Yeager: An Autobiography - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора Chuck Yeager (PILOTING THE X-1: 1947) #14

PILOTING THE X-1: 1947

The airplane was officially called the X-S-I. The "S" was dropped about three years later. "X" meant research; ' S" meant supersonic, and number one meant that it was the first Air Corps contract for a research airplane-this one to investigate high speed at high altitude. I would be flying higher (around 45,000 feet) and faster than any military pilot had yet flown and the Air Corps medical labs decided that Hoover and I would be perfect specimens for experiments to learn about the limits of human endurance under maximum G loads and extreme high altitude. Hoover and I were now the first Air Corps research pilots, so we were fair game for all the torture that the astronauts would later suffer. The X-1 was back at the Bell plant in upstate New York being outfitted with a new tail. That spring of 1947, I was being strapped onto centrifuges or locked into altitude test chambers, testing different kinds of pressure suits.

That was really stepping into the unknown. Just terrifying. Hoover and I wore primitive pressure suits looking like damned deep-sea divers, and got locked into sealed chambers where they'd rupture the diaphragm on the door, and in two-tenths of a second you would be at 70,000 feet. Papers flew around and the window fogged. The first time that happened, they forgot to hook up Hoover's oxygen supply inside his pressure suit, and he couldn't exhale or inhale or communicate, and turned dark purple inside his helmet.

They took us up to 105,000 feet, which is the most air they could pump out of those chambers then nearly did kill us on the centrifuges. As experienced fighter pilots we could routinely withstand the pull of four Gs without any "G" suits, but they put tremendous loads on us, while strapped standing up and lying down. God, it was miserable, and we got sick as dogs. Bob said, "You know, pard, these tests are more traumatic for me than sitting in that damned X-1 cockpit and running the rocket even though the whole thing might have blown us sky-high." I agreed.

David Clark, a corset manufacturer in Worcester, Massachusetts, received an Air Corps contract for the first high-altitude pressure suits, so Bob and I flew there in a B-25 bomber to be outfitted. We would be the first pilots to wear them; these first models were so cumbersome that we looked like the Pillsbury Doughboy. There was no way we could eject from an airplane wearing them. The company was in the bra and pantyhose business, and I returned home with boxloads for Glennis. We came within an eyelash of going down on the return flight to Ohio, and investigators would have searched our wreckage to find two fighter jocks and a ton of bras and panties. Colonel Boyd ordered us not to fly in bad weather, but we hit an unexpected electrical storm. We were bouncing all over that sky. Hoover was flying when we were struck by lightning, a first for both of us. I mean a severe strike that blasted out the Plexiglas nose of the airplane. There was a rush of air and a terrible burning smell. We were both blinded by the flash. When our vision returned, we glanced at one another. Bob said, "I'm surprised you're still with me, pard." I told him, "I was just waiting for you to move to the exit and I'd be right behind you. ' Man, that was the truth.

We left for the Mojave in early July. I was officially TDY from Wright Field. That was military jargon for "temporary duty" at Muroc Air Base in California. Because I was TDY, I was not entitled to any on-base housing for my family; nor could Glennis use any base facilities, including its hospital or emergency room. Unless I was being permanently relocated, I would have to pay to move my family out to Muroc, and there would be no housing allowance if I did. I was disgusted. Glennis was back in West Virginia, having just given birth to Mickey, our second son, and we had yet to really live together. I wasn't around for Mickey's delivery, either. All this time, I was coming home on weekends, and now they were sending me to the West Coast to risk my neck and giving me nothing in return. It was a rough deal, and we were both sick of living apart. I told Glennis that we'd find a place at Muroc even if it meant putting up a tent on the desert. And it almost came to that.

Meanwhile, I'd leave California late Friday afternoon and fly all night to West Virginia in a T-6 which was a single-engine prop trainer. Many times I fell asleep in that damned cockpit, only to wake up not knowing where I was and find the airplane circling. It's a wonder I lived so long. Bud Anderson arrived in Dayton as I was preparing to leave for California. He was TDY, too, and Wily was with her folks near Sacramento. We flew out a few times together in a C-45 cargo plane. We'd take off at the end of a long day of work and put that thing on autopilot. Andy slept in the aisle in the back and I slept in the cockpit seat. Once I woke up just in time to find us flying up a box canyon in the Sierras. Another time, we both fell asleep and ran a fuel tank dry. Two big red lights were flashing on the panel, with both of us scrambling around. So, he was either flying all night for me, or I was doing it for him. It was a stinking way to live, but that is the life we chose. We once drove from Wright out to see Wily in Andy's 1946 Ford when we couldn't take off in bad weather. We drove out nonstop, taking turns sleeping in the backseat. And all this breakneck traveling gave us one full day at home with our families.

On one of these trips, I showed Andy the X-1. He still talks about it. Here was a Top Secret, six million dollar research plane, and the two of us slid back the hangar door and walked in. No guards, no nothing. There were only thirteen of us working on the project, and we were off by ourselves at the south end of the lakebed. There were two big hangars and a few shacks and Quonset huts shimmering in the summer desert sun. The base commander, a bird colonel, ignored us completely. There isn't a film record on any of my first rides because no one bothered to install movie cameras. We weren't exactly warmly welcomed. Colonel Boyd had told me that no one would know that I existed unless or until the flights were successful. I didn't have to be a genius to figure out that they were putting plenty of distance between their own hides and south base to see whether or not the only thing I'd break was my own precious neck.

OTHER VOICES: Dick Frost

(BELL X-1 PROJECT ENGINEER)

Yeager, Ridley, and Hoover arrived at Muroc in mid July. The rumor I heard about the two pilots was that they were the most junior guys in the flight test section at Wright and therefore the most expendable in a catastrophe. That was the kind of sour-grapes rumor that I didn't believe. What I did believe was that they were supposedly two of the hottest fighter jocks in the Air Corps, who always flew balls-out. Having been a fighter test pilot myself, that description fit.

The military test pilots were very macho, in some it didn't show as aggressively as in others, but inside they were all the same. They'd rather fly a fighter than do anything else in the world, and they were awfully good at it. They flew daringly, surviving a lot of close shaves that killed some of their buddies. Each was convinced that he was better than a friend who bought the farm. When that happened, one part of them was sorry, another part contemptuous-the idea being that busting one s ass doesn't happen to those who know what they're doing. "Dumb bastard should've known better" was a common attitude. Supreme self-confidence is a big part of a fighter test pilot's baggage, a real cockiness. But they saw enough buddies die to know that what they were doing was a dangerous way to live. So all of them adopted the eat, drink, and be merry attitude, even if they had never heard the cliche. Being a wild character was part of their trade, and there were always plenty of women drawn to their bravery. I'd been around fighter pilots all my life, so I figured I knew Chuck and Bob even before I met them.

Ridley told me that Yeager had made the most perfect saw-tooth climb barograph record ever seen at Wright Field and that Hoover was simply a magician in the cockpit. My first impressions of the two were very different. Hoover was a happy-go-lucky stick-and-rudder man, a helluva good pilot, but Chuck Yeager was all test pilot. He was intent and serious. My job was to hold class every day for two weeks and teach them all that I knew about the X-1. I had been with it from the beginning and knew that airplane inside and out.

I was project engineer on all of Slick Goodlin's flights. Like Chuck, Slick was a superb pilot with all the courage in the world. They also shared an identically cool response to dangerous situations-completely cool to save themselves and their airplane. They were both only twentyfour, but Chuck had more native good sense and didn't care a damn about fame or wealth. The biggest difference between them was Slick's lack of interest in learning about the airplane and its power system. He knew how to fire the rocket engines or how to handle problems by common sense and overall pilot experience. But he depended entirely on the fact that I was in the sky with him, flying chase, and it never occurred to him that the radio might go out. In a pinch, he counted on me to tell him what to do. Yeager would rely on himself. I couldn't teach him enough.

Chuck didn't say much. He sat in class listening, and I could tell from his eyes that he understood everything. When he asked a question, it was always to the point. The guy was an instinctive engineer, born to an innate understanding of mechanics and mechanical systems. He told me that the pressure valve system on board was exactly the same as the one he had worked with helping his Dad in the gas fields of West Virginia. Those first days in the classroom, he was sizing me up. There was a certain skeptical look in his eyes, probably from the feeling that people looked down on him because he lacked their education and background, but, by God, he'd show them. He was immensely competitive and beat my ass off by the hour playing ping-pony. But any feeling of inadequacy he had about being only a West Virginia high-school graduate was nonsense. He used Ridley and me as his professors and wound up knowing nearly as much as we did.

I recall him as a loner-both gregarious and a loner, who needed space by himself, but also needed fun with others. I've seen this loner quality often in those who were topnotch test pilots.

We'd talk during lunch and coffee breaks, and I was amazed to learn about some of the independent research flying he had done, strictly out of his own curiosity. He was fascinated by ground effect. His opinion was that you couldn't fly the Shooting Star jet fighter into the ground while flying just over it. He knew because he had tried it! He flew ten feet or less over the ground to test his theory. No one would ever ask a pilot to try that stunt, but Chuck was aufficiently curious and skilled to pilot that P-80 over a flat lakebed and feel the ground effect for himself- the pressures that build up beneath an airplane as it approaches ground-level. Air compresses under it and it flies differently. He did it carefully; he wasn't about to kill himself, but he wanted to know. On flying and airplanes, his curiosity was endless, and it was his accumulated experience and knowledge that saved his life on several occasions. Yeager could always find that extra option in a critical situation that another pilot didn t know about.

The X- 1 was a complex airplane. It was only thirty-one feet long with a twenty-eight-foot wingspan. It had a high tail with a stabilizer in the fin, well above the wake of turbulent air off the wings at transonic speeds. It had a straight, extremely thin wing to delay the onset of shock waves as long as possible. It was a beautiful airplane to fly, but at least half the aviation engineers I had talked to thought it was doomed. Chuck raised a few questions that I answered uncomfortably, but frankly. He asked whether I thought he could survive a bailout. I told him, no way. He'd be sliced in half by those thin wings. But he never did ask me if I believed in an impregnable sound barrier. At best, I was ambivalent about it, and the only honest answer would have been that if any airplane could do it, it would be the X-1.

Dick Frost taught me all the systems, but without Jack Ridley, the X-1 probably would never have succeeded. Jack looked like a little elf with big ears that stuck straight out from the sides of his head. He was in his late twenties, but his skin was already weathered from the sun and wind, and when Glennis met him, she said, "Jack could pass for a man who is a hundred and three." That was true. He had an Oklahoma drawl and a dry Sooner wit, smoked like a fiend, and was always burning holes in his shirt and tie because he forgot to flick his cigarette ashes. He was small and tough; in college he had been a bantam wrestling champion, and although he was as sweet-natured as any man I've ever known, put a couple of drinks in him and he'd want to take on the biggest and toughest pilots he could find. Andy was the same, and because of those two, we were forever getting bounced off barroom walls. Jack loved to raise hell, but it was a chore getting him going because he pretended to be henpecked. "Jesus, Nell will kill me," he'd protest. But he always went along. He once went out with test pilot Pete Everest and got blasted. Jack was a complete mess when he staggered up on his front porch. Nell greeted him by hurling out a pillow and blanket, then slammed the door in his face.

I trusted Jack with my life. He was the only person on earth who could have kept me from flying the X-1. As committed as I was to the program, and with all that was riding on these flights, if Jack had said, "Chuck, if you fly in that thing, you're not gonna make it," that would have been it for yours truly. Jack was brilliant. He had been the prize pupil of Dr. Theodore Von Karman, the great Hungarian aerodynamicist, while a graduate student at Caltech. But he was also one sharp cookie who could spot a flaw in a flight profile or an engineering design before anyone else. Colonel Boyd told me, "Use Ridley. I'm sending him out there with you because you can always trust his judgment." And I always did.

At Muroc, we had to deal with a high-powered team of scientists and engineers from the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), the forerunner of the space agency. Those guys were in charge of the five hundred pounds of monitoring instrumentation aboard the X-1 and ultimately had a lot to say about the pace of our flights-how quickly we attempted to breach the barrier. It was clear that the NACA guys had expected Boyd to send out his most senior people, both in experience and education. Instead, Jack and I were just captains, Hoover a lieutenant-and the two pilots had never had any college. NACA wasn't thrilled.

I'd attend these highly technical NACA preflight planning sessions and postflight briefings and not know what in hell they were talking about. But Jack always took me aside and translated the engineers' technical jargon into layman's terms. There was no way I could communicate with Walt Williams, who headed the NACA team. He had a reputation for being pompous. But when Jack spoke, it was the only time that any of Walt's colleagues ever saw him listen intently to somebody else. Everyone listened to Jack that way. He had a lot more practical knowledge of what we were doing than any of the others. So, Jack is the one I relied upon, I really felt that he was my life-insurance policy. When he explained something, I usually kept asking why until I understood it thoroughly. If I had my own opinion, we'd discuss it and argue until we both agreed. Because he was also a good pilot and was so practical, we were always on the same wavelength. Ridley knew me so well that when I described something that was happening with the X-1, he knew immediately what we were getting into. Without having him close at hand, I'd have been lost.

There was one incident with Jack that cemented my trust in him. We had only been at Muroc a few days, when a training command pilot out of Luke Air Force Base had run out of fuel and made an emergency landing on a small strip out on the desert somewhere. These little strips were all over, constructed during the war as a hedge against a Japanese invasion of the West Coast, and were designed as emergency strips for prop fighters. The airplane that had run out of fuel was a P-84 Thunderjet, needing a longer runway to take off again with a load of fuel aboard. So, Jack said to me, "Come on, let's go out there and see what we can do about it." I can still see him standing next to that jet on that small runway working his slide rule. He calculated exactly how much fuel we'd need to get the jet back to Luke, then he carefully paced off the exact spot where I should fire jet boosters to lift off, driving in a stake at that point. He said, "I've given you ten feet of runway to spare. That should be plenty." A crew brought in the boosters and the fuel, and I took off, fired the boosters at the marker, and was airborne with ten feet to spare. After that, if Jack had told me, "No sweat Chuck, I've left you three inches," that would've been fine by me.

Jack was so convinced that the sound barrier was breakable that he eased my own fears. He said flat out, "The only barrier is bad aerodynamics and bad planning. Bell has designed the perfect ship for this program, and we're not gonna make any mistakes getting there." Period. Sure, I was neryous. But it was a good kind of neryousness-the neryousness of flying a completely different kind of airplane for the first time, of wanting to learn everything about it before I crawled inside, and psyching myself not to screw it up. It was the tension of wanting to get it over with as quickly as possible and getting back in one piece. I was intimidated by that orange beast, but Jack put me right about that too. He said, "Aw, bullshit, Chuck. You make quick friends with every new airplane that you fly. After a couple of flights in the X-1, you'll be in love. She won't bite you without any warning." He knew what he was talking about.

There was another guy who knew what he was talking about too, because he had already flown the X-1 twenty times. Slick Goodlin was still around, and Pancho Barnes, who ran the Fly Inn bar and restaurant at the edge of Rogers Dry Lake, arranged for Hoover and me to meet Slick at a dinner at her place, and have him brief us about flying the X-1. We had a steak and a couple of drinks. I said, "I was hoping you could tell me a few things to know about flying that bugger." Slick said he'd be glad to check me out in the X-1 as soon as the Air Corps made out a thousanddollar contract. I told him, "Well, Slick, if you flew that thing, I guess I can, too." Pancho was really ticked at him.

The first flights would be nonpowered, familiarization flights, scheduled for the middle of August. I'd be dropped at 25,000 feet from the B-29 mother ship, without any fuel aboard, and glide back down and land on the lakebed. That way, I could get a feel for the ship and its handling, as well as practice glide landing, which is how we landed even on powered flights. Any remaining fuel was jettisoned, and I glided in. Dead-sticking in was a must because of a lightweight landing gear that could not withstand the heavy load of a ship carrying fuel. And it was also safer that way. X-1 fuel was volatile.

I didn't eat much breakfast the morning of that first flight. I was out early watching them load the X-1 under the B-29, by backing it into a cross-shaped pit and pulling the bomber over it. Then the X-1 was hoisted up and hooked to the B-29's bomb bay with a bomb shackle. I'd fly in the B-29 until we got to altitude, then climb down a ladder to enter the X-1. Ridley would lower the cabin door, which I locked into place, then I would settle into the tiny cockpit and wait to be dropped like a goddamn bomb. The cockpit was pressurized with pure nitrogen that was nonflammable, so I had to be on 100 percent oxygen at all times. We had no backup oxygen system, that's how you did business in those days. A lot of the times, you'd get a leaky oxygen mask and land groggy. And we had only one battery to activate the radio, the propellant valves, the instrumentation, and the telemetry system. No backup battery, either. So, I guess that Colonel Boyd wasn't out of line when he suddenly sent for me just before I left for Muroc. Because I lived on base and Glennis wasn't around he just assumed I was a bachelor. Somehow he learned I was married and a father and he really looked perturbed. I told him because I had a family I would fly more cautiously than an unmarried pilot.

"This is a highly risky project," he said. "Have you considered what might happen to your family?"

"Yes, sir," I said, "I plan to bring them to Muroc as soon as we can find some housing."

I was good at watching out for myself in a cockpit. The only trouble was that with the X-1, there was so much to watch out for.

How we dropped the X-1 never varied from the first glided flight to the final powered run. Once everything was squared away on the ground, I stored my helmet inside the cockpit because I didn't want to carry it coming down the ladder. The first hardhat helmets had yet to be built, so I made my own by cutting the top out of a World War II tank helmet which fit like a protective dome on top of my skull and put four straps and a snap on my pilot's leather helmet, which was fitted around the dome. Then I carried my parachute and boarded the mother ship. I would sit on an apple box behind Maj. Bob Cardenas, the pilot, and Ridley, the copilot, as we taxied out and took off. We took off early in the morning, so that the sun would not be in my face when I landed on the dry lakebed. Cardenas kept his climb within gliding distance of Rogers Dry Lake. His flight plan called for him to climb to 25,000 feet, then back off for some forty miles to pick up speed, but always stay within gliding distance of the lakebed. He then dropped the nose into a twenty-degree diving angle until he reached 240 mph indicated. Then he gave me a countdown of ten and dropped me.

When Cardenas reached 12,000 feet I headed for the ladder in the bomb bay. The reason that I didn't sit in the shackled X-1 cockpit was that if we had an accidental shackle release, or had to drop the X-1 anywhere under 10,000 feet, I would end up in a fatal spin. In fact, loaded with fuel, the X- 1 stalled at anything below 240 mph, and the climbing speed of the B-29 was only 180 mph. We figured that it I were dropped at a slow speed in a stall, I would probably have time to recover and fire off the rocket engines, as long as I was above 10,000 feet.

So, at 12,000 feet I headed for that ladder, with Ridley behind me. Climbing down into the X-1 was never my favorite moment. The ladder was on the right side of the bomb bay opposite the entrance door on the right side of the X-1. The wind blast from the four bomber prop engines was deafening, and the wind-chill was way below zero. I wore a leather jacket and my flight suit, but no gloves so I could grip the rungs. I had to bounce on the ladder to get it going, and be lowered into the slipstream. There was a metal panel to protect against the wind blast, but it was rather primitive, and that bitch of a wind took your breath away and chilled you to the bone. I would slide into the X-1 feet first, wearing a seat-type parachute, primarily to sit on, because once you were in, the only way out was to land safely.

With those thin wings only six feet behind the door, Jumping was pointless.

Once I was safely inside, the crew above would lower the door on a pulley to Jack, who had followed me down the ladder. Jack would hold the door in place while I locked it from the inside. Still shackled to the B-29, it was dark as night in that cockpit.

I'd put on my helmet and oxygen mask and hook into the communications systems so I could speak with the mother ship and the two Shooting Star chase planes that were only now taking off from Muroc. Dick Frost flew low chase, sticking with me for the drop-out because he knew the systems so well. Hoover flew high chase. In powered flights he'd position himself about ten miles ahead at 40,000 feet, giving me an aiming point. Once I ignited the rockets, I whistled past him in a few seconds, but he tried to keep me in sight as long as he could in order to position himself as an escort when I glided in for a lakebed landing.

On this first flight, I was going over my checkhst, when that damned Hoover buzzed me! He Qew by so close that his jet exhaust almost knocked me loose from the B-29. Christ, I was rocking and swaying scared to death. "Hoover, you bastard!" I was really hot. I said, "If this thing carried guns, I'd shoot your ass out of the sky." 0l' Bob laughed. "Come and get me," he said. Well, I didn't try on this first glide flight. But on the third, when I saw him turning toward me, I turned into him and we had a dogfight down to the deck, just like at Wright, only this time I almost stalled the damned X-1 waxing Bob's fanny true and good.

Man, the adrenaline was pumping as I sat in that cockpit, waiting to be dropped for the first time. The cockpit floor sloped up toward the ship's nose so I sat on my seat-type parachute to get as high as I could to see out. The plexiglass windshield provided only marginal visibility on landings because it was flush with the fuselage, to eliminate drag. Squeezed in there, my knees were higher than my shoulders, and my feet rested on the X-1 rudder pedals. I drove with an H-shaped control wheel on which the rocket thrusters and key instrumentation switches were located, I didn't have to move my hands at critical moments, which is the reason I was able, later on, to fly with broken ribs.

"All set, Yeager?" Ridley asks.

"You bet," I reply. "Let s go to work."

At altitude, Cardenas begins a shallow dive and starts his countdown from ten. Inside the X-1, I brace myself.

"…Two. One."

The sound of a sharp pop, like snapping cable, and a jolt that lifts me off the seat and strains my shoulders against the safety harness. The X-1 falls free.

Bright sunlight blinds me. I blink rapidly, my eyes shocked after long minutes in the dark hole of the bomb bay. I push the control wheel out of neutral, and without even thinking, do two pretty slow rolls. Larry Bell was right: the X-1 glides like a bird. I'm flying in total silence, aware only of the sound of my own breathing through the oxygen mask, and my ship is graceful, responsive, and beautiful to handle. it's a fabulous ride that I wish would never end, but in less than three minutes, I begin a banking turn at 5,000 feet above the lakebed, and with Bob Hoover riding on my wing, lower the landing gear at 250 mph and line up with Rogers Dry Lake, which stretches before me almost to the horizon. Lakebed landings can be damned tricky; they weren't marked in those days, and without experience, a pilot's depth perception ran into trouble against all that open space-like landing on a calm ocean. But I had been landing on these lakebeds since 1945. I whistle on in, delaying touchdown as long as possible, and grease it down at 190 mph. When I crawl out into the hot sun, I'm wearing a grin that almost breaks my face. "Best damn airplane I ever flew," I tell Dick Frost.

I'm ready to load her with fuel and go for the sound barrier that afternoon.

On the second glide flight, she handles so wonderfully that I actually allow her to fly herself, and startle Frost, looking down at me from the chase plane above, by raising my arms in the air and exclaiming, "Look, Ma, no hands." The final glide test the following day, I dogfight Hoover down to the lakebed, merciless in an airplane that is lighter than his and more maneuverable.

Now we are ready for the "big boy" flights: load her with fuel and take off like a bullet for the dark part of the sky.

We needed a week to prepare the X-1 and plan our first powered flight. Colonel Boyd came out from Wright to confer with us. "Start out easy," he said. "Don't stretch the program by getting too eager on this thing. Find out what the hell is going on with the airplane." Ridley and I had already talked it over and agreed that since Goodlin had taken the X–I to .8 Mach, we would start by going out to .82 Mach. The old man approved. "Okay," he said, "we'll let you go up in increments of fifteen or twenty mph on each fl'ght, but no more than that."

I felt almost cocky about my ability to master the orange beast and make her do exactly what I wanted. What I knew for certain was that the X-1 would never play any dirty tricks on me without giving me fair warning. And I was right about that in terms of flying her. But I was wrong about other unexpected problems that gave me nightmares.