“_Leaf in a Tempest_”
I was king of the race track for three weeks. Then the old master,
Chuck Yeager, did it again. He shattered my record, but he nearly
died doing it.
I had been expecting the coup de grâce at any moment. Chuck had been
scheduled to fly the X-1-A on the day after my Mach 2 flight in the
Skyrocket. But when I logged Mach 2, the Air Force team pulled back
and regrouped, as the military say. Yeager now had his hands full.
Pete Everest describes this Air Force record-breaking in his book:
“By this time the old X-1 record had long since been broken by both
Bridgeman and Crossfield, so there was no question of keeping ahead
of them. Our problem now was trying to catch up.”
In early December Chuck flew the X-1-A Mach 2 and caught up. To quote
Everest again: “We had matched Bridgeman and Crossfield even money
and now we raised the bid.” Yeager would gun the X-1-A all out.
I watched these warm-ups--between my own press conferences--with more
than casual interest. The Wright Brothers Memorial dinner was just a
few days away. If Chuck failed, the Navy and Douglas could publicly
boast a clean sweep: Carl’s 85,000-foot altitude record and my Mach
2 speed record, both set in the Skyrocket. Yeager flew on December 12.
I took up a post that day on the Edwards radio circuit, to listen in
on the flight from the ground. Jack Ridley and Major Arthur “Kit”
Murray flew chase. I heard them routinely chatting on the air as the
mother plane bore down on the launch point at 32,000 feet. Then like
the crack of a starting pistol we heard the mother-plane pilot snap
to the co-pilot:
“Drop her, Danny.”
In my mind’s eye I could see the X-1-A falling rapidly away from the
mother plane and Yeager adroitly moving the controls. Now I knew he
would be hitting the four rocket-switches at intervals, blasting
skyward. In a matter of three minutes he would reach the finish line.
The seconds ticked by slowly.
“Got him in sight, Kit?” It was chase Ridley speaking to chase Murray.
“No,” Murray replied. “He’s going out of sight. Too small.” That was
a good sign--for Yeager.
The radio circuit was silent. There was no word from Yeager. I
dragged on a cigarette thinking: It’s just like him to keep everybody
on the hook.
Then suddenly all hell broke loose. Something was wrong. I became
aware of it when I heard Murray and Ridley shouting over the radio to
Yeager.
“Chuck! Chuck! Yeager! Where are you....”
Then Yeager came on the air, his voice hoarse and rasping, and barely
audible:
“I’m ... I’m down ... I’m down to 25,000 feet ... over Tehachapi.
Don’t know ... whether I can ... get back base or not....”
“At 25,000 feet?” Ridley asked incredulously.
“I’m ... I’m ... Christ!”
“What say, Chuck?” Ridley called. “Chuck!”
“I say ... don’t know ... if I tore ... anything or not ... but,
Christ!”
Yeager was obviously in serious trouble. The word flashed across the
base. Emergency trucks screamed toward the flight line. Helicopters
lifted off, heading for Tehachapi. We leaned over the radio speaker,
hanging on each word. Race-track competition was one thing, but now
a pilot’s life--a _great_ pilot’s life--was in jeopardy. I felt
helpless--almost sick.
“Chuck from Murray,” the radio crackled. “If you can give me altitude
and heading, I’ll try to check from outside.” The chase pilots were
trying desperately to find Yeager’s tiny craft, to guide him back to
base, to tell him if his wings were still in place.
“Be down at 18,000 feet. I’m about ... be over the base at 15,000
feet in a minute,” Yeager reported.
On the ground we cheered the master on. His last radio report
indicated he would make it. His voice had new confidence.
“Yes, _sir_,” Murray snapped on the radio.
We heard the routine as Chuck jettisoned and vented fuel tanks. He
sounded much better. The chase closed in.
“Does everything look okay on the airplane?” Yeager called, lining up
for the lake-bed landing.
There was still time to bail out if the ship was busted. But he
got little help. In his eagerness Murray had lined up on the wrong
airplane, a T-33 jet trainer. Quickly Murray shifted targets and
gunned his engine to close on Yeager’s craft, but it was too late.
Yeager was already letting down, committed.
“I don’t have you, Chuck,” Murray called.
“I’m on base leg,” Chuck reported. His voice sounded firm and strong.
“I’ll be landing ... in a minute.”
We heard some additional chatter and then Yeager said:
“Going to land long. I would appreciate it if you’d get out there and
get ... this thing ... this pressure suit. I’m hurting ... I think I
busted the canopy with my head.” He landed like the pro he is.
* * * * *
Yeager’s had been the fastest and wildest airplane ride in history.
The grim details of it spread through Edwards, hurriedly passed along
by tongues stammering in disbelief and admiration.
After drop, Yeager had lighted off the four X-1-A rocket barrels
one by one to achieve maximum speed. He pointed the X-1-A’s nose
toward the deep blue and at 75,000 feet he pushed over. The X-1-A,
in level flight, roared to Mach 2.42, or about 1600 miles an hour,
faster by a wide margin than man had ever flown before. Then in that
rarefied air, at a speed the X-1-A was not designed to fly, the plane
“uncorked.” The X-1-A tumbled wildly like a “leaf in a tempest, a
cork in a flooding stream,” as Everest puts it.
The X-1-A spun uncontrollably, dropping 51,000 feet in fifty-one
seconds, smashing Yeager about in the cockpit. As Yeager later
recalled the experience: “The voices have no reality in this lost
moment of your life. You’re taking a beating now and you’re badly
mauled. You can see stars. Your mind is half blank, your body
suddenly useless as the X-1-A begins to tumble through the sky. There
is something terrible about the helplessness with which you fall.
There’s nothing to hold to and you have no strength. There is only
your weight knocked one way and the other as the plane drops tumbling
through the air. The whole inner lining of its pressurized cockpit is
shattered as you’re knocked around, and its skin where you touch it
is still scorching hot. Then as the airplane rolls, yaws, and pitches
through a ten-mile fall, you suddenly lose consciousness. You don’t
know what hit you or where.”
Probably no other pilot could have come through that experience
alive. Much later I asked Yeager, as a matter of professional
interest, exactly how he regained control of the ship. He was vague
in his reply, but he said he thought that after he reached the thick
atmosphere, he had deliberately put the ship into a spin.
“A spin is something I know how to get out of,” he said. “That other
business--the tumble--there is no way to figure that out.”
The Air Force squeezed in by the skin of its teeth. Yeager’s new
record was triumphantly announced at the Wright Brothers Memorial
dinner in Washington. Yeager received many accolades. I didn’t
begrudge him one of them. If ever a pilot deserved praise for a job
well done, it was Yeager. After that X-1-A episode, he never flew a
rocket airplane again.
* * * * *
While it still retained control of the X-1-A, the Air Force itched to
make a try for an altitude record. As Everest says: “While we waited
for the engineers to tell us why Chuck got into trouble, we began an
alternate program to set a new altitude record....”
By then Everest must have come to believe his own Air Force press
releases. He says: “Bill Bridgeman’s record of 79,000 feet in the
Douglas Skyrocket was the mark ... to beat.” In reality the “mark
to beat” was Marion Carl’s 85,000-foot record established in the
Skyrocket. But, as I said, Carl’s record was seldom included in the
aviation-record summaries.
Major Kit Murray, who had flown chase for Chuck Yeager on the
ill-fated X-1-A flight, was picked as pilot for the Air Force
altitude attempt. His boss, Pete Everest, was reserving his strength
and skill for the X-2 flight program, if and when the airplane became
ready. Murray had flown chase on the X-1-A many times, but he had
never flown a rocket plane. Even so, as Everest puts it, Murray was
“well qualified” for this all-out attempt in the unstable X-1-A.
After long months of study, and conferences with Yeager, he was
thoroughly familiar with the airplane. However, as Everest reports:
“... we approached his flights with extreme caution.”
Inevitably there were delays. Murray’s “gravy flight,” as the Air
Force termed the record tries, did not arrive until June of 1954.
After drop and light-off Murray duplicated Yeager’s flight plan up to
65,000 feet. Then in place of Yeager’s high-speed run, Murray raised
the nose of the ship sharply and zoomed toward the sky. At 90,000
feet Murray pushed over in a gentle parabola, his speed just under
Mach 2. Says Everest: “Had he kept the nose up he could have gone
higher.... We wanted to play this one safe and use proper techniques
and not take chances.”
Then, Everest goes on, in spite of these “precautions,” the X-1-A
flipped out of control, virtually duplicating the final phase of
Yeager’s last X-1-A flight. As Everest explains it: “In thin air
of the upper atmosphere the plummeting rocket ship uncorked and
fell forty thousand feet before Kit was able to get control again.
Because he was going considerably slower than Yeager when he tumbled,
fortunately he did not take as bad a beating. After regaining control
he returned safely to base and landed, having flown higher than any
other human being.”
Murray had topped Carl’s record by 5,000 feet.
Following these demonstrations the X-1-A and its sister-ship, the
X-1-B, which had undergone several check flights by Everest and
Murray, were turned over to NACA for aeronautical research and
investigation. In his pilot report Pete Everest recommended that both
planes, “by using a cautious approach,” could probably be flown to a
maximum theoretical speed of Mach 2.5, or just a shade faster than
Yeager flew the X-1-A on his record-breaking flight. Neither airplane
was ever flown again to such speeds and altitudes.
By then the need for an advanced research airplane of stable design
was urgently felt throughout the entire aviation industry. At NACA,
Edwards, we then had four rocket planes in our hangar. These included
the X-1-A and the X-1-B, our rebuilt X-1, renamed the X-1-E, and
the trusty Skyrocket. All these airplanes were obviously unstable
above Mach 2; the Skyrocket could just barely squeak through to that
speed. The swept-wing X-2, by then almost ten years old from a design
standpoint, was at Edwards, in Everest’s able hands, but the engine
was still not ready for flight test. On a powerless glide test, with
ballast, the X-2 nose wheel had again skewered, causing the plane
to ground-loop at high speed, badly shaking Everest. This convinced
us--if we needed convincing--that the X-2 was really jinxed.
It was vital for the research airplanes to reach far ahead of the
military combat airplanes. Already the first of the Century Series
supersonic fighters had arrived at Edwards, and Air Force pilots
were flying at impressive speeds, encountering dangerous instability
and high-altitude engine malfunctions. One of these military planes,
a Lockheed F-104 straight-wing, lightweight day-fighter, with the
pilot’s pilot, Tony Le Vier, at the helm, cracked Mach 2 only a few
months after my Mach 2 flight in the Skyrocket. However, it was plain
that if we had learned more from the research airplanes in time, the
F-104 and the military planes that came with it--the F-100, F-101,
and F-105--good as they were, would have been immeasurably better
craft. At that time, moreover, the advance designers were laying
plans for a new generation of Mach 3 military airplanes. We had
yet to achieve Mach 2.5 in research airplanes. So the requirement
for data was even more pressing. It is possible to tell a great
deal from wind-tunnel data, of course, but wind-tunnel data are
always corrected with assumptions, which inevitably contain errors.
Airplanes must be flown full-scale to find out the true story. In
reaching to Mach 6, the NACA’s paper-study advanced research airplane
would provide a long-overdue and much-desired quantum leap.
* * * * *
The plane was slowly making its way into the world. In April of 1954
NACA completed its engineering studies, proposing a design that
looks very much like the X-15 of today. After the usual headquarters
shake-down, NACA forwarded this report to all of the senior members
of the main NACA committee and to the chairman, Jimmy Doolittle. A
few weeks later, in July of 1954, NACA brass met with the Pentagon
brass to hammer out the final details of the airplane. During this
meeting the Navy revealed that Douglas had prepared a paper study
of an “advanced Skyrocket,” with essentially the same performance
of the NACA-conceived craft. This report was received with great
interest, and some of its suggestions were later absorbed into the
X-15 program. But it was clear from the outset that the X-15 would be
primarily an Air Force show, with the Navy playing a supporting role.
There was not enough money in the kitty to build both Navy and Air
Force versions of a Mach 6 research airplane.
* * * * *
“About all this airplane will do is prove the bravery of the pilot.”
The speaker was the chief designer of a large aircraft manufacturer,
addressing a very influential body, NACA’s Aerodynamics Subcommittee.
The Subcommittee was composed of the chief design engineers of the
major aircraft companies of the United States. They were meeting
at NACA’s Edwards facility for a final rehash of the X-15. At
that pronouncement my heart skipped a beat. I was sitting on the
sidelines, a very interested bystander.
From conception the X-15 had proved controversial, just like most
matters in the highly competitive, uncertain aviation industry. Some
engineers believed NACA should reach for higher speed in measured
increments, that is to say, Mach 3, Mach 4, Mach 5, with separate
vehicles. Experts in the new and growing field of aero-space medicine
believed that zero G weightlessness and cosmic radiation would render
flight in the fringe of space, or in space itself, impossible.
Structural experts worried about the “re-entry” heating of the X-15.
It was known that the plane would glow red, like a blacksmith’s
forge, when it plunged back into the thick atmosphere. What known
metal could withstand so hot a blast and retain its integrity? Still
others were concerned about the very low L over D of the X-15.
Designed for stable, high-speed flight in rarefied air--or no air at
all--on landing, the ship would come in fast, dropping like a brick.
These were technical details. Even more significant was an ominous
philosophy underlying this historic meeting. By then--October,
1954--the U. S. had embarked on a massive, semi-crash program to
build a family of long- and medium-range ballistic missiles, to
include the Thor, Jupiter, Atlas, and Titan. In anticipation of these
weapons, missile-test vehicles had already achieved speeds--Mach 10
and up--that made our manned-aircraft efforts seem puny, indeed, in
some people’s eyes. These test vehicles were accumulating a vast
storehouse of limited-flight data within and beyond the atmosphere
on high-speed control, structure and aerodynamic heating. It was not
precisely airplane-type information, but it was very closely related.
Thus some of the engineers questioned the very need for a high-speed
manned research aircraft. Detractors suggested that an automatic
missile-type guidance system replace the pilot in the X-15.
Without quite realizing it, these engineers, who must always look
five to eight years down the road in their business, were, in a way,
debating the future of the manned airplane, as we think of it. Not
one of them would then have come right out and said that the manned
aircraft was diminishing in importance. On the contrary, they would
have protested it to the heavens. But the impact of the guided
missile was beginning to be felt, even though none of the proposed
missile weapons had been test-fired. In a subtle way, the missile was
creeping into all considerations of future projects. The fact that
the need for the X-15 and a pilot to fly it was questioned at all was
clear proof.
Despite strong objections the NACA Aerodynamics Subcommittee at this
meeting put the final stamp of recommendation on the X-15, in effect
ratifying Dr. Dryden’s course of action in Washington. Like other
research airplanes in the past, the X-15 would be an “open secret,”
that is, everything learned in its construction and flight operations
would be made available, through NACA and contractor reports, to all
of industry. The airplane would be thrown open to all industry for
bids. The Air Force would supply ninety per cent of the funds, the
Navy about ten per cent. When completed, it would be flown at Edwards
in accordance with the scheme I had developed earlier and presented
to Walt Williams. Just _who_ would fly the plane was left open for
further consideration. The whole project was to be carried out with
high priority as a “matter of national urgency.” A few weeks later
the Air Force called for bids.
Subsequently NACA displayed unusual boldness in dealing with the
Department of Defense over the proposed technical flight program of
the X-15. NACA demanded and received sole authority to determine who
should fly the airplane, and to what speed and altitude it should
be flown on each flight. Deference would be shown the Air Force,
of course, since that agency was footing most of the bills for the
plane, but NACA made it clear that aeronautical research would take
precedence over record-breaking. The X-15 would shatter existing
records, all in the line of business.
There was much that worried me after the aeronautical design titans
had departed Edwards. As I saw it, there was danger that the X-15
would wind up with too many cooks. Almost any member of the many
interested agencies had the authority to impose his ideas on the
airplane. Each was a specialist in one field or another; each an
advocate of this or that controversial, and often unproven, concept.
The overall shape and power requirements of the plane had been fixed
by physical law, but everything else was subject to change: the
instruments, the control surfaces, the control mechanism, the landing
gear, the escape system, and a lot of things yet to be invented.
The X-15, subjected to many individual influences, might wind up
not the ultimate, but a “bucket of worms” (all too familiar) as the
inevitable result, and far too late.
One thing worried me more. This was the growing influence of the
unmanned missile that had been so evident at the meetings. This same
influence had permeated the staff at our Edwards outpost. One day
during a bull session with the pilots, one of them said to me:
“You know, this X-15 might very well be the ship that closes a grand
era in aviation. The last of the great manned airplanes.”
“The hell you say!” Anger flushed my face. “The X-15 won’t close
anything. On the contrary, the X-15 will open a whole new era in
aviation: the second phase, the second fifty years. Centuries from
now historians dealing with space flight will look back to the X-15
as a starting point. They will compare its flights to the great
voyages of discovery, to the exploratory probes of Prince Henry the
Navigator’s captains down the coast of Africa, preceding the voyage
of Columbus. This is the beginning, not the end.”
“Say, Scotty,” one of the pilots said, “you feel pretty strong about
that airplane, don’t you?”
“You’re damned right I do.”
And that was a fact. I did.