Yeager: An Autobiography

FROM NOBODY TO SOMEBODY

German pilots dove for their lives in dogfights-wide-open, straight down power dives-in a desperate gamble to get us off their tails. Sometimes they never did pull out and plowed into the ground. More than once, I almost followed them in. Diving at more than 500 mph, my Mustang began to shake violently and my controls froze. I nearly bent that damned stick straining to pull out. I was lucky that Mustangs were slightly more resistant than the German airplanes to shock waves that form at the speed of sound (Mach 1). Air travels faster across the top curved surface of a wing than across the flat bottom, producing lift. In a steep dive, turbulent air was ripping past my wings at 700 mph or better, while shock waves slammed against my ailerons and stabilizer. At sea level, the speed of sound is 760 mph; at 40,000 feet, it is 660 mph. This buffeting in power dives was called "compressibility" and led to a widely held belief in the existence of a "sound barrier," an invisible wall of air that would smash any airplane that tried to pierce it at Mach 1.

The early jet fighters I had flown were all subsonic, but shortly after test pilot school, I flew a new and more powerful fighter, the P-84 Thunderjet, a single-seater capable of nuclear bomb delivery. Flying straight and level at .82 Mach number, the Thunderjet began to shake violently, and its nose pitched up. I got the message and eased back on the throttle. It was hard to believe that there wasn't a wall out there. But all of the major aircraft companies were competing to design more powerful engines and aerodynamically sleeker aircraft that would push us right up against that barrier in the sky. Yet there were a lot of engineer brains who thought that the laws of nature would punch the ticket for anyone caught speeding above Mach 1.

The famous British test pilot, Geoffrey De Havilland, Jr., was blown to pieces trying it when his tailless experimental aircraft called The Swallow disintegrated at .94 Mach. That happened early in 1947, during a practice dive in his attempt to break the barrier. So the British packed it in, giving up on their supersonic experiments.

Breaking the sound barrier was a very complex undertaking, and I knew next to nothing about it. Twice during quick trips out to Muroc to pick up airplanes and ferry them back to Wright, I saw the X-1 being shackled beneath a B-29 bomber prior to taking off on a flight. It was a small ship, painted bright orange and shaped like a fifty-caliber machine gun bullet. Somebody told me it was rocket-propelled with six thousand pounds of thrust, designed to fly at twice the speed of sound. That was beyond my understanding, and I let it go at that.

The pilot was a civilian named Chalmers "Slick" Goodlin, and I saw him around. He was a sharp looking guy, rumored to be making a fortune from Bell in these risky flights. I heard he was real hot and had to be to walk away from a few of those X-1 tests.

Bell really pumped out the publicity on him, and you couldn't open a magazine without reading about Slick who seemed destined to become America's first supersonic pioneer. In those days, civilians did all of the research flying, so they could be paid risk bonuses; nobody wanted to ask an Air Corps pilot to risk his neck on a military paycheck.

Goodlin and his orange beast belonged to another world from mine. Glennis was expecting again, and we had scraped up enough money to make a downpayment on a small house in Hamlin, Dayton was just too expensive. So I was still commuting home on the weekends. I was busy doing air shows and flight test work, being the most junior test pilot in the shop, I was lucky to be asked to make coffee but I did manage to get a few interesting jobs. One of them was comparison testing between the Shooting Star and a captured German Me-262 jet fighter. I was among the first Mustang pilots to shoot one down in the war, so I was fascinated to discover that the 262 and the Shooting Star performed identically- the same range, top speed, acceleration, and rate of climb. We had four P-80s in Europe in 1945, but they never did tangle with the 262. After that, I was sent to Long Island to test fly the Thunderjet at the Republic plant there, and was gone about six weeks. When I returned to Wright in May 1947, I attended a meeting of all the fighter test pilots, requesting volunteers to fly the X-1. Hoover, Ridley, and I raised our hands, along with about five others. It was probably a good thing that I wasn't very close to the flight test engineers who worked in the section, because they had warned some of the pilots to stay away from the X-1 project if they wanted to stay alive.

Hoover and I were renegades who were gone a lot of the time and definitely weren't part of the clique, so all we heard was that the X-1 research program was in some sort of trouble, and that the Air Corps was planning to take it over from Bell and Slick Goodlin. I said, sure, put my name down, knowing there were at least a dozen others with more seniority in the section, then I flew off to Cleveland to do an air show. The old man was also there, and I flew back on his wing. When he landed, I remarked on the radio, "Not bad for an old man." Colonel Boyd wasn't amused. "Who said that?" he barked. There was absolute silence, although I figured my drawl gave me away. Colonel Boyd had just bought a new car, and he was the kind who kept meticulous records about its performance. So, a couple of us decided to put some pebbles in his hub caps and make his life more interesting. We watched from a window when he began to drive home. He backed up, stopped, got out, looking puzzled, got back in, drove a little more, stopped, got out. We laughed until we almost wet our pants.

But a few days later, he sent for me, and I thought, oh, God, here we go! It was either the pebbles or my remark when he landed that had caught up with me. Colonel Boyd never looked sterner, and when I saluted in front of his desk, he kept me standing at attention for nearly half an hour, while we talked. I left in a state of shock. He didn't exactly offer me the X-1, but he sure moved around the edges. He asked me why I had volunteered, and I told him it seemed like an interesting program, something else to fly. He said, "Yeager, this is the airplane to fly. The first pilot who goes faster than sound will be in the history books. It will be the most historic ride since the Wright brothers. And that's why the X-1 was built." He told me there were all kinds of incredible planes on the drawing boards, including an aircraft that could fiy six times faster than the speed of sound and a supersonic bomber powered by an atomic reactor. The Air Corps was developing a project that would put military pilots into space. But all these plans were stuck on a dime until the X-1 punched through the sound barrier. "I haven't any doubt it will be done," Colonel Boyd told me, "and that an Air Corps pilot will be the one to do it."

He asked me if I knew why the Air Corps was taking over the program. "No, sir," I replied, "and until now, I could care less." He told me that Slick Goodlin had contracted with Bell to take the Xl up to .8 Mach, which he did. Then he renegotiated his contract and demanded $150,000 to go beyond Mach 1. Point-eight Mach was phase one of the program. Phase two was to take it on out to 1.1 Mach-supersonic. Slick completed twenty powered flights, but felt that things were getting too thrilling and tried to renegotiate his bonus by asking that it be paid over five years to beat taxes. Bell brought in their chief test pilot, Tex Johnson, to take a test flight and verify the dangers involved. He flew around .75 Mach and reported that Slick deserved every dime he asked for. But the Bell lawyers turned down Slick's payment on the installment-plan idea, and until the matter was resolved, Slick refused to fly. The Air Corps lost patience with all the delays and decided to take over the X-1 project.

I asked the old man if he thought there was a sound barrier. "Hell, no," he said, "or I wouldn't be sending out one of my pilots. But I want you to know the hazards. There are some very good aviation people who think that at the speed of sound, air loads may go to infinite. Do you know what that means?"

"Yes, sir," I said. "That would be it."

He nodded. "Nobody will know for sure what happens at Mach 1 until somebody gets there. This is an extremely risky mission, and we're not going to take it one step at a time, but one inch at a time. This is our first crack at being allowed to conduct research flying and we are not going to blow it like the British." Then he asked, "If I did choose you to fly the X-1, and left it up to you to select your backup pilot and flight engineer, who would you pick?"

I told him I'd pick Bob Hoover as backup because he was a fabulous stick-and-rudder man, and Jack Ridley as flight engineer, because he was one helluva brain and a good pilot, too.

That night, Ridley, Hoover, and I were ordered to fly to the Bell plant at Buffalo, New York, and be briefed on the X-1 and crawl around a backup ship there. I was in a daze; the job wasn't mine yet, and both Ridley and Hoover had also been interviewed by Colonel Boyd, so all we knew was that the three of us were in the running. That was amazing to us, because we were three of the most junior test pilots at Wright. Before we saw the ship, Bell's engineers took us up to the labs. Liquid oxygen and alcohol powered the four X-1 rockets, and the lab was right out of a horror movie, with big vats smoking mist. Liquid oxygen was a tad chilly, like minus 290 degrees, and to illustrate the point, they picked up a frog with tweezers, dipped it into the vat, then dropped it on the floor. The frog broke into five pieces.

Larry Bell was a great salesman. He was a self-made man, in love with aviation all his life, and by the time he got through selling us on the beauty of his orange beast, we were ready to believe that the X-1 could punch its way through the Pearly Gates and make it back covered with angel's feathers. A lot of what his engineers had to tell us sailed over my head, but not Ridley's: he sat there scribbling notes like teacher's pet. But I understood enough. It was reassuring to learn that the ship was built to withstand stress of eighteen Gs, or eighteen times the force of gravity. But the thin wings were razor-edged to dissipate shock waves, so if you had to jump for it, the only way out was through a side door that positioned you to be cut in half. Crammed inside that small ship were a dozen round fuel containers, stored from nose to tail, making that thing a flying bomb. And you didn't take off in the X-1: you were dropped like a bomb from the B-29 mother ship at 25,000 feet, giving the pilot time to jettison the fuel and dead stick in for a lakebed landing if something went wrong.

"Without fuel aboard, she handles like a bird," Larry Bell told us.

"A live bird or a dead one?" Hoover asked.

Late in the day, we stood in a hangar, open at one end, for a close look at the X-1, which was chained to the ground. I crawled in the cockpit and was invited to fire the engines. You could light them one at a time. I threw a switch, and, my God! A sheet of flame shot twenty feet out the back door. I clapped my hands over my ears against the loudest manmade noise ever heard on earth. I threw a second switch and that damned plane began surging against its chains; the hangar was shaking, and plaster and dust rained down on us. The noise was so fierce I thought my eyes would pop out. Hoover and I laughed in awe. We didn't walk too steady when we left that hangar. I told him, "Pard, I don't know about you but that sumbitch scares me to death." He agreed it was a damned monster. But not Ridley. He wore that engineer's smile, and on the ride back to Wright he said, "God almighty, what a brute-force machine! Those Bell guys have it figured just right. That sound barrier ain't got a chance." Then, for the two high school graduates aboard, he translated into simple English what the Bell engineers had tried to explain.

So I had some idea of what I was talking about when Colonel Boyd sent for me to hear my impressions. "Sir," I said, "that's the most tremendous airplane I've ever seen." He asked me if I wanted to fly in it, and when I said yes, he said, "Okay, Yeager, it's your ride."