Yeager: An Autobiography

FLYING IN THE GOLDEN AGE

Being at Edwards in the 1950s, I was part of the greatest era in research flying in the history of aviation. In less than five years, a whole new air force was dumped m our laps for flight testing, including most of the prototypes of today s supersonic aircraft. The grandparents of the combat planes that fought in the skies over Vietnam in the sixties and seventies were all tested at Ed-. wards in the fifties. I remember Jack Ridley coming back from a check flight in a new swept-wing jet bomber, his engineer's eyes bugged with excitement. "Those bastards haven't just gone back to the drawing board, " he said, " they've started over from scratch." That was about it.

From first light to last light, seven days a week, the desert sky over the Mojave thundered from new and powerful afterburners, an extra kick in the butt that shot us in the sky with a blast of flame and smoke. Man, we were at the center of the world, the only place on earth to be if you loved to fly. The old air force was being scrapped, and a new air force was being born right on our doorstep. Prop planes were obsolete, and the thousands of B-29s and Mustangs that had won World War II were being cut up for scrap, replaced by an air fleet of jet and rocket-propelled supersonic fighters and bombers.

The Air Force didn't have a dime for research and development when the war ended. But then the Cold War with the Russians began to heat up, and when they tested their own A-bomb in 1949, we suddenly had millions to spend to develop supersonic interceptors for air defense. One year later, war broke out in Korea, and our Sabres were dogfighting Russian-built MiGs high over the Yalu River. Combat pilots always exaggerate the performance of the enemy's equipment, and a lot of our guys were insisting that those Russian planes were flying supersonic in afterburner. True or not, the race was on among our airplane producers to build fighters that would outclimb, outspeed, outmaneuver, and outshoot the Russian MiGs. The hangars at Edwards were crammed with their prototypes.

BY the mid-1950s, the one hundred twenty test pilots working for General Boyd had flight tested more than fifty prototype fighters, interceptors, deep penetration fighters, all-weather fighters, day fighters, medium and heavy bombers, helicopters, heavylift cargo planes, and fuel tankers. We flew straight wings, swept-wings, and triangular delta-wings. We grew up believing that an airplane's wings were supposed to be longer than its body, but prototype high-performance fighters arrived from the factory with tiny stub wings thin as razors. We wondered how in hell they would stay in the air.

Everything changed at once. I had carried maybe fifty pounds of electronics in my World War II Mustang, but now new jets had fifteen hundred pounds of sophisticated electronics. Cockpits were right out of Buck Rogers. My old squadron relied on my eyes and Andy's to spot a gaggle of enemy planes. Now, a pilot who couldn't see beyond his kitchen sink saw the enemy from fifty miles away as blips on his cockpit radar screen. I had a couple of minutes to set up an attack on German fighters, but a jet pilot, closing at tremendous rates of speed, would have only a couple of seconds. (During the late fifties at Edwards, a test pilot, diving in a Mach 2 fighter, actually outraced the shells from his cannons and shot himself down.) These new jets would dogfight by radar-locked and heat-seeking missiles. Even as we flight tested these prototype airplanes, others were testing its new weapons. The first batch of heatseekers headed straight for the sun.

How complicated could flying get? The old prop fighter cockpits were kept simple so the average guy could fly in it. The new cockpits, crammed with dials and switches, caused even Jack Ridley to scratch his head. Some Air Force brass at the time talked about eliminating a human pilot altogether, to fly these complex airplanes by computer. I personally didn't think much of that idea. The practical compromise was the two-seater, with the guy in front doing the driving, while the guy in back worked the radar and weapons. But what a time to be a test pilot! BY the summer of 1954, I would be test-flving Lockheed's F-104 Starfighter, the so-called missile with a man that could fly at Mach 2 and climb more than ten thousand feet a minute. The oldest head among us was a brand new learner.

I flew, flew, flew. If I wasn't flying chase for another guy's test program, I was flying a program of my own. I was probably logging more flying time than the entire air force of some damned banana republic, but all of us were. There wasn't even time to be jealous when somebody else was assigned to test a hot new fighter. Wait an hour, and You would get to fly a hot new bomber or the latest X research airplane. The competition among the manufacturers was intense, but for every new airplane accepted into the Air Force inventory, one or two were rejected. Changes came so thick and fast that some airplanes were obsolete even as they arrived at Edwards. That was true of an X research airplane, the X-3, which had seemed so advanced when the Air Force contracted for it in 1945, but which was outperformed by the new jet fighters by the time I crawled in its cockpit in 1953.

There were so many new ways to bust my ass that I lost count. Every day was an adventure with the Ughknown-taking off for the first time in the X-5, with variable swept-wings that could be repositioned in flight to aid in lift or in landing, or with revolutionary pitch controls called elevons that combined the functions of elevator and aileron. I flew the X-4, which combined elevons and speed brakes; in a straight down power dive from 35,000 feet, I could not go faster than 250 mph. I did stability and control testing on that airplane, a semi-tailless research aircraft like the British Swallow that had crashed a few years earlier. Aerodynamicists still thought that the safest supersonic configuration was to leave off the horizontal tail surfaces, where air collides off the wings. Wrong. I got her out to .92 Mach when she began to spin violently. We figured that at .93 Mach she would punch a hole in the desert, so we quit right there and junked her.

I was even test flying our biggest new bomber. General Boyd flew to Edwards in the prototype of the Boeing B-47 Stratojet, our first swept-wing, six-engine bomber, capable of delivering an atomic bomb to its target at the speed of a fighter. He had Boeing's engineers thoroughly brief me on the systems, then he checked me out flying it. The bomber had two seats in tandem under a canopy, and the old man sat behind me while I took off. I did fine until the time came to land. I lined up with the lakebed, put down the landing gear, but that 200,000-pound bomber refused to land. It was so clean aerodynamically that there was absolutely no drag, and we floated forever fifty feet off the deck, while I sweated it out. General Boyd was just chuckling to himself; he knew this would happen and wanted to see how I'd handle it. "Christ," I said to him, "this thing is like a hot-air balloon." "So I notice," he replied. "But how about putting us down on the deck while it's still daylight." I finally did. But I almost ran out of eight miles of lakebed doing it. The old man hopped out. "Okay, Chuck," he said, "it's your test program."

Over the next six months, and in between other testing programs, I did all of the stability and control tests on the Stratojet, flying with their engineers and filling out test cards on its takeoff capacity with heavy bomb loads, its performance at various altitudes, and its flying range. Russ Schleeh teased me about it. "The next time there's a fight at Pancho's between the fighter jocks and the bomber pilots, I expect you to stay neutral." "Bullshit," I told him. "It'll take more than a couple of rides in the Forty-Seven to make me one of you bastards."

But it was funny. When the Forty-Seven became operational a year later, I had more time flying it than anybody else, and with my fighter training I could fly formation by second nature, so the Strategic Air Command asked me to help train their fuel tanker operators in airborne refueling of these big bombers. The KC-97 fuel tankers were filling stations in the sky that extended an attack bomber's range to targets anywhere in the world. They carried thirty thousand gallons of fuel. Airborne refueling was a brand new technique, and the boom operators aboard the tankers needed practice hooking up. For me, it was just simple formation flying, snuggling up to the big tanker and giving each operator ten practice tries. l gave thousands of hookups flying six hours a day, day after day, until it became routine for the boom operators. Not long after, a B-47 set a new record by flying twelve thousand miles during a twenty four hour period, refueled three times by tankers en route.

Flying formation was one of the first things I did to test a new fighter's control systems. A fighter is a gun platform, and the more stable the fighter, the easier it is to hit a target. In these tremendously fast jets, stability and control were critical performance factors. I'd crawl on somebody's wing to see how stable my airplane handled. But like anything else in life or in flying, the most difficult things become easier after you've done them hundreds of times. And a lot of the civilian test pilots working for the airplane manufacturers were barely able to stay in the sky flying the new high-performance jets. They lacked the background and experience of military pilots. We flew everything; they were limited to flying airplanes that their company produced. Many flew bombers or cargo planes in World War II, but through the seniority system became fighter test pilots who might be able to finesse testing a souped up Mustang, but who had no business in the cockpit of a modern jet fighter.

They couldn't fly in formation; they had no background or training. I flew as chase when a civilian test pilot butchered the test of the XF-85 Goblin, a tiny so-called parasite fighter that was carried by a bomber mother ship and launched to defend it against enemy air attackers. The company's civilian test pilot was incapable of staying in formation with me, and when the time came for him to attach the XF-85 to the mother ship by means of a trapeze configuration underneath, I watched him wreck the little parasite, and I was barely able to escort him down to an emergency landing on the lakebed. The Air Force canceled the XF-85 program after only two hours of testing.

It was a shame to see a good program and good equipment ruined by bad piloting. One of the worst accidents at Edwards occurred in the 1960s when another civilian test pilot, completely out of his element trying to fly in formation, rammed his fighter into the prototype B-70 bomber, killing himself, most of the bomber's crew, and wiping out both airplanes. That accident should never have happened. We had reached a point at Edwards where test flying challenged the best of us. There was just no room (or excuse) for underqualified test pilots.

These new airplanes demanded proficiency or they would kill you. By definition, a prototype was an unproven, imperfect machine. It was usually underpowered, had controls that were too light or too heavy, new hydraulic or electrical systems that were bound to fail, and more than a few idiosyncrasies that were certain to bust your ass if you spotted them too late. Some defects were obvious: Convair's Delta Dagger was completely redesigned following the poor performance of its prototype. But other problems, like an unexpected vicious pitch up at high speeds or a dangerous yawing tendency, might be discovered late in a program, only after hundreds of hours of flying time. The test pilot's job was to discover all the flaws, all of the potential killers. It was precise, scientific flying that included stressing an airplane beyond the most violent combat maneuvers.

Testing was lengthy and complicated, resulting in hundreds of major and minor changes before an airplane was accepted into the Air Force's inventory. Even then, airplanes were constantly being changed and improved with higher-performance engines, new electronics and weapons systems, so that a later model easily outperformed the original. But to stay alive testing prototypes, you just had to know what you were doing. You had to learn those systems, especially the emergency systems, ask questions of the engineers, study the damned pilot's handbook that was getting thick like a Manhattan phone directory. But a lot of pilots, civilian and military, weren't interested in doing homework and couldn't be bothered. And a lot of them got caught.

Arrogance got more pilots in trouble than faulty equipment. That's what killed Dick Bong, our top war ace in the Pacific, who became a test pilot. Dick wasn't interested in homework. He crashed on takeoff when his main fuel pump sheared. He had neglected to turn on his auxiliary pump because he hadn't read the pilot's handbook, so he flamed out only fifty feet up. He had no ejection seat, but stood up in the cockpit, popped the canopy and then his chute. The air stream wrapped him around the ship's tail, and he went in with his airplane.

Bong at least had a reason for being arrogant. He was a top war ace. But I never could figure why the most arrogant bunch at Edwards were the NACA pilots. The National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics had got into the flight test business while I was still flying the X-1. They bought a second X-1 and hired civilian test pilots to fly it. I flew it first, checked it out, then turned it over to them. Their two pilots took turns cracking the gear on landing. The X-1 demanded an experienced fighter pilot at the controls, and those two just weren't qualified to fly it. Both of them were later killed. Each time a new X research plane was delivered, the Air Force would fly it first, milk it dry of data, then turn it over to NACA. We did that with the X-3, X-4, and X-5, completely exhausting their capabilities. NACA would poop around with an X airplane for two or three years after we were done with it, acting as if they were discovering secrets of the universe. I thought that some of their pilots were the sorriest bunch in aviation.

By the time I left Edwards in 1954, NACA had assembled a better crew of civilian test pilots who would do important testing in the North America X-15. Scott Crossfield worked for NACA and was the first pilot to fly at Mach 2. He was a proficient pilot, but also among the most arrogant I've met. Scotty just knew it all, which is why he ran a Super Sabre through a hangar.

That stupid accident would never have happened to an Air Force pilot because he would have accepted a few pointers about what in hell was going on with a new airplane. But Scotty wouldn't. His attitude was typical of the NACA bunch: there was nothing worthwhile that a military pilot could tell them. I had been testing the Super Sabre and delivered one to the NACA hangar from the North American plant. The crew chiefs came out with Scotty, who was scheduled to fly it. I handed him all the paperwork and the handbook on the airplane and told him, "Scotty, it will take you about a week to run an acceptance inspection on this airplane. There's a lot to learn, but when you're ready to fly it, give me a call and I'll come over and go through the various systems with you." His reply was, "It has a pilot's handbook, doesn't it? That's all I need."

Well, you look at a guy like that and say, "See ya around." A week later, I received a call from Paul Bickel, NACA's boss at Edwards, asking me to come over to their hangar. There was the Super Sabre, bashed through their hangar wall. "What in hell happened?" I asked. Paul said, "Scotty lost utility pressure." I told him, "That's exactly right! If you lose that on landing, you have no brakes or nose-wheel steering." But Scotty didn't know it, and when he tried to taxi to his hangar, he ricocheted off two parked airplanes and punched his plane through the hangar. I told Bickel, "All your pilot had to do was take five minutes to go through some of the emergency systems before he tried to fly it."

Neil Armstrong may have been the first astronaut on the moon, but he was the last guy at Edwards to take any advice from a military pilot. Neil was NACA's backup pilot on the X-15. One day, Bickel called me to say that NACA was scheduling an X-15 flight and planning to use Smith's Ranch Lake as an emergency landing site. Paul knew me from my early days at Wright, where he had been one of those flight test engineers who thought the X-1 was doomed. But he respected my judgment about the condition of the lakebeds because he knew I'd been flying them since 1945 and knew them like the back of my hand. Smith's Ranch Lake was about 250 miles away, and I told him I had flown over it recently and it was soaked from the winter rains. He said, "Well, my pilots were over there today and they said it's not wet."

I laughed. "Well, then, be my guest." But Paul had doubts of his own or he wouldn't have called. He asked me if I would fly Neil up there and attempt a landing. "No way," I said. "Would you do it in a NACA airplane?" he asked. "Hell, no. I wouldn't do it in any airplane because it just won't work." He then asked, "Would you go up there if Neil flew?" "Okay," I said, "I'll ride in the back seat."

I tried my damndest to talk Armstrong out of going at all. "Honestly, Neil, that lakebed is in no shape to take the weight of a T-33," which was a two-seat jet training version of the Shooting Star. But Neil wouldn't be budged. He said, "Well, we won't land. I'll just test the surface by shooting a touch and go"-meaning, he'd set down the wheels then immediately hit the throttle and climb back up in the sky. I told him he was crazy. "You're carrying a passenger and a lot of fuel, and that airplane isn't overpowered, anyway. The moment you touch down on that soggy lakebed, we'll be up to our asses in mud. The drag will build up so high, you won't be able to get off the ground again." He said, "No sweat, Chuck. I'll just touch and go."

And that's exactly what Armstrong did. He touched, but we sure as hell didn't go. The wheels sank in the muck and we sat there, engine screaming, wide open, the airplane shaking like a moth stuck on flypaper. I said from back, "Neil, why don't you turn off the sumbitch, it ain't doin' nuthin' for you." He turned off the engine and we sat there in silence. Not a word for a long time. I would've given a lot to see that guy's face. It was cold, and the sun was moving behind the mountains in late afternoon. Very soon it would be dark and the temperature would drop to below freezing. We were only wearing thin flying suits and the nearest highway was thirty miles away. "Any ideas?" I asked him. Neil shook his head.

Before dark, NACA sent out a DC-3 to search for us. I got on the horn with the pilot and told him to give us time to walk over to the edge of the lakebed, about a mile away. I told him to touch down, but not to stop. "Open the door and keep on moving while we jump aboard." He did a good job, and when we got back to Edwards, Bickel was still there. I don't know what he said in private to Neil Armstrong, but when he saw me he burst out laughing.

NACA was the forerunner of NASA. But whatever their initials, in the old days I rated them about as high as my shoelaces. (Today it is a new breed. I'll take my hat off to any of the NASA pilots flying the shuttle.)

I lived balls-out, flew the same way. I had my own standards, and as far as I was concerned there was no room at Edwards for test pilots who couldn't measure up to the machines they flew. I was harsh in my judgments because a pilot either knew what he was doing or he didn't. The NACA pilots were probably good engineers who could fly precisely, but they were sorry fighter pilots. I was angry at the system which gave the first crack at new airplanes to the manufacturer's own test pilots. Testing should be impartial, but each manufacturer used its own test methods that often exaggerated its airplane's capabilities. There were some excellent civilian pilots, like Lockheed's Tony LeVier and Fish Salmon, Republic's Carl Bellinger, and North American's Wheaties Welsh. Pard Hoover had left the Air Force to join North American. But there were also a lot of duds, who flew new and expensive equipment for the big bonus risk money, their only qualifications being company seniority that gave them first crack at big projects. Frankly, when guys like that drilled a hole in the desert, I felt a lot worse about the airplanes they destroyed.

I had a grudge against those who flew for the money. We military pilots flew for low pay because flying was our way of life. Those guys collected two hundred bucks for every minute they spent above 40,000 feet. What prima donnas! The civilians flew a preliminary test to insure a new airplane's airworthiness. Then the plane was turned over to us. We tested it to verify their data and to determine whether the airplane met its military specifications. Spin testing and dive tests came later on. The civilians were supposed to take those risks and collect their bonuses for doing so. But as soon as I got my hands on a new airplane in that first phase, I did everything to it that could be done. I'd spin and dive test it because I enjoyed the challenge. When the manufacturers saw my data cards, they'd call in their own pilots and say, "Why should we pay you for a spin test when Yeager already did it?' The civilian pilots complained that I was taking the bread out of their mouths, but I could care less. The system rubbed me wrong, and General Boyd finally got it changed after a long, bloody battle. I was out of the testing business when the Air Force took it over entirely

To my mind, those company test pilots were salesmen with a license to fly. Military pilots were impartial. We could not recommend procuring or rejecting an airplane; that decision was made at the highest levels. But we did recommend that airplanes not be procured unless they were changed and improved in certain ways. For example, in 1953, North American delivered to us their new Super Sabre, the F-100, probably the most eagerly awaited new jet fighter of the postwar years, the first that could fly supersonic in straight and level flight. It became the first of what would be called "the Century series" of American jet fighters-the F- 100, the F102, F- 104 and F-105, culminating in the late sixties with General Dynamics' F-111 a swing-wing two-seater that carried eight tons of bombs and rockets at 1,650 mph.

Every test pilot at Edwards drooled for the chance to crawl in that F-100's cockpit, including yours truly. After my first flight, I went over to North American's hangar to talk to Wheaties Welsh, their chief test pilot. "Hey," I said, "you can't fly in formation with this thing It has the damned sorriest flight control system I've ever seen." Wheaties just shook his head. He was an old fighter jock who had shot down Japanese Zeros during the Pearl Harbor attack. "Goddamn it, Chuck, you're just being hypercritical," he insisted. "No, I'm not,' I said. "That airplane just isn't stable." Pete Everest told him the same thing.

Welsh said, "I'll prove to you that you're nitpicking. I'm going to bring in some fighter pilots from the Tactical Air Command, guys who just know how to fight, and let them fly it." And he did. Flying chase with those TAC pilots was wild. They had a ball booming across the sky. "God, this thing really goes," they said, taking it out to 1.33 Mach. When they came in, Welsh asked them, "What do you guys think about the airplane's stability?" Those jocks looked blank. "Huh?" No, they didn't try to fly formation, they just flew balls-out. "Great airplane," they said. "Really hot."

We had a real conflict developing with North American, and Dutch Kindelberger, their board chairman, went to the Pentagon to insist that there was nothing wrong with his Super Sabre and that a few of the Edwards test pilots were nit-picking. He carried with him the statements from the young fighter jocks saying how great the airplane handled. Usually the military test pilots have the final word about whether or not a prototype should go into production. In this case the Air Force, knowing that the Tactical Air Command was panting to get their hands on that hot new fighter, decided that the deficiencies in the F-100 were in the extreme corner of the flight envelope and would be unlikely to cause pilot problems. Dutch won the battle, but, man, did he lose the war.

About two hundred F-100s had been delivered to the Air Force in September 1954, when Wheaties Welsh was killed diving an F-100 at 1.4 Mach. The airplane disintegrated, but the flight recorders revealed it was directionally unstable. The Air Force grounded all the F-100s in its inventory and sent them back to North American. The modifications necessary included a larger tail and a new flight control system, and they almost bankrupted the company. But it took the death of their chief test pilot to make that airplane safe to fly. Was Welsh just being a salesman when he accused us of nit-picking? If so, he was a fool to attempt a structural integrity demonstration dive.

Only rarely are dangerous flaws discovered in airplanes that are already in place with squadrons around the world. But that happened with an earlier North American jet fighter, the F-86 Sabre. Suddenly, and for no apparent reason, we lost three or four pilots who were killed while doing rolls down on the deck. Their airplanes just went right into the ground. Investigators could not figure out why.

I flew a Sabre as a chase airplane. One day, I flew up into the Sierras to check on a favorite fishing lake. A buddy of mine named Dave Sheltren lived at the edge of the lake, and I came across low to buzz his place, did a slow roll over his house, when suddenly my aileron locked. It was a hairy moment, flying about 150 feet off the ground and upside down. But the moment I let off on the Gs, pushing up the nose, the aileron unlocked. Very strange. I climbed to 15,000 feet, where it was safer to try it again, and each time I performed that rolling maneuver, the aileron locked. I figured that somehow the wings were bending under stress and locking the aileron. I called General Boyd as soon as I landed and told him I thought I knew how those crashes occurred, but not why.

The old man sent inspectors to take apart my Sabre's wings. They found that a bolt on the aileron cylinder was installed upside down. Crew chiefs in every Sabre squadron were ordered to inspect their airplanes' wings for that upside-down bolt, while an inspection team went to the North American plant and found the culprit. He was an older man on the assembly line who ignored instructions about how to insert that bolt because, by God, he knew that bolts were supposed to be placed head up, not head down. Nobody told him how many pilots he had killed.

Those complex airplanes were unforgiving of mistakes, but some prototypes were so damned complicated that they never really got off the ground. We called them "hangar queens because that's where they sat while the engineers worked them over trying to figure out why this or that was leaking. Some were so delicate that if you kicked a tire you'd probably short a circuit. Republic had a hangar queen, a combination jet-rocket prototype, that took forever getting past taxiing tests. They taxied her so often that they wore out two sets of tires, but each time her engine was ignited, something else went wrong. As a joke, a couple of us threw a rope around her landing gear and hauled her out of the hangar at the end of a tractor. A crew chief came running up demanding to know what in hell we thought we were doing. We told him we were just taking her outside for some fresh air. The Republic guys were not amused. I flew as chase when that particular airplane finally got off the ground. Her engine exploded just as her gear was raised and the pilot was almost killed.

We lost a lot of people, mostly the victims of pilot error. Nearly twenty test pilots, some of them good friends, bought the farm during those years. One guy was killed just closing the canopy to his B-47, something went wrong and it crashed down on him, crushing his skull. Guys died because they delayed too long trying to decide whether to stay or jump. A test pilot's instinct was always to try to bring an airplane back, especially a prototype carrying expensive measuring and recording devices. Nine out of ten pilots will be killed if they attempt to deadstick back in a flamed-out jet. I only did it when I was feeling particularly good and sharp, knowing that gliding down in a jet was very tricky. Accidents occurred because all of us were flying too many different airplanes to really learn all there was to know about a specific emergency system. Flying at supersonic speeds, a pilot has a couple of seconds to take decisive corrective action when something goes alarmingly wrong. Some of the dead pilots needed more time to figure it out.

I was investigating officer on a few of the accidents. The crash site looked like a meteor-impact crater, just a smoking hole in the desert. We'd sift through the ashes searching for clues about what happened. The work was gruesome, but specially trained accident investigators almost always were able to determine the cause of a crash after a thorough job that included interviewing any eyewitnesses, recovering flight data, and analyzing bits and pieces of wreckage. But there were some fatal accidents that made no sense.

Driving into Edwards via the main gate, a visitor crossed James Fitzgerald Boulevard, en route to base headquarters. Fitz had been my backup pilot on the X-1 after Hoover. He was the best takeoff and landing pilot I ever saw. Nobody remembers that Fitz was the second pilot to break Mach 1 in the X- 1. He was a West Pointer, with a beautiful young wife and new baby, and was destined for great things as a military pilot. In late 1948, we had flown together to the Cleveland air races. Fitz returned alone, flying a T-33 with 312-gallon tip tanks on his wings. On landing, the wing hit the ground, the airplane cartwheeled, and Fitz died of terrible head injuries. How and why such a fabulous pilot was caught that way is hard to understand.

Joe Wolfe Avenue is a main drag at Edwards. Joe was a bomber pilot and a good one. He went- up in a B-47 and came down near the base housing area. Joe got caught somehow, but the wreckage provided no clues. He and I had talked about his flight the night before at my dinner table, so I know he thoroughly understood that airplane and all of its systems.

Neil Lathrop Street takes you to the main hangar complex at Edwards. Neil was a competent bomber pilot who got caught in a B-51. The old-timers at Edwards remember these guys, but in a couple of years they were just street names out there on the desert. Soon we ran out of streets to name and in a few very special circumstances, named buildings in honor of outstanding pilots who ran out of luck. Most of them died before they had really made their mark. The real art to test flying was survival maybe only a spoonful of more luck and more skill made the critical difference between a live test pilot and a street name.

In 1952, I drove around in a Model A Ford. I had as much fun driving it as tinkering with it. Joe Wolfe was the original owner. When he was killed, his wife Sylvia, sold it to Neil Lathrop for one hundred dollars. When Neil was killed, his widow sold it to me for one hundred dollars. Wanting that old car overcame my fear that it was jinxed, but I told Glennis, "If something happens to me, don't sell it to another pilot-blow it up.' When I left Edwards in 1954, I sold it to Pete Everest for one hundred dollars. We agreed that the car should always stay at Edwards, be sold from test pilot to test pilot, for no more than a hundred bucks. When Pete left, he sold it to X-2 pilot Iven Kincheloe. When Kinch was killed, his widow sold it to X-15 pilot Bob White. But Bob wasn't mechanical and couldn't keep the Model A running properly, so he broke the tradition by selling it to an airman; who took it with him when he left the service.

That I lived to sell that old car took nothing less than a miracle. After hundreds of hours of test flying my luck nearly ran out flying Larry Bell's latest rocket research airplane, the X-1A. No one who saw the flight data from that ride or heard the tapes of my voice transmissions could ever figure out how I survived-and neither could I.