Chapter 22: ►

_End of an Era_

I drove slowly, gaping at the pale green hangar-sized North American production buildings strung along the south edge of Los Angeles International Airport like some titanic freight train. Hundreds upon hundreds of automobiles were parked bumper to bumper in lots adjoining the buildings. Inside those buildings, I knew, tens of thousands of skilled workmen were riveting away on the last few hundred of the six thousand Sabrejets the Air Force had ordered, and tooling up for mass production of the supersonic F-100. Having taken the measure of its size from close quarters, I then understood how North American had ground out 43,000 airplanes in World War II. It was a tremendous operation--five hundred times the size of NACA, Edwards--a company that had built more airplanes than any other firm in the world. Its bid for the X-15 alone--about $50 million--almost equaled the yearly budget for all of NACA.

* * * * *

“How do you do, Mr. Crossfield.” North American’s president, Lee Atwood, a thin, soft-spoken man with deep-set green eyes, held out his hand. In stark contrast to the California environment, he was meticulously dressed, conservative style. An aeronautical engineer, in 1948 he had taken over day-by-day operation of North American from the dynamic Dutch Kindelberger, the famous airplane-builder who gave North American its great fame and reputation. Dutch had moved up to be chairman of the board of directors. Atwood offered me a seat and then returned to sit behind his broad desk. The office was mahogany-paneled and decorated with deep green potted plants.

As I wound up for my pitch, it occurred to me that I was then about to address one of the most important men in the aviation industry. That I was in his office at all, I believe, was due solely to the fact that I was the first man to fly at twice the speed of sound. In the two years since I had made the record, this flight, technically insignificant though it was, had opened many doors. Like Yeager, Everest, and Bridgeman, I came to know four-star generals and other big shots in aviation on a first-name basis. For example, I had met Atwood the previous year in New York when at a gathering of aeronautical engineers he presented me the Lawrence Sperry award for my high-speed flight work. It was a farce, in a way, but for a man on a mission it made the job a lot easier.

I was not really up to the interview that day. I was suffering from influenza, the same malady that weakened me on the day of the flight which paved my way to Atwood’s door. My nose was draining and every few minutes I had to take out my handkerchief and blow. It was annoying. I probably impressed Atwood as the least likely physical specimen to fly the X-15 he ever saw.

“Mr. Atwood, I want to come to work for North American on the X-15 project.” I paused to let this sink in, and to see if it might bring an immediate “no.” Mine was something of a bold and unorthodox move, to put it mildly. North American already employed a team of perhaps thirty test pilots, bossed by Bob Baker and Jack Bryan, both of whom had been with North American for many years. No doubt many of these pilots had their eyes on the X-15 and were fully capable of test-flying it. I had long since learned that big corporations like North American did not usually draw from the outside. They used their own talent of special jobs.

“Rocket planes are my business,” I said, blowing again. “I’ve been flying them for five years at Edwards, as senior pilot for NACA. I not only flew them, I laid out flight-test programs, recorded the data, drew up the reports, and presented NACA conclusions. I also oversaw maintenance and participated in the rebuilding of the X-1-E to the extent of laying out the new propulsion system--a combination of the best features of the Skyrocket and the X-1--and other hardware.”

Atwood interrupted me briefly to receive an important telephone call. I blew my nose and cursed my flu. When he hung up, I rolled on.

“I know you have a very experienced organization down here with plenty of able talent. But if you have never tackled a rocket plane, there are some special problem areas. There’ll be a lot of problems on this particular ship. It’s revolutionary. We’ve had a bad history in research airplanes, as you know. Delays. Explosions. Investigations. Instability. I think I can contribute. And I’d like to have the privilege of working on this airplane. I want to help make it as nearly perfect as possible and get it to Edwards in time to do some good.”

“What do you want to do specifically?” Atwood asked. It was clear from the telephone call I had overheard that he was a man of a few well-chosen words.

“I’d like to start from the beginning. Work on the plane as an engineer, helping with the systems, in a sort of advisory capacity. In that way, when it came time to fly the airplane, I’d be thoroughly familiar with all of it, down to the smallest bolt. During the construction I could interject my experience with other rocket airplanes. At the same time, as an ex-NACA hand, I’d be useful as a liaison with that agency during all phases of construction and flight test.”

I talked on, stressing my strong points--my master’s degree in aeronautical engineering, my background in the wind tunnel at the University of Washington, my brief experience at the Boeing plant in Seattle during the early days of World War II, my Navy tour as a flight instructor, my experience in manufacturing aircraft accessories, my flight and engineering record at Edwards. Whether it was all this combined, or the simple magic of Mach 2, I don’t know, but in spite of my influenza and runny nose, Atwood, as is his nature, gave me the benefit of the doubt.

As president of North American, Atwood bossed six separate divisions of the company. Only one of these, the Los Angeles division, would build the X-15. A president of a company of that size delegates total authority to chiefs. He doesn’t hire men off the streets and thrust them upon his lieutenants. He operates by suggestion.

“Would you like to go down and talk to Ray Rice about this? The proposal is a kind of unusual arrangement for us. His division will build the airplane and he knows what kind of people he needs.”

“Certainly,” I said.

“When can you get by to see him?”

“Right now, if it’s convenient.”

Ray Rice, Chief Engineer of the Los Angeles Division, bought my proposal, I have often thought since, with some reservations.

At that time the X-15 project was still so new in the company and I was so new to the company that there was no specific job slot available to me. Thus I was hired, more or less, as a consultant, and didn’t really learn who my boss was for a long time.

* * * * *

Coincidental with my move to North American, in December of 1955, the great and glorious era at Edwards was in the twilight of its life. The Skyrocket, after a total of about 130 flights, was slated for moth-balls. The X-1-E, so long in the rebuilding, flew shortly after my departure but never lived up to our expectations. Soon it was grounded for good, when NACA learned that the pilot’s boot-tips might strike the instrument panel in the event of an emergency ejection. The X-1-B made a few more flights, some to collect advanced information for the control system of the X-15, but this airplane was old before its time and it, too, was ultimately grounded. The X-2, the plane I was supposed to fly in the spring of 1951 for NACA, was still slowly winding her tragic course into history, six years or more behind schedule.

A few weeks after I departed Edwards, Pete Everest took the X-2 on her second powered flight, firing only one of the two rocket barrels. In the weeks following, in a startling burst of activity, he clicked off six additional powered runs, achieving on his eighth and final flight a speed of about Mach 2.9, or 1900 miles an hour. When Everest landed, as he wrote in his book, he telephoned his wife and said, “Honey, you are talking to the fastest man in the world.” She was--and his 1900-mile-an-hour flight in that unstable airplane was, in my opinion, remarkable. As Everest himself said, “Control was marginal and if the pilot overcontrolled or maneuvered the airplane too violently, anything could happen.”

Walt Williams was anxious to take over the X-2 for NACA in order to press ahead with a series of aerodynamic heating studies at extreme speeds. But after its years of frustrating toil and heartbreak, the Air Force understandably was not about to turn the plane over until some additional records had been chalked up. On the verge of his departure for other duties, Pete Everest assigned two new, young Air Force pilots to make these flights. Iven Kincheloe, a handsome blond captain, a graduate of the Empire Test Pilot School, and a Korean ace, would make the altitude attempt. Captain Milburn (“Mel”) Apt, a balding veteran of Edwards, would make the speed attempt. NACA dutifully protested these flights, pointing to the dangers involved. The Air Force compromised, setting a deadline of November 1, 1956, for turning the plane over to NACA, whether or not Kincheloe and Apt were successful.

Kincheloe came up to bat first. He made one check-flight in the X-2, under Everest’s direction. Then after Everest left, Kincheloe reared back to hit a home-run. He opened the engine wide when the X-2 was dropped, and pointed the tapered nose skyward, the stick hauled full back in his lap. On the first two flights the X-2 reached high, but not high enough. On the third try, Kincheloe’s fourth flight in the X-2, he succeeded. The X-2 hurtled to 126,000 feet. In that rarefied air, when it ran out of momentum, the X-2 fell back toward earth. When the plane reached the thicker atmosphere, Kincheloe, in a remarkable piece of piloting, recovered, slowed, circled, and landed. He never again flew a rocket airplane. On the strength of these four flights and his inexhaustible enthusiasm for the business, the Sunday newspaper supplements labeled him “Mr. Space.”

With the NACA deadline coming up fast, Captain Mel Apt, who had not yet had a check-flight in the X-2, made hurried preparations for a final effort to break Everest’s speed record. Four days before his time expired, he launched in the X-2 for the ship’s thirteenth powered flight. There was evidently no time for a preliminary flight at low speed. In any case, the Air Force did not specifically limit Apt on his first flight. He dropped, flicked on the rocket barrels, and flew a near-perfect parabolic flight plan. The X-2’s rocket burned six seconds longer than it ever had before. Mel Apt drove the X-2 to the amazing speed of about Mach 3.1, or 2,094 miles an hour, beating Everest by a wide margin.

The thirteenth flight proved to be the unlucky one. At the end of the speed run the X-2 behaved as many had predicted. It cartwheeled out of control, subjecting the X-2 and Apt to tremendous G forces. He could not recover. As the plane whipped into a deadly inverted spin, he tried to abandon ship. He blew the nose capsule and it separated from the main fuselage, but before he could dive out and open his parachute, the capsule struck the desert floor with terrible impact. Apt was killed, the X-2 destroyed. Around Edwards, Pete Everest’s title was changed from “Fastest Man in the World” to “Fastest Man Alive.” A new street at the base was named in Apt’s honor.

That was the final, dreadful end of the X-2. In eleven years from start to finish, the program had cost the U. S. millions of dollars. It robbed two excellent pilots and one crewman of their lives and destroyed, altogether, three airplanes. In its total of thirteen flights the X-2 had provided the U. S. a speed and altitude record, but precious little else. The X-2 yielded hardly a scrap of aerodynamic heating data, the purpose for which it was intended. The premature loss of the ship left the U. S. without a research airplane to probe the Mach 3 zone and created, in a sense, a larger and more urgent mission for the X-15.

The way I see it, that last flight of the X-2 drew the curtain on the grand era at Edwards. It closed out what might be called the first phase of the history of the experimental research airplane in the United States. The big NACA installation went on, of course, piling up data points by the tens of thousands, which proved useful. But all the old race-track excitement was gone completely. There was no plane to probe exciting new areas.

Edwards became a place of hard work and routine. NACA pilots wrung the last drop from the group of tired planes. The Air Force pilots concentrated on the newest production-model jets--Republic’s F-105 fighter-bomber; North American’s experimental F-107; Convair’s F-106, a faster, larger version of the delta-wing F-102; and Convair’s delta-wing, medium-range bomber, the B-58. The Navy pilots were busy de-bugging a stable of comparable carrier-deck fighters and bombers, and a pilotless missile, the Regulus.

I don’t mean to imply that the test work was not dangerous. On the contrary, it was hair-raising at times and many pilots lost their lives. Missing from the busy, formal scene, however, was the echoing boom of a rocket engine exploding to life at 35,000 feet, the long snaky trail of white rocket exhaust across the sky, the satisfaction of the free drink at Pancho’s, another milestone on man’s inexorable journey toward the stars reached or passed. In the period following the loss of the last X-2, almost everybody who cared to flew Mach 2 regularly in production-line airplanes. But no faster.

It is only human to be nostalgic, and to view one’s own life from a special point of view. So I draw some satisfaction from the thought that my work on the frontier of flight contributed considerably to the story of the grand era at Edwards. True, I came on the scene late, three years behind Yeager’s epic Mach 1 flight; and I left early, about nine months before Mel Apt’s epic Mach 3 flight. But I had come when the experimental plane program was picking up, as the new ships came from the factories, and I left just before the whole show ran out of steam.

In those five years I logged only six hundred hours in the air, but what hours they were! When I flip back through my own flight book, I am astonished. Where did I find the time? Eighty-nine flights in the Skyrocket; eleven flights in the X-1; a grand total of one hundred rocket flights. For what it’s worth, that total is about equal to all the rocket flights of Yeager, Everest, Marion Carl, Bridgeman, Murray, Kincheloe, and Apt put together. No less interesting were the twenty-five flights in the XF-92-A, thirty-two flights in the X-4, twelve flights in the X-5, sixty-five flights in the F-100, seventeen flights in the D-558-I, three flights each in the F-102 and F-84-F, one flight in a B-47 which I had studied years earlier in the University of Washington wind tunnel, thirteen flights in an F-86, one flight in a Navy F9F, sixty-four flights in the YF-84, and scores upon scores of routine flights in the wide variety of propeller-driven airplanes in NACA’s stable. I had even flown, briefly, a Hiller helicopter.

In sum, I believe it is fair to say that I was good for NACA and NACA was good for me. My six hundred hours of flight time, plus countless hours of preparation and analysis on the ground, helped lay bare many secrets in the trans-sonic area. It was a small contribution, admittedly, but when taken together with all the aeronautical research and experimentation in the United States, I believe it helped to advance the state of the art. At the same time, the education provided me by NACA in engineering, flying, industry and government politics, and a thousand other things, was invaluable. At NACA, Edwards, I graduated in my field. Most important, I found the means of bringing my life full circle, to the X-15, the airplane that would begin a new era at Edwards, the second phase in the turbulent history of the research airplane, the second fifty years of aviation history.