_End of an Era_
I drove slowly, gaping at the pale green hangar-sized North American
production buildings strung along the south edge of Los Angeles
International Airport like some titanic freight train. Hundreds
upon hundreds of automobiles were parked bumper to bumper in lots
adjoining the buildings. Inside those buildings, I knew, tens of
thousands of skilled workmen were riveting away on the last few
hundred of the six thousand Sabrejets the Air Force had ordered,
and tooling up for mass production of the supersonic F-100. Having
taken the measure of its size from close quarters, I then understood
how North American had ground out 43,000 airplanes in World War II.
It was a tremendous operation--five hundred times the size of NACA,
Edwards--a company that had built more airplanes than any other firm
in the world. Its bid for the X-15 alone--about $50 million--almost
equaled the yearly budget for all of NACA.
* * * * *
“How do you do, Mr. Crossfield.” North American’s president, Lee
Atwood, a thin, soft-spoken man with deep-set green eyes, held out
his hand. In stark contrast to the California environment, he was
meticulously dressed, conservative style. An aeronautical engineer,
in 1948 he had taken over day-by-day operation of North American
from the dynamic Dutch Kindelberger, the famous airplane-builder who
gave North American its great fame and reputation. Dutch had moved
up to be chairman of the board of directors. Atwood offered me a
seat and then returned to sit behind his broad desk. The office was
mahogany-paneled and decorated with deep green potted plants.
As I wound up for my pitch, it occurred to me that I was then about
to address one of the most important men in the aviation industry.
That I was in his office at all, I believe, was due solely to the
fact that I was the first man to fly at twice the speed of sound. In
the two years since I had made the record, this flight, technically
insignificant though it was, had opened many doors. Like Yeager,
Everest, and Bridgeman, I came to know four-star generals and other
big shots in aviation on a first-name basis. For example, I had
met Atwood the previous year in New York when at a gathering of
aeronautical engineers he presented me the Lawrence Sperry award for
my high-speed flight work. It was a farce, in a way, but for a man on
a mission it made the job a lot easier.
I was not really up to the interview that day. I was suffering from
influenza, the same malady that weakened me on the day of the flight
which paved my way to Atwood’s door. My nose was draining and every
few minutes I had to take out my handkerchief and blow. It was
annoying. I probably impressed Atwood as the least likely physical
specimen to fly the X-15 he ever saw.
“Mr. Atwood, I want to come to work for North American on the X-15
project.” I paused to let this sink in, and to see if it might bring
an immediate “no.” Mine was something of a bold and unorthodox move,
to put it mildly. North American already employed a team of perhaps
thirty test pilots, bossed by Bob Baker and Jack Bryan, both of
whom had been with North American for many years. No doubt many of
these pilots had their eyes on the X-15 and were fully capable of
test-flying it. I had long since learned that big corporations like
North American did not usually draw from the outside. They used
their own talent of special jobs.
“Rocket planes are my business,” I said, blowing again. “I’ve been
flying them for five years at Edwards, as senior pilot for NACA. I
not only flew them, I laid out flight-test programs, recorded the
data, drew up the reports, and presented NACA conclusions. I also
oversaw maintenance and participated in the rebuilding of the X-1-E
to the extent of laying out the new propulsion system--a combination
of the best features of the Skyrocket and the X-1--and other
hardware.”
Atwood interrupted me briefly to receive an important telephone call.
I blew my nose and cursed my flu. When he hung up, I rolled on.
“I know you have a very experienced organization down here with
plenty of able talent. But if you have never tackled a rocket
plane, there are some special problem areas. There’ll be a lot of
problems on this particular ship. It’s revolutionary. We’ve had a
bad history in research airplanes, as you know. Delays. Explosions.
Investigations. Instability. I think I can contribute. And I’d like
to have the privilege of working on this airplane. I want to help
make it as nearly perfect as possible and get it to Edwards in time
to do some good.”
“What do you want to do specifically?” Atwood asked. It was clear
from the telephone call I had overheard that he was a man of a few
well-chosen words.
“I’d like to start from the beginning. Work on the plane as an
engineer, helping with the systems, in a sort of advisory capacity.
In that way, when it came time to fly the airplane, I’d be thoroughly
familiar with all of it, down to the smallest bolt. During the
construction I could interject my experience with other rocket
airplanes. At the same time, as an ex-NACA hand, I’d be useful as a
liaison with that agency during all phases of construction and flight
test.”
I talked on, stressing my strong points--my master’s degree in
aeronautical engineering, my background in the wind tunnel at the
University of Washington, my brief experience at the Boeing plant
in Seattle during the early days of World War II, my Navy tour
as a flight instructor, my experience in manufacturing aircraft
accessories, my flight and engineering record at Edwards. Whether
it was all this combined, or the simple magic of Mach 2, I don’t
know, but in spite of my influenza and runny nose, Atwood, as is his
nature, gave me the benefit of the doubt.
As president of North American, Atwood bossed six separate divisions
of the company. Only one of these, the Los Angeles division, would
build the X-15. A president of a company of that size delegates total
authority to chiefs. He doesn’t hire men off the streets and thrust
them upon his lieutenants. He operates by suggestion.
“Would you like to go down and talk to Ray Rice about this? The
proposal is a kind of unusual arrangement for us. His division will
build the airplane and he knows what kind of people he needs.”
“Certainly,” I said.
“When can you get by to see him?”
“Right now, if it’s convenient.”
Ray Rice, Chief Engineer of the Los Angeles Division, bought my
proposal, I have often thought since, with some reservations.
At that time the X-15 project was still so new in the company and
I was so new to the company that there was no specific job slot
available to me. Thus I was hired, more or less, as a consultant, and
didn’t really learn who my boss was for a long time.
* * * * *
Coincidental with my move to North American, in December of 1955,
the great and glorious era at Edwards was in the twilight of its
life. The Skyrocket, after a total of about 130 flights, was slated
for moth-balls. The X-1-E, so long in the rebuilding, flew shortly
after my departure but never lived up to our expectations. Soon it
was grounded for good, when NACA learned that the pilot’s boot-tips
might strike the instrument panel in the event of an emergency
ejection. The X-1-B made a few more flights, some to collect advanced
information for the control system of the X-15, but this airplane was
old before its time and it, too, was ultimately grounded. The X-2,
the plane I was supposed to fly in the spring of 1951 for NACA, was
still slowly winding her tragic course into history, six years or
more behind schedule.
A few weeks after I departed Edwards, Pete Everest took the X-2
on her second powered flight, firing only one of the two rocket
barrels. In the weeks following, in a startling burst of activity,
he clicked off six additional powered runs, achieving on his eighth
and final flight a speed of about Mach 2.9, or 1900 miles an hour.
When Everest landed, as he wrote in his book, he telephoned his wife
and said, “Honey, you are talking to the fastest man in the world.”
She was--and his 1900-mile-an-hour flight in that unstable airplane
was, in my opinion, remarkable. As Everest himself said, “Control was
marginal and if the pilot overcontrolled or maneuvered the airplane
too violently, anything could happen.”
Walt Williams was anxious to take over the X-2 for NACA in order to
press ahead with a series of aerodynamic heating studies at extreme
speeds. But after its years of frustrating toil and heartbreak, the
Air Force understandably was not about to turn the plane over until
some additional records had been chalked up. On the verge of his
departure for other duties, Pete Everest assigned two new, young Air
Force pilots to make these flights. Iven Kincheloe, a handsome blond
captain, a graduate of the Empire Test Pilot School, and a Korean
ace, would make the altitude attempt. Captain Milburn (“Mel”) Apt,
a balding veteran of Edwards, would make the speed attempt. NACA
dutifully protested these flights, pointing to the dangers involved.
The Air Force compromised, setting a deadline of November 1, 1956,
for turning the plane over to NACA, whether or not Kincheloe and Apt
were successful.
Kincheloe came up to bat first. He made one check-flight in the X-2,
under Everest’s direction. Then after Everest left, Kincheloe reared
back to hit a home-run. He opened the engine wide when the X-2 was
dropped, and pointed the tapered nose skyward, the stick hauled full
back in his lap. On the first two flights the X-2 reached high,
but not high enough. On the third try, Kincheloe’s fourth flight
in the X-2, he succeeded. The X-2 hurtled to 126,000 feet. In that
rarefied air, when it ran out of momentum, the X-2 fell back toward
earth. When the plane reached the thicker atmosphere, Kincheloe, in a
remarkable piece of piloting, recovered, slowed, circled, and landed.
He never again flew a rocket airplane. On the strength of these four
flights and his inexhaustible enthusiasm for the business, the Sunday
newspaper supplements labeled him “Mr. Space.”
With the NACA deadline coming up fast, Captain Mel Apt, who had not
yet had a check-flight in the X-2, made hurried preparations for
a final effort to break Everest’s speed record. Four days before
his time expired, he launched in the X-2 for the ship’s thirteenth
powered flight. There was evidently no time for a preliminary flight
at low speed. In any case, the Air Force did not specifically limit
Apt on his first flight. He dropped, flicked on the rocket barrels,
and flew a near-perfect parabolic flight plan. The X-2’s rocket
burned six seconds longer than it ever had before. Mel Apt drove the
X-2 to the amazing speed of about Mach 3.1, or 2,094 miles an hour,
beating Everest by a wide margin.
The thirteenth flight proved to be the unlucky one. At the end of the
speed run the X-2 behaved as many had predicted. It cartwheeled out
of control, subjecting the X-2 and Apt to tremendous G forces. He
could not recover. As the plane whipped into a deadly inverted spin,
he tried to abandon ship. He blew the nose capsule and it separated
from the main fuselage, but before he could dive out and open his
parachute, the capsule struck the desert floor with terrible impact.
Apt was killed, the X-2 destroyed. Around Edwards, Pete Everest’s
title was changed from “Fastest Man in the World” to “Fastest Man
Alive.” A new street at the base was named in Apt’s honor.
That was the final, dreadful end of the X-2. In eleven years from
start to finish, the program had cost the U. S. millions of dollars.
It robbed two excellent pilots and one crewman of their lives and
destroyed, altogether, three airplanes. In its total of thirteen
flights the X-2 had provided the U. S. a speed and altitude record,
but precious little else. The X-2 yielded hardly a scrap of
aerodynamic heating data, the purpose for which it was intended. The
premature loss of the ship left the U. S. without a research airplane
to probe the Mach 3 zone and created, in a sense, a larger and more
urgent mission for the X-15.
The way I see it, that last flight of the X-2 drew the curtain on the
grand era at Edwards. It closed out what might be called the first
phase of the history of the experimental research airplane in the
United States. The big NACA installation went on, of course, piling
up data points by the tens of thousands, which proved useful. But all
the old race-track excitement was gone completely. There was no plane
to probe exciting new areas.
Edwards became a place of hard work and routine. NACA pilots wrung
the last drop from the group of tired planes. The Air Force pilots
concentrated on the newest production-model jets--Republic’s F-105
fighter-bomber; North American’s experimental F-107; Convair’s F-106,
a faster, larger version of the delta-wing F-102; and Convair’s
delta-wing, medium-range bomber, the B-58. The Navy pilots were busy
de-bugging a stable of comparable carrier-deck fighters and bombers,
and a pilotless missile, the Regulus.
I don’t mean to imply that the test work was not dangerous. On the
contrary, it was hair-raising at times and many pilots lost their
lives. Missing from the busy, formal scene, however, was the echoing
boom of a rocket engine exploding to life at 35,000 feet, the long
snaky trail of white rocket exhaust across the sky, the satisfaction
of the free drink at Pancho’s, another milestone on man’s inexorable
journey toward the stars reached or passed. In the period following
the loss of the last X-2, almost everybody who cared to flew Mach 2
regularly in production-line airplanes. But no faster.
It is only human to be nostalgic, and to view one’s own life from a
special point of view. So I draw some satisfaction from the thought
that my work on the frontier of flight contributed considerably to
the story of the grand era at Edwards. True, I came on the scene
late, three years behind Yeager’s epic Mach 1 flight; and I left
early, about nine months before Mel Apt’s epic Mach 3 flight. But I
had come when the experimental plane program was picking up, as the
new ships came from the factories, and I left just before the whole
show ran out of steam.
In those five years I logged only six hundred hours in the air, but
what hours they were! When I flip back through my own flight book, I
am astonished. Where did I find the time? Eighty-nine flights in the
Skyrocket; eleven flights in the X-1; a grand total of one hundred
rocket flights. For what it’s worth, that total is about equal to
all the rocket flights of Yeager, Everest, Marion Carl, Bridgeman,
Murray, Kincheloe, and Apt put together. No less interesting were
the twenty-five flights in the XF-92-A, thirty-two flights in the
X-4, twelve flights in the X-5, sixty-five flights in the F-100,
seventeen flights in the D-558-I, three flights each in the F-102
and F-84-F, one flight in a B-47 which I had studied years earlier
in the University of Washington wind tunnel, thirteen flights in an
F-86, one flight in a Navy F9F, sixty-four flights in the YF-84,
and scores upon scores of routine flights in the wide variety of
propeller-driven airplanes in NACA’s stable. I had even flown,
briefly, a Hiller helicopter.
In sum, I believe it is fair to say that I was good for NACA and NACA
was good for me. My six hundred hours of flight time, plus countless
hours of preparation and analysis on the ground, helped lay bare
many secrets in the trans-sonic area. It was a small contribution,
admittedly, but when taken together with all the aeronautical
research and experimentation in the United States, I believe it
helped to advance the state of the art. At the same time, the
education provided me by NACA in engineering, flying, industry and
government politics, and a thousand other things, was invaluable. At
NACA, Edwards, I graduated in my field. Most important, I found the
means of bringing my life full circle, to the X-15, the airplane that
would begin a new era at Edwards, the second phase in the turbulent
history of the research airplane, the second fifty years of aviation
history.