Chapter 2: ►

_The Gypsy Caravan_

In the spring of 1950, a few months before Commencement, I began to lay final plans for my move into the aviation world. The way the deck was stacked, it did not appear a ripe time for aspiring aeronautical engineers. The Pentagon’s post-World War II economy drive had severely deflated the giant aviation industry. There were a few jets in production--Boeing’s B-47, North American’s F-86, Lockheed’s F-80, Republic’s F-84, McDonnell’s “Banshee”--and many others in the experimental test stage. Crack aeronautical engineers were, as usual, rare; but new graduates were a dime a dozen, breaking into the industry at less than $300 a month. Many able experimental test pilots were killing time in routine jobs. But as the cards were played out, my timing couldn’t have been better. No one could then foresee the outbreak of the Korean War. In a few months this war changed the atmosphere in the aviation industry one hundred and eighty degrees. This change provided me with my great opportunity.

That spring, as I reviewed the chances open to me, I concluded the best stepping stone was a Civil Service job with the government as an “aeronautical research pilot” for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). Unknown to the general public, NACA had for years been the vital cauldron in which new ideas in aeronautical engineering were brewed and sampled. The agency was founded in 1915 by President Wilson, after the U. S. had lagged considerably behind Europe in the exploitation of the airplane for civilian and military purposes. The members of the committee, then the grandees of the U. S. aviation world, were charged with keeping close tabs on all domestic and foreign aviation developments, and to serve as a kind of clearing house for U. S. engineers. The committee was supposed to encourage officially any U. S. aviation development which held promise.

As the airplane grew in importance and complexity, NACA grew in size. Langley Laboratory was founded at Hampton, Virginia, to test seaplane hulls, new propeller designs, and important air foils. It was soon equipped with wind tunnels and other tools of the aeronautical engineers. Much later, in 1940, NACA founded a second aeronautical research laboratory--Ames--at Moffett Field, near San Francisco. Shortly before World War II, a third laboratory, Lewis, was built in Cleveland, Ohio, to work on problems of propulsion. While some NACA engineers dealt with hardware, much new basic theory--some of it sound, some of it impractical--emanated from the ivy-covered, college-like atmosphere of its laboratories. This theory, combined with that from universities such as Washington, and considerably more theory generated by the highly competitive aviation industry, served to keep the U. S. abreast.

The X-1 rocket plane was, in a way, a product of NACA. During World War II, NACA was frantically busy “fixing” design shortcomings on production military airplanes. In 1944, when the country stood on the threshold of the jet age, NACA engineers came face-to-face with the problem of the suspect data provided by wind tunnels near the speed of sound. Seeking a substitute solution, the Air Force’s Ezra Kotcher and a few NACA engineers, including Hartley Soule and John Stack, together with Bell engineer Robert Woods, conceived the idea of building a full-scale rocket-powered research plane that could actually be _flown_ through the speed of sound to get the necessary data. It was a bold--indeed, daring--move for the conservative agency, and it paid handsome dividends in the long run.

During the course of modern aviation history, NACA has been alternately praised and damned. In 1935 the British _Journal of the Royal Aeronautical Society_ huffed: “It is notorious that many of our most capable design staffs prefer to base their technical work on the results of the NACA.” After World War II, when the complete picture of the astounding Nazi achievements in the field of aeronautics came to light, NACA was severely criticized for the U. S. lag. Much later it was blamed for permitting the U. S. to fall behind in the field of ballistic missiles. These shortcomings, I believe, were more the result of a national attitude than a specific research or policy failure on NACA’s part. By and large, considering its shoestring budget, NACA had performed ably. With only occasional exceptions, the U. S. aviation industry has held NACA in high regard. One reason is that the agency served as a training ground for many U. S. aeronautical engineers. For example, my childhood hero, Eddie Allen, was one of NACA’s first and best test pilots.

From my point of view in 1950, NACA seemed a likely starting point. I knew that NACA kept a small stable of test pilots at each of its three major laboratories. Most of them were engineers, too--able to translate a deficiency encountered in the air into precise engineering terminology. A close association with these men for a period would be valuable experience. Thus, without knowledge of a specific vacancy, I mailed off a general application form to the government.

There were no openings, the government replied. I wrote again and again without results. When graduation exercises were only a few weeks away, I felt I had to take some land of direct action. I decided to pay an unannounced visit to Laurence Clousing, NACA’s chief test pilot at Ames. Clousing, I knew, was one of the best in the business. If he did not know of a job, his advice alone would make my trip worth while.

I remember everything about that day. It was remarkable not only because it was a turning point in my life, but also because it was filled with coincidences, minor but eerie. The first of the latter happened the moment I walked into Clousing’s office--unexpectedly, so I thought.

“Hello, Crossfield,” Clousing said. He was a tall man with a deceptively shy manner. He seemed to me more like a college professor than a test pilot. He thrust a friendly hand toward me. “We’ve been waiting for you. Your wife called a few minutes ago.”

I was very surprised by his greeting. I had told Alice only that I was going to see a “guy named Clousing down near San Francisco.” That she had been able to track me down to his office at the big NACA facility amazed me. This feeling soon gave way to concern. I was sure Alice would not call unless there was urgent news.

“Is somebody ill?” I asked Clousing.

“No,” he said. “She wanted to pass along the word that you received a reply this morning to your civil service application. You’re invited to Edwards for an interview. We have no openings here at all.” The most surprising fact of all in this news was that Alice had opened the letter. Not in seven years of marriage had she so much as touched a letter addressed to me. Well, I thought, it’s lucky she did. I turned to Clousing.

“Edwards?” I asked. “Isn’t that Air Force?” At that time I knew only that Edwards was a desert test center for experimental airplanes in Southern California. It was at Edwards that Chuck Yeager had flown the X-1 through the sonic barrier. Industry test pilots from the Los Angeles area used the base for first flights of new planes.

“NACA has a small experimental test group at Edwards,” Clousing said. “Two or three pilots and a few engineers and mechanics. They came out with the X-1 back in ’46. They’re doing some work there with other planes. It was supposed to be a temporary group but they’ve made it a permanent station now. Walt Williams runs the unit. The chief test pilot is John Griffith. Do you want to go down and see them?”

I wasn’t too keen on Edwards. Clousing’s brief comments brought to mind a picture of a gypsy caravan from NACA camping in tents on the edge of the Air Force base. What a contrast to the scholarly atmosphere of the massive Ames installation! To me Ames was a known quantity but Edwards a big question. But Clousing had made it clear he was not hiring. Edwards, at least, was a foot in the door. I thought it might be worth a gamble.

When I said yes, Clousing put through a call to Walt Williams to arrange a rendezvous. Soon I was on a train, chuffing slowly over the coastal mountains toward the great, desolate Mojave Desert.

Today Edwards, like the rest of Southern California, has grown to spectacular proportions. It is a well-organized military base, manned by some 10,000 men, with a neat base-housing area, cross-hatched by streets named for pilots who have died in the course of duty at Edwards. It has a Base Exchange, an Officers’ Club, gigantic hangars, and all the rest. But on that day when I saw it for the first time, it was little more than a runway scratched out of the desert. The handful of pilots lived in “tarpaper” shacks and drank whiskey in a roadhouse run by an aging but colorful aviatrix named Pancho Barnes.

John Griffith met my train in Mojave, a frontier town not far from Death Valley, once a stopping-off place for the famous twenty-mule teams which labored across the desert hauling borax. The brown wastes of the desert were harsh to my eyes, which had looked for so long on the green of the Northwest. I was not sure Alice would like it. Even in May the heat was stifling.

Griffith, a stocky, powerfully built man about thirty-one years old, was appropriately dressed for the climate--slacks, sport shirt, dark glasses. I felt out of place in my blue serge suit, but John quickly put me at ease with his friendly smile and easy manner. We climbed into his car and drove along an arrow-straight, black-top road toward the base. It was hard to believe that this primeval environment was the center of aviation’s most advanced flying.

On the way to the field I learned a little of the history of the NACA pilots at Edwards. The original group had consisted of Herbert Hoover, and Howard Lilly, both fine pilots. Lilly was killed when an experimental plane blew up on take-off. Hoover was killed later, when a B-45 jet exploded in the air; his co-pilot, John Harper, escaped. He subsequently went to work for Lear, Inc. To replace them, Griffith came from Lewis Lab and Bob Champine from the Langley Lab to be number two man. An able, sharp-eyed pilot, but not a very experienced one, Champine soon developed a distaste for experimental flight tests. He transferred back to Langley, leaving the opening for which I was to be interviewed. Griffith was the sole pilot, a World War II veteran. He flew for the Air Force in the Solomons and later joined NACA. Superior to him was Joe Vensel, chief of Flight Operations, then came Walt Williams, chief of the station.

The NACA High Speed Flight Test Station occupied one of two small hangars in the sand bordering the runway. As we drew close, I saw there was just one building, a combination hangar and office. I was soon to learn that the NACA operation was, as I had envisioned it, completely parasitic. It leaned on the Air Force for water, communications, fuel, fire protection--everything but salaries, pilots, and engineers. But the primitive façade was deceptive. Inside there was a highly contagious, pioneering spirit. The NACA group at Edwards was ready to perform big deeds; even more spectacular plans were in the works.

The principal reason for this spirit, I soon found, was the boss, Walt Williams, a thirty-one-year-old engineer from New Orleans. A cocky, hard-working operator, Williams had cut his teeth in NACA’s Langley Laboratory during the war. In 1946 he had come to Edwards with twelve men under his command, to supervise the research phase of the X-1 program. The plan then was that when Bell had finished the initial flight tests of the plane, Williams and his group would move in. They would fit the ship with instruments and begin recording scientific data on each flight. This scheme had been unavoidably delayed when Goodlin bowed out.

After Chuck Yeager flew the plane through the sound barrier, other Air Force pilots moved in to take the controls and set new records. One of these was Major Frank K. (“Pete”) Everest, who zoomed to an altitude of 73,000 feet. Others followed: Captain Jack Ridley and Colonel Albert Boyd, who was then commander of the Edwards outpost, and the epitome of a service test pilot. Herbert Hoover of NACA flew the X-1 and became the first civilian to penetrate the sound barrier.

There were actually _three_ X-1s, I discovered. The first, Yeager’s plane, which he nicknamed _Glamorous Glennis_ after his beautiful wife, had been shipped off to the Smithsonian Institution. The second X-1 had been turned over to NACA. The third X-1 was still at the Bell plant in Buffalo, New York, being fitted with a new low-pressure fuel system which would enable it to go higher and faster. But many, many months would pass before X-1 number three was ready for flight. It held a grim surprise.

I talked first with Joe Vensel, chief of Flight Operations. He was a man cautious in decision but quick in physical movement. He bore the scars of a rough life of flying: shattered sinuses. At 40, he wore a hearing aid. Vensel had little to say or to ask.

Griffith then took me directly to Williams’ office, a make-shift area in one end of the hangar. Williams met me with a firm and enthusiastic handshake. He bounced around the room impatiently, pausing frequently to run his hand through his crew-cut brown hair, or to doodle violently on a scratch pad. It was immediately clear that Williams was a man of action. I liked him on first sight. He and Griffith probed my background.

“How is it you have so much single-engine time?” Griffith asked.

“I like to fly,” I said. “I got my private license before the war. During the war I was an instructor at Corpus Christi, Texas. We were very busy. Lot of students. Lot of hours. I took extra students when I could. After the war I was active in the Naval Reserve.”

“What about this stunt team?” Williams asked.

And so it went. As the interview progressed, I learned there were two other pilots being considered for the opening, each with about half my flying experience. This competition, unsuspected until then, sharpened my senses. I talked earnestly about my desire to make a serious contribution to aeronautical science. Before the session drew to a close, Williams made it clear that the job was mine--if I wanted it. I didn’t want to appear overly eager. I parried for a while, seeking answers to a few questions of my own.

“What kind of flying would I be doing here?” I asked. “It looks to me as though Chuck Yeager and Pete Everest and the other Air Force pilots have a corner on the market.” It was a deliberate needle and it obviously touched Williams on a sore spot. He responded with a spiel which sounded as though it had been drafted for a Congressional committee.

“The research airplane was conceived at NACA’s Langley Laboratory. The funds are provided principally by the Air Force and the Navy. NACA has technical jurisdiction over the flight programs, which are designed to provide maximum data within a given time. Under the new concept, civilian test pilots of the companies concerned in the design and construction of the research airplanes make initial test flights, verifying established design and structural points, engine reliability, and so on. The Air Force pilots then take over and fly them with an eye to military application, under NACA cognizance. After that, so the plan goes, the ships are turned over to us here at NACA for detailed flight research. The ... ah ... the Air Force has been somewhat slow in turning over the planes, that’s true, but we have encountered one unpredicted technical problem after the other ...”

“I suppose--” I broke in. But Williams had not finished. He lunged out of his chair and paced back and forth, warming to his subject.

“We are blazing new trails in aeronautical science out here. The data we are producing are fed directly into the aviation industry through NACA reports available to all. Industry engineers are applying the data to concepts for the next generation of jet fighters--a family of supersonic fighters. We’re testing everything here: straight wing, swept wing, tailless jobs. We’re running into all kinds of phenomena. Some of them have been predicted in theory and tunnel test; some are brand-new.”

“What planes are you working with now?” I asked.

“We’ve got an X-1 out there in the hangar now, and the X-4. Hell, come on out and I’ll show you.”

Williams boomed out of the office into the hangar space. I followed, looking in detail for the first time at the collection of weird and fascinating planes. The hangar was busy. Mechanics swarmed over the little hot-rods, removing plates, pulling long snarls of wire from their insides, shoving calibration carts here and there. The whine of a pneumatic drill, accompanied by the staccato of a rivet gun, echoed through the high-beamed, arched ceiling. The scene reminded me of the feverishly busy pits at the Indianapolis race track a few hours before the 500-mile Speedway race on Memorial Day. The analogy is not far-fetched. These planes were nearly comparable to temperamental, overpowered, dangerous, finely-tuned racing cars. Edwards, in reality, was an Indianapolis of the air.

A few of the planes, such as the X-1, were familiar to me; others were new. We stopped alongside the X-4, a tailless plane powered by two jet engines. It had just been turned over to NACA by the Air Force, Williams said, patting the side of the ship. It was a metallic white, like an icebox.

“She was supposed to go Mach 1,” he said. “But she can’t make it. It’s a little tricky to fly. The engines flame out at altitude. She pitches a bit at Mach .9. British lost a couple of DeHavilland Swallows of similar design. Mystery why they crashed. Maybe we can find out with this baby.” Williams rattled on in this fashion as we moved about the hangar. We came to another beautiful ship which looked somewhat like the X-1.

“This is the Douglas Skystreak, the D-558-I,” Williams said. “It’s a Navy project.”

“Oh, yes,” I said. This was the model that killed Lilly. I recalled a few of the details of the program. “Gene May also flew that one, didn’t he?” May was a Douglas test pilot.

“That’s right,” Williams said. “We have two of these left. This one is just like the X-1 only it has a jet instead of a rocket engine. We had another D-558 version here, swept wing with a jet using JATO for take-off, called the Skyrocket. Then there also is another swept-wing version with a jet engine and a rocket engine. It’s back at the Douglas plant now being modified to an all-rocket version. We’ll air-launch it from a mother plane like we do the X-1.”

_All-rocket, air-launch, swept-wing._ I turned these phrases over briefly in my mind, little realizing then the impact this airplane would have on my future.

“What do you expect from that?” I asked.

“Well, the figures are classified, frankly. But in round numbers and stretching, we think she might reach Mach 2, and maybe 90,000 or 100,000 feet,” Williams said. He spoke in a low, confidential tone.

“Who is the pilot going to be?” I asked. “Gene May?”

“No.” Williams said. “Douglas has a new pilot, an ex-Navy type named Bill Bridgeman.”

“The Air Force doesn’t get this one?”

“No. This is a Navy project. They do it differently. They’d just as soon have the manufacturer establish the limits of the airplane. Good, sharp outfit to do business with. They don’t mind racking up a few records, but it is not their first order of business.”

The way Williams spoke of “records,” he conveyed clearly the impression that at NACA records per se were unimportant, if not frowned upon. We wandered back to his office and sat down.

“Now,” he said, “there are about four other types in the works. Bell’s got a souped-up version of the X-1 coming out which will easily exceed Mach 2, or better. They also have a swept-wing rocket plane, the X-2, which is designed for nearly Mach 3 and about 150,000 feet. Then there’s the X-3, a straight-wing job by Douglas. It is way behind schedule and very complicated. It might turn out to be a dud. Then we’ll have the Bell X-5, a jet-powered ship with an inflight variable-sweep capability.”

My head was swimming with figures and visions of these fantastic airplanes. My top speed in an airplane then was maybe five hundred miles an hour, clocked in a dive in a Corsair. Williams talked of 1500 and 2000 miles an hour as if those speeds were routine. I was sold.

“I would have a shot at those airplanes?” I asked.

“If everything works out,” Williams said.

“The X-2 as well?”

“If everything works out,” Williams repeated.

“When do I start?”

“We’ll let you know,” Williams said. He glanced at his watch. “You going back into Mojave to catch a train? Why don’t you hitch a ride with Drake and Carmen?”

Hubert M. Drake and L. Robert Carmen together made up the “advance design” group at NACA’s Edwards installation. They were the “dreamers,” paid to look far into the future and scheme new ways to fly higher and faster. I didn’t know it then--and they didn’t discuss it--but Drake and Carmen were doing work at night in their homes on an airplane to put the best of dreamers to shame. It was a rocket-powered craft that would fly four thousand miles an hour and to an altitude of 500,000 feet. Five years later, after a tortuous journey through a jungle of bureaucracy, and endless modification, this craft became the X-15. Looking back now, I regard the fact that these two men were picked to give me a lift to Mojave as something of a coincidence.

Of pressing concern to me at that moment was the fact that I was almost flat broke. I had hitch-hiked down to the Ames Laboratory on a Navy airplane and had intended to return to Seattle that same day by the same means. The plane had long since returned; I was stranded in the desert without nearly enough cash for a train ticket to Seattle. There was no money in my checking account. However, by the time I climbed out of Drake’s car at the bleak, dusty Mojave railroad station and bid my hosts farewell, I had a plan.

I checked with the station master. There was a north-bound train scheduled to pass through Mojave at midnight. The daycoach fare to Seattle, via San Francisco, was about $20, and this was about $10 more than I had.

“What’s the next stop beyond Mojave?” I asked.

“Martinez,” the station master said. He eyed me curiously.

“Okay,” I said, “give me a ticket to Martinez.” It was about $7.00.

I then placed a telephone call, collect, to my sister, Elena Ruth (“Babe”) Brown, who lived in Sierra Madre, just outside Los Angeles. When she answered, considerably surprised to hear from me, I told her I was taking the midnight train to Martinez and asked her to wire me $25 in care of the station master there. I had not often borrowed money in my life, but I didn’t mind asking her. Many years before, when she was a student at Berkeley, I had hocked my camera in order to lend her $40 for flying lessons, for which my father refused to pay.

After Babe assured me the money would be sent immediately, I hung up and retired to a corner to count my remaining fortune. I spent another dollar at the Silver Dollar Cafe for dinner, then blew the rest on a ticket to the local movie. By still another coincidence, the picture was about a test pilot and Humphrey Bogart was the star. I plumped into a seat and watched while he wrestled with a rattling control stick, braving the frontiers of flight.

Hours later I was still deeply absorbed, not in that turkey of a movie but in what I had seen and heard that day, when I felt a hand on my shoulder. A voice spoke:

“Are you Mr. Crossfield?”

Startled, I broke out of my supersonic reverie and spun around. It was the theater usher.

“Yeah. I’m Crossfield.”

“There’s a gentleman out front to see you.”

I followed the usher up the aisle wondering who it could be. No one on earth knows where I am, I thought.

To my astonishment, I found Babe’s husband, Claude, and behind him, my mother, Lucia, waiting in the lobby. My mother had been visiting my sister when I called. After I hung up she talked my brother-in-law into making the three-hour drive to Mojave to surprise me.

“But how did you know I was in there?” I asked.

“Well, I cased every bar in town first, while your mother waited in the car. I didn’t see you in any of them so I figured in a town of this size the only place left was the movie.”

We laughed and made our way to a nearby restaurant. At midnight, $25 richer, I boarded a daycoach on the train.

Back in Seattle, I collected my Master’s degree in aeronautical engineering, resigned from my Naval Reserve unit, packed up the family--Alice, Becky, age two, and our new addition, Tommy--traded my 1941 Ford for a ’49 Ford, and drove to the desert to begin a new life.

Three weeks later many of my Naval Reserve comrades were mobilized and shipped off to Korea.