Chapter 16: ►

_Bright Light Under a Bush_

I eyed the new ship skeptically. White as a lily, it was the X-5, another product from Bell. The ship was powered by a single jet engine, and from a distance it appeared fairly conventional. What was vastly different about the X-5 was that its wings could be swept to several different angles in flight. Two X-5s had been built. One was turned over to the Air Force; NACA got the other. Joe Walker was project pilot and had gotten our program off the ground. I was to make my first check-out flight.

“What do you want on this flight?” I asked Thomas Finch, an NACA engineer.

“The flight plan calls for aggravated stalls,” he said. These would help define the safe low-speed limits of the airplane.

“What do you mean, aggravated stalls?” I said. “How far?”

“Use your own judgment,” Finch said. “But if you can take her well into the stall region, that’ll be fine.”

The wings were to be swept to sixty degrees that flight. I cooled down the runway, followed by an Air Force chase, and climbed rapidly to altitude. I had read the manual on the airplane and all of the early flight reports, which had been prepared by Skip Ziegler before he died over Lake Ontario; I had also been briefed by Joe Walker. The X-5 handled in the air like a three-wheeled automobile. It was loose and danced crazily. Even so, we thought it would make a fine research tool. With its high sustained speed just under Mach 1, and its variable sweep, NACA could explore a wide variety of unknowns. It was like having a whole stable of swept-wing airplanes in one.

I climbed to 25,000 feet and reported to chase that I would make several aggravated stalls. I pulled back on the throttle and eased back the stick. As the X-5 slowed, she began to buffet; slower and slower, more and more buffet. Suddenly her nose veered sharply to the left. In a split second, the X-5 turned 180 degrees. Then she dropped precipitously into a spin. My first-flight jinx was back.

A kaleidoscope of brown desert, blue sky, and white clouds passed dizzily in review in my windshield as the X-5 wound up steadily toward the desert floor. I pushed the stick hard to forward left and bent on full right rudder--the prescribed spin-recovery-control maneuver--but the X-5 stubbornly refused to conform. Then I tried every trick in the book, pretty thick by now, after those years of flying unstable airplanes at Edwards. After a drop of over 10,000 feet, the X-5 pulled out.

Walker had run into the same thing. This slow-spin-recovery was a dangerous weakness of that airplane. Since the Edwards area was 2500 or more feet above sea level, we made a careful note on the plane’s flight handbook _never_ to perform maneuvers which could result in a spin below 20,000 feet.

* * * * *

“Did you get the word on Popson?” Joe Walker asked. Popson was an Air Force pilot assigned to fly the Air Force’s X-5.

“No,” I said. “What happened?” I had just come in from a trip to the East Coast.

“He was assigned to do aggravated stalls at 12,000 feet. He spun in.”

I was sick. We had somehow failed in a basic NACA mission--getting information to the right place in time.

Popson was a well-qualified pilot. If there had been better coordination between Air Force and NACA, he might be alive today; his flight plan was his death warrant, as so often happened. He was dead before he took off, the thirteenth pilot to die at Edwards. Following custom, a street was named in his honor.

* * * * *

Bell’s Bob Woods was a tremendous man. He’s dead now, so there is no way to check, but I think he weighed at least three hundred pounds. He was the last of the Great Guns of an era at Bell. In spite of the X-1 and X-2 difficulties, Wood carried on in the grand old style. You had to admire his vision and political guts.

Woods had a talent for hypnotizing a crowd--or anyway _me_, at least. And so it was in the spring of 1952, during a semiannual meeting of the full NACA Aerodynamics Subcommittee at the Ames Laboratory, Woods stood before a blackboard. From my inconspicuous seat in the background, I stared at his girth and the vast outpouring of enthusiasm as he made a case which, to me, was as fascinating as his size.

“As I see it,” Woods went on before the large meeting of industry designers, “this would essentially be a research aircraft and come under NACA jurisdiction. The information it returned would be made available to all. The craft would be mounted on top of a vertical booster, in effect a ballistic missile. Launch speed would be 4,000 or 5,000 feet a second. The booster would fall away. The vehicle would continue a climb to about eighty miles. On descent, recovery would be effected by a deployed parachute. The booster vehicle could essentially be a V-2 type missile.

“This vehicle would enable us to probe a number of unexplored areas. Aerodynamic heating at hypersonic speed. Weightlessness for the pilot and research airplane machinery.” As he talked, a lieutenant stood by to flip through a set of expertly drafted drawings demonstrating each point.

“Gentlemen,” Woods concluded, “I don’t think I have to stress the need for an advanced research vehicle. The best thing we have in the hopper now is the X-2 and we all know the limitations of this aircraft, which has not even flown yet. We must face up to the fact that we are going to do something about this or sit back and let the Russians take the lead.”

I listened eagerly while the brass kicked around Woods’ proposal. There were many pros and cons from a technical standpoint.

As I say, Bob Woods had something of a magnetic personality. After the meeting at Ames, he paid us a visit at Edwards. Then, I suppose, he went on to NACA headquarters in Washington and probably on down to talk to John Stack at NACA’s Langley Lab in Virginia. In any case, all at once, all the somnolent parts of NACA were suddenly awake and chirping simultaneously about a new advanced research airplane. One reason was that the timing was good. The other rocket planes were in trouble or dropping far behind schedule. The missile engineers were then beginning to squeeze enormous thrust out of a single rocket barrel, more than twice the power of the V-2 rocket engine developed by the Nazis. The Army’s Redstone missile generated 75,000 pounds thrust, about ten times the thrust of the engine in the Douglas Skyrocket. It was clearly time to take advantage of this rapid technological advance.

Walt Williams came alive with enthusiasm. He called in Drake and Carmen and asked them to pull out their advanced report which had been pigeon-holed the year before.

“Damn it,” said Williams, “if Woods can get up before a meeting of the Aerodynamics Subcommittee and propose shooting a man eighty miles into space in a missile, I guess we can propose the five-engine monster.” The Drake-Carmen report, with Williams’ endorsement, was sent on to the Langley Laboratory for serious study.

None of this produced any immediate results in terms of hardware. The Drake-Carmen proposal was rejected out of hand. The Woods proposal, because it came from industry, got the full NACA treatment--that is to say, a rejection, complete with technical data attached. Basically, no one at that time was in favor of the “ballistic” approach, although the U. S., and NACA, specifically, would return to exactly that same approach for Project Mercury some five or six years later. However, all this activity set NACA planning toward a more or less “conventional” advanced research airplane in the range of Mach 6 and 100-mile altitude. As everyone knows, once the ponderous machinery of a government agency is set in motion toward an objective, it can hardly be stopped.

During the weeks that followed, I paid this paper-study airplane more than casual attention. From exactly this kind of start, I knew, eight years earlier Kotcher, Stack, and Woods had given birth to the X-1 and ushered in a new dimension in aviation. With rocket engines now ten times more powerful, were we on the threshold, were we in the very act of conceiving a new generation that would make the X-1 pale by comparison? Man had yet to fly at Mach 2 and we were talking of Mach 6 and altitudes of 100 and 200 miles. This was Buck Rogers stuff, space flight. This was it!

I knew instinctively that my future lay in that paper airplane. It was then no more than a column of figures together with NACA’s resolution to investigate its possibilities. But in my mind it was a thing of steel, or titanium, or whatever material it would be built of--a sleek, perfectly engineered object, a thing of marvelous beauty and near-perfection, a boyhood dream in real life.

The X-15 had been born. The name of the game was to get aboard it somehow, and at the right time.

* * * * *

The months rolled by at NACA. I flew sometimes two or three flights a day in the X-4, X-5, and other craft. But my biggest effort was reserved for the Douglas Skyrocket. Lacking other high-speed rocket airplanes for data purposes, I gradually pushed the Skyrocket to Bridgeman’s record of Mach 1.8 and beyond. In fact, during the spring of 1953 after I had logged some thirty flights in the bird, I regularly flew to Mach 1.8 and frequently to Mach 1.9 or a little more. Since we had no real technical reasons to exceed it, I kept below Bridgeman’s altitude record of 79,000 feet. My speed in the Skyrocket was, of course, a world’s record. Typical of NACA we hid this bright light under a bush, and Dr. Dryden ordered me to stay below Mach 2. It mattered only a little to me. I had grown up professionally within NACA and had come to accept urgency in record-making as childish.

The military thought otherwise. That year, 1953, the world was celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of flight, and the publicists were casting around for a sensational drum-beat in memory of the Wright brothers. In short, a new speed or altitude record. That summer the long-awaited Bell X-1-A, a sister-ship of the ill-fated X-1-D, arrived at Edwards. With it came the Air Force’s star, Chuck Yeager, temporarily released from another assignment. We knew what he would be shooting for: Mach 2. If he made it, he would go down in history as the first man to fly Mach 1 and then Mach 2. It was a publicity agent’s dream, a perfect unveiling for the fiftieth anniversary of flight.

The Navy had not the slightest intention of letting the Air Force pluck this plum without a stiff fight. One day in the summer of 1953 Marine Colonel Marion Carl arrived at NACA. Carl is one of the most fabulous aviators in history. A leading ace in World War II, Carl had set a speed record in the original D-558-I back in 1947. Since that time he had been engaged in other assignments in Washington and was top pilot for the Naval Air Test Center, Patuxent River, Maryland, the Navy’s counterpart of Edwards. Carl had never flown a rocket airplane. But Walt Williams called all of us into the office to announce that the Navy was “borrowing” the Skyrocket for a few days. Colonel Carl would try to beat Bridgeman’s altitude record of 79,000 feet and set a speed record of Mach 2.

“That will really make Yeager’s job tougher,” Williams said.

I threw myself into the venture as enthusiastically as if the flight had been planned for me. One reason was that Carl, a big lanky guy, was immensely likable and a superb aviator, in my book. I had to admire his guts. There weren’t many pilots in the world who would deliberately jump in the Skyrocket and go for broke. We stayed up late at night. I told him every detail of the Skyrocket, all her quirks and strong points, what to beware of, just how to balance on that knife-edge high in the thin air, how to avoid the dangerous Supersonic Yaw that had bothered Bridgeman and myself. In many ways this was superfluous: he had done considerable cramming before he came.

Carl had one advantage over most beginning rocket-plane pilots. The NACA Skyrocket team was unbeatable. The plane was by now almost completely debugged. He could count on efficiency and competence up to the moment of launch, and a mechanically near-perfect bird in flight. The rest was up to him.

The first two flights were failures--he never launched. On the first I flew chase. Carl experienced some difficulty in the strange Skyrocket cockpit and I was too far away to help. Thus on the second flight I rode in the mother-ship bomb-bay compartment. I helped Carl suit up and strapped him in the Skyrocket cockpit. Then, up until the moment of launch, I helped Jack Russell operate the mother plane’s manual Lox top-off system, pumping Lox into the tanks of the Skyrocket to replace boil-off. Since liquid oxygen (Lox) “boils away” at altitude, we had equipped the mother plane with a Lox “top-off system,” which keeps pumping Lox into the research airplane until a few moments before launch. Full Lox tanks also mean a longer rocket flight, always a prime objective. Carl would need every ounce we could squeeze in to break an altitude record. The second flight ended much like the first. Frankly, I was amazed at the limitless competence of the man in a brand-new and, to him, hostile environment.

On the third flight and first launch Carl made it. After a perfect light-off he stood the Skyrocket on its tail and blazed to 85,000 feet, beating Bridgeman’s record by a healthy 6,000 feet. His recovery in that thin air was adroit, and he landed the ship dead-stick on the lake, beaming with pride. Now he was ready to tackle the speed record, to rack up Mach 2 for the Navy.

This would be tough, I knew. My top speed in the Skyrocket, and Carl had to exceed this first, was Mach 1.96. I had achieved that speed only after months of flying in the ship, of learning to tread the knife-edge with extreme care and skill. In that airplane even the slightest over-pressure on the stick would cut the speed back drastically and botch a flight. It would be tougher in summer, when the air was warmer. The Skyrocket performed best when it was cold.

Colonel Carl made two unsuccessful tries for Mach 2. Then, under pressure from some conservative elements in Navy headquarters, he gave up the attempt, after failing to come close. Ever since, I have held Carl in highest regard. In five brief Skyrocket flights he had shattered the world altitude record. His record is usually omitted from most aviation-record summaries. I think that is because he was a Marine. But Carl, in no sense a small man, had never raised the point himself.

Carl’s performance made a lasting impact on me. After he left Edwards I began to think hard about records. The names of the famous rocket pilots hummed through my mind: Yeager, Boyd, Ridley, Everest, Bridgeman, Carl. I had seen enough of these men to know that when they spoke they commanded the attention of four-star generals and admirals, even Dr. Dryden. Although only one (Ridley) was an engineer, when they made a suggestion about an airplane it was considered a command, and millions were spent on their intuitive say-so. Their authority had been built not only on a foundation of tens of thousands of data points wrung from research airplanes, but mainly from singular, spectacular bursts--records.

With the right man at the controls I knew the Skyrocket could reach Mach 2, though not easily. Scott Crossfield might be the man, the first man to fly at Mach 2. If so, who knew what the future held?