Chapter 15: ►

_Disaster on the Race Track_

The success of the Navy-sponsored Skyrocket caused great consternation in the Air Force camp at Edwards. Suddenly two of Bell’s rocket planes were made ready--or _almost_ ready, as it turned out--for flight. One was the long-awaited X-1, model 3 (called “Queenie”), with a low-pressure fuel system, thus putting its debut years behind those of its sister-ships, _Glamorous Glennis_ and the NACA’s X-1. The second Bell plane was the X-1-D, one of the second-generation X-1s with the larger fuel tank and the military cockpit. In the strange way of schedules, the X-1-D was completed before the X-1-A and X-1-B. The planned X-1-C was never built. Its parts and funds were cannibalized to complete the A, B and D models.

The X-1-D was a new animal, a strikingly fast, dangerous research airplane. On paper it could reach Mach 2.5 or maybe Mach 3. Like most of the planes arriving at Edwards in those tumultuous, fast-moving days, its design was already outmoded. We knew that the X-1-D would be unstable at very high Mach numbers. Its new fuel system, nearly identical to that in Queenie, was untried, and full of bugs. Under such circumstances, caution was the better part of valor. But no. At Edwards occasionally the temptation to throw caution to the winds was overwhelming. As Pete Everest has written in his book, _The Fastest Man Alive_, mincing no words: “... we had a chance to set another record that would be much harder to beat.”

Everest goes on: “Bell flew half a dozen tests to prove the new rocket ship’s flying characteristics and tested the rocket engine in run-ups on the ground.” The historical accounts show that in actual fact _two_ test flights were made, neither of them thorough or conclusive because of pressure of schedule and poverty. On the first, the X-1-D was carried aloft, empty of fuels, cut loose, and steered back to earth, as a glider, by Skip Ziegler. On the second, the X-1-D was fueled for a powered flight with Everest but aborted when the fuel system malfunctioned. The tests had been, to say the least, inconclusive.

Then, as Everest writes, “I was selected to take it up and see what it could do wide open.” In short, Everest elected to take over the X-1-D, which had never been flown under power, and never flown at all by Everest, on a maximum-speed run on first powered flight. That he agreed to this at all, I think, demonstrates remarkable courage. That the Air Force would sanction such a first flight has always been a mystery to me. They were smarting badly from Bridgeman’s licking.

That day in August, 1951, was a dark one in Edwards’ history and a very lucky one for Pete Everest. Al Boyd, then a brigadier general, and still commander of Edwards, elected to fly chase. Jack Ridley was co-pilot of the mother ship, a B-50, a more powerful version of the B-29. At 10,000 feet Everest put on his helmet and crawled from the mother ship’s bomb-bay into the X-1-D cockpit. He noticed right off that the rocket plane’s gauges were in the red. There was a leak; the tank pressures were sagging.

Everest climbed back into the B-50 bomb-bay compartment for a conference with Jack Ridley. They agreed “reluctantly,” Everest reports, that the flight should be canceled. Everest returned to the X-1-D cockpit to jettison fuel. Standing in the seat of the plane, he reached down to pressurize the tanks. As he did, a bone-jarring explosion shook the X-1-D and nearly threw Everest to the floor of the cockpit. A tongue of fire licked into the mother ships bomb-bay compartment.

Everest leaped from the X-1-D cockpit into the B-50 bomber. Seconds later Jack Ridley pulled an emergency lever and the burning X-1-D fell away from the bomber, trailed by bits and pieces of the B-50 which were shattered loose by the force of the rocket-ship explosion. The $5 million X-1-D crumpled onto the desert floor, a costly disaster on the race track.

It was lucky for Everest that the X-1-D blew up when it did. In the haste to launch the flight, the plane had only half a load of liquid oxygen. Had Everest launched, the X-1-D would have been so much out of balance that it would have spun in, instantly and uncontrollably. The ship had no ejection seat.

* * * * *

Joe Cannon, a test pilot for Bell, had been chosen to make the initial demonstration flights in the Queenie. With the new low-pressure fuel system and larger fuel tanks, some thought that Queenie might crack Mach 2. This would put her a shade beyond the record Bridgeman made in the Skyrocket. Queenie had “U. S. Air Force” painted in large letters on the fuselage. Whether Cannon or some Air Force pilot, such as Yeager or Everest, flew it, the Air Force technically would regain the record. After that, NACA would take charge of the plane for high-speed instability and aerodynamic heating investigations. I was to fly the Queenie for NACA.

The new low-pressure fuel system in Queenie gave much trouble. Bell ground engineer Q. C. Harvey, a fox-terrier type with limitless nervous energy, was nearly frantic from the thinly-veiled pressure. The Bell ground crews cut corners. In early November on the second “heavyweight captive” flight--a trip to launch altitude with fuel tanks loaded for test purposes--Joe Cannon could not jettison the plane’s fuel. The B-29 mother plane returned to earth, bearing Queenie fully loaded with volatile fuel.

It was something of a trick to purge the little planes of fuel on the ground. The B-29 moved into the dump area, still mated. Cannon began the ground-jettison routine. Suddenly a tremendous explosion rocked Edwards. Queenie and the mother plane were enveloped by swirling, vaporizing liquid oxygen.

Cannon had removed the side door of the X-1. Through the fog the men saw him come through the opening, feet first. Then they saw his head and heard him yelling:

“Get the hell out of here! She’s going to go!”

Joe Cannon scrambled down to the ground and ran away from Queenie as fast as his legs could take him. The concrete ramp was flooded with the slippery, dangerous Lox. He fell headlong into a puddle of fuel. The Lox “burned” through his clothing and froze his skin, putting him out of action for nearly a year. Queenie and the mother ship went up in a burst of smoke and flames. Fortunately, no one was killed. The loss of the $4 million Queenie was severely felt at NACA.

The Navy retained the speed and altitude records. The official investigations into the X-1-D and Queenie explosions went on for months and ultimately delayed the delivery of the X-1-A and X-1-B nearly two years. After the official report came out, all rocket airplanes of this series were extensively modified. At NACA our own X-1, in which I had completed about a dozen flights since last overhaul, was considered “fatigued” and was withdrawn from active flying. We launched a project to redesign and rebuild our X-1. The plane was redesignated the X-1-E, and years later it got into the air. But it never really produced again. For all practical purposes it was retired that fall.

Along about the same time--that grim fall of 1951--we gave up hope on still another promising airplane. This was the celebrated Douglas X-3, a weird-looking, needle-nose craft with two jet engines and brief straight wings. The X-3 was designed to cruise for long periods at very high speed, hopefully near Mach 2. But she had fallen victim to the cotter-key crowd. No more complicated, botched-up, dangerous airplane was ever produced, unless it was the XF-92-A, which I shall deal with in time.

Bridgeman was waiting patiently at Douglas to make the first flights on the long-delayed X-3. I talked to him about the plane occasionally, since like the Skyrocket it was ultimately slated for NACA. It was possible that I might be named X-3 pilot along with my other duties. In time, Bridgeman made twenty flights in the plane. Happy to be rid of it then, he turned it over to Chuck Yeager and Pete Everest, and never again flew an experimental airplane. Yeager and Everest flew the plane three times each. “It was one of the most difficult airplanes I have ever seen,” Everest said.

Apart from its sheer mechanical complexity, the basic trouble with the X-3 was that it was underpowered. The high-thrust engines, which had been planned for it, fell behind schedule and then were canceled because of lack of funds; the interim engines used yielded only about fifty per cent of the desired thrust. Thus it required every trick in the book to get the heavy X-3 into the air and keep it there without falling out. When Yeager and Everest, with few regrets, turned the plane over to NACA, we tried unsuccessfully to fix it. Walker made about twenty flights. The X-3 became a glamorous Hangar Queen, useful mainly for publicity photographs. I never got to fly it.

Thus the Douglas Skyrocket became by default the lone high-speed workhorse at Edwards. I was the lone jockey for a while. As the weeks sped by, the NACA Skyrocket team began to mesh with carrier-deck efficiency. We often flew the Skyrocket every other day--such “turn-around” time was then considered a near-miracle--probing the dark mysteries high in the sky. No Skyrocket flight was ever routine. But I got to know the ship so well that I could land it dead-stick on the dry lake and coast right up on the NACA parking ramp in front of the hangar door--without brakes! This saved my hard-working ground crew the trouble of going out to the lake with a tow-tractor.

* * * * *

The floor of the Bell plant in Buffalo was immaculately clean. In one corner behind a curtain the shell of the X-2 lay awaiting inspection. In another corner engineers had rigged a simulated cockpit and control system. I was there with Walt Williams and other NACA and Air Force engineers to pass an interim judgment on this much-delayed airplane. I was especially interested because if the X-2 were ever finished I would fly her after Skip Ziegler had made the demonstrations.

I walked up to a mechanic, working near a row of dry-cell batteries. I knew these batteries were to be installed in the X-2 to supply power for the control system. I picked up a battery.

“What’s this for?” I said to the mechanic.

“My God!” he yelled. His face was white. “Don’t pick that up. It’s delicate. It’s for the X-2 control system. If you jar it, it might break.” It was a new and sophisticated kind of battery.

“You don’t mean it?” I said. Then I smashed the battery down on the bench. Sure enough, five plates broke and the battery short-circuited.

Later I learned from a Bell engineer that the delicate batteries had been shipped to Bell from the manufacturer in a nitroglycerine truck. I said to the engineer: “You really expect to put that kind of stuff in an airplane that will be subject to God knows what kind of loads and shocks in the air?”

“Don’t ask me, Scotty,” he said. “I just work here and we have a thousand bosses in every corner of the government.”

While the X-2 control system was a studied attempt to make a tremendous step, there was much we did not like about it. I noticed that when I operated the stick in the simulator cockpit, it whipped. The simulator, for demonstration purposes, was set to operate only at full design loads, which was far from a realistic measure. At my insistence the simulator was rigged to carry low-load conditions. Guessing what force the whipping stick might display, I asked Pete Everest, a member of the Air Force inspection party, to get in the cockpit and try it.

The demonstration was far more dramatic than I could have hoped. When Everest pulled on the stick, the electrical units took hold, the stick whipped violently, and Everest, a small man, was thrown clear out of the cockpit.

This highly sophisticated control system, which had already cost $4 million, was symptomatic of the disease that had drained the X-2 program (many programs, in fact) of its vitality. It obviously could not be made suitable for the X-2 in time, and although it meant some further delay on delivery of the airplane, Bell was asked to come up with a reliable and simple control system. Under the revised plan X-2 number 1 was to be hastily equipped with cables, which would not overly delay the glide tests scheduled to take place at Edwards. X-2 number 2 would have a hydraulic-control system. Similar units would be installed in X-2 number 1 after the glide tests.

The X-2 with cable controls arrived at Edwards in June of 1952, hung in the belly of the B-50 mother plane. I should say the shell of the X-2 arrived. The lagging engine (itself overly sophisticated) was still on the test bench at Curtiss-Wright. In its place was concrete ballast. Everybody at Edwards must have turned out to see the X-2. Few of them realized then that the ship was jinxed. They saw only a sleek, swept-wing airplane, looking as though it were moving supersonically while sitting still on the ground.

The X-2 had the conventional nose wheel; and the main landing gear had been made a broad ski which protruded from the fuselage just below the wing center-section. The main purpose of the glide test was to check on the nose-wheel ski concept. Bets were laid when Ziegler went aloft in the X-2 on his first flight. It was important that the gear work perfectly. A powerless rocket plane landing dead-stick cannot go around for another try.

I watched from the sidelines. The X-2 was heavy, and the B-50 mother plane labored to reach launch altitude of 30,000 feet. Then I saw the X-2, looking like a tiny white toy in the deep blue sky, fall away cleanly. Powerless, silent, Skip guided the plane toward Rogers Dry Lake. His flare-out, at 200 miles an hour, looked good. The skid and nose wheel popped out. The X-2 touched and the nose wheel failed. When it collapsed, the plane churned around on a wingtip, gouging a hole in the desert runway.

The plane was repaired and the landing-gear unit improved. They also added “whisker skids”--smaller skis midway under each side of the wing. Skip Ziegler tested the new gear without incident. Then Pete Everest made one hair-raising test--the left whisker ski extended only after the right ski had jarred the earth--and the X-2 was shipped back to the factory for installation of the new hydraulic-control system and the rocket engine.

Months later the plane was ready for “captive” fuel tests. These were conducted not at Edwards but over Lake Ontario, near the Bell factory, because of Ziegler’s dedicated zeal to get the program rolling. On the second captive fuel test in May, 1953, an explosion ripped through the X-2. The blast and flames reached into the mother ship’s bomb-bay, killing Skip Ziegler and a Bell crewman, Frank Walko. The X-2 was cut loose and plunged flaming and exploding into Lake Ontario. The B-50, blown skyward and gutted by the explosion, somehow stayed together long enough for Bell pilot Bill Lewshon, with brilliant flying, to get it back on the ground. Then it was junked.

* * * * *

Dr. Hugh Dryden, one of the world’s leading aeronautical scientists, was Director of NACA. Technically, Jimmy Doolittle was chairman of the main National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, which reported directly and only occasionally to the President. But Dryden was Doolittle’s chief general. Dryden, an older man who wore thick glasses, ran NACA day by day. He had a slow, deliberate way of talking. If ever a government agency was the perfect image of its director, it was NACA. In Dryden’s face you could see it all: conservatism, scholarship, wisdom, caution. His office in an old building on H Street in Washington was Spartan. It might have been the office of a college professor.

I was there on an urgent mission--back on a familiar theme.

“Dr. Dryden,” I said. “This X-2 program is in serious trouble. What’s lacking is a Bob Stanley or a Skip Ziegler, if you will. The drive has gone out of the X-2 project. If we’re not careful, sir, it’s going to wind up like the X-3, a great big expensive Hangar Queen.

“I know this is an Air Force project, that they’re funding it. But I think it is time we stepped in and took a firm hold. That plane’s supposed to come to us for serious aerodynamic investigation. There’s another investigation going on about the explosion. It may take months. The control system hasn’t been checked out. The engine is so far behind schedule you can’t say anything good about it.”

“Well, you certainly seem quite interested in this program,” Dryden said. He weighed each word.

“Yes, sir,” I said. “I am supposed to fly the airplane and I would like to do so before I retire.”

“What do you propose?”

“I propose that I be assigned to the Bell plant on temporary duty. There I’ll help every way I can to spark the program to completion. Then I’ll make the demonstration flights for Bell. Then I’ll return with the plane to NACA at Edwards and complete the flight-test program. I have talked with Bell people about it and they think the idea has some merit.”

Dr. Dryden’s answer surprised me, frankly. “Very well,” he said. “If Williams approves, you may try it.”

I returned to Edwards on Cloud Nine. The X-2 plan, as I had envisioned it, would be immensely valuable experience and background for my future. It would give me time in a rocket-plane factory, flight-test experience in the most advanced airplane man had conceived, and inevitably a little public notice which, I was learning, was a necessary part of moving ahead in my field. The X-2 was not the ideal because it amounted, in effect, to bailing out a sinking boat. But it was a start.

“Damn it, Scotty,” Williams said, “we really need you around here. The X-2 can wait. That plane may kill more people yet.”

“But Walt,” I said. “When you hired me you said I’d get a crack at the X-2. That was three years ago and we haven’t got the plane yet.”

“Well, maybe it’s okay with me if it’s okay with Vensel. He’s your boss. He has the final say-so. Tell him it’s up to him.”

Vensel said no. He implied I was urgently needed at Edwards.