Chapter 18: ►

“_Fastest Man on Earth_”

November 20, 1953, was a cold, blustery day on the desert. I arrived at the ramp before daybreak, shivering from the frigid wind and weak from a bad dose of influenza. I had slept only a few hours. But it mattered little how _I_ felt. My mind and body would be called upon to perform full-bore for only four critical minutes. I had no doubt that both could be summoned to peak at the proper time. The important thing was how the Skyrocket shaped up.

She was snugged under the belly of the B-29 mother plane, almost lost in a swirl of liquid oxygen fog, which boiled out of a vent. Pipes, wires, and hoses leading from the ground-equipment carts and fuel trucks were plugged into her top and sides. A swarm of mechanics, heavily bundled against the cold, fretted about. In the background was a steady, eerie, high-pitched whistle caused by pressure dumping overboard through a relief valve, signifying to all that the Skyrocket was ready for action. It was a falsetto call to arms.

In truth, the Skyrocket was being called upon to perform a minor miracle. She was not designed for supersonic flight in the first place. In concept she was old, years old, and even at Mach 1.8 we were pressing her far beyond rational limits. One simple fact made her go fast: the 200-second blast of her enormously powerful rocket engine lighted off in mid-air at 35,000 feet, where we could take advantage of the thin air. If the Skyrocket took off from the ground, which she was not designed to do, even with her rocket engine going she would not exceed the speed of sound. Too much time would be lost, too much fuel consumed, leaving the ground and climbing through the thick air that lies between the earth and 35,000 feet. The secret lay in the air-launch. And even with an air-launch, the best any ordinary team could hope for, with luck, was a speed of Mach 1.9. Bridgeman and I had already crowded her limits. This speed was achieved in the thin air above 50,000 feet, where at any instant the Skyrocket, not designed for flight in those regions, could skid slightly and then tumble wildly out of control.

After months of working together, the NACA Skyrocket team had learned many little tricks to save time and gain an edge on the unknown. Take the prime, for example, when we squirted a preliminary shot of Lox through the engine, to chill it down for the big start. The prime exhausted through a tube in the rear of the bird. As soon as the prime flowed smoothly, we launched. If we delayed, we wasted valuable Lox-energy. Jim Newman, an observer in the B-29, had learned to anticipate the prime. He could tell on the first puff if it was going to be good. As another example, I had perfected a rhythmatic method of lighting off the four rocket barrels so that each tube gave us every ounce of impulse it was capable of exerting.

All else being equal, in the final analysis the speed we achieved depended directly on how much fuel we could carry. Here, too, we had tried a trick. If we pumped the frigid, unstable, boiling liquid oxygen into the Skyrocket about four or five hours before flight time, giving it time to “settle down,” we knew we could squeeze in a few more pounds. Storing the freezing liquid in the airplane for so long a period caused the ship to transform into a gigantic deep-freeze. Because of this, we called the procedure “cold-soaking” the airplane. We also chilled the alcohol fuel for higher density.

The way our orders read, we had only one chance to crack Mach 2. There could be no mistakes and thus we did everything possible to grease the ship, hoping to gain a knot of speed or save an ounce of weight. Everyone scoffed, but I had the crew wax the glistening white wings and fuselage. We placed masking tape over every aperture and crack. We replaced the stainless-steel prime and jettison tubes, used only in an emergency fuel-dump, with lightweight aluminum tubing. We carefully bent these tubes so they curved into the blast of the rocket engine. Once I had lighted off and no longer required them, they would burn away and fall off, shedding another few pounds of drag from the Skyrocket.

* * * * *

“How’s everything, Jack?” Jack Moise, one of the B-29 launch-panel operators, had, along with the whole crew, been awake most of the night nursing the Skyrocket. He was an able mechanic and a cool head in the air at launch time. He often operated the liquid oxygen top-off system in the mother plane, pumping in the last bit of fuel before launch.

“She looks real good, Scotty,” Jack said. “We’re ready to load hydrogen peroxide.” We used peroxide as a fuel for the Skyrocket’s fuel and Lox pumps that supplied the rocket engines with the high-pressure propellants at tremendous rates. The peroxide solution--ninety per cent--was so strong that a rag doused in the liquid would spontaneously burst into flames.

“Go ahead,” I said. I tightened my jacket against the cold desert wind.

Moise gave the signal and the peroxide flowed from a truck into the Skyrocket. But a calamity was in the making--one of those unfortunate “accidents” that always seem to haunt the record-breakers at Edwards. The long “cold-soak” had frozen shut a hydrogen-peroxide vent fitting. The dangerous liquid, pumped in under pressure, sought an escape route. It overflowed into a manifold, rushed through a pipe, and suddenly burst out of an untaped port near the rear of the Skyrocket, showering Jack Moise. He yelled and covered his face with his hands.

A quick-thinking mechanic, Kinkaid, grabbed a fire hose and brutally splashed Moise full in the face with water. Without a second’s delay we hurried Moise to the flight-line emergency dispensary. There they carefully rinsed his face and eyes and stripped off his peroxide-soaked clothing. His face was blotched white in a few spots, but fortunately these disappeared within a few days.

Coming out of the doctor’s office, I saw Kinkaid sitting on a bench, waiting for a check-up. He was soaking wet.

“You better get out of those wet clothes,” I said.

“No, Scotty, it’s okay. I’m warm,” he said.

I was about to leave when a question flashed into my mind. Why would Kinkaid, wet as he was, be “warm” on so cold a day? The answer came quickly: he, too, was soaked with peroxide, a thermite bomb, ready to burst into flames.

I’m sure Kinkaid thought I had lost my mind. I ran to him and began peeling off his many layers of clothing--two pairs of trousers, long underwear, a jacket, sweater, and shirt. When at last he stood before us completely nude and looking sheepish, I saw that his arms and legs were bleached white. We had saved him from serious injury and possibly a consuming peroxide fire.

This near-disaster delayed our preparations, but not much. Back at the ship another mechanic thawed the peroxide fitting with a hot-air gun, and soon the Skyrocket was loaded, ready to go.

Herman Ankenbruk, the project engineer, had spent many hours working out a flight plan that would give the Skyrocket maximum performance--and then some. Usually after drop I flew the plane on a giant parabolic course, going uphill and then pushing over, achieving maximum speed in a mild dive. Everything was timed to the split second. Too much climb would rob me of rocket-engine burning time on the descent. A sloppy pushover would leave the Skyrocket at too low or too high an altitude at burn-out. The high-speed dive lasted only a few seconds. Plunging earthward, the Skyrocket soon encountered thick air, building up a dragging shock-wave on the nose. When the drag equaled the thrust of the rockets, they shut off and the Skyrocket slowed like a truck hitting a brick wall.

After a brain-numbing analysis of all previous flight data and endless conferences with me, Herman advised me to climb to 72,000 feet. The winds aloft that day blew from the east. A launch in the western end of the valley, heading east, might add a few miles per hour, we thought. The cold temperature that day suited the Skyrocket fine.

* * * * *

The success of the flight to a large extent depended on the performance of the mother-ship crew. On this day especially, the Lox top-off had to be perfect. Each drop of Lox pumped in at the last moment added precious micro-seconds to the burning time. I was completely confident. Jim Newman, I knew, would anticipate the prime and call it right. The mother-plane pilot, Stan Butchart, an old friend from the war and the University whom I had recruited for NACA, would drop at precisely the right point at the best speed and altitude. He had done so many times in the past. These men were pros.

At 10,000 feet I crawled into the familiar cockpit of the Skyrocket and the canopy was slammed shut. All the gauges were in the green. Only one thing worried me. When we reached altitude, it was my job to pressurize the cockpit of the Skyrocket by releasing compressed air through a valve. There was no gradual compression. The gas exploded into the cockpit in one burst. The effect on the pilot was similar to that a diver might experience with a split-second change in depth. The sinus tubes sometimes clogged and built up pressure that telegraphed a racking pain through every cavity in the pilot’s head. Long before, from years of flying and pressure-chamber work, I had developed that dreadful occupational affliction of pilots: tortured, mangled sinus channels. On two occasions in the past the pain had been so severe at pressurizing that I had had to cancel. I worried now about how my influenza might have complicated my sinuses. It was possible they might be unbearably painful.

Against this possibility I had brought along a piece of insurance, a small cork. Preparing to pressurize, I reached back and plugged the cork in the compressed-air tube outlet. I turned the valve and eased the cork out of the pipe slowly. The pressure in the cockpit built up gradually and caused me no pain whatsoever. When the cabin-pressure gauge reached the green, I reported by radio to Butchart:

“Pressurized.”

We droned on toward launch point, our path marked by four snowy-white contrails. The air was slightly turbulent and we bounced more than usual. The Skyrocket creaked in its mechanical nest. Too busy to care, I set my stop-watch and began the pre-launch routine. I pressurized the fuel tanks. The gauges, thank God, held steady in the green. Then I turned the switch on the Skyrocket panel which blazed a green “ready” light on Butchart’s panel in the B-29.

“Going to prime,” I intoned on the radio. There was no dramatic nonsense on our radio circuits. Almost before I had completed my sentence, Jim Newman called back:

“Prime looks good.”

“Five, four, three, two, one. DROP!” Butchart called the countdown with almost exaggerated calm.

The Skyrocket fell away on its elevator course, and a blinding flash of sunlight hit my eyes. When the ship rolled gently to the right, as usual, I trimmed quickly and hit the rocket-barrel switches, pausing a split second until each caught. The Skyrocket surged ahead. I pulled back on the stick and the horizon disappeared from my windshield. I called Butchart by radio for a steer.

“You’re to my right and going uphill, Scotty,” Butchart said, placing the Skyrocket in relative position to the mother plane. This was important because in the steep climb I couldn’t tell direction.

“All four going good,” chase Captain Givens reported. I soon left them far below and behind.

With luck the rocket barrels would burn a total of 200 seconds. These three minutes would spell success or failure. While the Skyrocket bored steadily toward the heavens, I prayed silently to God. “Don’t let me goof this one.” Meanwhile I kept my eye glued to the needle-ball, air-speed and altitude instruments, an archaic but very effective method. If they charged ahead too much or dropped off suddenly, I would burn fuel needlessly. The way Herman had calculated it, I had to ride an imaginary parabola in the sky, veering no more than a few feet off course. This was the delicate knife-edge.

Coming up on 72,000 feet, I began the push-over. The Skyrocket, engines blazing furiously, arched nicely and began the big downhill run. This was the supreme moment: the Olympic bobsled run, the 80-meter ski-jump, the first and last downhill lunge on my wild roller-coaster. I prayed that the barrels would burn a few more seconds. My eye now alternated from the Mach meter, which was slowly edging toward the magic 2.0 reading, to the needle and ball; if either deviated, precious energy and speed were lost.

I could hear the usual chatter on the radio from chase: “Do you have him in sight?”

“No. I see the exhaust. But I can’t see him. He’s lost in the sun some place.”

“Well, I’ll ease over the base and try to pick him up when he gets back down here.”

“Rog.”

The Skyrocket was performing like an Olympic champion. She held true on her spectacular dive. The rocket engine burned several seconds longer than usual--207. The “cold-soak” had paid off. The Mach meter needle edged past 2.0 and hung at 2.04. WE HAD MADE IT! I had become the first man to fly at twice the speed of sound, and this historic milestone had been automatically recorded by the data instruments in the Skyrocket.

The rocket engine cut off with a pop-pop-pop-pop, just about the instant the Skyrocket entered the “thick” air. The ship slowed abruptly, throwing me forward against the shoulder straps. I drew back on the stick and began the pull-out, still coasting at better than Mach 1.8, taking care to see that the ship did not fall off the knife-edge. Dropping silently back through Mach 1.0, the Skyrocket for a brief instant shook harshly, like a wet dog drying his fur.

Now it was time for the dead-stick lake-bed landing. Coming over the edge of the lake at 15,000 feet, I whipped the ship into a victory roll. As I slowed, the chase planes found me and closed on my wingtips. I lined up for the let-down.

The Skyrocket’s wheels touched down between the two long black lines painted on the dry-lake bed at precisely the point I had picked to land. She rolled to a stop twelve minutes from launch. Walt Williams, followed by Walter Bonney, ran up to the side of the ship, awaiting my report. I pushed back the canopy and looked at Bonney.

“I don’t think you’ve wasted your time coming out here.” He beamed.

* * * * *

“Scotty, how did it feel?” It was a mob scene in a room of the Statler-Hilton Hotel in Los Angeles. In the glare of spotlights, newsreel cameras ground and flash cameras exploded in my face. The reporter who asked the question, one of about fifty jammed in the room, held his notebook in hand, pencil poised. Other reporters were shouting from all corners of the room. The phone was ringing. Everybody wanted an interview. National magazines were on the scent. Walter Bonney was in his element. At last NACA had hit the big time in his business, too.

How did it feel? I turned the question over in my mind slowly, gazing blankly at the reporter. How did you explain how it felt in a word or two, which was all he wanted? Tell them you didn’t believe in making records? Tell them it was part of a careful lifetime plan? Reveal the secrets of the proposed advanced research airplane? Tell them you just wanted to show Yeager a thing or two?

“Well, if you want to know the truth,” I said, “I didn’t feel good yesterday. I had the flu. A real bellyache.”

The newsmen scrambled out, leaving Bonney and me to sort through a hundred or more invitations to make speeches, appear at football games in the half-time, and other scientifically significant events, and to fend off still more reporters who wanted to write “human interest” stories about me and, worse, my family. It was a new and zany world to me. That night when I picked up a Los Angeles newspaper, I stared dazedly at the black headline two inches high and eight columns long:

PILOT FLIES MACH 2 AND GETS BELLYACHE

A few nights later I was guest of honor at a ceremony in San Diego. Sitting next to me at the head table was movie star and swimming champion, Esther Williams. We all waited patiently while some Air Force general droned through a long, prepared speech about the marvels of science and airplanes in particular. Finally my beautiful dinner companion, dressed in a tight-fitting gold lamé dress, was called upon to speak.

Esther Williams approached the mike. Leaning over the lectern until her best features were prominently spot-lighted, she spoke slowly: “You know, I’ve been getting a lot of static all night long about sitting next to the fastest man on earth. But I don’t believe it. He hasn’t laid a hand on me yet!”

I only wished that the exceedingly eminent Dr. Dryden had been there to see the crowd double up on the floor with glee. NACA had indeed arrived at a turning point. Scott Crossfield, too.