so many times in the past. These men were pros.
At 10,000 feet I crawled into the familiar cockpit of the Skyrocket
and the canopy was slammed shut. All the gauges were in the green.
Only one thing worried me. When we reached altitude, it was my job to
pressurize the cockpit of the Skyrocket by releasing compressed air
through a valve. There was no gradual compression. The gas exploded
into the cockpit in one burst. The effect on the pilot was similar
to that a diver might experience with a split-second change in
depth. The sinus tubes sometimes clogged and built up pressure that
telegraphed a racking pain through every cavity in the pilot’s head.
Long before, from years of flying and pressure-chamber work, I had
developed that dreadful occupational affliction of pilots: tortured,
mangled sinus channels. On two occasions in the past the pain had
been so severe at pressurizing that I had had to cancel. I worried
now about how my influenza might have complicated my sinuses. It was
possible they might be unbearably painful.
Against this possibility I had brought along a piece of insurance, a
small cork. Preparing to pressurize, I reached back and plugged the
cork in the compressed-air tube outlet. I turned the valve and eased
the cork out of the pipe slowly. The pressure in the cockpit built up
gradually and caused me no pain whatsoever. When the cabin-pressure
gauge reached the green, I reported by radio to Butchart:
“Pressurized.”
We droned on toward launch point, our path marked by four snowy-white
contrails. The air was slightly turbulent and we bounced more than
usual. The Skyrocket creaked in its mechanical nest. Too busy to
care, I set my stop-watch and began the pre-launch routine. I
pressurized the fuel tanks. The gauges, thank God, held steady in the
green. Then I turned the switch on the Skyrocket panel which blazed a
green “ready” light on Butchart’s panel in the B-29.
“Going to prime,” I intoned on the radio. There was no dramatic
nonsense on our radio circuits. Almost before I had completed my
sentence, Jim Newman called back:
“Prime looks good.”
“Five, four, three, two, one. DROP!” Butchart called the countdown
with almost exaggerated calm.
The Skyrocket fell away on its elevator course, and a blinding flash
of sunlight hit my eyes. When the ship rolled gently to the right,
as usual, I trimmed quickly and hit the rocket-barrel switches,
pausing a split second until each caught. The Skyrocket surged ahead.
I pulled back on the stick and the horizon disappeared from my
windshield. I called Butchart by radio for a steer.
“You’re to my right and going uphill, Scotty,” Butchart said, placing
the Skyrocket in relative position to the mother plane. This was
important because in the steep climb I couldn’t tell direction.
“All four going good,” chase Captain Givens reported. I soon left
them far below and behind.
With luck the rocket barrels would burn a total of 200 seconds.
These three minutes would spell success or failure. While the
Skyrocket bored steadily toward the heavens, I prayed silently to
God. “Don’t let me goof this one.” Meanwhile I kept my eye glued to
the needle-ball, air-speed and altitude instruments, an archaic but
very effective method. If they charged ahead too much or dropped off
suddenly, I would burn fuel needlessly. The way Herman had calculated
it, I had to ride an imaginary parabola in the sky, veering no more
than a few feet off course. This was the delicate knife-edge.
Coming up on 72,000 feet, I began the push-over. The Skyrocket,
engines blazing furiously, arched nicely and began the big downhill
run. This was the supreme moment: the Olympic bobsled run, the
80-meter ski-jump, the first and last downhill lunge on my wild
roller-coaster. I prayed that the barrels would burn a few more
seconds. My eye now alternated from the Mach meter, which was slowly
edging toward the magic 2.0 reading, to the needle and ball; if
either deviated, precious energy and speed were lost.
I could hear the usual chatter on the radio from chase: “Do you have
him in sight?”
“No. I see the exhaust. But I can’t see him. He’s lost in the sun
some place.”
“Well, I’ll ease over the base and try to pick him up when he gets
back down here.”
“Rog.”
The Skyrocket was performing like an Olympic champion. She held true
on her spectacular dive. The rocket engine burned several seconds
longer than usual--207. The “cold-soak” had paid off. The Mach meter
needle edged past 2.0 and hung at 2.04. WE HAD MADE IT! I had become
the first man to fly at twice the speed of sound, and this historic
milestone had been automatically recorded by the data instruments in
the Skyrocket.
The rocket engine cut off with a pop-pop-pop-pop, just about the
instant the Skyrocket entered the “thick” air. The ship slowed
abruptly, throwing me forward against the shoulder straps. I drew
back on the stick and began the pull-out, still coasting at better
than Mach 1.8, taking care to see that the ship did not fall off the
knife-edge. Dropping silently back through Mach 1.0, the Skyrocket
for a brief instant shook harshly, like a wet dog drying his fur.
Now it was time for the dead-stick lake-bed landing. Coming over the
edge of the lake at 15,000 feet, I whipped the ship into a victory
roll. As I slowed, the chase planes found me and closed on my
wingtips. I lined up for the let-down.
The Skyrocket’s wheels touched down between the two long black lines
painted on the dry-lake bed at precisely the point I had picked to
land. She rolled to a stop twelve minutes from launch. Walt Williams,
followed by Walter Bonney, ran up to the side of the ship, awaiting
my report. I pushed back the canopy and looked at Bonney.
“I don’t think you’ve wasted your time coming out here.” He beamed.
* * * * *
“Scotty, how did it feel?” It was a mob scene in a room of the
Statler-Hilton Hotel in Los Angeles. In the glare of spotlights,
newsreel cameras ground and flash cameras exploded in my face. The
reporter who asked the question, one of about fifty jammed in the
room, held his notebook in hand, pencil poised. Other reporters
were shouting from all corners of the room. The phone was ringing.
Everybody wanted an interview. National magazines were on the scent.
Walter Bonney was in his element. At last NACA had hit the big time
in his business, too.
How did it feel? I turned the question over in my mind slowly, gazing
blankly at the reporter. How did you explain how it felt in a word or
two, which was all he wanted? Tell them you didn’t believe in making
records? Tell them it was part of a careful lifetime plan? Reveal the
secrets of the proposed advanced research airplane? Tell them you
just wanted to show Yeager a thing or two?
“Well, if you want to know the truth,” I said, “I didn’t feel good
yesterday. I had the flu. A real bellyache.”
The newsmen scrambled out, leaving Bonney and me to sort through a
hundred or more invitations to make speeches, appear at football
games in the half-time, and other scientifically significant events,
and to fend off still more reporters who wanted to write “human
interest” stories about me and, worse, my family. It was a new
and zany world to me. That night when I picked up a Los Angeles
newspaper, I stared dazedly at the black headline two inches high and
eight columns long:
PILOT FLIES MACH 2 AND GETS BELLYACHE
A few nights later I was guest of honor at a ceremony in San Diego.
Sitting next to me at the head table was movie star and swimming
champion, Esther Williams. We all waited patiently while some Air
Force general droned through a long, prepared speech about the
marvels of science and airplanes in particular. Finally my beautiful
dinner companion, dressed in a tight-fitting gold lamé dress, was
called upon to speak.
Esther Williams approached the mike. Leaning over the lectern until
her best features were prominently spot-lighted, she spoke slowly:
“You know, I’ve been getting a lot of static all night long about
sitting next to the fastest man on earth. But I don’t believe it. He
hasn’t laid a hand on me yet!”
I only wished that the exceedingly eminent Dr. Dryden had been there
to see the crowd double up on the floor with glee. NACA had indeed
arrived at a turning point. Scott Crossfield, too.