Chapter 40: ►

_Bad News with the Good_

“Coming up on 40,000 feet.”

Jack Allavie in the B-52 called our altitude. It was about fifteen minutes before launch, October 10, twenty-three days after the first powered flight and the fire, my ninth trip up in the X-15. The rear of the ship had been rebuilt in record time; some additional fixes had been made on the airplane while it was torn down. A new hydrogen peroxide tank had been installed.

There were two new faces in the B-52 crew. Charlie Bock was off to Fort Worth, Texas, to help conduct experimental flight tests on Convair’s B-58 Hustler bomber, then undergoing its final shake-down. The B-52 co-pilot, Jack Allavie, moved over to the left-hand seat. Fitz Fulton, a long-time Edwards mother-plane and chase pilot, got the right-hand seat. This was Fulton’s third tour at Edwards. He had launched Yeager, Everest, Murray, Crossfield, Kincheloe, and Mel Apt, among others.

The North American launch-panel operator in the B-52, Bill Berkowitz, bowed out of the flight-test program. One reason was that he was not able to get adequate life insurance to protect his wife and growing family. My old friend and cohort from NACA Skyrocket days, Jack Moise, the lad who was sprayed by hydrogen peroxide on the day of my record Mach 2 flight in 1953, took Bill’s place.

I admired Moise. He was a go-getter, a short man with a swarthy complexion and a cool, even disposition in the air. As an NACA hand, Moise pulled Joe Walker out of the burning X-1-A at 30,000 feet just before they threw it away. For this he was given a citation praising his courage, and a near-absolute guarantee that he would never be fired from the government, no matter what turn his life might take. But he decided to forego this big chunk of security to join the X-15 team. We were glad to have him. With Moise and Fulton in the B-52 it was like Old Home Week.

Moise was then struggling with the B-52 Lox top-off panel. “I can’t pressurize the B-52 Lox tank,” he reported. “Something is wrong.”

Murphy’s Law? Not again, I thought, not on Moise’s and Fulton’s first flight.

“I’ve tried the emergency by-pass,” Moise reported. “Tank pressure will not rise.” The critical Lox had stopped flowing to the X-15 tank, unbalancing the airplane. There was nothing Moise could do. We were finished.

“Abort,” Q.C. announced with stark finality.

* * * * *

It was October 14, my tenth flight in the X-15, my fifteenth hour airborne in my nest beneath the B-52 wing. After the Lox top-off failure the ground crews had prepared the ship for flight in the amazingly brief time of four days. We were ready.

When we passed 35,000 feet, the X-15 ram-air door open, the full-pressure suit came into play, holding the flesh of my body in a glove-like grip. At 41,000 feet I strained forward to close the ram-air door so that the cabin pressure would build to its normal level of 35,000 feet and relieve the pressure in the suit.

When I closed the ram-air door the nitrogen gas, as designed, built up in the cockpit at a rapid rate. The cockpit “altitude” dropped to 35,000 feet and the pressure suit relaxed. Allavie and Fulton steered the mother plane toward launch point. My eyes swept back and forth across the instrument panel, routinely checking gauges. I noted then that the cockpit altitude was falling rapidly. It was down to 30,000 feet. Something was wrong. There was a regulator in the cockpit which was supposed to allow the flowing nitrogen gas to escape, maintaining a constant 35,000-foot altitude in the cockpit.

I kept my eye fixed on the cockpit pressure gauge. As the nitrogen built up inside the cockpit, the altitude dropped to 29,000, then to 25,000 and below. We were courting possible disaster. As the cabin altitude dropped toward an earth-like level, it became far more dense than the thin air outside the plane at 41,000 feet. If the difference became too great, I knew that the dense gas inside, seeking to equalize the pressure to the thin air outside, would cause the cockpit to explode for the same reason that an over-inflated rubber balloon pops. I opened the ram-air door to relieve the pressure.

“Delay the countdown,” I radioed, asking Jack Allavie to circle the B-52. Then I added: “Hey, Q.C., I’ve got something bothering me. The cabin goes from 41,000 down through 20,000 and I don’t dare let it go any further because it’ll bust it. There’s too big a pressure difference here.”

Q.C. consulted his team of experts and relayed some technical suggestions. I recycled the pressurization and asked Allavie to make another turn.

“Oh, boy!” I radioed. “That thing pressurizes like mad. I don’t dare let it go below 20,000 feet, do I? Let’s think about this a minute.” I was very much concerned. A cockpit explosion of the X-15 could inflict irreparable damage on the X-15 and her pilot and very probably drastically damage the mother plane. I recycled the system, again to no avail. I knew then, once again, we were finished. I had planned to fly the ship to 60,000 or 70,000 feet. With the cabin pressure on the blink this was out of the question.

“Abort,” I radioed.

Later on the ground we discovered that somehow moisture had accumulated in the cabin regulator and frozen it shut. One more pre-flight item to check was added to the growing list.

* * * * *

“One minute to drop,” Jack Allavie intoned.

“X-15 oxygen ON,” I said. Then: “Data burst.”

It was October 17. The X-15 ground crew had shattered its own record: it had made the ship ready for flight in three days. It was a beautiful fall day in the desert. The sky was deep blue and clear. Far to the north of us a few feathers of wispy cirrus reached toward the heavens. In the X-15 cockpit all gauges were in the green.

“40 seconds.”

“Engine master switch ON.”

“Both primes coming on NOW.”

“Five. Four. Three. Two. One.”

“DROP.”

“Kerchunk.” And for the third time the X-15 fell away from the B-52. My left hand was resting on two of the rocket-barrel switches. As soon as I heard the shackles rattle, I flicked the switches. Then my hand moved rapidly to the other six. Within five seconds all eight barrels were running wide open.

An amber light flashed on near my knee. It was the roll damper, the automatic device which would help stabilize in roll, help to prevent severe, unexpected, or violent roll. It was out. No matter. I would simply be careful in roll control.

“Roll damper out,” I said.

The ship felt a little sluggish. I missed the powerful punch of the Skyrocket.

“Going uphill.”

I moved the sidearm control ever so slightly with my right hand. The nose came up gently. The altimeter and Mach meter climbed. Following an item on the flight plan, I then pulled the nose up steeply until the plane shuddered in protest. It was a check of the “buffet” point. I repeated this maneuver twice.

“Buffet at Mach .8,” I said.

“Going uphill. Supersonic.”

The X-15 Mach meter approached Mach 1.6 and locked there. One minute had gone by.

The recovery maneuver caused my check-list, mounted in spiral rings on a pad on my knee, to flip ahead several pages. I knew the list by heart. But I always tried to follow each page, just to be doubly sure.

“I’ve lost my place,” I said. I flipped back through the pages. “Never mind. Found it again.”

“Going through 40,000 feet.”

The roll damper was still out. Now I would see how much I needed that roll damper. I moved the sidearm control. The right wing flipped up sharply. I reversed the control. The right wing dropped and the left came up swiftly. With a little more control I could whip the ship horizontally through the air like a spinning bullet. In level flight I balanced on a knife-edge.

“It’s very sensitive to roll,” I radioed.

“Pulling to a 1.8 G turn. Yaw.” I kicked the nose to one side in an attempt to define the ship’s sideslip characteristics.

“Pushing over at 55,000.” I leveled the nose. The pages of my spiral notebook flipped again.

“Lost my place again.”

“What’s that?” It was Q.C. I could almost hear Charlie Feltz muttering: “Wha’d he say? Wha’d he say?”

“Never mind,” I said.

I banked and dived. The G meter registered two. Then I deliberately sideslipped. I leveled out. The Mach meter climbed steadily: 1.6, 2.0, 2.4, or about 1,600 miles an hour. I had edged over my 2.0 restriction for a few seconds.

Only three other men had flown that fast. Yeager had, and he almost died in the try. Pete Everest had. Mel Apt had gone to Mach 3. But he died in the X-2. The temptation to forge ahead and smash Apt’s record, which I could easily do in the X-15, was very great. The plane was running like a dream. All I had to do was let the rocket engines burn a little longer, build up a little more speed and then.... Crossfield, the first man to fly at twice the speed of sound and the first man to fly at three times the speed of sound ... and live. But no, that was reserved for someone else, for Joe Walker and Bob White or, if they died, their back-ups. I was an engineering test pilot. It was necessary that I adhere to plan in the air. If I deviated from plan, violated the discipline, then my value as an engineering test pilot was zero. Dependability, perfection, these are the prerequisites of the test pilot. Too many airplanes and pilots have paid for violating the intelligence of planning. The X-15 would not.

I shut down several of the rocket barrels. I pulled the nose up and climbed quickly to 67,000 feet, my maximum planned altitude for the flight. Then as the remaining rocket barrels burned out, I nosed the X-15 into a steep, supersonic dive to check her stability going downhill at Mach 1.5 without rocket power.

“Burnout,” I said.

At 50,000 feet I leveled out and my speed abruptly fell off to subsonic. It was time to begin thinking about the landing. At that moment my eye caught a blur flashing across my nose, dead ahead. It was NASA chase pilot Joe Walker in an F-104, joining up fast to escort me back to the lake bed. He was close.

“There goes my chase--right across my bow!” I called on the radio.

“About eight per cent fuel remaining. Going to jettison.” I pushed the lever and a long trail of white vapor flowed into the sky in my wake.

“260 knots. 30,000.”

“I’m going to land a little long this time,” I said.

I laid out my approach for the dry-lake landing strip, reporting my choice of direction by radio to the chase. At 8,000 feet, I turned on my final leg and for the third time got set to put the X-15 on the ground.

Just then I thought I saw an airplane on the lake near the spot I had picked to land. I snapped in the radio: “There’s an airplane down on the lake.” I was committed. There could be no further maneuvers. At the X-15’s glide speed on final, 280 miles an hour, I would touch down in twenty seconds.

The “airplane” turned out to be the emergency helicopter which hovers near the landing area. It was almost directly below me when I dropped the ventral fin. I radioed: “Hope that helicopter doesn’t get hit.”

Luckily it didn’t. As I pulled the X-15 nose high, feeling for the ground, chase White reported: “You’re looking good, buddy.”

The flaps were slow in extending. I landed with 28 degrees of flaps instead of 40, which made the touchdown a little faster than usual. Even so, I judged it the best X-15 landing I had made. As was his custom, Q.C. radioed:

“Everything all right?”

For once everything _was_ all right. No fire, no porpoising near the ground, no other major malfunctions. It was judged a near-perfect flight from a mechanical standpoint.

“No sweat,” I replied.

I called the gauges and opened the ram-air door to relieve the cockpit of nitrogen gas pressure so that I could open the canopy without undue strain. The ground crews arrived. The men lifted the X-15 onto its special trailer and towed it back to the North American hangar. Captain Richardson met me in his support van with a full-blown martini.

* * * * *

Not many days after that flight I received a startling piece of news. I had been promoted, or more precisely I had been granted a clearly defined slot in North American. No longer just a consultant for the X-15 and its demonstration pilot out on a limb, I was made Chief Engineering Test Pilot of the division, working directly for George Mellinger, long-time manager of North America’s Engineering Flight Test. Here was one more handhold to insure the building of airplanes so that a pilot can fly them. Slowly but surely the trend that started in 1942 with the deaths of Eddie Allen and Jimmy Taylor, of airplane design growing foreign to pilots’ needs, was reversing. It now takes legions of engineers to build an airplane, and then in hindsight there is a pitifully slow and expensive stewing by the test pilot to make the fruit of this endeavor palatable.

In my life, it seems, bad news usually comes with the good. Shortly after my promotion, or assignment, we received the stunning word that the B-70, the last of the Air Force future combat airplanes, had been severely cut back. According to the Air Force, North American would build only one prototype, a gutless shell with no armament or weapons system. All the major subcontracts were canceled. North American would make the complete airplane on much the same pattern by which we had built the experimental X-15. In the aircraft trade this “cutback” was interpreted as stage-setting for complete cancellation of the project in the following Air Force budget. The cut left North American without any airplanes in production except a few twin-jet executive-type T-39s. The last of the advanced manned airplanes was all but gone.

The news left me bewildered. Now at last I was on the point of achieving my dream of being an engineering test pilot in a position to do some substantial good. But there would be no airplanes to fly. We were all dismayed at this incredible break in history. We were almost finished de-bugging the X-15. But there would be no airplanes to benefit from the data we collected in the flights. The dire prediction of one of my fellow pilots at NACA years before--that the X-15 would be the last of the manned aircraft--seemed to be coming true. We were not opening a new era in aviation at all. We were closing one. Unless....

* * * * *

The briefing room was crowded with Air Force and NASA brass. Stormy was holding forth with his limitless energy, in his persuasive, articulate, prophetic way. On the blackboard behind him was a drawing of Saturn, the giant booster rocket under development by Wernher von Braun and his team of ex-German rocket experts at the Army’s Ballistic Missile Agency in Huntsville, Alabama. Perched atop Saturn, a cluster of eight Jupiter rocket engines generating a staggering 1.5 million pounds of thrust, was an ICBM-type second stage, and on top of that a familiar shape, the X-15.

“We figure the X-15, carrying two pilots on a maximum shot, could be put into orbit hundreds of miles above the earth. Or with a scientific or military payload of thousands of pounds, not including the weight of two X-15 pilots, the ship could be put into a lower orbit. The target date is, say, three or four years. By then our current X-15 will have accumulated more than one hundred powered flights. The ICBMs should be fully operational. Saturn itself will have been fired many times. We believe this is the logical, thoughtful, and economic approach to manned space travel. Many improvements to the X-15 will be required, of course, but we will begin from a firm foundation of experience. Many of the present X-15 systems are adaptable for true space flight. We will have amassed considerable flight-test experience, which is not acquired overnight, as you know quite well. We have an active flight-test team in being today.”

Much later I asked Stormy: “What do you think?”

“I don’t know, Scotty. NASA is pretty much absorbed with the Project Mercury capsule approach. The Air Force is reluctant to move because of the ill-defined lines of authority and maybe because the X-15 is NASA-inspired and NASA-controlled, and you know the President’s directives in this area. The Air Force, I think, will probably award study contracts for specific kinds of orbiting vehicles yet to be invented. We’ll keep trying. But I think politically our idea is neither fish nor fowl and because of that--certainly not for technical reasons--we may be left out in the cold.”

“We can’t let this thing just wither and die right on the verge of success,” I said. “Too much has gone into it, too much can come out of it.”

“But it’s hard to get a point like that across, Scotty. People are too busy. Too many committees. Too many phone calls. Too many investigations. Too many specialists in details are growing up, building empires around special theories, turning their backs on the hard facts of operations.”

“Well, maybe I’ll write a book and try to get all this across,” I said.

“Go ahead,” Stormy said. “But I’ll tell you _that’s_ a big job in itself.”

And, as usual, Stormy was right.