Yeager: An Autobiography

FIRST POWERED FLIGHT AUGUST 29, 1947

Shivering, you bang your gloved hands together and strap on your oxygen mask inside the coldest airplane ever flown. You're being cold-soaked Erom the hundreds of gallons of liquid oxygen (LOX) fuel stored in the compartment directly behind you at minus 296 degrees. No heater, no defroster, you'll just have to grit your teeth for the next fifteen minutes until you land and feel that wonderful hot desert sun. But that cold saps your strength: it's like trying to work and concentrate inside a frozen food locker.

That cold will take you on the ride of your life. You watched the X-1 get its 7:00 A.M. feeding in a swirling cloud of vapor fog, saw the frost form under its orange belly. That was an eerie sight; you're carrying six hundred gallons of LOX and water alcohol on board that can blow up at the flick of an igniter switch and scatter your pieces over several counties. But if all goes well, the beast will chug-a-lug a ton of fuel a minute.

Anyone with brain cells would have to wonder what in hell he was doing in such a situation- strapped inside a live bomb that's about to be dropped out of a bomb bay. But risks are the spice of life, and this is the kind of moment that a test pilot lives for. The butterflies are fluttering, but you feed off fear as if it's a high-energy candy bar. It keeps you alert and focused.

You accept risk as part of every new challenge; it comes with the territory. So you learn all you can about the ship and its systems, practice flying it on ground runs and glide flights, plan for any possible contingency, until the odds against you seem more friendly. You like the X-1; she's a sound airplane, but she's also an experimental machine, and you're a researcher on an experimental flight. You know you can be hammered by something unexpected, but you count on your experience, concentration, and instincts to pull you through. And luck. Without luck…

You can't watch yourself fly. But you know when you're in sync with the machine, so plugged into its instruments and controls that your mind and your hand become the heart of its operating system. You can make that airplane talk, and like a good horse, the machine knows when it's in competent hands. You know what you can get away with. And you can be wrong only once. You smile reading newspaper stories about a pilot in a disabled plane that maneuvered to miss a schoolyard before he hit the ground. That's crap. In an emergency situation, a pilot thinks only about one thing-survival. You battle to survive right down to the ground; you think about nothing else. Your concentration is riveted on what to try next. You don't say anything on the radio, and you aren't even aware that a schoolyard exists. That's exactly how it is.

There are at least a dozen different ways that the X-1 can kill you, so your concentration is total during the preflight check procedures. You load up nitrogen gas pressures in the manifolds-your life's blood because the nitrogen gas runs all the internal systems as well as the flaps and landing gear. Then you bleed off the liquid oxygen manifold and shut it down. All's in order.

Half an hour ago, we taxied out to takeoff in the mother ship. Because of the possibility of crashing with so much volatile fuel, they closed down the base until we were safely off the ground. That's the only acknowledgment from the base commander that we even exist. There's no interest in our flights because practically nobody at Muroc gives us any chance for success. Those bastards think they have it all figured. They call our flights "Slick Goodlin's Revenge." The word is that he knew when to get out in one piece by quitting over money.

One minute to drop. Ridley flashes the word from the copilot's seat in the mother ship. We're at 25,000 feet as the B-29 noses over and starts its shallow dive. Major Cardenas, the driver, starts counting backwards from ten.

C-r-r-ack. The bomb shackle release jolts you up from your seat, and as you sail out of the dark bomb bay the sun explodes in brightness. You're looking into the sky. Wrong! You should be dropped level. The dive speed was too slow, and they dropped you in a nose-up stall. You blink to get your vision, fighting the stall with your control wheel, dropping toward the basement like an elevator whose cable snapped. You're three thousand pounds heavier than in those glide flights. Down goes that nose and you pick up speed. You level out about a thousand feet below the mother ship and reach for that rocket igniter switch.

The moment of truth: if you are gonna be blown up, this is likely to be when. You light the first chamber.

Whoosh. Slammed back in your seat, a tremendous kick in the butt. Nose up and hold on. Barely a sound; you can hear your breathing in the oxygen mask-you're outracing the noise behind you-and for the first time in a powered airplane you can hear the air beating against the windshield as the distant dot that is Hoover's high chase P-80 grows ever bigger. You pass him like he's standing still, and he reports seeing diamond-shaped shock waves leaping out of your fiery exhaust. Climbing faster than you can even think, but using only one of four rocket chambers, you turn it off and light another. We're streaking up at .7 Mach; this beast's power is awesome. You've never known such a feeling of speed while pointing up in the sky. At 45,000 feet, where morning resembles the beginning of dusk, you turn on the last of the four chambers. God, what a ride! And you still have nearly half your fuel left.

Until this moment, you obeyed the flight plan to the letter: firing only one chamber at a time, to closely monitor the chamber pressures; if you use two or more, there's too much to watch. If you fire all four, you may accelerate too rapidly, be forced to raise your nose to slow down, and get yourself into a high-speed stall.

Now the flight plan calls for you to jettison remaining fuel and glide down to land. But you're bug-eyed, thrilled to your toes, and the fighter jock takes over from the cautious test pilot. Screw it! You're up there in the dark part of the sky in the most fabulous flying machine ever built, and you're just not ready to go home. The moment calls for a nice slow roll, and you lower your wing, pulling a couple of Gs until you're hanging upside down in zero Gs and the engine quits. As soon as the X-1 rights itself it starts again, but you've been stupid. At zero Gs the fuel couldn't feed the engine, and you might have been blown up. But the X-1 is forgiving — this time.

You know what you're supposed to do, but you know what you're gonna do. You turn off the engine but instead of jettisoning the remaining fuel, you roll over and dive for Muroc Air Base. We blister down shit-heavy, 8 Mach in front of the needle, a diveglide faster than most jets at full power. You're thinking, "Let's show those bastards the real X-1."

Below 10,000 feet is the danger zone, the limit for jettisoning fuel with enough maneuver time to glide down to a safe landing. But we're below 5,000 lined up with Muroc's main runway. And we're still in a dive.

We whistle down that main runway only 300 feet oft the ground, until wc are parallel with the control tower. You hit the main rocket switch. The four chambers blow a thirty-foot lick of flame. Christ, the impact nearly knocks you back into last week. That nose is pointed so straight up that you can't see the blue sky out the windshield. We are no longer an airplane: we're a skyrocket. You're not flying. You're holding on to the tiger's tail. Straight up, you're going .75 Mach! In one minute the fuel is gone. By then you're at 35,000 feet, traveling at .85 Mach. You're so excited, scared, and thrilled that you can't say a word until the next day.

But others said plenty. The NACA team thought I was a wild man. Dick Frost chewed me out for doing that slow roll. Even Jack Ridley shook his head. He said, "Any spectators down there knew damned well that wasn't Slick rattling those dishes. Okay, son, you got it all out of your system, but now you're gonna hang tough." Colonel Boyd fired a rocket of his own. "Reply by endorsement about why you exceeded .82 Mach in violation of my direct orders." I asked Ridley to write my reply. "Bullshit," he said. "You did it. You explain it."

I wrote back: "The airplane felt so good and flew so well that I felt certain we would have no trouble going slightly above the agreed speed. The violation of your direct orders was due to the excited state of the undersigned and will not be repeated."

A few days later the old man called me. "Damn it, I expect you to stick to the program and do what you are supposed to. Don't get overeager and cocky. Do you want to jeopardize the first Air Corps research project?"

"No, sir."

"Well, then obey the goddamn rules."

From then on I did. But on that first powered flight I wanted to answer those who said we were doomed in the attempt to go faster than sound. My message was, "Stick it where the sun don't shine."

Going out to .85 Mach put the program out on a limb because it carried us beyond the limits of what was then known about high-speed aerodynamics. Wind tunnels could only measure up to .85 Mach, and as Walt Williams of NACA was quick to point out to me, "From now on, Chuck, you'll be flying in the realm of the unknown." Ridley and I called it "the Ughknown."

Whatever happened, I figured I was better off than the British test pilots who had attempted supersonic flights in high-powered dives. If they got into trouble, that was it-especially in a tailless airplane like The Swallow. All my attempts would be made in climbs-the power of the rocket over the jet-and that way, if I encountered a problem, I could quickly slow down. But the price of rocket power was flying with volatile fuel. Running four chambers, my fuel lasted only two and a half minutes; it lasted five minutes on two chambers and ten minutes on one. Each minute of climbing we got lighter and faster, so that by the time we had climbed up and over at 45,000 feet, we were at max speed.

Who would decide the max speed of a particular flight? This was an Air Corps research project, but the seventeen NACA engineers and technicians used their expertise to try to control these missions. They were there as advisers, with high-speed wind tunnel experience, and were performing the data reduction collected on the X-1 flights, so they tried to dictate the speed in our flight plans. Ridley, Frost, and I always wanted to go faster than they did. They would recommend a Mach number, then the three of us would sit down and decide whether or not we wanted to stick with their recommendation. They were so conservative that it would've taken me six months to get to the barrier.

I wanted to be careful, but I also wanted to get it over with. Colonel Boyd sided with NACA caution going up only two-hundredths of a Mach on each consecutive flight. Once I flew back with Hoover to see if I could get the old man to agree to speed things up. We met in the evening at his home. But Bob led off by trying to explain why he had been forced to crash-land a P-80 a few days before. I could tell the old man wasn't buying Bob's explanations; those thick eyebrows were bunching up. But ol' Hoover pushed on, becoming emotional to the point where he accidentally spat a capped tooth onto the old man's lap. I decided to have my say at another time.

So I flew in small increments of speed. On October 5, I made my sixth powered flight and experienced shock-wave buffeting for the first time as I reached .86 Mach. It felt like I was driving on bad shock absorbers over uneven paving stones. The right wing suddenly got heavy and began to drop, and when I tried to correct it my controls were sluggish. I increased my speed to .88 Mach to see what would happen. I saw my aileron vibrating with shock waves, and only with effort could I hold my wing level.

The X-1 was built with a high tail to avoid air turbulence off the wings, the tail was also thinner than the wings, so that shock waves would not form simultaneously on both surfaces. Thus far the shock waves and buffeting had been manageable, and because the ship was stressed for eighteen Gs, I never was concerned about being shaken apart. Also, I was only flying twice a week, to give NACA time to reduce all the flight data and analyze it. Special sensing devices pinpointed the exact location of shock waves on any part of the airframe. The data revealed that the airplane was functioning exactly as its designers planned.

But on my very next flight we got knocked on our fannies. I was flying at .94 Mach at 40 000 feet experiencing the usual buffeting, when I pulled back on the control wheel, and Christ, nothing happened! The airplane continued flying with the same attitude and in the same direction.

The control wheel felt as if the cables had snapped. I didn't know what in hell was happening. I turned off the engine and slowed down. I jettisoned my fuel and landed feeling certain that I had taken my last ride in the X-1. Flying at .94, I lost my pitch control. My elevator ceased to function. At the speed of sound, the ship's nose was predicted to go either up or down, and without pitch control, I was in a helluva bind.

I told Ridley I thought we had had it. There was no way I was going faster than .94 Mach without an elevator. He looked sick. So did Dick Frost and the NACA team. We called Colonel Boyd at Wright, and he flew out immediately to confer with us. Meanwhile, NACA analyzed the telemetry data from the flight and found that at .94 Mach, a shock wave was slammed right at the hinge point of the elevator on the tail, negating my controls. Colonel Boyd just shook his head. "Well," he said, "it looks to me like we've reached the end of the line." Everyone seemed to agree except for Jack Ridley.

He sat at a corner of the conference table scribbling little notes and equations. He said "Well, maybe Chuck can fly without using the elevator. Maybe he can get by using only the horizontal stabilizer." The stabilizer was the winglike structure on the tail that stabilized pitch control. Bell's engineers had purposely built into them an extra control authority because they had anticipated elevator ineffectiveness caused by shock waves. This extra authority was a trim switch in the cockpit that would allow a small air motor to pivot the stabilizer up or down, creating a moving tail that could act as an auxiliary elevator by lowering or raising the airplane's nose. We were leery about trying it while flying at high speeds; instead, we set the trim on the ground and left it alone.

Jack thought we should spend a day ground testing the hell out of that system, learn everything there was to know about it, then flight test it. No one disagreed. There was no other alternative except to call the whole thing quits, but Jack got a lot of "what if" questions that spelled out all the risks. What if the motor got stuck in a trim up or trim down position? Answer: Yeager would have a problem. What if the turbulent airflow at high speed Mach overwhelmed the motor and kept the tail from pivoting? Answer: Yeager would be no worse off than he was during the previous mission. Yeah, but what if that turbulent air ripped off that damned tail as it was pivoting? Answer: Yeager better have paid-up insurance. We were dealing with the Ughknown.

Before returning to Wright, Colonel Bovd approved our ground tests. We were to report the results to him, and then he'd decide whether to proceed with a flight test. Then the old man took me aside. "Listen," he said, "I don't want you to be railroaded into this deal by Ridley or anyone else. If you don't feel comfortable with the risks, I want you to tell me so. I'll respect your decision. Please don't play the hero, Chuck. It makes no sense getting you hurt or killed. "

I told him, "Colonel Boyd, it's my ass on the line. I want us to succeed but I'm not going to get splattered doing it.

So, Ridley and I ground tested that stabilizer system every which way but loose. It worked fine and provided just enough control (about a quarter of a degree change in the angle of incidence) so that we both felt I could get by without using the airplane's elevator. "It may not be much," Ridley said, "and it may feel ragged to you up there, but it will keep you flying." I agreed. But would the system work at high Mach speed? Only one way to find out. Colonel Boyd gave us the go ahead.

No X-1 flight was ever routine. But when I was dropped to repeat the same flight profile that had lost my elevator effectiveness, I admit to being unusually grim. I flew as alert and precisely as I knew how. If the damned Ughknown swallowed me up, there wasn't much I could do about it, but I concentrated on that trim switch. At the slightest indication that something wasn't right, l would break the record for backing off.

Pushing the switch forward opened a solenoid that allowed high-pressure nitrogen gas through the top motor to the stabilizer, changing its angle of attack and stabilizing its upward pitch. If I pulled back, that would start the bottom motor, turning it in the opposite direction. I could just beep it and supposedly make Pitch changes. I let the airplane accelerate up to .85 Mach before testing the trim switch. I pulled back on the switch, moving the leading edge of the stabilizer down one degree, and her nose rose. I retrimmed it back to where it was, and we leveled out. I climbed and accelerated up to .9 Mach and made the same change, achieving the same result. I retrimmed it and let it go out to .94 Mach, where I had lost my elevator effectiveness, made the same trim change, again raising the nose, just as I had done at the lower Mach numbers. Ridley was right: the stabilizer gave me just enough pitch control to keep me safe. I felt we could probably make it through without the elevator.

I had her out to .96 at 43,000 feet and was about to turn off the engine and begin jettisoning the remaining fuel, when the windshield began to frost. Because of the intense cabin cold, fogging was a continual problem, but I was usually able to wipe it away. This time, though, a solid layer of frost quickly formed. I even took off my gloves and used my fingernails, which only gave me frostbite. That windshield was lousy anyway, configured to the bullet-shaped fuselage and affording limited visibility. It was hard to see out during landings, but I had never expected to fly the X-1 on instruments. I radioed Dick Frost, flying low chase, and told him the problem. "Okay, pard," he said, "I'll talk you in. You must've done a lot of sweating in that cockpit to ice the damned windshield." I told him, "Not as much as I'm gonna do having You talk me in. You better talk good Frost." He laughed. "I know. A dumb bastard like you probably can't read instruments."

The X-1 wasn't the Space Shuttle. There were no on-board computers to line you up and bring you down. The pilot was the computer. Under normal flight conditions, I'd descend to 5,000 feet above the lakebed and fly over the point where I wanted to touch down, then turn and line up downwind, lowering my landing gear at around 250 mph. The X-1 stalled around 190 mph, so I held my glide speed to around 220 and touched down at around 190. The ship rolled out about three miles if I didn't apply the brakes. Rogers Dry Lake gave me an eight-mile runway but that didn't make the landing untricky. Coming in nose-high, you couldn't see the ground at all. You had to feel for it. I was sensitive to ground effect and felt the differences as we lowered down. There was also that depth perception problem, and a lot of pilots bent airplanes porpoising in, or flaring high then cracking off their landing gears. My advantage was that I had landed on these lakebeds hundreds of times. Even so, the X-1 was not an easy-landing airplane. At the point of touchdown, you had to discipline yourself to do nothing but allow the ship to settle in by itself. Otherwise you'd slam it on its weak landing gear.

So, landing blind was not something you'd ever want to be forced to do. I had survived the Ughknown only to be kicked in the butt by the Unexpected. But that was a test pilot's life, one damned thing after another. Frost was a superb pilot, who knew the X-1's systems and characteristics even better than I did. I had plenty of experience flying on instruments, and in a hairy deal like this, experience really counted. Between the two of us we made it look deceptively easy, although we both knew that it wasn't exactly a routine procedure. Frost told me to turn left ten degrees, and I followed by using my magnetic compass, monitoring my rate of turn by the needle and ball. I watched the airspeed and rate of descent, so I knew how fast I was coming down from that and the feel of the ground effect. I followed his directions moving left or right to line up on the lakebed, which was also five miles wide, allowing him to fly right on my wing and touch down with me.

He greased me right in, but my body sweat added another layer of frost to the windshield. "Pard," Dick teased, "that's the only time you haven't bounced her down. Better let me hold your hand from now on."

Before my next flight, Jack Russell, my crew chief, applied a coating of Drene Shampoo to the windshield. For some unknown reason it worked as an effective antifrost device, and we continued using it even after the government purchased a special chemical that cost eighteen bucks a bottle.

Despite the frosted windshield, I now had renewed confidence in the X-1. We had licked the elevator problem, and Ridley and I phoned Colonel Boyd and told him we thought we could safely continue the flights. He told us to press on. This was on Thursday afternoon. The next scheduled flight would be on Tuesday. So we sat down with the NACA team to discuss a flight plan. I had gone up to .955 Mach, and they suggested a speed of .97 Mach for the next mission. What we didn't know until the flight data was reduced several days later, was that I had actually flown .988 Mach while testing the stabilizer. In fact there was a fairly good possibility that I had attained supersonic speed.

Instrumentation revealed that a shock wave was interfering with the airspeed gauge on the wing. But we wouldn't learn about this until after my next flight.

All I cared about was that the stabilizer was still in one piece and so was I. We were all exhausted from a long, draining week, and quit early on Friday to start the weekend. I had promised Glennis that I would take her to Wily Anderson's, in Auburn, for a change of scene and to get her away from the kids. As cautiously as we were proceeding on these X–I flights, I figured that my attempt to break the barrier was a week or two away. So I looked forward to a relaxed few days off. But when I got home, I found Glennis lying down, feeling sick. We canceled the babysitter and called Wily. By Sunday she was feeling better, so we went over to Pancho's place for dinner. On the way over, I said to Glennis, "Hey, how about riding horses after we eat?" She was raised around horses and was a beautiful rider.

Pancho's place was a dude ranch, so after dinner we walked over to the corral and had them saddle up a couple of horses. It was a pretty night and we rode for about an hour through the Joshua trees. We decided to race back. Unfortunately there was no moon, otherwise I would have seen that the gate we had gone out of was now closed. I only saw the gate when I was practically on top of it. I was slightly in the lead, and I tried to veer my horse and miss it, but it was too late. We hit the gate and I tumbled through the air. The horse got cut and I was knocked silly. The next thing I remember was Glennis kneeling over me, asking me if I was okay. I was woozy, and she helped me stand up. It took a lot to straighten up, feeling like I had a spear in my side.

Glennis knew immediately. "You broke a rib," she said. She was all for driving straight to the base hospital. I said, no, the flight surgeon will ground me. "Well, you can't fly with broken ribs," she argued. I told her, "If I can't, I won't. If I can, I will."

Monday morning, I struggled out of bed. My shoulder was sore, and I ached generally from bumps and bruises, but my ribs near to killed me. The pain took my breath away. Glennis drove me over to Rosemond, where a local doctor confirmed I had two cracked ribs, and taped me up. He told me to take it easy. The tape job really helped. The pain was at least manageable and I was able to drive myself to the base that afternoon.

I was really low. I felt we were on top of these flights now, and I wanted to get them over with. And as much as I was hurting, I could only imagine what the old man would say if I was grounded for falling off a horse. So, I sat down with Jack Ridley and told him my troubles. I said, "If this were the first fight I wouldn't even think about trying it with these busted sumbitches. But, hell, I know every move I've got to make, and most of the major switches are right on the control wheel column."

He said, "True, but how in hell are you gonna be able to lock the cockpit door? That takes some lifting and shoving." So we walked into the hangar to see what we were up against.

We looked at the door and talked it over. Jack said, "Let's see if we can get a stick or something that you can use in your left hand to raise the handle up on the door to lock it. Get it up at least far enough where you get both hands on it and get a grip on it." We looked around the hangar and found a broom. Jack sawed off a ten-inch piece of broomstick, and it fit right into the door handle. Then I crawled into the X-1 and we tried it out. He held the door against the frame, and by using that broomstick to raise the door handle, I found I could manage to lock it. We tried it two or three times, and it worked. But finally, Ridley said, "Jesus, son, how are you gonna get down that ladder?"

I said, "One rung at a time. Either that or you can piggyback me."

Jack respected my judgment. "As long as you really think you can hack it," he said. We left that piece of broomstick in the X-1 cockpit.