Yeager: An Autobiography

GIVING CHASE

I never lost a pilot while flying chase, but there were many close calls. After I had flown the X4 research airplane, the Air Force turned it over to NACA, and I flew chase for their pilot, Joe Walker. We were climbing together through 20,000 feet, and I was listening to Joe talking with the control center, when it hit me that there was something very wrong. Joe wasn't making sense, and he was slurring his words. Hey, I thought, that guy has hypoxia. And it was going to get worse because we were climbing straight up. Without enough oxygen pilots act drunk and irrational, then black out I flew close to his canopy and saw that his head wasn't rolling from side to side, which probably meant he was getting partial oxygen from his mask. I radioed: "Hey, Joe, be alert. Go to one hundred percent on your oxygen." He replied, "Oh, shut up, will you. I'm trying to fly a program here."

I needed to find a way to slap him back to reality. I said, "Hey, man, I just flamed out. Got me a real emergency. Follow me down." That got through to him, and he went down with me, his head clearing at the lower altitude, although he was dazed. Being typical NACA-arrogant, he was ready to readjust his oxygen mask and go back up. "No way," I said. "Get down on the ground." He finally did.

I flew a lot of chase for the Navy's Skyrocket project in 1951. Bill Bridgeman flew this Douglas rocket plane; he was a former Navy fighter pilot and a good guy. His engine system and flight profiles were identical to the X-1's, so there were dozens of ways I could be helpful during his flights. And poor Bill had some hairy moments. On one early flight he got a fire warning light and black smoke billowed out of his engine. I was right there with him. Man, I knew that terror. "Have you jettisoned your fuel?" I asked him. "No," he replied. I didn't have to ask why. He was scared to dump fuel into the burning engine. I told him to ease back on the throttle to see what happened. The smoke thinned. That meant the fire was inside the jet engine that was carrying him toward the lakebed, not inside the rocket chambers. I told him to turn off the engine and hit the CO2 bottles (his fire extinguisher). The smoke vanished, and the warning light went off, and he was able to glide back, just barely. As we were coming in, a Douglas engineer asked him to fire up the jet again to see what would happen. Christ, we couldn't believe that idiot.

Bill had other nightmares: about to be launched from the mother ship, he saw the pressure drop on his fuel gauge and called for an abort. I heard him loud and clear. Bill turned off all the systems, but the pilot of the mother ship must've had his finger punched down on the microphone transmission key and couldn't hear Bridgeman. He started the countdown to launch with Bill screaming, " Don't drop me." It was horrifying. I was screaming at the pilot, and so were the control guys on the ground, but the Skyrocket was dropped. Bill dropped like a boulder and I dove after him, figuring he had had it. But he managed to crank up and fly right. "Goddamn it, I told you guys not to drop me," he shouted.

It was funny later, much later, as was the time when his troubles came in bunches. He lost his engine and his radio, and his canopy frosted over. I was in a frenzy. How do you talk a guy down who can't hear you? He got his radio back, and I was busy lining him up, crawling under his damned airplane to make sure his gear was down and locked, correcting this, suggesting that, so I didn't notice that the bastard had got his engine started, which immediately started his defroster. I looked and saw him sitting in there with a big grin, watching me struggle to sweat him down. He saw that I saw and began to chuckle. "You were doing so great Chuck I didn't want to interrupt." We were only about fifty feet off the deck. I said, "Okay, Navy, you're on your own from here. Hope you don't screw it up."

Test pilots sometimes just did screw up. Bill once stalled that thing at 30,000 feet, got to pitching violently and went into a straight down spin. The Skyrocket was known to be dynamically unstable and spins were to be avoided. I dove down with him stayed on his wing as he plunged seven thousand fee; in ten seconds. On a deal like that I kept my mouth shut, no radio chatter, because there were dozens of people listening intently, including all of Bill's Douglas bosses on the ground who wouldn't be pleased with his performance. But I knew that the flight data would give him away, so I purposely asked, "How are the stalls progressing?" as if he had planned a stall test. There was an investigation after the flight data was studied and both of us were called on the carpet, but we played dumb to the point where Bill's boss exploded, "You're a pretty cute pair," and slammed out of the room.

Bridgeman did more than his share of good flying, eventually achieved 1.8 Mach. He survived the Skyrocket only to be killed doing leisure flying out to Catalina. For Bill, that trip was like a motorist driving to the Seven-Eleven to pick up a quart of milk. He was probably flying complacent and without his usual alertness. That's when an airplane bites hard.

NACA also had a Douglas Skyrocket. Scotty Crossfield flew it and, in November 1953, became the first one to break Mach 2. None of us blue suiters was thrilled to see a NACA guy bust Mach 2, but as Jack Ridley said, "We'll take 'em on Mach 3." Things were happening that fast. About ten months before Scotty's big flight, Bell delivered a new rocket research airplane for testing, the X-1A. It was a longer version of the X-1, with a bubble canopy for better vision and a different fuel system to provide more sustained power than did Glamorous Glennis. The X-1A was scheduled to be flight tested at Edwards by one of Bell's contract civilian pilots, then turned over to NACA for high altitude research. I flew chase for Bell's pilot, Jean "Skip" Ziegler. And it was the old story: another civilian pilot in over his head.

I chased Skip in a Sabre jet and kept up with him using my afterburner. I sat right on his wing up to .93 Mach, saw the shock waves rippling across the wing's surface, and heard the fear in Skip's voice reporting: "My ailerons are buzzing like mad." He was also getting heavy buffeting. I told him, "Everything is normal. That's exactly what happened in the X-1 at .93. Push on and it will smooth out for you."

He wouldn't or couldn't. For three consecutive flights he sat out there at .93, saw shock waves, got bounced around, and came back in. He thought the airplane was unstable, and his concern began to worry Bell's engineers, who decided to send the airplane back to the Buffalo plant for static ground testing. Skip went back with it, and while he was there, he participated in a fueling test of another Bell research plane, the X-2. Skip was inside the X-2, attached to the bomb bay of a B-50, when the LOX tank suddenly blew up at 20,000 feet. The X-2 and Skip were ripped from the mother ship and sent to the bottom of Lake Ontario. Ziegler never had a chance.

So, Larry Bell had a rocket airplane and no driver. Skip had worked on the program for months and to begin training a new pilot would create a long delay. Bell asked the Air Force to take over the test of the X-1A and requested me as test pilot. General Boyd agreed and brought together the old X–I team to help-Ridley, Dick Frost, and Jack Russell, my crew chief. I would need those trusted old heads on this program because like the X-1 there was no ejection seat aboard the X1A. Hell, there wasn't even a door. I was bolted inside without any way to get out in an emergency. That had worried Ziegler, too, but I told him, "It makes no difference because there's no way to survive a jump at such high speeds and altitudes." True or not, it was a naked feeling stepping into an experimental airplane with no exit.

In the past when I began a tough program, I was fired up. This time my heart wasn't in it. In fact, I probably had no business flying in that thing. I was tense, depressed, and sick with worry about Glennis who was expecting our fourth child. Nothing had ever slowed down Glennis. During the other pregnancies she had morning sickness for the first few weeks, then perked right up and kept to her normal schedule until the day of delivery. This time she physically went to pieces and none of the doctors could figure out why. She ran a constant fever, and her joints became so sore and swollen that she could barely get out of bed to go to the bathroom. Each new day found her weaker than the last, until I really began to fear that Glennis wasn't going to make it.

It didn't take long for me to realize how much I depended on my wife's strength and how much I had taken it for granted. The foundation of our family life was knocked out from under us. Donald, our eldest was only four. Mickey was three, and my mother volunteered to take him for a while if I could find transportation back to West Virginia. So, on my next flight east, I loaded ol' Mickey into a B-25 and delivered him to Mom. Sharon, our youngest, was a two year-old toddler who learned how to crawl under our backyard fence and wandered out into the desert, so that the air police had to send up helicopters to find her. I got special permission for my inlaws to come onto the base and move their trailer right next to our house. Without them to help at home, I'd be lost.

I took out all my worry on the doctors at the base hospital. They didn't know what in hell was wrong. They thought Glennis might have rheumatic fever. One specialist said she probably had a bacterial infection called San Bernardino Valley fever, that was an undulant fever common on the desert. They ran tests up one side and down the other, then stood around scratching their heads. I was tempted to strafe the bunch of them. They kept her in the hospital for three weeks, but she came home sicker than ever, instructed to take three aspirin every four hours to ease the pain in her swollen joints. In those days, the more uncertain they were, the more X-rays they took. The hazards of too much radiation were unknown, and they kept zapping Glennis and our unborn child every chance they got. We would pay a terrible price many years later.

I raised such hell with those damned doctors that the Air Force finally sent out a two-star general who was head of the medical branch. He drove to the house and examined Glen, scratched his head, too, and shipped her off to Letterman, the big military hospital in San Francisco. She was there for three months.

It was the worst possible time for me to be involved with a risky research project. I was thirty, recently promoted to major, and for the first time I began to think that test flying was a young guy's game. Glennis was always so self-reliant and efficient that I never really worried about doing dangerous work. She ran that family whether I was around or not. I knew other test pilots whose wives went to pieces every time they left for work. Those women were bitchy and miserable; a few hit the bottle hard. Their husbands were under the gun, and some were forced out of test flying, or, faced with the choice, broke off the marriage. I was one of the very lucky ones, but this time, flying the X-1A, I felt I had my neck stuck out from California to Buffalo, New York.

I talked about it with Glennis. I told her, "I'm crazy to take this on with you so sick. I'm thinking about backing out of it." She said, "I know you really want to go ahead, and I think you should. I don't worry about your flying, so don't you start worrying or you'll get into trouble up there."

Ziegler was killed in April. The next month, Larry Bell came to Edwards for a visit and we had a talk. "Well, Chuck," he said, "once again you've bailed my company out of a tough spot. We owe you a big debt of gratitude." I said, "Well, Mr. Bell, that's fine. But if I bust my ass in your airplane, who's going to take care of Glennis and my kids?" He looked startled. I said, "I'm not one of your civilian pilots who collects a big bonus and all kinds of insurance. I'm just hanging out there with a neck stretched ten miles."

Mr. Bell said his company would take out an insurance policy on my life. "Even though it probably isn't legal, we will pay for the high-risk premium, and I think the Air Force will look the other way knowing the tough spot you're in." A few days later he called me to say they had taken out a $50,000 premium on my life. It sure as hell wasn't legal, but I felt a little less stretched.

The X-1A remained at the Bell plant for five months undergoing testing and modifications, so it was November before I made my first flight. By then, Glennis had delivered Susie. The birth was normal; Susie weighed eight pounds and was perfectly healthy. Best of all, Glennis's mysterious ailment slowly disappeared; the fever was gone and so was the inflammation in her joints. She was still weak and tired easily, but we were both tremendously relieved and began to return to normal living. For me, that meant climbing into the X-1A without an ejection seat.