Chapter 13: ►

“_Barefoot Boy with Cheek_”

It was a sparkly clear spring day in the desert, about eight months after I joined NACA at Edwards. When the Air Force B-29 mother plane reached 8,000 feet, its pilot, Captain Pete Sellers, passed that fact over the intercom. It was a signal to me: aft in the bomb-bay compartment, converted to nest the X-1 in the bomber’s belly, I climbed on the small elevator--a plank with aluminum-tubing guard-rails--hitched up my chute, and waved to the launch operator, Eddie Edwards. The elevator descended slowly through the bomb-bay, and presently I found myself precariously suspended over the wide-open spaces, battered by the slipstream. The vast, desolate desert lay in unobscured view in all directions.

The X-1 “door” was on the side of the airplane. Thus it could not be entered, like the Skyrocket, from the mother plane’s bomb-bay compartment. The pilot had to go outside, below the mother plane. The elevator, seemingly a crude way to get to the X-1, was actually considered plush. In the early stages, back in 1947, Chuck Yeager had to climb down a ladder into the whipping slipstream.

I eased into the cramped X-1 cockpit and waved my hand. The elevator ascended and presently came down again, bearing the X-1 door, which had been placed inside the bomb-bay compartment before take-off. I set it in place and dogged the handles shut from the inside. In preparation for my first flight in the X-1, I had practiced this maneuver several times on the ground.

Actually, that day, the fitting of the door in place was much more difficult than I have made it out to be. The reason was that I had three broken ribs. This minor calamity had occurred several days earlier in the hangar while I was skylarking with the mechanics. I had playfully grabbed one by the seat of the pants and thrust him through the stockroom window. As his head disappeared over the sill, his feet came up and accidentally smacked me in the chest, cracking three ribs at once. I had sworn him and the others to secrecy. I knew that if Williams or Vensel found out, I would be grounded for a long period.

There were two additional NACA pilots at Edwards then, Walt Jones and Joe Walker. Walt Jones, about 25, had been hired about the time John Griffith left NACA. A graduate of Purdue, he had served in the Air Force with Griffith. A handsome man, the son of a minister, he was short on flying hours but showed great potential. He later left NACA and was killed test-flying for Northrop. Joe Walker, my age, was an Air Force veteran of World War II, who had worked at NACA’s Lewis Lab. A superb foul-weather pilot, Walker specialized in de-icing experiments at Lewis. Walker was a Pennsylvanian, but he talked like a West Virginian, and had a slow easy-going manner and a toothy smile. But Jones and Walker were new to Edwards, and the demands on NACA were increasing. So I had my chest taped and flew anyway.

My flight that day in the X-1, as planned, was nothing sensational; simply a check-out flight. By then, not surprisingly, I had acquired a reputation for encountering an emergency on first flight. I was determined that the X-1 check-flight would go off without a hitch.

After I had dogged the X-1 door in place, there was still a long and monotonous climb to our drop altitude of 30,000 feet. I snapped my lap belt and shoulder harness and settled back, sweeping my eyes across the instrument panel, checking the pressures in the rocket-fuel tanks and other systems. Everything was normal, or as near-normal as it is possible to come in a research airplane.

The X-1 was old then--going on six years--but she was still the fastest and best research airplane at Edwards. The main reason for this was the fact that the plane was a model of simplicity. When Bell had been assigned the job of designing her in 1944, they had ably and swiftly tamed a wide frontier of aerodynamic unknowns. They knew that a .50 caliber bullet had been fired supersonically, so they shaped the X-1 like a bullet. They stuck on a pair of thin, straight, stubby wings and a Navy-sponsored rocket engine, built by Reaction Motors, Inc., a small outfit working out of a garage in New Jersey. From beginning to end, Bell’s Chief Engineer Robert Stanley insisted on simplicity. The control system, instrument panel, landing gear, everything about the plane, were deliberately and forcefully held to a minimum of complexity.

Stanley’s approach to research airplanes had paid rich dividends a hundred times over. After Yeager had cracked the sonic wall, and Pete Everest had climbed to 73,000 feet in the X-1, a dozen other test pilots had flown the ship during 1948, ’49, and ’50. _Glamorous Glennis_ was in the Smithsonian, but our X-1 had already logged a total of maybe forty-five flights. They had provided tons of data without a single flight casualty. It would continue to fly off and on over the next few years, providing data in the trans-sonic area and a never-ending challenge for its pilots. In its day, the X-1 was the king of the hot-rods.

Approaching launch altitude, I got set for my first X-1 drop, priming the rocket engine, building up pressures in the fuel system. My chase pilots that day were Air Force Majors Jack Ridley, an old X-1 hand, and Pete Everest. Tucked in close under the tail of the B-29, they watched the puffs of vaporized fuel snaking out prime lines and reported:

“Prime looks good.”

B-29 pilot Pete Sellers began the countdown. Suddenly I recalled a humorous incident which had happened one time when Bob Champine, the pilot I replaced at NACA, had reached this stage of an X-1 flight. It had been no fault of the plane, just a simple language snafu. An ex-Navy pilot, Bob always spoke in Navy terminology in the air. Seconds before launch, the pressure gauges fell off, and he decided to cancel the flight. From the cockpit of the X-1 he snapped on the radio: “Secure the drop.”

Dick Payne, in the bomb-bay compartment, was then working loose the pins in the shackles which held the X-1 in its belly nest. Accustomed to working with Air Force pilots, Payne thought “secure the drop” meant “go ahead and complete the drop.” Champine had loosened his lap belt and was on the point of crawling out of the X-1 side door to return to the bomb-bay when his plane suddenly fell away from the bomber. Luckily he had time to snap himself down. From then on, “secure the drop” was used to rib all of us ex-Navy types.

To achieve a good launch from the mother plane it is vital that the research plane be in proper trim. This means that the plane’s controls should be set for full fuel tanks. A pilot _could_ correct the control trim after launch, but an overly nose-up or nose-down setting at the moment of launch _could_ cause the plane to take off on a wild gyration.

The X-1 stabilizer was always set on “trim” on the ground before take-off. That morning I had watched the engineer working with a template and inclinometer, attempting to align the stabilizer chord with the wing chord. I had done this many times on models in wind tunnels and knew it was quite easy to make a mistake. I had asked a few questions but the engineer replied, in effect, that he knew what he was doing. I was still feeling my way then with the ground personnel. I let it go.

As it turned out, the engineer _had_ made a mistake. The X-1 was launched with a full degree in excess of normal stabilizer trim. The result was spectacular. When I dropped away from the mother plane, the X-1 pitched, stalled, and flipped on its back.

Chase pilots Pete Everest and Jack Ridley, who had been flying beside me, quickly searched the skies, wondering where I disappeared to. When Pete spotted the X-1 below them, upside down, he was dumbstruck. At last, he found his voice and, with the aplomb he could always muster, spoke on the radio:

“Well, _that’s_ certainly a new way to launch!”

There was no use in blowing my stack, I thought. The launch was hopelessly botched. It was now clear to me that on first flight of any plane I was jinxed, and there was no reason to fight it. The thing to do now, I thought, was to make a respectable recovery from an impossible start. Get the plane right-side up, light off the rockets, and go for broke.

I rolled out, cranking the stabilizer back to normal trim, and then I fired all four rocket barrels. When they caught, the X-1 lurched ahead, picking up speed. I held the nose steady and climbed. But there was no chance for high speed on that flight. During the unorthodox launch and recovery, the X-1 had fallen too far into the thick atmosphere. Drinking fuel at better than a ton a minute, her engine, I knew, would sputter and die in another eighty seconds. I focused all my attention on maintaining a positive gravity (positive G) pull on the airplane. If I porpoised and lost it, including weightlessness (zero G)--that unusual sensation one sometimes experiences in a fast-falling elevator--the fuel flow to the engine would stop, closing it down prematurely. At least I would try to avoid that.

I did. I was hitting about Mach .9 and going through 41,000 feet when the last of the fuel whipped through the engines. The four barrels of the rocket engine blew out almost simultaneously, each one making a noise like a pop-gun. Following that, the X-1 was a tomb of silence. Except for the crackle of static in my earphone, and a gentle scrubbing of air on the fuselage skin, there was no earthly sound. I was now flying a glider--one of the world’s heaviest and fastest--which I would have to sail back to Rogers Dry Lake alongside Edwards Base.

If misfortune had dogged my flight thus far, it was nothing compared to what happened next. Quick as a wink, on base leg for landing, the whole windshield was blanketed by a thick coating of ice. I was sealed in--blind as a bat. This time the cause was not attributable to the failure of machinery. The X-1 defogging system was simply too weak. On humid days it was not unusual for considerable moisture to collect inside the X-1 cockpit on the climb to pilot boarding-point while the door was off. At high altitude this moisture turned to ice. It was my first-flight luck to go aloft on a very humid day.

When I reported an iced windshield on the radio, I received little sympathy from my fellow pilots. Jack Ridley laughed over the radio and, in his strange, falsetto voice, cracked: “Funny, isn’t it? Same thing happened to me the other day.” Both pilots joined me quickly, however, and pulled their fighters close in to my wingtips, standing by to guide me back to the lake-bed landing, if necessary. An old hand with iced windshields by now, I banked around and, with help from Ridley, lined up on the lake.

By Hollywood standards, by now I should have been overwhelmed by fear. Beads of perspiration should have been popping out on my forehead, and my hand should have been trembling on the stick. Alas, such was not the case, nor have I ever known it to be amongst my fellow test pilots.

So many people have asked me so many times whether I have ever experienced “fear” in the air that I have been compelled to think about this word and analyze it. My conclusions may be far from complete and slightly inarticulate, since I believe this word falls into the realm of philosophy, which is not my strong point. Fear, I think, is something that a man feels when faced with an unknown--when in spite of his background and experience he runs out of things to do. In a mechanical device such as a fast-moving airplane, an unexpected or unpredicted emergency often happens suddenly, and it is startling. Perhaps it is comparable to walking up behind a child and shouting “Boo!” The child is startled, and this is a better word than “fear” to describe the initial moment, I believe. If the circumstances are fairly routine, the child follows a pattern of action. He turns to see what has startled him. Observing the cause, he laughs away his concern. There are exceptions, of course--a startled child in a strange or hostile environment, for example, which may make a lasting impression.

Pilots are occasionally startled like everyone else. The normal reaction to being startled, like the child’s, is to look for the cause. The pilot learns from long experience to determine this cause swiftly and positively. Then, in place of the child’s immature laughter, he turns to action. There are set procedures to put matters straight again. If, for example, a fire-warning light suddenly flashes on the instrument panel of a propeller-driven airplane, there are prescribed routines. The pilot shuts down the engine, cuts off the fuel lines, dumps a fire-extinguisher foam into the cowling, and feathers the propeller so that it does not cause unnecessary drag on the surviving engines. Then, if necessary, he must look for a field and land. If a pilot is certain of a bad fire in a jet, there is one prescribed procedure: get out fast in the ejection seat.

When startled by an emergency, pilots whose minds dissolve into a frenzy which delays, interferes with, or prohibits corrective steps ought, I believe, to get into some other business. Beads of sweat on the forehead should come only from hard work or too much clothing; a trembling hand on the stick only from a hangover.

Men who climb mountains don’t experience fear when faced by some crisis. They take the necessary steps to avoid the crisis. Experienced divers don’t melt into a panic when they face an aggressive shark underwater. They take the necessary counteraction. Ship captains don’t give up in despair when their craft founder. They launch the lifeboats.

These are cases where the emergency comes swiftly and in an environment that seems to attract the purple-prose experts. But men and women in other walks of life face grave, unheralded emergencies every day of the week. Consider the ponderous emergencies big financiers must slide into as they deal on the stock exchange day by day. Or surgeons who probe the human body, or mothers who must deal promptly with gagging children. We never think of these people as dissolving into fits of fear, yet their responsibility may outweigh the lone pilot in his craft by a factor of a thousand or ten thousand. If something goes wrong, they take the necessary steps to settle it favorably. The incident is rarely noted publicly, as are the pilot’s emergencies.

I suppose there are many people who go through all of life beset by a variety of fears. It could be fear of disease, of professional failure; fear of love or of not being loved; fear of the neighbors; fear of government, or their leaders, or fear of fear itself. All these people, in my book, would fare better in this life if they probed the cause of this fear, if they don’t know it already. Once the cause were known, they could, or should, take the proper action to right the situation, and rid themselves of it. This could even apply to those people who live in slave nations, under a constant so-called reign of fear of a different order. Witness the birth of this nation.

I have been startled in an airplane many times. This, I may say, is almost routine for the experimental test pilot. But I can honestly say I have never experienced real fear in the air. The reason is that I have never run out of things to do.

Some day I might. Conceivably, I might be locked helplessly in the cockpit of a burning airplane in a death spiral, unable to take any further action to save my life. Facing certain death which I was powerless to forestall, I might very well be overcome by fear. But for me this would be a very special kind of fear--a fear of coming face-to-face with a strict God who might look askance on the ways of a test pilot--and not be talked out of it. But so far I have been spared that ultimate confrontation.

* * * * *

What concerned me that afternoon on my first flight in the X-1 was the landing--the possibility I might wind up in the ever-growing “Nose Wheel Club.” The X-1 had a most peculiar behavior pattern just at the moment of touchdown. In the final flare-out, when the three wheels were reaching for the ground, the plane sometimes bounced skyward without warning. Ordinarily a pilot in a plane that behaved thus would push forward on the stick and bring the nose down. If he did this in the X-1, the nose slammed hard and caved in the nose wheel. That master pilot, Yeager, had discovered by his native skill that if the pilot were to violate all his instincts and pull _back_ on the stick, the plane would recover and grease on with no damage. Only Yeager and a few other pilots had avoided the Nose Wheel Club. It was no disgrace to prang a nose wheel, and to avoid it was a fine point of flying indeed, but I intended, as a matter of pride, to stay out of this club. The iced windshield, however, vastly complicated my first X-1 landing and made my nomination almost certain.

As my altimeter unwound rapidly, I searched the X-1 cockpit for a rag, a tool, anything I could use to rub off the coat of ice. There was nothing. I had no handkerchief in my flying coveralls. But wait....

I loosened my shoulder straps and bent over, pulling at the shoestrings of the low-cut oxford shoe on my right foot, thanking my lucky stars I hadn’t worn flying boots. In two seconds I had the shoe off. Then I took off my right sock and replaced my bare foot on the right rudder bar. The metal was frightfully cold. My foot clung to the bar stickily, like one’s hand on the bottom of an ice tray just out of the freezer. Using my cotton sock as a scraper, I rubbed hard in one spot on the front windshield, just over the instrument panel.

By the time we had descended to 5000 feet--gliding like a brick--I had worn a small hole in the ice, enough to permit me to see the X-1’s nose and the long desert lake bed stretching ahead. I squinted one eye and fixed the other on the small hole like a peep-sight, lining up the parallel black lines painted on the dry-lake floor. Ridley was droning off my decreasing altitude, but I didn’t need him. I flared out at 135 miles an hour.

I brought the stick back slowly; the air speed got low and the right wing dropped sharply, scraping the desert floor as I touched down. I threw the stick to the left at just about the moment the nose wheel touched. The X-1 rolled out straight and level, rumbling firmly across the hard-packed silt. The nose wheel held.

The usual caravan of vehicles, trailing a huge rooster-tail of dust, tore out across the lake and clustered around the small white bird. When I undogged the X-1 door, a mechanic lowered it to the ground. I climbed out--with my right foot bare as a baby’s behind.

Someone shouted: “Where is your right shoe?”

When I held it aloft for all to see, another voice cried: “Barefoot boy with cheek.” Then they all broke into laughter. I knew that at Edwards, at least, I had it made.