Chapter 3: ►

_A Sense of Urgency_

A harsh, bitterly cold December wind, gathering momentum over miles of flat desert, lashed the ramp behind the NACA hangar. I buttoned my jacket close and bowed my head as I pushed against it toward the airplane. Here and there I saw that the small puddles were frozen to solid ice. The desert warms up during the day, but on a winter night it is like the North Pole. Sometimes it snows at Edwards.

I climbed into the cockpit and pulled on my crash helmet, grateful to be shielded at last from the frigid blast. Ralph Sparks, who, on that blue-cold morning, looked as though he was born before the Wright brothers, closed the canopy and removed the aluminum boarding ladder. I smiled and waved my hand sharply. Sparks claimed personal authorship of most of aviation’s achievements, but there were few mechanics at NACA, or anywhere for that matter, more able than he. He stood by while I wound up the engines. They caught, and I taxied out for my first X-4 flight, the first of a series of hurried checkouts in NACA’s stable of thoroughbreds.

My first six months at Edwards had been a tumultuous time of hurry and change. Walt Williams, as a matter of routine, kept a fast pace. When the Korean War broke out, our outfit, like all of the aviation world, worked with a new sense of urgency. At the climax of the dramatic shift, NACA’s top pilot, John Griffith, resigned to take a job at Chance-Vought. In the new climate of the industry, journeyman test pilots were desperately needed. I checked out in a couple of jets, the F-84 and the Douglas Skystreak. Then, in the final days before Griffith’s departure, I gathered what information I could about the foibles of our temperamental champions. Suddenly, then, I was completely on my own. The entire NACA Edwards test program was dumped in my lap.

Actually, I couldn’t have been more pleased. Looking back, I believe now that the months that followed were, professionally speaking, the happiest days of my life. I was then too new and too young to concern my mind seriously with government and industry politics. My approach to the job was completely starry-eyed. I could move at my own pace, always fast. I flew morning, noon, and afternoon in the strangest and most unpredictable airplanes man had ever devised. These flights were never long. Experimental airplanes are like powerful rockets. They blaze furiously for a few moments, during which the pilots strive to probe an unknown area, and then they sputter and die. The one big difference between the manned plane and the missile is that the pilot brings the multi-million-dollar plane back to earth for another flight. Usually.

Before my flight in the X-4 that morning, Walt Williams and Joe Vensel clucked around the hangar like two old maids grooming their niece for a grand debut. I had read all the flight reports on the X-4 and had picked Griffith’s brain thoroughly. I knew the weak points of the airplane: its two engines were erratic above 30,000 feet; at Mach .88 the plane became unstable; it broke into a steady porpoising motion, like an automobile cushioning over a washboard road. Beyond that, nearer the speed of sound, no one knew what would happen. The X-4 had never been flown there. Williams and Vensel added a fact I knew quite well: the plane was equipped with barn-door-sized speed brakes. If popped in flight they would slow the X-4 abruptly and allow her to withdraw from any zone of trouble.

The X-4, by then, was a veteran of Edwards. The plane was conceived in the postwar years by Jack Northrop, an imaginative inventor and an unyielding advocate of the “tailless” concept. The X-4 was first flown by Northrop’s renowned test pilot, Charlie Tucker, in 1949. After considerable modification, it had been turned over to the Air Force. Chuck Yeager, Pete Everest, Colonel Richard Johnson, and Al Boyd flew it. Thirty flights later, NACA inherited the plane and its mechanic, Ralph Sparks, who had been with the project from the outset.

I pushed the twin throttles forward and as the fuel surged into the burning chambers, the X-4 leaped toward the runway. In the distance I could see a plane leaving Air Force Fighter Ops, headquarters for the military test-pilot group. Pete Everest was the pilot of the Air Force craft, an early-model F-86. He would join me to fly “chase,” observing the performance of the X-4 and watching for danger signals from close quarters.

Officially, no rivalry existed between the pilots of the Air Force and the NACA group. As Williams had said, the two jobs were poles apart. Once contractor pilots, such as Tucker, had demonstrated that the plane could fly, the Air Force flew it to evaluate military applications. Then NACA pilots put the plane through an exhaustive aerodynamic dissection, learning every new fact possible.

In fact, there was a natural rivalry between the test pilots. Each day at Edwards, the pilots played out a kind of small-scale Olympic Games of the air. Occasionally these were major battles to break records, staged by rival Navy and Air Force. More often, they were small but significant demonstrations of a new flying technique or a daring maneuver into the unknown, a step beyond the previous pilot of the airplane. For example, some of the planes had vicious weaknesses. If, on a given flight, the pilot was able to skirt these, he had achieved a minor triumph, worth a toast at Pancho’s. Edwards was not the place to attract non-competitive pilots.

Some of the reason for the keen rivalry lay in the Air Force’s approach to flight test. Along with its triumphs in the X-1, the Air Force, first at Wright Field, later at Edwards, had set out to create a cadre of schooled engineering test pilots on a par with the best in NACA and industry. For example, Yeager was not an educated engineer. He was an intuitive engineer, one of the best. He could feel in an instant a deficiency in an airplane and come close to pin-pointing its fault technically. A rare pilot, born to fly, like a figure-skater born to skate, Yeager set standards of conduct in the air that were emulated for years afterward at Edwards. The pilots adopted even his understated West Virginia drawl, and ever afterward the radio talk at Edwards reflected this. The pilots at Edwards--to judge by the radio talk--were raised on hominy grits and corn fritters.

But Yeagers are rare. Later the Air Force sent vast numbers of its pilots back to college to study aeronautical engineering and, still later, founded a full-blown test-pilot school at Edwards, which in recent years has graduated a fine group of young, educated test pilots. But before this ambitious, challenging program, many Air Force pilots, resisting the engineering approach, died needlessly. We gave them little reverence: “Hell, he was dead before he took off.”

I was not a member of the “inner circle” that morning in early December. I had met Yeager, Everest, Jack Ridley, Boyd, and the rest, but I had yet to prove my ability in the air. I knew that the moment Everest locked wingtips, he would be watching every move. He had flown the X-4. He would know when I goofed, and the word would soon get back to the others. Conceivably, some leeway might be allowed for the first flight, but it was not likely. Yeager gave little quarter in the air. On his first flight in the X-1, he says, he had been tempted to roll the ship in front of the Edwards tower, scant feet above the ground.

When I received radio permission to take off, I firewalled the throttles. As the X-4 wobbled down the long, bumpy runway, I gingerly felt out the controls. Then the churning jets took hold, and the small X-4 abruptly lunged into the air. Backing off the stall point, I nosed her over gently and leveled out. Then I eased back on the stick and the tiny, tailless craft zoomed skyward like a winged rocket. Behind me, Everest had opened his F-86 wide, trailing a long, black snake of soot, but he could not keep up. I waited for him at altitude, rolling and stalling the plane, getting to know its special strengths and weaknesses. When Everest locked wingtips, I opened the throttle wide, once again leaving him far behind. As predicted, at Mach .88 the X-4 broke into its gentle but potentially dangerous porpoising motion. I opened the air brakes, and the X-4 slowed instantly, throwing me forward against my shoulder restraint straps. Everest hurtled by, chortling on the radio.

The Edwards base now lay far below us, nearly obscured in the vast wilderness of the Mojave wastes. Here and there on the desert floor I could make out the mottled outlines of the curiously shaped “dry lakes.” These “lakes” are stretches of fine, closely packed silt, left behind eons ago by the retreating seas and bleached almost white by the hot desert sun. The soil of the lakes is quite unusual. When mixed with water, it becomes slimy like oil. Industrialists mined the soil as a lubricant for well drills. When the lakes are completely dry, the surface is hard and flat, like concrete, and thus ideal natural landing areas for airplanes.

When it rains in the desert, the lake beds are temporarily put out of commission. The water, unable to penetrate the fine, self-sealing surface soil, collects on top in small pools, or sometimes, after a hard rain, in vast, shallow, real-life lakes. This water is swept back and forth by the brisk desert winds until it evaporates. The gentle movement of the water smooths the surface of the lake beds, eliminating bumps and ruts. During this “re-paving” process, the surface becomes mushy and slick, dangerous for a heavy airplane. There is sometimes a little rain in July which temporarily closes the lakes. But the hard rainy season usually begins in mid-December. Frequently, but not always, the intermittent rains keep the lake beds either flooded or soft until March or April. No one can predict the capricious desert weather.

The Edwards base was set directly alongside one of these lakes--Rogers Dry Lake--which in earlier times, appropriately enough, had, like the great salt flats of Utah, been an automobile race track. During the rainy season, at times, I have seen the water on the lake so deep that it was lapping at the edge of the parking ramps, and so penetrating that shrimp eggs of some prehistoric age worked loose from the soil and came to life, mysteriously attracting sea gulls from the distant California coast. To maintain year-round operations, the Air Force had built a normal concrete runway at the base, butting against the dry lake. In the dry season, if required, the lake bed, marked by parallel black lines, could be used as an extension of the concrete runway. For the rocket planes, which required long take-off and landing areas, another runway, lying in the opposite direction and seven miles long, had been painted on the lake bed. Still other nearby lakes--Rosamond, Harper, Three Sisters, Cuddeback--were designated emergency landing areas. When flying experimental planes at Edwards, the pilots always kept within easy reach of one of the dry lakes.

After about fifteen minutes in the air, I felt at home in the X-4. The plane responded so well, in fact, that it was hard for me to keep in mind that I was piloting a marginally stable, experimental race horse. Had all that talk of danger been the product of some public relations mill? I was beginning to feel my oats now, and a determination that hardly struck me as daring at the time seized me. I would loop the X-4.

Heading back toward Edwards, the check-out virtually complete, flying wing to wing with Everest, without warning I pulled back hard on the stick. The X-4 climbed rapidly, leaving Everest far below. The desert disappeared from my windshield, replaced by the deep blue of the clear sky. In a few seconds the X-4 was flat on its back at 27,000 feet. Suddenly all hell broke loose. A noise like the sound of a fifty-caliber machine-gun exploded through the cockpit.

My maneuver had disrupted the smooth flow of air into the two engine intakes. Starved for air, and sensitive anyway at my altitude, the engines had rebelled, and after a flash of uneven running they gave up completely. I righted the plane and sheepishly called Pete Everest on the radio.

“Lost both engines.”

“Rog,” he said. Then I heard him calling Edwards Tower to report an emergency. I could visualize the reaction there: sirens screeching, fire trucks racing out to the runway, NACA’s Walt Williams and Joe Vensel perched on the edge of their chairs. Now working desperately to restart the engines in the air, and mentally locating the position of the emergency dry lakes, I silently cursed my boldness. I could imagine the talk that night: “That new fellow, Crossfield, down at NACA. Pretty green....”

I managed at last to win half the battle. One engine coughed to life. If it kept running (a big if, indeed, at that point), I would have sufficient power, at least, to reach the Edwards base runway. Without the engines the X-4 would come in with a low lift over drag (L over D)--in other words, it would glide like a brick, but I would be spared the ignominy of landing on a lake remote from the base. Vensel was taking no chances. By radio he ordered me to land on the lake.

As we lined up for the approach, I could see the emergency trucks parked along the edge of the lake; quite embarrassing. The X-4, already sluggish, began to settle toward earth. As we descended, I was further chagrined when Everest began to call altitude readings, interspersed with occasional helpful hints on how to fly a plane. He was ribbing and I had it coming, so when, finally, the X-4’s tires screeched on the lake, I switched off the radio receiver.

Joe Vensel was waiting anxiously on the NACA ramp when I rolled to a stop in front of the hangar. I climbed down the ladder.

“Well,” Vensel said, “what happened?”

“I looped it and lost both engines,” I said. “Got an air start on one and stop-cocked the other.”

“Damn,” Vensel muttered. He stalked back to his office.