Chapter 17: ►

_Light in the Open_

“What’s the situation on the X-1-A?” Williams asked. I had just come from an inspection of the ship, which was being readied for flight in the Edwards Air Force hangar.

“There are some technical difficulties in the airplane, some of them critical, I think. I’ll give it to you in a report,” I said.

“Is Yeager going to go?” Williams asked.

“All out, that’s for sure. He was trying to feel me out a little, find out what we were doing with the Skyrocket. I didn’t tell him, although I let drop it was a pretty high Mach number. They’re going to get this flight in before the Wright Brothers Memorial dinner if it kills them.”

“Don’t say that.”

“I didn’t mean it that way, Walt.” I said. “But everything indicates that this airplane is going to go directionally unstable at Mach 1.8 and above. I’m sorry to see they have pulled Yeager back especially for this. Something might happen. He is going to Mach 2 or faster if he can.”

“How about giving me a written report on the inspection? At least we can show we were trying to make this thing as nearly safe as possible. I’ve already put in one objection and gotten my ears pinned. Don’t get into the flight operations aspects, just confine the report to the systems inspection.”

“Okay, Walt.” I turned to leave.

“By the way,” Williams said, “we’re supposed to get some stuff together for this proposed advanced research airplane. I’ve got a report here prepared by O’Sullivan, Brown, and Zimmerman from Langley.”

My heart skipped a beat or two.

“What do they recommend?” I asked.

“It’s not a recommendation for a specific airplane configuration. They think some more study should be given. They want to run a lot more wind-tunnel studies on shapes. They especially want to investigate aerodynamic heating. They’ve sent the report to all NACA facilities for general comment, and in some cases for specific engineering studies. Most of the technical work will be done down at Langley--the aerodynamic heating phase. They’ve rigged up a shotgun-type wind tunnel that will give them a micro-second blast as high as Mach 16. Miniature stuff, but a start.”

“What can we do to keep this thing rolling, Walt?” I asked.

“_Keep_ it rolling? You mean _get_ it rolling good and fast, don’t you? This thing could die on the vine right quick if the right people don’t push it.”

“All right, _get_ it rolling.”

“What I’d like _you_ to do, Scotty, is prepare a report--take your time, a couple of weeks, if need be--outlining the operational phase of the proposed advanced research airplane. Make this a real positive report. Write it as though the airplane were a definite thing and don’t overstress the problems. Show them that for us the flight program of this airplane would be strictly no sweat.”

“I can do that because I believe it will be no sweat,” I said. “What kind of guide-lines have they given us on speed and altitude?”

“The numbers they’re kicking around now are Mach 6 and 75 miles altitude, close to 400,000 feet.”

I got up and walked to a map which covered one part of the wall in Williams’ office. I made some mental calculations and spaced off some distances with my thumb and little finger stretched to maximum.

“I think you’ll probably have to launch some place over Salt Lake to make a powered flight and land at Edwards,” I said.

Williams got up and joined me before the map.

“How about this area around Las Vegas?” he said.

We stared at the patches on the map which outlined the many dry lakes. There was a long string of them between Edwards and Salt Lake, forming almost a straight line. Any of the lakes along the route could serve as an emergency strip if something went wrong.

“How far is it from here to Salt Lake?” Williams asked.

“About four hundred miles,” I said.

He sat down and doodled on a scratch pad. He slammed open his desk drawer and pulled out a slide-rule. He figured swiftly for several minutes, scratched his closely cropped, stiff hair. I noticed that it was beginning to gray.

“I think that’s it,” he said. “If the mother plane is fast enough, you can take off from here, fly to Salt Lake in an hour or so and launch. The research plane would be back here on the ground in half an hour more.”

“Our first aircraft in space,” I said. In NACA’s vernacular we called it “extra-atmospheric flight.”

That afternoon I began my report: “Operational techniques for a research airplane of the type proposed in reference (a) will _not_ present difficult problems if operational people have a strong voice in the philosophy of the design and function of the airplane and its parts....”

I went on to discuss some of the technical details of the mother plane, the launch speed and altitude and recovery phases, recommending the Salt Lake area as a launch point. Then I digressed into a discussion of the pilot safety and escape mechanisms, emphasizing that all could be performed adequately by following known procedures and making use of existing techniques. I expressed doubt that cosmic radiation or zero G weightlessness would prove a problem, although at that time, typically, there were experts in these fields who had made a federal case of each.

I concluded my report: “Directly proportional to operational problems, and hence of vital importance, is the complication of the airplane devices and over-engineering of the systems. From the inflight point of view, the pilot-protection items lose their value if reliability and airplane performance are sacrificed.”

In short, let’s not botch up the airplane like the X-2 and X-3. Keep it simple, always realizing that performance means pilot safety and performance comes in this sense from reliability.

I completed the report on the following day and forwarded it to Walt Williams. Thus, little by little, and much too slowly for our money, the X-15 was taking shape in people’s minds.

* * * * *

They had towed the XF-92-A far down on the lake bed. It was sensitive to crosswind and the more the take-off run was directly into the wind, the better. Pete Everest was ready to make the last Air Force test flight before turning the plane over to NACA. After the plane was in place, the wind changed slightly. But that was enough to cancel the flight. I was in Williams’ office with Everest.

“Well, Scotty,” he said, “you’re going to fly the plane next week. Why don’t you go down to the lake and get it? You can taxi it back and lift it off the lake, just to get the feel of it.”

I grabbed my flight gear and drove down to the airplane.

The XF-92-A was the worst-flying airplane built in modern times that I know of. It was a delta-wing plane, the first modern delta job manufactured in the country. Originally the plane was designed for a ram-jet engine. When that engine fell by the wayside, the XF-92-A was fitted with first one jet engine and then another. It was a hopeless mess, a patchwork quilt of fixes upon fixes. It was underpowered, under-geared, under-braked, and overweight. It was a nightmare. When it first arrived at Edwards in the early days, Chuck Yeager washed out the gear on take-off. After company demonstration, and Al Boyd’s flight, by Air Force order only three Edwards pilots were permitted to fly the plane: Yeager, Everest, and Crossfield. The Air Force was not sorry to turn it over to me.

I climbed into the cockpit, pulled the canopy shut, and got set for a fast taxi, and shallow lift-off, back toward the base area. I gunned the engine, and the plane, heavy with fuel, wobbled into the air. I had read the manual and talked at length with Pete Everest. I knew the plane was weak on brakes. One way to stop the roll was to hold the plane nose-high--very high. With the lake bed running out on me, I horsed back on the stick and brought the nose up. My speed fell off only slightly. I pulled back hard on the stick and nearly stood the beast on her tail. She plopped down on the lake but continued to roll like a Ferrari.

I was in trouble. The lake was all but gone. I was barreling toward a cluster of sand dunes, unable to stop the plane. Well, Crossfield, I thought, the old first-flight jinx is working hard, and this time you’re going to wrap this plane up in a ball. It would be a mess, too. The plane was fully fueled, all the tanks around the engine and wheel-wells were brimming. Even under the best of circumstances, she was a fire-trap.

I figured a way to save my own hide. I could see that a small bluff lay ahead directly across my path. I would let the plane roll on until an instant before it smashed into the bluff. At that second I would retract the gear, turn on all the fire-extinguishers, blow off the canopy, and, as the belly skidded onto the bluff, jump out and run. I stop-cocked the engine and shut down all the circuit breakers and pumped what little brake I had, first left then right, to dodge a couple of sand islands in my path.

As the plane raced on toward the bluff, I suddenly noticed a narrow dirt road going off to my left. Could I make that? I jammed on the left brake with all my might. The small brake seized for a split second, then fell off on the lake floor, a molten mass of metal. But the plane had turned slightly toward the rutted dirt road and I turned it still more by sheer will power. When I hit the road, the tires blew and burned. But the plane stayed straight and level. A hundred yards up the road, it finally ground to a halt. I pulled the fire-extinguishers and jumped out.

After that the dirt road was facetiously renamed the Crossfield Pike in my honor. Everest cracked: “You know, Scotty, you’re the only pilot still alive at Edwards who has a road named after him.”

One of the weakest points of the XF-92-A was the engine installation. During the early phase of the program before I flew it, we burned out an engine on almost every other flight, laying the ship up for repairs for weeks on end. In fact, it took eighteen months to log eighteen flights. We made many changes in the installation and operational procedures, so that by the time I flew it we fortunately never lost another engine. But every time I took off in that plane I held my breath until I reached sufficient altitude to use the ejection seat, if necessary. The pilot never really flew that airplane, he corralled it.

I made twenty-five flights in her during the summer and fall of 1953. On the last one, in October, she collapsed on the lake bed while taxiing after landing. The nose wheel simply got tired and buckled. The plane ground-looped and came to rest, teetering on the nose and one wingtip. After I was sure that it would not fall over on me, I crawled out.

The plane never flew again after that. It was finished and no one shed any tears. Some mechanics patched it up, and for a while it was used for publicity purposes as a static exhibit at air shows, Rose Bowl parades, and so on.

From an engineering standpoint I should not be overly harsh on the XF-92-A. Actually, the combined Air Force-NACA flight program produced a great deal of information which ultimately made the Convair F-102 delta-wing fighter and its newer sister-ship, the F-106, feasible airplanes. The data we accumulated from the XF-92-A enabled the F-102 and F-106 to achieve an acceptable stability in flight, and thus the darned thing had accomplished its purpose.

* * * * *

Not long after the final demise of the XF-92-A, I visited the office of “Perk” Perkins, the Navy liaison civilian stationed at Edwards. He was the very valuable contact for NACA when we needed something from the Navy. He had been in the thick of the Marion Carl altitude and speed attempts in the Skyrocket. He was a good friend.

“Perk,” I said, “I can’t be here officially. Dr. Dryden has ordered me not to take the Skyrocket to Mach 2. But this is a Navy-sponsored plane and I thought I would kick around some possibilities with you. Something that the Navy would think beneficial.”

Perkins caught on fast. My case made sense. Yeager was going to take the X-1-A to Mach 2, come hell or high water. The X-1-A was a new bird. We knew it would be unstable above Mach 1.8. Yeager had already encountered instability above that speed on a practice run. Knowing Yeager, though, the chances were he would make it. The Wright Brothers dinner was coming up. We could achieve Mach 2 in the Skyrocket because after scores of flights we had learned to live with its instability. I knew the plane well. I could fly it. “U. S. Navy” was stamped all over the project. The Navy would get the credit without risking a failure. If I failed, no one would be the wiser.

“The only thing is,” I said, “the pressure for this flight must come from the Navy direct to Dr. Dryden on the highest levels. It’s going to be tough because Dryden does not want to challenge the Air Force. He’ll be caught in the middle but it ought to be interesting.”

I left Perkins’ office wondering if I had not slipped a cog. Imagine Crossfield proposing a record attempt. Imagine Dr. Dryden approving it!

In the best Navy tradition, Perkins was a resourceful and decisive man. Right off, he found out that the Navy’s Chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics, Rear Admiral Apollo Soucek, was visiting on the West Coast. Perkins tracked him down. Soucek had no objections, provided the matter had been cleared through the Chief of Naval Operations in the Pentagon. Perkins got on the wire to the Pentagon and talked with our old friend Marion Carl. Carl knew just how to do it, apparently, because a week later Dryden sent word to Walt Williams to say that the Mach 2 restriction on the Skyrocket had been lifted. Williams was dumbfounded and for some reason suspicious of my role in this caper.

“It’s up to you now, Scotty,” said Perkins. “The Pentagon says we can have one try at it. If we miss, we have to step aside for Chuck Yeager.”

“I won’t miss,” I said.

* * * * *

The timing was splendid. I was not aware of it then, but a change was taking place within NACA. The cost of operating its laboratories was mounting in direct proportion to the increasing complexity of modern airplanes. NACA urgently required advanced tools to probe new areas of flight. These had to be in place in a hurry if they were to do any good. But money was hard to come by. The administration, in general, had taken a dim view of “research,” and NACA’s contributions were not easy to explain in lay language. NACA was about to bring its light into the open. The Mach 2 proposal must have fitted very neatly with NACA’s new plans.

In fact, a few days later, to my astonishment Dr. Dryden’s able assistant, Walter Bonney, arrived at Edwards. Bonney, a good-natured man then a few years my senior, had worked for Bell Aircraft for years as a public relations man. In 1949 Bonney had joined NACA in Washington, where he soon discovered that his talents as a flack were not so appealing as his talent for writing history. In the prevailing atmosphere Bonney went underground and began preparing the most thorough and objective history of aviation yet conceived. For years my hobby had been aviation history. During the years Bonney and I had spent many hours together on this subject. I had turned over to him my collection of research.

“Walt!” I said. “What brings you to Edwards? We’re not doing anything out here an aviation historian would be interested in.”

“Son,” Bonney said, tossing me a quizzical smile, “I’m not a historian on this mission.” Bonney called everyone younger than he “son.”

I knew then that Bonney had come out to handle “press relations” in the event I was successful in reaching Mach 2. What was happening to staid old NACA, anyway?