Chapter 19: ►

“_Leaf in a Tempest_”

I was king of the race track for three weeks. Then the old master, Chuck Yeager, did it again. He shattered my record, but he nearly died doing it.

I had been expecting the coup de grâce at any moment. Chuck had been scheduled to fly the X-1-A on the day after my Mach 2 flight in the Skyrocket. But when I logged Mach 2, the Air Force team pulled back and regrouped, as the military say. Yeager now had his hands full. Pete Everest describes this Air Force record-breaking in his book: “By this time the old X-1 record had long since been broken by both Bridgeman and Crossfield, so there was no question of keeping ahead of them. Our problem now was trying to catch up.”

In early December Chuck flew the X-1-A Mach 2 and caught up. To quote Everest again: “We had matched Bridgeman and Crossfield even money and now we raised the bid.” Yeager would gun the X-1-A all out.

I watched these warm-ups--between my own press conferences--with more than casual interest. The Wright Brothers Memorial dinner was just a few days away. If Chuck failed, the Navy and Douglas could publicly boast a clean sweep: Carl’s 85,000-foot altitude record and my Mach 2 speed record, both set in the Skyrocket. Yeager flew on December 12.

I took up a post that day on the Edwards radio circuit, to listen in on the flight from the ground. Jack Ridley and Major Arthur “Kit” Murray flew chase. I heard them routinely chatting on the air as the mother plane bore down on the launch point at 32,000 feet. Then like the crack of a starting pistol we heard the mother-plane pilot snap to the co-pilot:

“Drop her, Danny.”

In my mind’s eye I could see the X-1-A falling rapidly away from the mother plane and Yeager adroitly moving the controls. Now I knew he would be hitting the four rocket-switches at intervals, blasting skyward. In a matter of three minutes he would reach the finish line. The seconds ticked by slowly.

“Got him in sight, Kit?” It was chase Ridley speaking to chase Murray.

“No,” Murray replied. “He’s going out of sight. Too small.” That was a good sign--for Yeager.

The radio circuit was silent. There was no word from Yeager. I dragged on a cigarette thinking: It’s just like him to keep everybody on the hook.

Then suddenly all hell broke loose. Something was wrong. I became aware of it when I heard Murray and Ridley shouting over the radio to Yeager.

“Chuck! Chuck! Yeager! Where are you....”

Then Yeager came on the air, his voice hoarse and rasping, and barely audible:

“I’m ... I’m down ... I’m down to 25,000 feet ... over Tehachapi. Don’t know ... whether I can ... get back base or not....”

“At 25,000 feet?” Ridley asked incredulously.

“I’m ... I’m ... Christ!”

“What say, Chuck?” Ridley called. “Chuck!”

“I say ... don’t know ... if I tore ... anything or not ... but, Christ!”

Yeager was obviously in serious trouble. The word flashed across the base. Emergency trucks screamed toward the flight line. Helicopters lifted off, heading for Tehachapi. We leaned over the radio speaker, hanging on each word. Race-track competition was one thing, but now a pilot’s life--a _great_ pilot’s life--was in jeopardy. I felt helpless--almost sick.

“Chuck from Murray,” the radio crackled. “If you can give me altitude and heading, I’ll try to check from outside.” The chase pilots were trying desperately to find Yeager’s tiny craft, to guide him back to base, to tell him if his wings were still in place.

“Be down at 18,000 feet. I’m about ... be over the base at 15,000 feet in a minute,” Yeager reported.

On the ground we cheered the master on. His last radio report indicated he would make it. His voice had new confidence.

“Yes, _sir_,” Murray snapped on the radio.

We heard the routine as Chuck jettisoned and vented fuel tanks. He sounded much better. The chase closed in.

“Does everything look okay on the airplane?” Yeager called, lining up for the lake-bed landing.

There was still time to bail out if the ship was busted. But he got little help. In his eagerness Murray had lined up on the wrong airplane, a T-33 jet trainer. Quickly Murray shifted targets and gunned his engine to close on Yeager’s craft, but it was too late. Yeager was already letting down, committed.

“I don’t have you, Chuck,” Murray called.

“I’m on base leg,” Chuck reported. His voice sounded firm and strong. “I’ll be landing ... in a minute.”

We heard some additional chatter and then Yeager said:

“Going to land long. I would appreciate it if you’d get out there and get ... this thing ... this pressure suit. I’m hurting ... I think I busted the canopy with my head.” He landed like the pro he is.

* * * * *

Yeager’s had been the fastest and wildest airplane ride in history. The grim details of it spread through Edwards, hurriedly passed along by tongues stammering in disbelief and admiration.

After drop, Yeager had lighted off the four X-1-A rocket barrels one by one to achieve maximum speed. He pointed the X-1-A’s nose toward the deep blue and at 75,000 feet he pushed over. The X-1-A, in level flight, roared to Mach 2.42, or about 1600 miles an hour, faster by a wide margin than man had ever flown before. Then in that rarefied air, at a speed the X-1-A was not designed to fly, the plane “uncorked.” The X-1-A tumbled wildly like a “leaf in a tempest, a cork in a flooding stream,” as Everest puts it.

The X-1-A spun uncontrollably, dropping 51,000 feet in fifty-one seconds, smashing Yeager about in the cockpit. As Yeager later recalled the experience: “The voices have no reality in this lost moment of your life. You’re taking a beating now and you’re badly mauled. You can see stars. Your mind is half blank, your body suddenly useless as the X-1-A begins to tumble through the sky. There is something terrible about the helplessness with which you fall. There’s nothing to hold to and you have no strength. There is only your weight knocked one way and the other as the plane drops tumbling through the air. The whole inner lining of its pressurized cockpit is shattered as you’re knocked around, and its skin where you touch it is still scorching hot. Then as the airplane rolls, yaws, and pitches through a ten-mile fall, you suddenly lose consciousness. You don’t know what hit you or where.”

Probably no other pilot could have come through that experience alive. Much later I asked Yeager, as a matter of professional interest, exactly how he regained control of the ship. He was vague in his reply, but he said he thought that after he reached the thick atmosphere, he had deliberately put the ship into a spin.

“A spin is something I know how to get out of,” he said. “That other business--the tumble--there is no way to figure that out.”

The Air Force squeezed in by the skin of its teeth. Yeager’s new record was triumphantly announced at the Wright Brothers Memorial dinner in Washington. Yeager received many accolades. I didn’t begrudge him one of them. If ever a pilot deserved praise for a job well done, it was Yeager. After that X-1-A episode, he never flew a rocket airplane again.

* * * * *

While it still retained control of the X-1-A, the Air Force itched to make a try for an altitude record. As Everest says: “While we waited for the engineers to tell us why Chuck got into trouble, we began an alternate program to set a new altitude record....”

By then Everest must have come to believe his own Air Force press releases. He says: “Bill Bridgeman’s record of 79,000 feet in the Douglas Skyrocket was the mark ... to beat.” In reality the “mark to beat” was Marion Carl’s 85,000-foot record established in the Skyrocket. But, as I said, Carl’s record was seldom included in the aviation-record summaries.

Major Kit Murray, who had flown chase for Chuck Yeager on the ill-fated X-1-A flight, was picked as pilot for the Air Force altitude attempt. His boss, Pete Everest, was reserving his strength and skill for the X-2 flight program, if and when the airplane became ready. Murray had flown chase on the X-1-A many times, but he had never flown a rocket plane. Even so, as Everest puts it, Murray was “well qualified” for this all-out attempt in the unstable X-1-A. After long months of study, and conferences with Yeager, he was thoroughly familiar with the airplane. However, as Everest reports: “... we approached his flights with extreme caution.”

Inevitably there were delays. Murray’s “gravy flight,” as the Air Force termed the record tries, did not arrive until June of 1954. After drop and light-off Murray duplicated Yeager’s flight plan up to 65,000 feet. Then in place of Yeager’s high-speed run, Murray raised the nose of the ship sharply and zoomed toward the sky. At 90,000 feet Murray pushed over in a gentle parabola, his speed just under Mach 2. Says Everest: “Had he kept the nose up he could have gone higher.... We wanted to play this one safe and use proper techniques and not take chances.”

Then, Everest goes on, in spite of these “precautions,” the X-1-A flipped out of control, virtually duplicating the final phase of Yeager’s last X-1-A flight. As Everest explains it: “In thin air of the upper atmosphere the plummeting rocket ship uncorked and fell forty thousand feet before Kit was able to get control again. Because he was going considerably slower than Yeager when he tumbled, fortunately he did not take as bad a beating. After regaining control he returned safely to base and landed, having flown higher than any other human being.”

Murray had topped Carl’s record by 5,000 feet.

Following these demonstrations the X-1-A and its sister-ship, the X-1-B, which had undergone several check flights by Everest and Murray, were turned over to NACA for aeronautical research and investigation. In his pilot report Pete Everest recommended that both planes, “by using a cautious approach,” could probably be flown to a maximum theoretical speed of Mach 2.5, or just a shade faster than Yeager flew the X-1-A on his record-breaking flight. Neither airplane was ever flown again to such speeds and altitudes.

By then the need for an advanced research airplane of stable design was urgently felt throughout the entire aviation industry. At NACA, Edwards, we then had four rocket planes in our hangar. These included the X-1-A and the X-1-B, our rebuilt X-1, renamed the X-1-E, and the trusty Skyrocket. All these airplanes were obviously unstable above Mach 2; the Skyrocket could just barely squeak through to that speed. The swept-wing X-2, by then almost ten years old from a design standpoint, was at Edwards, in Everest’s able hands, but the engine was still not ready for flight test. On a powerless glide test, with ballast, the X-2 nose wheel had again skewered, causing the plane to ground-loop at high speed, badly shaking Everest. This convinced us--if we needed convincing--that the X-2 was really jinxed.

It was vital for the research airplanes to reach far ahead of the military combat airplanes. Already the first of the Century Series supersonic fighters had arrived at Edwards, and Air Force pilots were flying at impressive speeds, encountering dangerous instability and high-altitude engine malfunctions. One of these military planes, a Lockheed F-104 straight-wing, lightweight day-fighter, with the pilot’s pilot, Tony Le Vier, at the helm, cracked Mach 2 only a few months after my Mach 2 flight in the Skyrocket. However, it was plain that if we had learned more from the research airplanes in time, the F-104 and the military planes that came with it--the F-100, F-101, and F-105--good as they were, would have been immeasurably better craft. At that time, moreover, the advance designers were laying plans for a new generation of Mach 3 military airplanes. We had yet to achieve Mach 2.5 in research airplanes. So the requirement for data was even more pressing. It is possible to tell a great deal from wind-tunnel data, of course, but wind-tunnel data are always corrected with assumptions, which inevitably contain errors. Airplanes must be flown full-scale to find out the true story. In reaching to Mach 6, the NACA’s paper-study advanced research airplane would provide a long-overdue and much-desired quantum leap.

* * * * *

The plane was slowly making its way into the world. In April of 1954 NACA completed its engineering studies, proposing a design that looks very much like the X-15 of today. After the usual headquarters shake-down, NACA forwarded this report to all of the senior members of the main NACA committee and to the chairman, Jimmy Doolittle. A few weeks later, in July of 1954, NACA brass met with the Pentagon brass to hammer out the final details of the airplane. During this meeting the Navy revealed that Douglas had prepared a paper study of an “advanced Skyrocket,” with essentially the same performance of the NACA-conceived craft. This report was received with great interest, and some of its suggestions were later absorbed into the X-15 program. But it was clear from the outset that the X-15 would be primarily an Air Force show, with the Navy playing a supporting role. There was not enough money in the kitty to build both Navy and Air Force versions of a Mach 6 research airplane.

* * * * *

“About all this airplane will do is prove the bravery of the pilot.” The speaker was the chief designer of a large aircraft manufacturer, addressing a very influential body, NACA’s Aerodynamics Subcommittee. The Subcommittee was composed of the chief design engineers of the major aircraft companies of the United States. They were meeting at NACA’s Edwards facility for a final rehash of the X-15. At that pronouncement my heart skipped a beat. I was sitting on the sidelines, a very interested bystander.

From conception the X-15 had proved controversial, just like most matters in the highly competitive, uncertain aviation industry. Some engineers believed NACA should reach for higher speed in measured increments, that is to say, Mach 3, Mach 4, Mach 5, with separate vehicles. Experts in the new and growing field of aero-space medicine believed that zero G weightlessness and cosmic radiation would render flight in the fringe of space, or in space itself, impossible. Structural experts worried about the “re-entry” heating of the X-15. It was known that the plane would glow red, like a blacksmith’s forge, when it plunged back into the thick atmosphere. What known metal could withstand so hot a blast and retain its integrity? Still others were concerned about the very low L over D of the X-15. Designed for stable, high-speed flight in rarefied air--or no air at all--on landing, the ship would come in fast, dropping like a brick.

These were technical details. Even more significant was an ominous philosophy underlying this historic meeting. By then--October, 1954--the U. S. had embarked on a massive, semi-crash program to build a family of long- and medium-range ballistic missiles, to include the Thor, Jupiter, Atlas, and Titan. In anticipation of these weapons, missile-test vehicles had already achieved speeds--Mach 10 and up--that made our manned-aircraft efforts seem puny, indeed, in some people’s eyes. These test vehicles were accumulating a vast storehouse of limited-flight data within and beyond the atmosphere on high-speed control, structure and aerodynamic heating. It was not precisely airplane-type information, but it was very closely related. Thus some of the engineers questioned the very need for a high-speed manned research aircraft. Detractors suggested that an automatic missile-type guidance system replace the pilot in the X-15.

Without quite realizing it, these engineers, who must always look five to eight years down the road in their business, were, in a way, debating the future of the manned airplane, as we think of it. Not one of them would then have come right out and said that the manned aircraft was diminishing in importance. On the contrary, they would have protested it to the heavens. But the impact of the guided missile was beginning to be felt, even though none of the proposed missile weapons had been test-fired. In a subtle way, the missile was creeping into all considerations of future projects. The fact that the need for the X-15 and a pilot to fly it was questioned at all was clear proof.

Despite strong objections the NACA Aerodynamics Subcommittee at this meeting put the final stamp of recommendation on the X-15, in effect ratifying Dr. Dryden’s course of action in Washington. Like other research airplanes in the past, the X-15 would be an “open secret,” that is, everything learned in its construction and flight operations would be made available, through NACA and contractor reports, to all of industry. The airplane would be thrown open to all industry for bids. The Air Force would supply ninety per cent of the funds, the Navy about ten per cent. When completed, it would be flown at Edwards in accordance with the scheme I had developed earlier and presented to Walt Williams. Just _who_ would fly the plane was left open for further consideration. The whole project was to be carried out with high priority as a “matter of national urgency.” A few weeks later the Air Force called for bids.

Subsequently NACA displayed unusual boldness in dealing with the Department of Defense over the proposed technical flight program of the X-15. NACA demanded and received sole authority to determine who should fly the airplane, and to what speed and altitude it should be flown on each flight. Deference would be shown the Air Force, of course, since that agency was footing most of the bills for the plane, but NACA made it clear that aeronautical research would take precedence over record-breaking. The X-15 would shatter existing records, all in the line of business.

There was much that worried me after the aeronautical design titans had departed Edwards. As I saw it, there was danger that the X-15 would wind up with too many cooks. Almost any member of the many interested agencies had the authority to impose his ideas on the airplane. Each was a specialist in one field or another; each an advocate of this or that controversial, and often unproven, concept. The overall shape and power requirements of the plane had been fixed by physical law, but everything else was subject to change: the instruments, the control surfaces, the control mechanism, the landing gear, the escape system, and a lot of things yet to be invented. The X-15, subjected to many individual influences, might wind up not the ultimate, but a “bucket of worms” (all too familiar) as the inevitable result, and far too late.

One thing worried me more. This was the growing influence of the unmanned missile that had been so evident at the meetings. This same influence had permeated the staff at our Edwards outpost. One day during a bull session with the pilots, one of them said to me:

“You know, this X-15 might very well be the ship that closes a grand era in aviation. The last of the great manned airplanes.”

“The hell you say!” Anger flushed my face. “The X-15 won’t close anything. On the contrary, the X-15 will open a whole new era in aviation: the second phase, the second fifty years. Centuries from now historians dealing with space flight will look back to the X-15 as a starting point. They will compare its flights to the great voyages of discovery, to the exploratory probes of Prince Henry the Navigator’s captains down the coast of Africa, preceding the voyage of Columbus. This is the beginning, not the end.”

“Say, Scotty,” one of the pilots said, “you feel pretty strong about that airplane, don’t you?”

“You’re damned right I do.”

And that was a fact. I did.