- Crossfield, Albert Scott and Clay Blair.
Always Another Dawn.
Seattle, CreateSpace, [1960] 2018.
ISBN 978-1-7219-0050-3.
-
The author was born in 1921 and grew up in Southern California.
He was obsessed with aviation from an early age, wangling
a ride in a plane piloted by a friend of his father (an open
cockpit biplane) at age six. He built and flew many model
airplanes and helped build the first gasoline-powered model
plane in Southern California, with a home-built engine. The
enterprising lad's paper route included a local grass field
airport, and he persuaded the owner to trade him a free
daily newspaper (delivery boys always received a few extra)
for informal flying lessons. By the time he turned thirteen,
young Scott (he never went by his first name, “Albert”)
had accumulated several hours of flying time.
In the midst of the Great Depression, his father's milk
processing business failed, and he decided to sell out
everything in California, buy a 120 acre run-down dairy
farm in rural Washington state, and start over. Patiently,
taking an engineer's approach to the operation:
recording everything, controlling costs, optimising
operations, and with the entire family pitching in on
the unceasing chores, the ramshackle property was
built into a going concern and then a showplace.
Crossfield never abandoned his interest in aviation, and
soon began to spend some of his scarce free time at
the local airport, another grass field operation, where
he continued to take flight lessons from anybody who
would give them for the meagre pocket change he could
spare. Finally, with a total of seven or eight hours
dual control time, one of the pilots invited him to
“take her up and try a spin.” This was
highly irregular and, in fact, illegal: he had no
student pilot certificate, but things were a lot
more informal in those days, so off he went. Taking
the challenge at its words, he proceeded to
perform three spins and spin recoveries during his
maiden solo flight.
In 1940, at age eighteen, Scott left the farm. His
interest in aviation had never flagged, and he was certain
he didn't want to be a farmer. His initial goal was to
pursue an engineering degree at the University of
Washington and then seek employment in the aviation
industry, perhaps as an engineering test pilot. But
the world was entering a chaotic phase, and this chaos
perturbed his well-drawn plans. “[B]y the time I
was twenty I had entered the University, graduated from
a civilian aviation school, officially soloed, and
obtained my private pilot's license, withdrawn from the
University, worked for Boeing Aircraft Company, quit to
join the Air Force briefly, worked for Boeing again, and
quit again to join the Navy.” After the U.S.
entered World War II, the Navy was desperate for pilots
and offered immediate entry to flight training to those
with the kind of experience Crossfield had accumulated.
Despite having three hundred flight hours in his logbook,
Crossfield, like many military aviators, had to re-learn
flying the Navy way. He credits it for making him a
“professional, disciplined aviator.” Like
most cadets, he had hoped for assignment to the fleet as
a fighter pilot, but upon completing training he was
immediately designated an instructor and spent the
balance of the war teaching basic and advanced flying,
gunnery, and bombing to hundreds of student aviators.
Toward the end of the war, he finally received his
long-awaited orders for fighter duty, but while in
training the war ended without his ever seeing combat.
Disappointed, he returned to his original career plan and
spent the next four years at the University of Washington,
obtaining Bachelor of Science and Master of Science
degrees in Aeronautical Engineering. Maintaining his
commission in the Naval Reserve, he organised a naval
stunt flying team and used it to hone his precision
formation flying skills. As a graduate student, he
supported himself as chief operator of the university's
wind tunnel, then one of the most advanced in the country,
and his work brought him into frequent contact with engineers
from aircraft companies who contracted time on the tunnel
for tests on their designs.
Surveying his prospects in 1950, Crossfield decided he
didn't want to become a professor, which would be the
likely outcome if he continued his education toward
a Ph.D. The aviation industry was still in the postwar
lull, but everything changed with the outbreak of the
Korean War in June 1950. Suddenly, demand for the next
generation of military aircraft, which had been seen as
years in the future, became immediate, and the need for
engineers to design and test them was apparent.
Crossfield decided the most promising opportunity for
someone with his engineering background and flight
experience was as an “aeronautical research
pilot” with the
National
Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), a U.S. government
civilian agency founded in 1915 and chartered with performing
pure and applied research in aviation, which was placed in the
public domain and made available to all U.S. aircraft
manufacturers. Unlike returning to the military, where
his flight assignments would be at the whim of the service,
at NACA he would be assured of working on the cutting edge of
aviation technology.
Through a series of personal contacts, he eventually managed
to arrange an interview with the little-known NACA High Speed
Flight Test Station at Edwards Air Force Base in the high desert
of Southern California. Crossfield found himself at the very
Mecca of high speed flight, where Chuck Yeager had broken the
sound barrier in October 1947 and a series of “X-planes”
were expanding the limits of flight in all directions.
Responsibility for flying the experimental research aircraft at
Edwards was divided three ways. When a new plane was delivered,
its first flights would usually be conducted by company test
pilots from its manufacturer. These pilots would have been
involved in the design process and worked closely with the
engineers responsible for the plane. During this phase, the
stability, maneuverability, and behaviour of the plane in
various flight regimes would be tested, and all of its component
systems would be checked out. This would lead to
“acceptance” by the Air Force, at which point
its test pilots would acquaint themselves with the new plane
and then conduct flights aimed at expanding its “envelope”:
pushing parameters such as speed and altitude to those which
the experimental plane had been designed to explore. It was
during this phase that records would be set, often trumpeted
by the Air Force. Finally, NACA pilots would follow up, exploring
the fine details of the performance of the plane in the new
flight regimes it opened up. Often the plane would be
instrumented with sensors to collect data as NACA pilots
patiently explored its flight envelope. NACA's operation at
Edwards was small, and it played second fiddle to the Air Force
(and Navy, who also tested some of its research planes there). The
requirements for the planes were developed by the military, who
selected the manufacturer, approved the design, and paid for
its construction. NACA took advantage of whatever was developed,
when the military made it available to them.
However complicated the structure of operations was at Edwards,
Crossfield arrived squarely in the middle of the heroic age
of supersonic flight, as chronicled (perhaps a bit too
exuberantly) by Tom Wolfe in
The Right Stuff. The
hangars were full of machines resembling those on the
covers of the pulp science fiction magazines of Crossfield's
youth, and before them were a series of challenges seemingly
without end: Mach 2, 3, and beyond, and flight to the threshold
of space.
It was a heroic time, and a dangerous business. Writing in
1960, Crossfield notes, “Death is the handmaiden of the
pilot. Sometimes it comes by accident, sometimes by an act of
God. … Twelve out of the sixteen members of my original
class at Seattle were eventually killed in airplanes. …
Indeed, come to think of it, three-quarters of all the pilots
I ever knew are dead.” As an engineer, he has no illusions
or superstitions about the risks he is undertaking: sometimes
the machine breaks and there's nothing that can be done about it.
But he distinguishes being startled with experiencing fear: “I
have been startled in an airplane many times. This, I may say, is
almost routine for the experimental test pilot. But I can honestly say
I have never experienced real fear in the air. The reason is that I
have never run out of things to do.”
Crossfield proceeded to fly almost all of the cutting-edge
aircraft at Edwards, including the rocket powered X-1 and
the Navy's
D-558-2
Skyrocket. By 1955, he had performed 99 flights under rocket
power, becoming the most experienced rocket pilot in the world
(there is no evidence the Soviet Union had any comparable
rocket powered research aircraft). Most of Crossfield's
flights were of the patient, data-taking kind in which the NACA
specialised, albeit with occasional drama when these finicky,
on-the-edge machines malfunctioned. But sometimes, even at staid
NACA, the blood would be up, and in 1953, NACA approved taking the
D-558-2 to Mach 2, setting a new world speed record. This was
more than 25% faster than the plane had been designed to fly,
and all the stops were pulled out for the attempt. The run
was planned for a cold day, when the speed of sound would be
lower at the planned altitude and cold-soaking the airframe
would allow loading slightly more fuel and oxidiser. The wings
and fuselage were waxed and polished to a high sheen to reduce air
friction. Every crack was covered by masking tape. The stainless
steel tubes used to jettison propellant in an emergency before
drop from the carrier aircraft were replaced by aluminium which
would burn away instants after the rocket engine was fired,
saving a little bit of weight. With all of these tweaks, on
November 20, 1953, at an altitude of 72,000 feet (22 km), the
Skyrocket punched through Mach 2, reaching a speed of Mach 2.005.
Crossfield was the Fastest Man on Earth.
By 1955, Crossfield concluded that the original glory
days of Edwards were coming to an end. The original rocket
planes had reached the limits of their performance, and the
next generation of research aircraft, the
X-15,
would be a project on an entirely different scale, involving
years of development before it was ready for its first flight.
Staying at NACA would, in all likelihood, mean a lengthy period
of routine work, with nothing as challenging as his last five
years pushing the frontiers of flight. He concluded that the
right place for an engineering test pilot, one with such
extensive experience in rocket flight, was on the engineering
team developing the next generation rocket plane, not
sitting around at Edwards waiting to see what they came
up with. He resigned from NACA and took a job as chief
engineering test pilot at North American Aviation, developer
of the X-15. He would provide a pilot's perspective
throughout the protracted gestation of the plane, including
cockpit layout, control systems, life support and pressure suit
design, simulator development, and riding herd on the
problem-plagued engine.
Ever wonder why the space suits used in the X-15 and by the
Project Mercury astronauts were silver coloured? They said it
was something about thermal management, but in fact when
Crossfield was visiting the manufacturer he saw a sample of
aluminised fabric and persuaded them the replace the original
khaki coverall outer layer with it because it “looked
like a real space suit.” And they did.
When the X-15 finally made its first flight in 1959, Crossfield
was at the controls. He would go on to make 14 X-15
flights before turning the ship over to Air Force and
NASA (the successor agency to the NACA) pilots. This book,
originally published in 1960, concludes before the record-breaking
period of the X-15, conducted after Crossfield's
involvement with it came to an end.
This is a personal account of a period in the history of
aviation in which records fell almost as fast as they were
set and rocket pilots went right to the edge and beyond,
feeling out the treacherous boundaries of the frontier.
A Kindle edition is available, at
this writing, for just US$0.99. The Kindle edition appears to
have been prepared by optical character recognition with
only a rudimentary and slapdash job of copy editing. There
are numerous errors including many involving the humble
apostrophe. But, hey, it's only a buck.
October 2019 