Always another dawn

Transcriber’s Note: Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

Always Another Dawn ►

Always Another Dawn

The Story Of A Rocket Test Pilot

_by A. Scott Crossfield with Clay Blair, Jr._

Cleveland And New York

[Illustration: (Colophon)]

The World Publishing Company

_Published by_ The World Publishing Company 2231 West 110th Street, Cleveland 2, Ohio

_Published simultaneously in Canada by_ Nelson, Foster & Scott Ltd.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 60-14641

First Edition

Wp1060

Copyright ©1960 by A. Scott Crossfield and Clay Blair, Jr. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher, except for brief passages included in a review appearing in a newspaper or magazine. Printed in the United States of America.

To Joseph, who knows why

_Contents_

(_Illustrations will be found following pages 134 and 294._)

Foreword 15

A Note On Speed 16

1. “A Modern-Day Lindbergh” 19

2. The Gypsy Caravan 25

3. A Sense of Urgency 38

4. Excitement and Frustration 45

5. An Unusual Heritage 53

6. An Isolated Environment 62

7. “Take Her Up and Try a Spin” 72

8. Change and Challenge 82

9. Manhood and Maturity 89

10. No Penalty for Being Late 99

11. How Dark the Clouds 109

12. A Short Man with Santa Claus Eyebrows 119

13. “Barefoot Boy with Cheek” 125

14. The Need for Speed 135

15. Disaster on the Race Track 145

16. Bright Light Under a Bush 154

17. Light in the Open 162

18. “Fastest Man on Earth” 171

19. “Leaf in a Tempest” 180

20. “Please Come to a Complete Stop” 190

21. End of the Line 200

22. End of an Era 209

23. Secrets in the Cafeteria 217

24. Ullage and Capsules 226

25. Girdles, Brassieres, and Shattered Sinuses 234

26. The Agricultural Approach 244

27. A Tornado Named Stormy 246

28. Wilting Straws in Plaster of Paris 253

29. Eyes Toward Space 262

30. Muting the Cassandras 271

31. Working in a Fish Bowl 280

32. Time for Extraordinary Action 289

33. Circus Day 297

34. A Carnival at Dawn 307

35. Smoke in the Cockpit 317

36. The Reluctant Dragon 327

37. Engulfed in Disappointment 338

38. “She Blew Sky High” 346

39. The Old Pro 359

40. Bad News with the Good 367

41. “You Have a Fire!” 376

42. Minor Miracles 388

43. “The Real Significance” 399

44. “Prophecies of the Next Age” 407

Chronology 411

Index 415

_Foreword_

Long ago at Edwards, I heard a story that stuck in my mind. Two small boys, the sons of pilots, were discussing their fathers. One said to the other: “Aw, your father _can’t_ be a test pilot. He hasn’t written a book.”

Now I have joined the clan, but, I hope, with a difference. Inevitably I have reminisced, as, it seems, all pilots must. But the intent of this book is broader than mere memoirs. Put simply, the objective is to restate an old principle: that not talk but action is the key to man’s progress, and in this age, freedom from enslavement.

A. Scott Crossfield

_Los Angeles, Calif.

August 1960_

_A Note on Speed_

We have used the modern method of expressing aviation speed--the Mach number. Mach 1.0 is the speed at which sound travels through the air. On an average day at sea level, the speed of sound, or Mach 1.0, is about 760 miles an hour. At higher, colder altitudes on the same day, it is less. For example, at 35,000 feet it might be only 660 miles an hour. Since most of the flying described in this account is at high altitude, Mach 1.0 is, on an average day, about 660 miles an hour. The speed is also expressed in terms of fractions of a Mach number. Thus Mach .5 is half of Mach 1 or half of 660 miles an hour--about 330 miles an hour. Speeds above Mach 1.0 are also expressed in whole Mach numbers and fractions of Mach numbers. For example, Mach 1.5 is the equivalent of one and a half times the speed of sound, or about 1,000 miles an hour. Mach 2.0--or twice the speed of sound--is twice 660 miles an hour, or about 1,320 miles an hour. Mach 2.5 is about 1,650 miles an hour. Mach 3 is about 2,000 miles an hour.

Always Another Dawn ►

“There is no liberty except the liberty of someone making his way towards something.”

--Antoine De Saint ExupéRy

Chapter 1 ►

“_A Modern-Day Lindbergh_”

A misty rain, typical of Seattle in the spring, fell across the lush green campus of the University of Washington that afternoon. It was 1947. I don’t recall the exact date because that whole period of my life remains fixed in my mind as a steady, uninterrupted blur of work and study. I do remember that as I drove through the narrow streets setting apart the ivy-smothered Tudor-Gothic buildings, I proceeded with caution. My car was a veteran of many campaigns in Seattle weather and traffic. It was barely hanging together.

When I pulled into my special parking place behind the University’s wind tunnel, I was quietly angry. I had just come from an advanced class in aeronautical engineering under Professor Frank K. Kirsten, a brilliant but crotchety old martinet. He had devoted the lecture to a discourse on the jet engine, which, he held, had no future because its fuel consumption was too great. I had challenged his assertions and argued forcibly, concluding, with some heat, that other experts in aviation had made such dogmatic statements, only to have them later completely disproved. “Take Monteith,” I had said (actually quoting Kirsten). “He predicted the cantilever wing would not be practicable. Yet almost every airplane flying today has a cantilever wing.” In the aviation world, as anywhere, I concluded, everything is subject to change. We must believe this.

I walked through the power room to a door marked: “Chief Wind Tunnel Operator,” stashed my textbook and notes in a desk drawer, and then scanned the bulletin board. Posted over the tunnel’s Schedule-of-Operations sheet was a photograph of a smashed-up automobile, with “Guess Who?” scrawled underneath. It was an earlier car I owned, a veteran of several brief but devastating engagements. It occurred to me then, for the first time, that both my problem cars had been painted green. I recalled an old race-track superstition against green cars. That was the trouble, I was sure. Overdriving my car and its brakes in Seattle streets couldn’t be the reason, of course.

The wind tunnel of the University of Washington was one of the first--and finest--modern wind tunnels built in the United States. Many major aircraft companies, such as Boeing and McDonnell, contracted work to the tunnel. The tunnel tests and analyses were carried out by students under faculty supervision. I had worked in the tunnel part-time since returning to the University in the spring of 1946. We were then engaged in tests on the Boeing B-47 bomber. Many years later the plane, bought in vast quantity, would become the backbone of the Strategic Air Command, and a direct descendant, the Boeing 707, would become the first U. S. commercial jet airliner. In 1947 the plane’s concept--sharply swept cantilever wings, six jet engines slung on pods beneath the wing--was controversial and exciting.

I joined a fellow student, Joe Tymczyszyn, near the tunnel control panel and greeted him above the noise, the great rushing of wind, and the steady humming of electric generators. Through a glass port mounted on the bottom of the big wind tube, I could see a silvery model of the B-47 rigidly fixed on a pylon. Sensitive force-measuring devices supporting the pylon below the chamber showed the effects of the blast on a row of meters on the control panel. Tym photographed the meter readings every few moments on a special recorder. The panel was marked “Secret” since Boeing and the Air Force considered the data classified.

I plopped into a chair and lighted a cigarette. Then Tym and I fell into avid conversation on the topic that bound us as friends and co-workers: aviation. Tym had a wide acquaintance in aviation. He always had some bit of gossip or vital news to impart.

“Did you hear about Slick Goodlin?” he began. “They say he’s reluctant to fly the X-1.” Slick was a Bell Aircraft test pilot. The X-1 was then the sensation of the aviation world--a tiny, bullet-shaped craft fitted with a rocket engine. It was built for research purposes, to provide high-speed flight data so that we, and others in aviation, could get information we then could not get from wind tunnels. In those days, when we pumped air through a tunnel close to the speed of sound, strange things happened. The air “choked” and the flow was distorted. As a result, most wind-tunnel data near the speed of sound were suspect at a time when they were vitally needed. The X-1 had sufficient power to fly faster than the speed of sound.

“He’s reluctant to fly it?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Tym said. “They say he wants a lot more money.”

Few could blame him. The rocket engine of the X-1, a complex device which burned a fuel combination almost as explosive as dynamite, had never been flown wide open. Engineers were split about fifty-fifty over what would happen structurally when the X-1 reached the speed of sound. Some said the plane would disintegrate; others, especially engineers at Bell, said it would not. In any case, it might be a risky flight. But the rewards, other than money, would be great.

“Hell,” I said. “The man who flies that plane through the sonic barrier will be a modern-day Lindbergh.” Tym nodded agreement and returned to his log.

For the rest of the afternoon I was busy putting together the data from the wind-tunnel meters. But my mind was fixed on the X-1 and I let my imagination soar. For a test pilot, the X-1 was the absolute ultimate. There was nothing like it in the past; it would be years before anything else surpassed it. I was still thinking about the plane when I got home that evening. Before dinner, when my wife, Alice, and I sat down for our usual martini, I was lost in thought.

“What’s eating you?” she asked. Alice is a native of Seattle. Like many people from that part of the country, typical of Norwegian descent, she is usually quiet and straight to the point. After four years of marriage she had come to terms with my obsession for aviation and rarely questioned either my progress or my mood. I didn’t encourage it.

“Oh, nothing,” I said.

I was mentally composing a letter I intended to write to Bell Aircraft proposing that I be named the new test pilot of the X-1. After dinner, while Alice was washing the dishes, I sat down to my battered portable typewriter and carefully pecked out the letter, stressing my qualifications:

Age: 26. Flying time: 2500 hours, single-engine, World War II Navy instructor and fighter pilot. Special flying: lead pilot, Seattle Naval Reserve stunt team (which could be matched against any stunt team in the country, I added). Education--prewar: three quarters, University of Washington, basic freshman engineering. Postwar: five semesters, aeronautical engineering (aimed at a Master’s degree). Practical experience: prewar, production expediter, Boeing plant, Seattle; postwar, partner in aircraft accessories firm (ash trays; serving tables); University of Washington wind tunnel. Temperament: reliable, family-man type; even disposition, cool in emergencies. Salary? I would fly the X-1 for nothing, if necessary.

It occurred to me, as I reflected over this letter, that anyone outside the aviation world would have viewed this brief summary of my life as the work of a single-minded zealot. This was not precisely so. My interests ranged wide enough--from philosophy to farming. Yet it was a fact that, since boyhood, almost every waking moment had been devoted, directly or indirectly, to the single purpose of scoring a mark in the aviation world. It was not a spectacular record I sought--a round-the-world flight, a speed dash, or a new altitude. Mine was a more serious bent. I wanted to follow in the footsteps of the aviation giants: Boeing’s Edward (“Eddie”) Allen and the Air Force’s James H. (“Jimmy”) Doolittle, and the like. They were both serious scientists and superb pilots, a rare combination and, in these days of specialization, a rapidly disappearing breed. More specifically, my goal was to participate in the design and construction of the most advanced craft man could conceive and then take it into the air and fly it.

This may strike many as a heady ambition for so young a man. It never seemed that way to me. On this earth, at least, I believe man is master of his own fate. Within his God-given physical and mental limitations, he can do what he wants to do. I believe the secret is to work intelligently, economically, and steadily toward a set goal. I must have been about six years old when I made up my mind what I wanted. Shortly after that, I was struck by a disease that kept me bed-ridden, off and on, for almost five years. As a result, I was told I would never fly. My mind shut out these predictions and stubbornly plotted the future. There are many hurdles along the way. I am scaling them, one way or another. Anyone with determination can do the same, I think.

That night when I drafted the letter to Bell I was still far from completing what I believed to be an adequate foundation. For one thing, my education, interrupted by the war, was considerably short of my design. Yet I must admit that at heart I am also a gambler. If I were lucky enough, I knew, the X-1 could catapult me directly toward the very position I sought. The advanced education could come later, with experience. Besides, who could resist the temptation to fly the X-1, if there was a chance?

Bell must have received many such letters from adventurous pilots. I imagine they were all passed on to the public relations department and from there to a handy waste-paper basket. I never received a reply. Unknown to me, and to others who may have written, the Air Force had already picked Goodlin’s replacement. Shortly after I mailed my application, I read in the papers that Air Force Captain Charles Yeager was assigned the job. In October, 1947, he flew the X-1 through the sonic barrier with ease--and overnight became the new Lindbergh of the aviation world.

I felt not the slightest tinge of envy over Yeager’s feat. On reflection I considered it just as well that my letter had not been answered. My time had obviously not come. Not for one minute, however, did I doubt that it would. I buckled down at the University, working doggedly toward my Master’s degree. I supplemented my meager G.I. stipend with the small returns from the aircraft accessories business and my work in the wind tunnel, where, in time, I was named student boss of operations. I kept my flying sharply honed in exercises with my Naval Reserve unit. So as not to tempt fate further on the streets, I painted my battered car bright blue with gratifying results.

Chapter 2 ►

_The Gypsy Caravan_

In the spring of 1950, a few months before Commencement, I began to lay final plans for my move into the aviation world. The way the deck was stacked, it did not appear a ripe time for aspiring aeronautical engineers. The Pentagon’s post-World War II economy drive had severely deflated the giant aviation industry. There were a few jets in production--Boeing’s B-47, North American’s F-86, Lockheed’s F-80, Republic’s F-84, McDonnell’s “Banshee”--and many others in the experimental test stage. Crack aeronautical engineers were, as usual, rare; but new graduates were a dime a dozen, breaking into the industry at less than $300 a month. Many able experimental test pilots were killing time in routine jobs. But as the cards were played out, my timing couldn’t have been better. No one could then foresee the outbreak of the Korean War. In a few months this war changed the atmosphere in the aviation industry one hundred and eighty degrees. This change provided me with my great opportunity.

That spring, as I reviewed the chances open to me, I concluded the best stepping stone was a Civil Service job with the government as an “aeronautical research pilot” for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). Unknown to the general public, NACA had for years been the vital cauldron in which new ideas in aeronautical engineering were brewed and sampled. The agency was founded in 1915 by President Wilson, after the U. S. had lagged considerably behind Europe in the exploitation of the airplane for civilian and military purposes. The members of the committee, then the grandees of the U. S. aviation world, were charged with keeping close tabs on all domestic and foreign aviation developments, and to serve as a kind of clearing house for U. S. engineers. The committee was supposed to encourage officially any U. S. aviation development which held promise.

As the airplane grew in importance and complexity, NACA grew in size. Langley Laboratory was founded at Hampton, Virginia, to test seaplane hulls, new propeller designs, and important air foils. It was soon equipped with wind tunnels and other tools of the aeronautical engineers. Much later, in 1940, NACA founded a second aeronautical research laboratory--Ames--at Moffett Field, near San Francisco. Shortly before World War II, a third laboratory, Lewis, was built in Cleveland, Ohio, to work on problems of propulsion. While some NACA engineers dealt with hardware, much new basic theory--some of it sound, some of it impractical--emanated from the ivy-covered, college-like atmosphere of its laboratories. This theory, combined with that from universities such as Washington, and considerably more theory generated by the highly competitive aviation industry, served to keep the U. S. abreast.

The X-1 rocket plane was, in a way, a product of NACA. During World War II, NACA was frantically busy “fixing” design shortcomings on production military airplanes. In 1944, when the country stood on the threshold of the jet age, NACA engineers came face-to-face with the problem of the suspect data provided by wind tunnels near the speed of sound. Seeking a substitute solution, the Air Force’s Ezra Kotcher and a few NACA engineers, including Hartley Soule and John Stack, together with Bell engineer Robert Woods, conceived the idea of building a full-scale rocket-powered research plane that could actually be _flown_ through the speed of sound to get the necessary data. It was a bold--indeed, daring--move for the conservative agency, and it paid handsome dividends in the long run.

During the course of modern aviation history, NACA has been alternately praised and damned. In 1935 the British _Journal of the Royal Aeronautical Society_ huffed: “It is notorious that many of our most capable design staffs prefer to base their technical work on the results of the NACA.” After World War II, when the complete picture of the astounding Nazi achievements in the field of aeronautics came to light, NACA was severely criticized for the U. S. lag. Much later it was blamed for permitting the U. S. to fall behind in the field of ballistic missiles. These shortcomings, I believe, were more the result of a national attitude than a specific research or policy failure on NACA’s part. By and large, considering its shoestring budget, NACA had performed ably. With only occasional exceptions, the U. S. aviation industry has held NACA in high regard. One reason is that the agency served as a training ground for many U. S. aeronautical engineers. For example, my childhood hero, Eddie Allen, was one of NACA’s first and best test pilots.

From my point of view in 1950, NACA seemed a likely starting point. I knew that NACA kept a small stable of test pilots at each of its three major laboratories. Most of them were engineers, too--able to translate a deficiency encountered in the air into precise engineering terminology. A close association with these men for a period would be valuable experience. Thus, without knowledge of a specific vacancy, I mailed off a general application form to the government.

There were no openings, the government replied. I wrote again and again without results. When graduation exercises were only a few weeks away, I felt I had to take some land of direct action. I decided to pay an unannounced visit to Laurence Clousing, NACA’s chief test pilot at Ames. Clousing, I knew, was one of the best in the business. If he did not know of a job, his advice alone would make my trip worth while.

I remember everything about that day. It was remarkable not only because it was a turning point in my life, but also because it was filled with coincidences, minor but eerie. The first of the latter happened the moment I walked into Clousing’s office--unexpectedly, so I thought.

“Hello, Crossfield,” Clousing said. He was a tall man with a deceptively shy manner. He seemed to me more like a college professor than a test pilot. He thrust a friendly hand toward me. “We’ve been waiting for you. Your wife called a few minutes ago.”

I was very surprised by his greeting. I had told Alice only that I was going to see a “guy named Clousing down near San Francisco.” That she had been able to track me down to his office at the big NACA facility amazed me. This feeling soon gave way to concern. I was sure Alice would not call unless there was urgent news.

“Is somebody ill?” I asked Clousing.

“No,” he said. “She wanted to pass along the word that you received a reply this morning to your civil service application. You’re invited to Edwards for an interview. We have no openings here at all.” The most surprising fact of all in this news was that Alice had opened the letter. Not in seven years of marriage had she so much as touched a letter addressed to me. Well, I thought, it’s lucky she did. I turned to Clousing.

“Edwards?” I asked. “Isn’t that Air Force?” At that time I knew only that Edwards was a desert test center for experimental airplanes in Southern California. It was at Edwards that Chuck Yeager had flown the X-1 through the sonic barrier. Industry test pilots from the Los Angeles area used the base for first flights of new planes.

“NACA has a small experimental test group at Edwards,” Clousing said. “Two or three pilots and a few engineers and mechanics. They came out with the X-1 back in ’46. They’re doing some work there with other planes. It was supposed to be a temporary group but they’ve made it a permanent station now. Walt Williams runs the unit. The chief test pilot is John Griffith. Do you want to go down and see them?”

I wasn’t too keen on Edwards. Clousing’s brief comments brought to mind a picture of a gypsy caravan from NACA camping in tents on the edge of the Air Force base. What a contrast to the scholarly atmosphere of the massive Ames installation! To me Ames was a known quantity but Edwards a big question. But Clousing had made it clear he was not hiring. Edwards, at least, was a foot in the door. I thought it might be worth a gamble.

When I said yes, Clousing put through a call to Walt Williams to arrange a rendezvous. Soon I was on a train, chuffing slowly over the coastal mountains toward the great, desolate Mojave Desert.

Today Edwards, like the rest of Southern California, has grown to spectacular proportions. It is a well-organized military base, manned by some 10,000 men, with a neat base-housing area, cross-hatched by streets named for pilots who have died in the course of duty at Edwards. It has a Base Exchange, an Officers’ Club, gigantic hangars, and all the rest. But on that day when I saw it for the first time, it was little more than a runway scratched out of the desert. The handful of pilots lived in “tarpaper” shacks and drank whiskey in a roadhouse run by an aging but colorful aviatrix named Pancho Barnes.

John Griffith met my train in Mojave, a frontier town not far from Death Valley, once a stopping-off place for the famous twenty-mule teams which labored across the desert hauling borax. The brown wastes of the desert were harsh to my eyes, which had looked for so long on the green of the Northwest. I was not sure Alice would like it. Even in May the heat was stifling.

Griffith, a stocky, powerfully built man about thirty-one years old, was appropriately dressed for the climate--slacks, sport shirt, dark glasses. I felt out of place in my blue serge suit, but John quickly put me at ease with his friendly smile and easy manner. We climbed into his car and drove along an arrow-straight, black-top road toward the base. It was hard to believe that this primeval environment was the center of aviation’s most advanced flying.

On the way to the field I learned a little of the history of the NACA pilots at Edwards. The original group had consisted of Herbert Hoover, and Howard Lilly, both fine pilots. Lilly was killed when an experimental plane blew up on take-off. Hoover was killed later, when a B-45 jet exploded in the air; his co-pilot, John Harper, escaped. He subsequently went to work for Lear, Inc. To replace them, Griffith came from Lewis Lab and Bob Champine from the Langley Lab to be number two man. An able, sharp-eyed pilot, but not a very experienced one, Champine soon developed a distaste for experimental flight tests. He transferred back to Langley, leaving the opening for which I was to be interviewed. Griffith was the sole pilot, a World War II veteran. He flew for the Air Force in the Solomons and later joined NACA. Superior to him was Joe Vensel, chief of Flight Operations, then came Walt Williams, chief of the station.

The NACA High Speed Flight Test Station occupied one of two small hangars in the sand bordering the runway. As we drew close, I saw there was just one building, a combination hangar and office. I was soon to learn that the NACA operation was, as I had envisioned it, completely parasitic. It leaned on the Air Force for water, communications, fuel, fire protection--everything but salaries, pilots, and engineers. But the primitive façade was deceptive. Inside there was a highly contagious, pioneering spirit. The NACA group at Edwards was ready to perform big deeds; even more spectacular plans were in the works.

The principal reason for this spirit, I soon found, was the boss, Walt Williams, a thirty-one-year-old engineer from New Orleans. A cocky, hard-working operator, Williams had cut his teeth in NACA’s Langley Laboratory during the war. In 1946 he had come to Edwards with twelve men under his command, to supervise the research phase of the X-1 program. The plan then was that when Bell had finished the initial flight tests of the plane, Williams and his group would move in. They would fit the ship with instruments and begin recording scientific data on each flight. This scheme had been unavoidably delayed when Goodlin bowed out.

After Chuck Yeager flew the plane through the sound barrier, other Air Force pilots moved in to take the controls and set new records. One of these was Major Frank K. (“Pete”) Everest, who zoomed to an altitude of 73,000 feet. Others followed: Captain Jack Ridley and Colonel Albert Boyd, who was then commander of the Edwards outpost, and the epitome of a service test pilot. Herbert Hoover of NACA flew the X-1 and became the first civilian to penetrate the sound barrier.

There were actually _three_ X-1s, I discovered. The first, Yeager’s plane, which he nicknamed _Glamorous Glennis_ after his beautiful wife, had been shipped off to the Smithsonian Institution. The second X-1 had been turned over to NACA. The third X-1 was still at the Bell plant in Buffalo, New York, being fitted with a new low-pressure fuel system which would enable it to go higher and faster. But many, many months would pass before X-1 number three was ready for flight. It held a grim surprise.

I talked first with Joe Vensel, chief of Flight Operations. He was a man cautious in decision but quick in physical movement. He bore the scars of a rough life of flying: shattered sinuses. At 40, he wore a hearing aid. Vensel had little to say or to ask.

Griffith then took me directly to Williams’ office, a make-shift area in one end of the hangar. Williams met me with a firm and enthusiastic handshake. He bounced around the room impatiently, pausing frequently to run his hand through his crew-cut brown hair, or to doodle violently on a scratch pad. It was immediately clear that Williams was a man of action. I liked him on first sight. He and Griffith probed my background.

“How is it you have so much single-engine time?” Griffith asked.

“I like to fly,” I said. “I got my private license before the war. During the war I was an instructor at Corpus Christi, Texas. We were very busy. Lot of students. Lot of hours. I took extra students when I could. After the war I was active in the Naval Reserve.”

“What about this stunt team?” Williams asked.

And so it went. As the interview progressed, I learned there were two other pilots being considered for the opening, each with about half my flying experience. This competition, unsuspected until then, sharpened my senses. I talked earnestly about my desire to make a serious contribution to aeronautical science. Before the session drew to a close, Williams made it clear that the job was mine--if I wanted it. I didn’t want to appear overly eager. I parried for a while, seeking answers to a few questions of my own.

“What kind of flying would I be doing here?” I asked. “It looks to me as though Chuck Yeager and Pete Everest and the other Air Force pilots have a corner on the market.” It was a deliberate needle and it obviously touched Williams on a sore spot. He responded with a spiel which sounded as though it had been drafted for a Congressional committee.

“The research airplane was conceived at NACA’s Langley Laboratory. The funds are provided principally by the Air Force and the Navy. NACA has technical jurisdiction over the flight programs, which are designed to provide maximum data within a given time. Under the new concept, civilian test pilots of the companies concerned in the design and construction of the research airplanes make initial test flights, verifying established design and structural points, engine reliability, and so on. The Air Force pilots then take over and fly them with an eye to military application, under NACA cognizance. After that, so the plan goes, the ships are turned over to us here at NACA for detailed flight research. The ... ah ... the Air Force has been somewhat slow in turning over the planes, that’s true, but we have encountered one unpredicted technical problem after the other ...”

“I suppose--” I broke in. But Williams had not finished. He lunged out of his chair and paced back and forth, warming to his subject.

“We are blazing new trails in aeronautical science out here. The data we are producing are fed directly into the aviation industry through NACA reports available to all. Industry engineers are applying the data to concepts for the next generation of jet fighters--a family of supersonic fighters. We’re testing everything here: straight wing, swept wing, tailless jobs. We’re running into all kinds of phenomena. Some of them have been predicted in theory and tunnel test; some are brand-new.”

“What planes are you working with now?” I asked.

“We’ve got an X-1 out there in the hangar now, and the X-4. Hell, come on out and I’ll show you.”

Williams boomed out of the office into the hangar space. I followed, looking in detail for the first time at the collection of weird and fascinating planes. The hangar was busy. Mechanics swarmed over the little hot-rods, removing plates, pulling long snarls of wire from their insides, shoving calibration carts here and there. The whine of a pneumatic drill, accompanied by the staccato of a rivet gun, echoed through the high-beamed, arched ceiling. The scene reminded me of the feverishly busy pits at the Indianapolis race track a few hours before the 500-mile Speedway race on Memorial Day. The analogy is not far-fetched. These planes were nearly comparable to temperamental, overpowered, dangerous, finely-tuned racing cars. Edwards, in reality, was an Indianapolis of the air.

A few of the planes, such as the X-1, were familiar to me; others were new. We stopped alongside the X-4, a tailless plane powered by two jet engines. It had just been turned over to NACA by the Air Force, Williams said, patting the side of the ship. It was a metallic white, like an icebox.

“She was supposed to go Mach 1,” he said. “But she can’t make it. It’s a little tricky to fly. The engines flame out at altitude. She pitches a bit at Mach .9. British lost a couple of DeHavilland Swallows of similar design. Mystery why they crashed. Maybe we can find out with this baby.” Williams rattled on in this fashion as we moved about the hangar. We came to another beautiful ship which looked somewhat like the X-1.

“This is the Douglas Skystreak, the D-558-I,” Williams said. “It’s a Navy project.”

“Oh, yes,” I said. This was the model that killed Lilly. I recalled a few of the details of the program. “Gene May also flew that one, didn’t he?” May was a Douglas test pilot.

“That’s right,” Williams said. “We have two of these left. This one is just like the X-1 only it has a jet instead of a rocket engine. We had another D-558 version here, swept wing with a jet using JATO for take-off, called the Skyrocket. Then there also is another swept-wing version with a jet engine and a rocket engine. It’s back at the Douglas plant now being modified to an all-rocket version. We’ll air-launch it from a mother plane like we do the X-1.”

_All-rocket, air-launch, swept-wing._ I turned these phrases over briefly in my mind, little realizing then the impact this airplane would have on my future.

“What do you expect from that?” I asked.

“Well, the figures are classified, frankly. But in round numbers and stretching, we think she might reach Mach 2, and maybe 90,000 or 100,000 feet,” Williams said. He spoke in a low, confidential tone.

“Who is the pilot going to be?” I asked. “Gene May?”

“No.” Williams said. “Douglas has a new pilot, an ex-Navy type named Bill Bridgeman.”

“The Air Force doesn’t get this one?”

“No. This is a Navy project. They do it differently. They’d just as soon have the manufacturer establish the limits of the airplane. Good, sharp outfit to do business with. They don’t mind racking up a few records, but it is not their first order of business.”

The way Williams spoke of “records,” he conveyed clearly the impression that at NACA records per se were unimportant, if not frowned upon. We wandered back to his office and sat down.

“Now,” he said, “there are about four other types in the works. Bell’s got a souped-up version of the X-1 coming out which will easily exceed Mach 2, or better. They also have a swept-wing rocket plane, the X-2, which is designed for nearly Mach 3 and about 150,000 feet. Then there’s the X-3, a straight-wing job by Douglas. It is way behind schedule and very complicated. It might turn out to be a dud. Then we’ll have the Bell X-5, a jet-powered ship with an inflight variable-sweep capability.”

My head was swimming with figures and visions of these fantastic airplanes. My top speed in an airplane then was maybe five hundred miles an hour, clocked in a dive in a Corsair. Williams talked of 1500 and 2000 miles an hour as if those speeds were routine. I was sold.

“I would have a shot at those airplanes?” I asked.

“If everything works out,” Williams said.

“The X-2 as well?”

“If everything works out,” Williams repeated.

“When do I start?”

“We’ll let you know,” Williams said. He glanced at his watch. “You going back into Mojave to catch a train? Why don’t you hitch a ride with Drake and Carmen?”

Hubert M. Drake and L. Robert Carmen together made up the “advance design” group at NACA’s Edwards installation. They were the “dreamers,” paid to look far into the future and scheme new ways to fly higher and faster. I didn’t know it then--and they didn’t discuss it--but Drake and Carmen were doing work at night in their homes on an airplane to put the best of dreamers to shame. It was a rocket-powered craft that would fly four thousand miles an hour and to an altitude of 500,000 feet. Five years later, after a tortuous journey through a jungle of bureaucracy, and endless modification, this craft became the X-15. Looking back now, I regard the fact that these two men were picked to give me a lift to Mojave as something of a coincidence.

Of pressing concern to me at that moment was the fact that I was almost flat broke. I had hitch-hiked down to the Ames Laboratory on a Navy airplane and had intended to return to Seattle that same day by the same means. The plane had long since returned; I was stranded in the desert without nearly enough cash for a train ticket to Seattle. There was no money in my checking account. However, by the time I climbed out of Drake’s car at the bleak, dusty Mojave railroad station and bid my hosts farewell, I had a plan.

I checked with the station master. There was a north-bound train scheduled to pass through Mojave at midnight. The daycoach fare to Seattle, via San Francisco, was about $20, and this was about $10 more than I had.

“What’s the next stop beyond Mojave?” I asked.

“Martinez,” the station master said. He eyed me curiously.

“Okay,” I said, “give me a ticket to Martinez.” It was about $7.00.

I then placed a telephone call, collect, to my sister, Elena Ruth (“Babe”) Brown, who lived in Sierra Madre, just outside Los Angeles. When she answered, considerably surprised to hear from me, I told her I was taking the midnight train to Martinez and asked her to wire me $25 in care of the station master there. I had not often borrowed money in my life, but I didn’t mind asking her. Many years before, when she was a student at Berkeley, I had hocked my camera in order to lend her $40 for flying lessons, for which my father refused to pay.

After Babe assured me the money would be sent immediately, I hung up and retired to a corner to count my remaining fortune. I spent another dollar at the Silver Dollar Cafe for dinner, then blew the rest on a ticket to the local movie. By still another coincidence, the picture was about a test pilot and Humphrey Bogart was the star. I plumped into a seat and watched while he wrestled with a rattling control stick, braving the frontiers of flight.

Hours later I was still deeply absorbed, not in that turkey of a movie but in what I had seen and heard that day, when I felt a hand on my shoulder. A voice spoke:

“Are you Mr. Crossfield?”

Startled, I broke out of my supersonic reverie and spun around. It was the theater usher.

“Yeah. I’m Crossfield.”

“There’s a gentleman out front to see you.”

I followed the usher up the aisle wondering who it could be. No one on earth knows where I am, I thought.

To my astonishment, I found Babe’s husband, Claude, and behind him, my mother, Lucia, waiting in the lobby. My mother had been visiting my sister when I called. After I hung up she talked my brother-in-law into making the three-hour drive to Mojave to surprise me.

“But how did you know I was in there?” I asked.

“Well, I cased every bar in town first, while your mother waited in the car. I didn’t see you in any of them so I figured in a town of this size the only place left was the movie.”

We laughed and made our way to a nearby restaurant. At midnight, $25 richer, I boarded a daycoach on the train.

Back in Seattle, I collected my Master’s degree in aeronautical engineering, resigned from my Naval Reserve unit, packed up the family--Alice, Becky, age two, and our new addition, Tommy--traded my 1941 Ford for a ’49 Ford, and drove to the desert to begin a new life.

Three weeks later many of my Naval Reserve comrades were mobilized and shipped off to Korea.

Chapter 3 ►

_A Sense of Urgency_

A harsh, bitterly cold December wind, gathering momentum over miles of flat desert, lashed the ramp behind the NACA hangar. I buttoned my jacket close and bowed my head as I pushed against it toward the airplane. Here and there I saw that the small puddles were frozen to solid ice. The desert warms up during the day, but on a winter night it is like the North Pole. Sometimes it snows at Edwards.

I climbed into the cockpit and pulled on my crash helmet, grateful to be shielded at last from the frigid blast. Ralph Sparks, who, on that blue-cold morning, looked as though he was born before the Wright brothers, closed the canopy and removed the aluminum boarding ladder. I smiled and waved my hand sharply. Sparks claimed personal authorship of most of aviation’s achievements, but there were few mechanics at NACA, or anywhere for that matter, more able than he. He stood by while I wound up the engines. They caught, and I taxied out for my first X-4 flight, the first of a series of hurried checkouts in NACA’s stable of thoroughbreds.

My first six months at Edwards had been a tumultuous time of hurry and change. Walt Williams, as a matter of routine, kept a fast pace. When the Korean War broke out, our outfit, like all of the aviation world, worked with a new sense of urgency. At the climax of the dramatic shift, NACA’s top pilot, John Griffith, resigned to take a job at Chance-Vought. In the new climate of the industry, journeyman test pilots were desperately needed. I checked out in a couple of jets, the F-84 and the Douglas Skystreak. Then, in the final days before Griffith’s departure, I gathered what information I could about the foibles of our temperamental champions. Suddenly, then, I was completely on my own. The entire NACA Edwards test program was dumped in my lap.

Actually, I couldn’t have been more pleased. Looking back, I believe now that the months that followed were, professionally speaking, the happiest days of my life. I was then too new and too young to concern my mind seriously with government and industry politics. My approach to the job was completely starry-eyed. I could move at my own pace, always fast. I flew morning, noon, and afternoon in the strangest and most unpredictable airplanes man had ever devised. These flights were never long. Experimental airplanes are like powerful rockets. They blaze furiously for a few moments, during which the pilots strive to probe an unknown area, and then they sputter and die. The one big difference between the manned plane and the missile is that the pilot brings the multi-million-dollar plane back to earth for another flight. Usually.

Before my flight in the X-4 that morning, Walt Williams and Joe Vensel clucked around the hangar like two old maids grooming their niece for a grand debut. I had read all the flight reports on the X-4 and had picked Griffith’s brain thoroughly. I knew the weak points of the airplane: its two engines were erratic above 30,000 feet; at Mach .88 the plane became unstable; it broke into a steady porpoising motion, like an automobile cushioning over a washboard road. Beyond that, nearer the speed of sound, no one knew what would happen. The X-4 had never been flown there. Williams and Vensel added a fact I knew quite well: the plane was equipped with barn-door-sized speed brakes. If popped in flight they would slow the X-4 abruptly and allow her to withdraw from any zone of trouble.

The X-4, by then, was a veteran of Edwards. The plane was conceived in the postwar years by Jack Northrop, an imaginative inventor and an unyielding advocate of the “tailless” concept. The X-4 was first flown by Northrop’s renowned test pilot, Charlie Tucker, in 1949. After considerable modification, it had been turned over to the Air Force. Chuck Yeager, Pete Everest, Colonel Richard Johnson, and Al Boyd flew it. Thirty flights later, NACA inherited the plane and its mechanic, Ralph Sparks, who had been with the project from the outset.

I pushed the twin throttles forward and as the fuel surged into the burning chambers, the X-4 leaped toward the runway. In the distance I could see a plane leaving Air Force Fighter Ops, headquarters for the military test-pilot group. Pete Everest was the pilot of the Air Force craft, an early-model F-86. He would join me to fly “chase,” observing the performance of the X-4 and watching for danger signals from close quarters.

Officially, no rivalry existed between the pilots of the Air Force and the NACA group. As Williams had said, the two jobs were poles apart. Once contractor pilots, such as Tucker, had demonstrated that the plane could fly, the Air Force flew it to evaluate military applications. Then NACA pilots put the plane through an exhaustive aerodynamic dissection, learning every new fact possible.

In fact, there was a natural rivalry between the test pilots. Each day at Edwards, the pilots played out a kind of small-scale Olympic Games of the air. Occasionally these were major battles to break records, staged by rival Navy and Air Force. More often, they were small but significant demonstrations of a new flying technique or a daring maneuver into the unknown, a step beyond the previous pilot of the airplane. For example, some of the planes had vicious weaknesses. If, on a given flight, the pilot was able to skirt these, he had achieved a minor triumph, worth a toast at Pancho’s. Edwards was not the place to attract non-competitive pilots.

Some of the reason for the keen rivalry lay in the Air Force’s approach to flight test. Along with its triumphs in the X-1, the Air Force, first at Wright Field, later at Edwards, had set out to create a cadre of schooled engineering test pilots on a par with the best in NACA and industry. For example, Yeager was not an educated engineer. He was an intuitive engineer, one of the best. He could feel in an instant a deficiency in an airplane and come close to pin-pointing its fault technically. A rare pilot, born to fly, like a figure-skater born to skate, Yeager set standards of conduct in the air that were emulated for years afterward at Edwards. The pilots adopted even his understated West Virginia drawl, and ever afterward the radio talk at Edwards reflected this. The pilots at Edwards--to judge by the radio talk--were raised on hominy grits and corn fritters.

But Yeagers are rare. Later the Air Force sent vast numbers of its pilots back to college to study aeronautical engineering and, still later, founded a full-blown test-pilot school at Edwards, which in recent years has graduated a fine group of young, educated test pilots. But before this ambitious, challenging program, many Air Force pilots, resisting the engineering approach, died needlessly. We gave them little reverence: “Hell, he was dead before he took off.”

I was not a member of the “inner circle” that morning in early December. I had met Yeager, Everest, Jack Ridley, Boyd, and the rest, but I had yet to prove my ability in the air. I knew that the moment Everest locked wingtips, he would be watching every move. He had flown the X-4. He would know when I goofed, and the word would soon get back to the others. Conceivably, some leeway might be allowed for the first flight, but it was not likely. Yeager gave little quarter in the air. On his first flight in the X-1, he says, he had been tempted to roll the ship in front of the Edwards tower, scant feet above the ground.

When I received radio permission to take off, I firewalled the throttles. As the X-4 wobbled down the long, bumpy runway, I gingerly felt out the controls. Then the churning jets took hold, and the small X-4 abruptly lunged into the air. Backing off the stall point, I nosed her over gently and leveled out. Then I eased back on the stick and the tiny, tailless craft zoomed skyward like a winged rocket. Behind me, Everest had opened his F-86 wide, trailing a long, black snake of soot, but he could not keep up. I waited for him at altitude, rolling and stalling the plane, getting to know its special strengths and weaknesses. When Everest locked wingtips, I opened the throttle wide, once again leaving him far behind. As predicted, at Mach .88 the X-4 broke into its gentle but potentially dangerous porpoising motion. I opened the air brakes, and the X-4 slowed instantly, throwing me forward against my shoulder restraint straps. Everest hurtled by, chortling on the radio.

The Edwards base now lay far below us, nearly obscured in the vast wilderness of the Mojave wastes. Here and there on the desert floor I could make out the mottled outlines of the curiously shaped “dry lakes.” These “lakes” are stretches of fine, closely packed silt, left behind eons ago by the retreating seas and bleached almost white by the hot desert sun. The soil of the lakes is quite unusual. When mixed with water, it becomes slimy like oil. Industrialists mined the soil as a lubricant for well drills. When the lakes are completely dry, the surface is hard and flat, like concrete, and thus ideal natural landing areas for airplanes.

When it rains in the desert, the lake beds are temporarily put out of commission. The water, unable to penetrate the fine, self-sealing surface soil, collects on top in small pools, or sometimes, after a hard rain, in vast, shallow, real-life lakes. This water is swept back and forth by the brisk desert winds until it evaporates. The gentle movement of the water smooths the surface of the lake beds, eliminating bumps and ruts. During this “re-paving” process, the surface becomes mushy and slick, dangerous for a heavy airplane. There is sometimes a little rain in July which temporarily closes the lakes. But the hard rainy season usually begins in mid-December. Frequently, but not always, the intermittent rains keep the lake beds either flooded or soft until March or April. No one can predict the capricious desert weather.

The Edwards base was set directly alongside one of these lakes--Rogers Dry Lake--which in earlier times, appropriately enough, had, like the great salt flats of Utah, been an automobile race track. During the rainy season, at times, I have seen the water on the lake so deep that it was lapping at the edge of the parking ramps, and so penetrating that shrimp eggs of some prehistoric age worked loose from the soil and came to life, mysteriously attracting sea gulls from the distant California coast. To maintain year-round operations, the Air Force had built a normal concrete runway at the base, butting against the dry lake. In the dry season, if required, the lake bed, marked by parallel black lines, could be used as an extension of the concrete runway. For the rocket planes, which required long take-off and landing areas, another runway, lying in the opposite direction and seven miles long, had been painted on the lake bed. Still other nearby lakes--Rosamond, Harper, Three Sisters, Cuddeback--were designated emergency landing areas. When flying experimental planes at Edwards, the pilots always kept within easy reach of one of the dry lakes.

After about fifteen minutes in the air, I felt at home in the X-4. The plane responded so well, in fact, that it was hard for me to keep in mind that I was piloting a marginally stable, experimental race horse. Had all that talk of danger been the product of some public relations mill? I was beginning to feel my oats now, and a determination that hardly struck me as daring at the time seized me. I would loop the X-4.

Heading back toward Edwards, the check-out virtually complete, flying wing to wing with Everest, without warning I pulled back hard on the stick. The X-4 climbed rapidly, leaving Everest far below. The desert disappeared from my windshield, replaced by the deep blue of the clear sky. In a few seconds the X-4 was flat on its back at 27,000 feet. Suddenly all hell broke loose. A noise like the sound of a fifty-caliber machine-gun exploded through the cockpit.

My maneuver had disrupted the smooth flow of air into the two engine intakes. Starved for air, and sensitive anyway at my altitude, the engines had rebelled, and after a flash of uneven running they gave up completely. I righted the plane and sheepishly called Pete Everest on the radio.

“Lost both engines.”

“Rog,” he said. Then I heard him calling Edwards Tower to report an emergency. I could visualize the reaction there: sirens screeching, fire trucks racing out to the runway, NACA’s Walt Williams and Joe Vensel perched on the edge of their chairs. Now working desperately to restart the engines in the air, and mentally locating the position of the emergency dry lakes, I silently cursed my boldness. I could imagine the talk that night: “That new fellow, Crossfield, down at NACA. Pretty green....”

I managed at last to win half the battle. One engine coughed to life. If it kept running (a big if, indeed, at that point), I would have sufficient power, at least, to reach the Edwards base runway. Without the engines the X-4 would come in with a low lift over drag (L over D)--in other words, it would glide like a brick, but I would be spared the ignominy of landing on a lake remote from the base. Vensel was taking no chances. By radio he ordered me to land on the lake.

As we lined up for the approach, I could see the emergency trucks parked along the edge of the lake; quite embarrassing. The X-4, already sluggish, began to settle toward earth. As we descended, I was further chagrined when Everest began to call altitude readings, interspersed with occasional helpful hints on how to fly a plane. He was ribbing and I had it coming, so when, finally, the X-4’s tires screeched on the lake, I switched off the radio receiver.

Joe Vensel was waiting anxiously on the NACA ramp when I rolled to a stop in front of the hangar. I climbed down the ladder.

“Well,” Vensel said, “what happened?”

“I looped it and lost both engines,” I said. “Got an air start on one and stop-cocked the other.”

“Damn,” Vensel muttered. He stalked back to his office.

Chapter 4 ►

_Excitement and Frustration_

“You might as well try a rocket flight,” Joe Vensel said.

We were sitting in his office, which faced the NACA hangar workshop. His tone lacked enthusiasm. His whole attention seemed focused on the pencil he was twirling between his fingers.

It was the day after Christmas, twenty days since my first X-4 flight. The Chinese Communists had entered the Korean War, splitting and decimating our armies on the peninsula. The President had declared a state of national emergency. In the Pentagon the economizing Secretary of Defense, Louis Johnson, had been replaced by General George Marshall. The aviation industry, now overwhelmed with money, was gearing for a future freighted with uncertainty, perhaps a global war with the Soviet Union. Its engineers desperately needed data. Wind-tunnel results from scale models of the newly designed, supersonic, Century Series jet fighters--the F-100, the F-101, F-102, and F-104--had foreshadowed critical instability at high speed. Every man at NACA was anxious to press ahead.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll tell them to get 945 ready.”

The number 945 was our mundane designation for the Douglas D-558-II Skyrocket, a research airplane with an impressive background and a sensational future.

It requires much time and planning to prepare a rocket plane for a test flight. This was especially true in those pioneering days. Rocket engines are complicated and temperamental, something like the engines of expensive high-speed racing cars. They burn a powerful, dangerous fuel combination of liquid oxygen (Lox) and water-alcohol, and sometimes even more exotic fuels, which eat into the pipes and fittings, corroding or unsealing joints. The fuel is pumped into the engine through a complex maze of plumbing, which forever leaks and loses pressure. The liquid oxygen is very cold, approaching minus 300 degrees Fahrenheit. This intense cold forms a coating of ice on the outside of the tanks and the plane, and permeates everything, sometimes freezing systems not designed for extreme temperatures. The preparation of a rocket engine for flight was always an adventure for our mechanics.

I made my way into the hangar to pass on the word to Eddy Layne, our crew chief on 945.

“How about it, Eddy?” I said. “Can we fly tomorrow?” The skin of 945 lay about the hangar floor. The bare skeleton was under siege by half a dozen mechanics, who appeared to be devouring the plane like so many piranha fishes. It hardly seemed possible that it could all be reassembled in one day.

“Sure thing, Scotty,” Eddy said. “Got a leaky regulator in the fuel tank, but we’ll get it squared away in a while. Go ahead and plan on it. Is this a speed run?”

“No, just a check-flight,” I said.

“I think Bridgeman and the Douglas people will be flying 943 in the morning. You might want to touch base with them.”

“Right,” I said. It was obvious that I had not yet scored among the mechanics. What Eddy meant was that I had better check with Bridgeman and find out how to fly the 945. I had already done that.

I remained in the hangar for some time, looking over the ship and recalling the plane’s history.

In late 1944, when the Air Force and NACA launched the X-1, the Navy, as part of the overall research airplane program, began a separate project of its own, referred to as the D-558. (In the Navy’s hopelessly confusing aircraft terminology, the “D” stands for Douglas, the manufacturer.) The D-558 “Skystreak” was similar to the X-1 in shape; the main difference was that the plane was powered by a jet instead of a rocket engine. The X-1, which was intended to be launched in the air from a mother plane, would fly fast in brief bursts. The D-558, which was designed to take off conventionally from a runway, was slower, but it could stay aloft longer. Between the two designs, it was thought, the aerodynamics in the trouble area at, or just below, the speed of sound could be thoroughly blanketed.

Three of the original jet-powered D-558 Skystreaks were built. In August, 1947, a couple of months before Yeager flew the X-1 through the sound barrier, Navy Commander Turner Caldwell, flying the first D-558, set a speed record of 640.7 miles an hour. Five days later Marine Major Marion Carl pushed the same plane to 650.6 miles an hour, a speed considered sensational at that time. In May, 1948, the “time bomb” engine in one D-558 blew up on take-off, killing NACA test pilot Howard Lilly. The second airplane became a Hangar Queen and was cannibalized for parts. The third Skystreak was still at NACA gathering data. I had flown it before my first hop in the X-4.

From the outset the D-558 program grew into a second generation of airplanes. To distinguish these from the earlier models, we called the later ones “Phase Two” airplanes, which was short for D-558-II. The plane was popularly called the “Skyrocket.” Three Phase Two airplanes were built, all with the new swept wing. In 1946 there was then much controversy, but little swept-wing flight data except those which we had obtained from the Nazis. In each of the Phase Two airplanes, the power-plant or launch scheme was deliberately varied to cover a wide range of research possibilities. The first Phase Two model was, like the 558-I, powered by a single jet engine. Designed to take off conventionally, it was fitted with two small jettisonable rocket bottles (JATO) to help boost it into the sky. The second model, also intended for conventional ground take-off, was powered by a jet engine _and_ a rocket engine, similar to the rocket engine in the X-1. The third model (945), built to be dropped from a mother plane like the X-1, was also equipped with a jet and rocket-engine combination. Its maximum speed was about Mach 1.2, somewhat slower than the X-1’s top of Mach 1.4.

Douglas test pilots John Martin and Gene May first flew these tricky Phase Two’s, taking off from the ground, burning the rocket barrel, the jet engine, or both at once. The adventures they logged would make a book in themselves. Ex-Navy pilot Bill Bridgeman of Douglas was later recruited to make the Phase Two air-launched demonstrations. By the time I arrived at NACA, the Phase Two Skyrocket was a familiar sight on the Edwards runway, and Bill Bridgeman was on his way to the Hall of Fame.

Bridgeman flew the jet-rocket ground take-off version of the plane fairly regularly at Edwards. The jet-only JATO-boosted version never really panned out. The Navy ordered it shipped back to the factory for changeover to an all-rocket version, designed for an air-launch (causing even more model confusion). It was this plane that Walt Williams, in our first interview, hinted might reach Mach 2 and 100,000 feet. NACA--I, to be specific--would get a crack at it after Bridgeman had worked out the bugs. The third Phase Two airplane, the air-launched jet-rocket combination, had been delivered to NACA in the fall of 1950, after Bridgeman had made three test air-launches. No NACA pilot had yet flown this model. This was ship number 945, my next challenge. In the long run it turned out to be a very useful and worthy research airplane in the trans-sonic zone, a work horse as well as a race horse.

On the following day, when I reported to the flight line, lugging my parachute and crash helmet, the ground crews were ready. The Skyrocket had already been “mated”--snugged up like a bomb in its special nesting place in the belly of the B-29 mother plane. The Skyrocket’s fuel tanks, for both the jet and the rocket engine, were brimming. The B-29 mother-plane pilot was George Jansen, a top man for Douglas, and experienced in air-launch. Douglas intended to keep the mother plane until Bridgeman had checked out the all-rocket version of the Skyrocket.

I spotted the tanned bald dome of Bill Bridgeman towering above the knot of men clustered near the boarding ladder of the B-29. He was dressed in a flying suit. A crash helmet dangled loosely from his right hand. I walked over.

“You going along, Bill?”

“Yeah. Might be able to help out a little,” he said with that wonderful friendliness that was his hallmark.

“Fine. Fine.”

We climbed aboard and made our way back to the bomb-bay compartment, into which the top of the Skyrocket fuselage protruded. The Skyrocket cockpit canopy was erect. A maze of wires and tubes--the umbilical cords--was plugged into the back of the Skyrocket, supplying power from the B-29 en route to the launch point. At the proper time I had only to climb into the cockpit, close the hatch, and fall away.

Jansen lost no time. Through my earphones in the bomb-bay compartment, I heard him contact Edwards tower, and the two chase pilots, Fitzhugh Fulton and John Konrad, both Air Force types. In the following years, Fulton became something of a legend at Edwards. I think he must have spent three or four tours at the base, specializing in mother-plane operations. He launched most of the rocket pilots and was back again in 1959 to launch me in the X-15.

Soon we were airborne, straining for altitude. I sat beside Bridgeman on a bench, going through the long pre-flight check-list. At 10,000 feet the crew went on oxygen and I started to board the Skyrocket.

I climbed down into the tiny cockpit, connecting my oxygen hose to the supply inside the Skyrocket. As Bridgeman towered over me, helping to cinch up my shoulder harness straps, I wondered how that long drink of water had ever managed to squeeze into the Skyrocket cockpit. Bridgeman and the launch operator slammed the canopy shut. The floodlights inside the bomb-bay compartment spilled through my windshields, affording enough light for me to see the instrument panel. At twenty minutes prior to launch, Jansen called the time. Following an item on the check-list, I lit off the jet engine. This added thrust would help the B-29 through the thin air and provide the Skyrocket with flying speed when I dropped.

Now all hands in the air kept a sharp watch for signs of danger. They could come from a hundred points. At that time we had not yet lost a rocket-powered airplane, either in the air or on the ground. But it could happen at any moment--and did, in later months. The B-29s were something of a problem, too. They were fire-prone.

A few minutes before drop I primed the rocket engines. Chase pilots Fulton and Konrad, who were flying alongside the B-29 beyond my view, reported routinely:

“Prime looks good.”

As we bore down over the dry lake at 35,000 feet, seconds before launch, I glanced one last time at the instrument panels and made ready. Launching a rocket plane and lighting off the engine properly is an exacting task. Improper observation of the numerous gauges and their reactions, or a small mistake in their analysis, can bring failure, possibly fatal. To gain maximum performance from the engines--the basic purpose of any research airplane flight--they should be touched off before the plane has dropped too far into the thick atmosphere. The plane must also be maintained at a precise angle of attack. If it noses down too steeply, precious rocket fuel is expended regaining lost altitude. If the plane is overly nose-high, the increased drag consumes fuel needlessly.

In theory, the jet-rocket Skyrocket gave the pilot a nice edge. He could launch with the jet engine going full blast. This would help him maintain the plane’s equilibrium during the rocket-engine light-off.

The next sixty seconds were crowded with excitement and frustration. Jansen, keying his radio mike, droned a brief countdown: “Five ... four ... three ... two ... one ... DROP.”

I heard a rattle as the two bomb shackles holding the Skyrocket in its metallic perch were disengaged. Suddenly, then, brilliant sunlight poured into the Skyrocket cockpit, blinding me. I was falling like an elevator and flying!

I pulled the nose up and climbed; there was not much time. The jet engine, fed by scoops that were far too small and inefficient, would soon starve for want of air. My fingers had flicked across the separate switches for the four rocket barrels. I felt a gentle forward surge, indicating a successful light-off. Chase pilot Fulton drawled on the radio:

“All four going.”

I glanced momentarily at the rocket pressure-gauges. They were in the green--I think. My eyes were still adjusting to the glare of the sunlight.

Five ... ten ... fifteen seconds. My Mach meter and altimeter seemed to be running a clock-like race. Speed: Mach .9 and increasing. Altitude: 40,000 feet and increasing. My chase planes were far behind, left in a cloud of rocket dust. Altitude: 43,000 feet.

In the next second, fifteen events--all of them bad--took place simultaneously. In the first brief instant, I was suddenly thrown forward against my shoulder straps, almost to the face of the instrument panel. I heard the jet engines popping crazily, then the rockets burned out, followed by eerie silence. I knew what had happened: the balky jet had flamed out; the sudden loss of thrust had sloshed the rocket fuel forward in the tanks, shutting down all four barrels. Suddenly my chest felt as though it were supporting the weight of a platoon of soldiers. The engines were out; cabin pressure was seeping off. The battery, which should have supplied ship’s power in the event of engine failure, responded slowly. Everything was out: radios and electrical instruments.

In that particular airplane, the windshield defogging system was hooked directly into the electrical system. With no power to supply defogging air to the windshield, a coat of ice quickly formed, shutting off my vision. Now the emergency was complete; no power, no instruments, no cabin pressure, iced-over windshields. Breathing heavily under the strain of the decompression, I leveled the plane and then banked until the sun beamed directly on the windshield. I knew, at least, that I was pointed in the general direction of the lake, which lay to the west of my position.

By strange coincidence, it happened that the same critical sequence of events had taken place on Bridgeman’s Skyrocket flight that morning. When I suddenly left the radio circuit, he guessed immediately what must be taking place in the Skyrocket cockpit. He yelled on the radio for chase pilots Fulton and Konrad to pull up and lock wingtips with my plane--to guide me, if possible, back to the landing area.

My battery came on the line at last and began to pump power. To conserve it, I switched off all but the most important instruments. As I descended, the ice began to thaw and the breathing became easier. I reached up and scratched a small hole on both sides of the windshield. Now I could see Fulton and Konrad sitting on my wingtips. They flew formation on me until 10,000 feet, where the ice became so slushy that I could brush it off with my hand. I never wore gloves. Flying a sensitive airplane with gloves is like playing a piano with gloves.

I brought the Skyrocket in dead-stick and made a normal landing on Rogers Dry Lake. The mechanics towed the powerless craft to the NACA hangar with a tractor.

“Scotty,” Walt Williams said later, “if we can just get you through these first check-out flights, I think we’ve got it made.”

Chapter 5 ►

_An Unusual Heritage_

“Getting it made” was very important to me, and always will be. The quest for perfection is a compulsion with me, and has been since boyhood. One reason may be my unusual heritage. Another, without doubt, was my father. Then, as always, it would seem, there were those twinges of adversity, and stern compressions of circumstance, in early life, which Winston Churchill writes “are needed to evoke that ruthless fixity of purpose and tenacious mother-wit” which drive men to unusual endeavor. There was, too, an element of denial, an important factor in a man’s motivation, I believe.

My family tree has always intrigued me. One reason may be that while I was growing up I was very conscious of it. There was a strong sense of “family” in our house, no matter how the luck ran. There was a Crossfield mold which we children--my two sisters and I--were expected to fit. We were constantly reminded that we were entrusted with a tradition that spanned almost the entire history of the New World. And because of the unusual mixture of our blood we were acutely aware of matters of race and prejudice. I know it is popular today to scoff, as decadent, at Southern traditions, and mock the proper Bostonians who cling to family ties, and to trumpet the dope-crazed sputterings of beatnik derelicts who, given complete head, would destroy all concept of God and family. Perhaps here, in this increasingly mobile society, this is one place we have failed. I cannot be held responsible for my family, but I am proud of it.

My mother, for example, fiercely proud and uncompromising, was half Mexican. The other half was pure Irish, and a more fearsome combination one is not often likely to encounter. She was a direct descendant of a Spaniard named Holguin, a Conquistadore who served under Cortés during the Conquest of Mexico. Every inch a lady in the most severe Spanish tradition, my mother demanded extreme standards of conduct and discipline in our home. These were seldom relaxed, no matter how low our material circumstances, which at their nadir were very low indeed. I inherited a great deal from my mother: jet-black hair, dark eyes, a swarthy complexion, an insatiable curiosity, a touch of the romantic, an appreciation of music, and a flair for drawing and working with my hands. I profited even more by her example.

My mother’s side of the family is a little complicated. What I know of it comes not from books and historical documents, but by word of mouth from my relatives. For this reason it is not precise but may be close. To describe it best I should begin with my maternal great-grandfather, Thomas Aloysius Dwyer, who from all accounts was an amazing character. Born in Ireland, he was one of the youthful cadets who figured in the great Irish insurrection of 1848. He married a Lady Crocker who was, so the family story goes, a lady-in-waiting to Queen Victoria. Just how this politically incongruous match came about is lost in the mists of love and history, but no doubt it accounts, at least in part, for the somewhat adventurous, peripatetic aftermath. Thomas and Anne Dwyer immigrated to Boston. Soon thereafter they moved on to Corpus Christi and San Antonio, Texas, where Thomas Aloysius Dwyer, an educated man, became a judge and sired six children, including Thomas Aloysius, Junior.

Judge Dwyer, remembered as a distinguished-looking man with a carefully manicured beard and pince-nez, was evidently not totally dedicated to the law. He developed a good many side business interests, including the shipment of various goods and supplies by railroad from El Paso to small towns in Mexico. He sent his son, Thomas Junior, my maternal grandfather, then sixteen years old, to Mexico to oversee these shipments. Tom Junior was a curious blend of hard-headed businessman and romantic. He reported to his father in beautifully scripted letters (some of which I have seen), and sometimes enclosed drawings and sketches stroked with skill and talent. In Jimenez, Mexico, the youthful, talented Tom Junior branched out. He became, successively, a Wells Fargo agent, the proprietor of a general store, a streetcar magnate (the cars were pulled by mules), a lumberman, and a distributor for the ubiquitous Singer sewing machines.

In Mexico Tom Junior met, admired, and married a seventeen-year-old senorita named Paula Holguin, my maternal grandmother. Paula, both an artist and a musician, was truly gifted, stubborn, and proud. I enjoyed her piano-playing in later years, but communications between us were difficult: as a matter of personal pride she refused to speak any language except Spanish. In her ladylike way she was also quite fearless.

The marriage between Tom Dwyer and Paula Holguin produced fifteen offspring, ten of whom survived childhood. One of these was my mother, Lucia. For a while the large family lived in happiness on a great, prosperous ranch. My grandfather’s businesses expanded. As new mines were developed in Parrall and Terron, Mexico, he sent men to open general stores and to establish wagon-train routes.

Then in about 1910, the Mexican bandit Madero, who preceded Pancho Villa, rose up to strike down the prosperous. Americans especially suffered in this period of anarchy, and for a long while it was touch-and-go for my grandparents. As a child I listened in awe to the tales of how my mother stood off groups of marauding Mexican _banditos_ with a bull-whip. When the United States President declared he could no longer guarantee the safety of Americans in Mexico, Tom and Paula Dwyer sent the ten children by train to El Paso. My mother, Lucia, then 19, was one of the first to go. She was followed in time by the others, now virtually destitute, having lost everything in the retreat. Lucia, who was educated by nuns in a convent in Mexico, inherited much of her mother’s talent for music and art. She dabbled briefly at writing and then took a job teaching elementary Spanish in an American school in El Paso. A year or so later, in 1914, she went to the University of California at Berkeley to study for the summer. There she met my father.

* * * * *

The Crossfields came from England; I have never been able to determine just when, but it was probably seven or eight generations ago. They settled in New England. There is a court record noting the marriage of a Crossfield before the Revolution. One branch of the family moved to Kentucky. The Scott in the name comes from the same family as does General Winfield Scott, who was, I’m told, a distant relative. Scott has been a middle name on the Crossfield side of the family for generations.

My paternal grandfather, Amasa Scott Crossfield, was a lawyer from New England who married Louise Brown, a direct descendant of Governor William Bradford. I am certain of the latter point, because some of the Governor’s furniture was passed along in the family. It was traced to us and later asked for by a museum. We still have a highboy which I believe is authentic Governor Bradford.

About 1885 someone conceived a plan to build a canal in Minnesota connecting Big Stone and Traverse Lakes to provide a direct water route between the Hudson Bay and the headwaters of the Mississippi. Somehow my grandfather Crossfield became interested in that project and moved from Boston to Browns Valley, Minnesota. (The Brown was no kin to my grandmother.) When the canal project fell through, my grandfather entered local politics. He was an Indian Reservation Agent and later he ran for and won a seat in the state legislature. I’m told that he won his first election when he bested his political opponent at knuckle-bending before a large crowd of voters. My father, Albert Scott Crossfield, one of three children, was born in Browns Valley.

From all the family stories I’ve heard, I surmise that my grandfather Crossfield was a rugged, pioneering type, a two-fisted drinker with a restless soul, seeking new frontiers to conquer. In any case, he didn’t stay in Browns Valley long. Soon he turned up in the Philippine Islands as Chief of the Customs Department under the colonial administration of Governor William Howard Taft. My father, his brother, who later died, and a sister were raised in the Philippines. My father’s sister, Ruth, married Peter A. Drakeford, a brother of Sir Arthur Drakeford, Australia’s Air Minister in World War II.

The move to the Philippines brought prosperity and success to my grandfather. He built up a coconut and hemp plantation, the Kumassie Plantation Company, on the Bay of Davao on Mindanao, which still exists, I believe. In time he became a pillar of the Philippines. He was appointed a judge of the Supreme Court in the Philippines. Contemporary with him was a woman journalist, Bessie Dwyer, an editor of the Manila newspaper, a daughter of Judge Dwyer of San Antonio, Texas, and my great-aunt on my mother’s side. Judge Crossfield and Bessie Dwyer were close friends in the Philippines.

My father was a conscientious young man who took his schooling seriously. He was a scientist by nature, especially interested in chemistry. He took most of his secondary education in the Philippines, then graduated from high school in Berkeley, California, where he lived with his mother, who had temporarily returned to the States to give the children a U. S. education. Later he studied chemistry at the University of California and was a graduate Fellow at the Mellon Institute in Pittsburgh.

Bessie Dwyer wrote to her niece, Lucia, then studying at the University of California, suggesting that she get in touch with the family of her good friend Judge Crossfield, then residing in Berkeley. By then my father was a graduate student taking advanced work in chemistry. When the two met, love bloomed and they were married in 1916. One chemical result of this union was me, Albert Scott Crossfield, Junior, one-quarter Mexican, with a sprinkling of pure English, Irish, Boston Brown, and the good Lord only knows what else.

My father was slow and deliberate, a man who patiently looked at all sides of an issue and was forgiving, yet in his quiet, detached way quite demanding. As I think about it, he was a very unusual person. I have a lasting and profound respect for him.

He was basically a chemist, a scientist, if you please, one whose natural bent leaned to theory but whose life led him into the practical application of science, or as we call it today, development, as opposed to pure research. When World War I broke out, he took a commission in the army and worked for the Chemical Warfare Department trying to perfect bizarre new weapons. After the war he turned to the petroleum industry. He was a pioneer in the then new field of extracting oil deposits from shale. This work ultimately led to an executive position with the Union Oil Refinery in Wilmington, at that time a small waterfront and refinery town in Southern California.

Outwardly my father was the coolest man I have ever known. He used to tell me: “A gentleman never laughs, but he may chuckle. Nor does he cry.” When he punished me, he never displayed anger or emotion. He was completely detached about it, as though analyzing some chemical compound. I don’t think I ever heard him raise his voice. He was not altogether without personal fear, but I never saw any signs of it and, believe me, I searched diligently.

He took great pains to disguise his courage. During the first World War, he was a leader of a small group of chemists who developed a new and effective gas mask, an urgently needed item in those days. My father was one of those who entered gas chambers to test the mask. The tests apparently were not always successful; the repeated exposures to gas in the chamber robbed him of much of his hair--my earliest recollection is that he was bald--and left a grim reminder on his body--white splotches where the gas had discolored his skin. I was quite old before I was able to worm out of him the fact that he had taken part in this hazardous experimental work.

My father routinely worked seven days a week and eventually he rose to be superintendent of the Union Oil Company in Wilmington. On Sundays, when there was no school, he sometimes took me to the plant with him. In those days, as in these, the men kept a careful watch for fires; a refinery fire is a vicious and terrible catastrophe. One Sunday while we were walking through the “cracking plant” a fire broke out. My father ordered everyone to keep back. As I looked on, he draped a blanket over his head and asked the firemen who had answered the alarm to douse him thoroughly with water. Then, quietly and calmly he walked into that roaring inferno and closed off some valves in order to keep the fire from spreading. His burns were severe and he was confined to a hospital for days. Not a word about the fire ever was mentioned in our house.

Dad was infinitely polite and proper. He was neither aloof nor snobbish, yet I think it is a fact that he was little understood by his friends and co-workers, perhaps because of his studied emotional detachment. Perhaps it was because of his granite-like principles about right and wrong. He was unyielding in this respect. On one occasion he clung to his principles so tenaciously that it cost him his position at the refinery and changed the whole course of his life and ours as well.

The oil refinery in those days, around 1930, imported many Mexican laborers for the dirty work. They were paid, I believe, fifty cents a day, and they lived in shacks around Wilmington; the area soon became pretty much of a Mexican community. My parents had a natural sympathy and pity for these people and my father was outspoken at the refinery about this “exploitation” of alien labor. With time these feelings grew deeper and more pointed.

When the depression struck Southern California, these imported workers were the first to lose their jobs at the plant. It was my father’s duty to fire them. A number were shipped back to Mexico, but a good many remained, out of work and penniless and, because they were aliens, not entitled to the usual governmental or community relief. Feeling responsible to some degree for the distress of these people, my father set aside a good deal of his own money for their support. My mother spent the money for food, scouring the markets for day-old bread and rejected vegetables which she cooked and passed out to the Mexicans. She was running a soup kitchen, really, and at times it seemed as though we fed half the population of Wilmington.

As the depression worsened, the firing went on at a more rapid and ruthless pace. One day one of my father’s bosses pointed out to him that there were still people on the roster with Spanish and Italian names. That was true, my father replied, but those people were not aliens: they were Americans, born on the soil of the United States, and many of them excellent workers. Never mind that, they must be fired before the ones with Anglo-Saxon names, was the order from the boss. This my father refused to do, and he was thus forced to resign. He left the oil industry entirely. I do not believe there are very many men who would have given up a top position at the height of the depression for the sake of a principle.

Our family was not destitute--far from it. Dad was not frugal, but he was not a spendthrift either, and during his years at the refinery he had managed to lay aside a healthy nest egg. He used most of this money to buy a small creamery. Like many chemists he was fascinated by the challenge of producing some unusual substance--a plastic, for example--from the waste-products of milk. I think his plan was to operate the milk company as a livelihood and spend his evening hours experimenting with the casein waste-products in a laboratory.

He never realized this goal. Not long after he bought the creamery, a vicious price war erupted in Southern California, and in time it wiped us out completely. The trucks were overturned and the men were beaten up. When Dad began in the business, he bought the raw milk for six cents a quart and after it was processed sold it for about eleven cents a quart delivered to the home. At the peak of the milk war the raw-milk cost remained fixed by the NRA but the price on delivery fell as low as one and a half cents a quart. Caught in the squeeze, Dad trimmed the business to the bare bones, but his capital dwindled rapidly.

The final days were grim. The whole family rushed to the rescue. My mother collected money on the milk routes, then being served by several trucks which were driven by my father and a man named Harold Babb. I often rode the trucks and ran up to the houses with the milk bottles. Later in the day I ran the bottle-washing machine, which cleaned about 7,500 bottles a day, all of which had then to be put into crates and stacked. I was not in the best of health. Often, in the midst of the grueling work, I was so tired that I hid behind the crates--where my father, who never seemed to tire, couldn’t see me--and bawled. Typically, my father refused to give up on that milk business until he ran through his last dime. When the business finally collapsed, he must have been hurt deeply, but he showed no outward signs of his feelings.

There was one noteworthy facet of Dad’s character, which in retrospect seems important, and perhaps contradictory. Although he certainly held a tight rein on us children, at the same time he allowed us great individual responsibility. We were given complete freedom, for example, in our choice of courses in school. “What you make of your schooling is your own business,” he said. On the question of learning, he was not didactic, but had what was probably a shrewdly calculated way of spurring us on. At the dinner table, where we had the closest contact with him, he would never say, “Well, why don’t you know that?” about some subject. Instead he would say, “That’s strange. I thought you _knew_ that.” This, of course, made us feel like idiots and soon after dinner we were all flying to the encyclopedia.

My father’s unusually severe and unyielding spirit dominated our home, where I can remember no emotional scenes. Every family problem was discussed with judicial calm, and the solution arrived at was not an expeditious one, but a just one as my father saw it. Mother was a full and enthusiastic partner in these discussions. She was treated by my father, and by us children as well, with regal respect. This atmosphere might have seemed to some outsiders as oppressively dull. I am certain it had a profound impact on me, a pint-sized kid who might otherwise have grown up to fear his own shadow.

Chapter 6 ►

_An Isolated Environment_

I believe the fact that I was told I would never be physically able to fly was the single greatest spur in my life. I was a healthy baby, but all this changed rather abruptly one day.

In Wilmington we lived in a big pink stucco house on the corner of Lakme and L streets. There was a huge eucalyptus tree in the parkway, so large that its roots had tunneled beneath our house and disturbed the foundations. We were fond of that tree, but my father decided after painful consideration that it would have to go. Its removal was an enormous task, requiring many men, bulldozers, and other pieces of earth-moving machinery. The job took a whole day. I was five years old. There were no boys my age living on the block, so I usually played alone, or with my older sister, Elena Ruth, then eight. My younger sister, Mary Ann, was a toddler, going on three. The day the men removed the tree was a big one for all three of us. The weather was cold and damp, but we stayed outside from dawn to dusk watching as the bulldozer gouged the earth from the yard.

This prolonged exposure left Elena and me with bad cases of pneumonia. She recovered quickly, but I was seriously ill. My lungs were severely damaged and my heart was affected. For a while my parents thought I was going to die. They sent for our priest, Father Skiperelli. I can still remember the moment he entered my room. The walls were covered with pictures of airplanes. Father “Skip” joshed: “But what about the Lord?” My mother led him to a picture of the Sacred Heart, almost obscured by the montage of airplanes. He administered the last rites.

It was touch-and-go for days on end. My mother smothered me in mustard plasters. I was in a coma for some time. Our family physician, Dr. E. J. Rowan, knew a man at the University of California who was trying to develop a new serum for pneumonia. He injected some of this serum into my blood. Finally I began to recover, but the illness had left its mark. For years I was sickly and small--and would always be the smallest boy in my class.

A year or so later, perhaps as an aftermath of the pneumonia, I came down with rheumatic fever. I was not strong and the fever struck me harder than it does most people. I was in bed, flat on my back, for at least four months, possibly longer. Then for the four years following--until I was about ten years old--every so often for weeks at a time I was made to lie down and rest until dinnertime. My mother and father thought I might be crippled for life. They didn’t tell me this. My father’s strategy was to feign complete indifference lest I feel sorry for myself. Not once did anyone ever say to me that I might be a cripple. On the contrary, my parents used to joke about my having developed “rheumatism” at so young an age. But I sensed that from a physical standpoint I was lacking.

I grew to adolescence in an unusual, isolated environment, finding things to pass the long hours at rest that few other boys do. Although it now pains me to recall it, my mother taught me how to sew and knit, and I became quite adept at embroidering. I also became skilled at drawing. I had once withdrawn from school for a while, but my fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Paymiller, came to my house to award me the class prize for art. My main interest, however, was aviation, and most of these long, lonely hours were devoted to it.

This interest was stimulated originally, I am certain, by a close friend and neighbor of my father’s named Charles (“Carl”) Lienesch, a pilot for the Union Oil Company. The company maintained one airplane, a wire and fabric Eagle Rock (or “Eagle Brick,” as Lienesch used to call it). This was probably one of the very first “executive” airplanes. Lienesch, who was also a chemist, visited at our home frequently. He was a colorful character, quite a story-teller. I believe his rambling air stories bored my father and mother. But in me he had an eager one-boy audience. Lienesch brought fascinating word pictures into my restricted life, and I always looked forward to his visits.

He gave me my first airplane ride. It took place in 1927, when I was about six years old. Oddly, I can remember but a few details of the flight, although it was undoubtedly the high point of my childhood. Lienesch remembers that after flying 45 minutes or so in the front cockpit of the biplane, I fell sound asleep. This, too, strikes me as odd--if not inconceivable, though my own youngsters today do this. It may be the lulling effect of the engine.

In those times, everyone involved in aviation was a walking public relations man for the trade. I don’t know why Lienesch singled me out for a special pitch. It couldn’t have been simply the fact that I was an eager listener. In any case, my earliest recollection is that this generous friend was determined that some day I should be an aviator. Although he knew I was not too strong physically, he urged me on and continued to do so for many years. I really didn’t need much urging. Lienesch had captured me from the outset. When I was old enough to realize that my health was shaky, and told by some doctor that I could probably never pass a flight physical, I was more determined than ever to be a pilot.

I leaned heavily on my imagination in those days. When I was about nine, during the time I had to rest each day after school, my mother set aside a special wicker chair for me in our small lattice-work “summer house” in the back yard. The chair had deep, downy pillows and broad arm-rests to hold my books and drawing board. To this chair I rigged some special devices of my own: an airplane control stick and rudder pedals. With the books lying open on the arm of the chair, I “flew” hour after hour, carefully following the instructions. In that chair I learned the correct stick and rudder motions for every conceivable airplane maneuver. My imagination took me across oceans, into deep valleys, and above the mountains. I dreamed of flying from California to New York non-stop and setting a new record!

Meanwhile, I had become a model airplane addict. I built models of many airplanes then in the air. The models were not hastily or sloppily made. They were near-professional, I hoped. As I grew older, I sought absolute perfection. This work led, in turn, to considerable research into the theory of flight and aircraft construction. I read everything available on the subject and wrote away, for example, to NACA, for reports on various wing airfoils and aircraft structures. I kept meticulous files. Soon I was designing my own model airplanes. Later I helped some boys build Southern California’s first model airplane powered by a (handbuilt) gasoline engine.

Flying was then a sports rage in Southern California. I think there were at least a hundred small airports in and around Los Angeles. When I could manage it, I used to hang around these places. I was impressed by any pilot. But I was especially fascinated when I heard about pilots who flew air races, which in those days were frequent and dangerous events. A boyhood hero of mine--heroine, rather--was Pancho Barnes, the aviatrix who later built the ranch near Edwards. In those days she was idolized locally, something like the way Amelia Earhart was nationally. Pancho had a new airplane known as the Travelair _Mystery Ship_. She swaggered around in boots and flying jacket and won nearly every race she entered.

For several years Los Angeles, or more specifically Burbank Airport, was the starting point for the 1500-mile Transcontinental Bendix race to Cleveland. Carl Lienesch took me out to Burbank to watch the start. I can still remember the frenzied last-minute preparations by the ground crews, and the high-pitched whine as the ridiculously tiny, stubby-winged, man-killing planes took off into the darkness with no radio and no instruments. I saw and worshiped all the great pilots: Roscoe Turner in his Weddell-Williams Special, Jimmy Weddell in another Weddell-Williams, and Benny Howard in _Ike_, _Mike_, and _Pete_, and _Mr. Mulligan_, the plane that nearly killed him. I built models of all these planes, and followed air racing around the country, from long distances, as some people follow baseball games and players. I was aware of the most obscure racing pilots, and every new racing design that emerged from their garages and workshops.

From one side of the family or the other, I must have inherited a broad stubborn streak. I did no special exercises or took no special medicines; but somehow, by sheer will power and the help of God, I began to regain my strength. I firmly believe that if the spirit is willing, the flesh will keep pace. I think my father’s example--his refusal to display physical or emotional weakness--influenced me tremendously in this regard. You can’t be around a man like that very long and feel sorry for yourself. I think, too, the fact that Carl Lienesch treated me like a normal, healthy boy who would obviously some day be a pilot, had a strong psychological impact on me. By the time I was twelve years old I was well on the road to recovery, and as a result of my long years of confinement a dedicated airplane fanatic.

About that time I took over a newspaper route for the Long Beach _Press-Telegram_ from a boy named Norman Laird. By coincidence, or maybe it wasn’t coincidence, one delivery point on the route was the Wilmington Airport, a small grass field in a slough, operated by a great colorful aviator named Vaughn McNulty. McNulty had an Inland Sportster, a high-wing monoplane, which he used to teach people to fly and to take up passengers. There were a few other planes on the field--an old C-3 Cub, an Eagle Rock, and a Travelair.

Those were tough days for small airport operators. The depression had hit Southern California and few people had dollars to shell out for airplane rides; fewer still had money for flight instruction. McNulty was ripe for the deal I proposed to him.

The newspaper delivered at the airport cost him sixty-five cents a month. I offered to supply the paper free (I always had a couple of extras) in return for one half hour of flight instruction a month. McNulty agreed, I think, not because it was an equitable business, but because he was moved to help a starry-eyed kid get a start in aviation. I was tremendously grateful and performed odd jobs around the airport for McNulty: sweeping out the hangars, cleaning mud from the airplanes, and so on. My association with McNulty and the Wilmington airport was a very personal secret. My parents did not know I was taking flying lessons.

By my thirteenth birthday I had logged several hours in McNulty’s Inland Sportster. I wasn’t yet ready to solo, but McNulty had taught me some of the basic rudiments of flying, how to handle an airplane in flight. For me each practice minute in the air was a fantastic, wonderful experience, and a tonic as well. Each minute removed me that much further from the possibility of backsliding into illness, and took me closer to my dream. I continued these flights, off and on, until my father became involved in the milk-price war and I was recruited to help wash those 7,500 bottles every day.

In sum, the seed of my life’s ambition had sprung from a twinge of adversity and it grew boldly and intensely in the face of denial. By the time I was thirteen it was clear to me that nothing could stand in the way. Moreover, what had begun as ambition had, perhaps because of the stern compression of circumstances, subtly been transformed into an urgent drive toward perfection. I would be not only a pilot but the best damned pilot in the world.

My father’s ill-timed move into the milk-processing business had certainly proved to be one of the “stern compressions of circumstances.” He was left at the depth of the depression jobless, virtually penniless and wounded in spirit, I think, although typically he showed no outward flicker of unhappiness or distress. I know the experience moved him profoundly. He broke all ties with the past. He gave up his chosen field of chemistry, at which he had excelled for eighteen years or more, and moved all of us to a new and totally different environment. It is idle, perhaps, to probe too deeply for motivation in matters of this kind for, as we know, nothing is so clear-cut as it may appear. My own belief is that in starting life anew he responded to what I believe is a basic and fundamental urge in all of us to return to the soil whence we come and where we shall return in death. He sold our house in Wilmington and bought a heavily-mortgaged, run-down 120-acre farm in the rich but remote Boistfort Valley near Chehalis, Washington, about midway between Seattle and Portland, Oregon. He got it for $50 an acre.

I was both pleased and stunned when I first saw the farm. The setting was beautiful. Boistfort Valley was lush green and stayed that way the year round. It was a land of rich, virgin timber--towering Douglas fir trees--lovely grape arbors, and rushing, salmon-filled streams. A river ran right next to our property. About sixty acres of our farm lay along this river. There were twenty more acres under cultivation and these lay higher, on a hill overlooking the river. It was a clean, silent country, full of wild fruits and berries.

Apart from the setting there was not much about the farm I could admire. The main house was a rambling, drafty, thirteen-room monster, with detached toilet facilities: a two-seater privy, which in the deep of winter was less than comfortable. Out back there was also a tottering barn, built in 1884, and a wobbly chicken shack, the whole enclosed by a broken-down, zig-zag wooden fence. Then in the winter there was mud, more mud than I ever dreamed existed on the face of the earth. The barnyard, the grounds, the paths, the driveway--all were a bottomless sea of mud.

My father’s approach to this new challenge was somewhat startling. From the outset he was determined to transform that bruised and battered piece of ground into a show place. He was an intelligent man and his method was intelligent. He studied farming. He sought advice from other farmers. He consulted often with the county government farm agent. He stretched every dime to the breaking point. Typical, I think, was his scientific handling of the chickens. He despised chickens. Yet he became the champion chicken farmer in the valley. He did it by keeping greatly detailed, endless records. He logged every egg that was laid. He carefully analyzed the results of different feed combinations on the chickens, noting if a new type increased or retarded the laying rate, how frequently the chicken house had to be cleaned, and so on. Everyone laughed, until in due time his painstaking research began to pay off handsomely.

He followed the same system with the cattle. His objective was to build up a dairy herd, the best in the valley. He couldn’t afford to buy good cattle: pure-breds cost four or five hundred dollars. Instead he bought grade cattle for $50 apiece or less. Then when he found a good cow, he bred her. Again he kept unending records. By trial and error, and trading cows left and right, he built up a herd of twenty-five, which produced a much greater return than the pure-bred herds.

As I think back on it, my father had soon organized everything on that farm to perfection.

The work was limitless. Every morning and night for seven days a week we milked those twenty-five cows. In the spring we did the plowing, a brutal, grueling, seemingly hopeless task. We couldn’t afford tractors or even good draught horses. We used cayuses, worn out from years of labor in the nearby logging camps. It was usually my fate to draw the walking plow. Near the river on the bottom land, the soil was a thick, black loam. We plowed two acres a day, moving at a fast clip, and worked several cayuses to death. In the fall we harvested the hay, wheat, and oats--a hundred tons, cured to a “T”--and stored them in the barn, after the appropriate and detailed data on the crop had been drawn up and filed away for study.

After a year or so the farm was still a long way from a show place. But I do remember one evening when my father closed his account books with a smile. He said: “We’re now one dollar in the black, the net result of twenty years of work.”

In the curious way that life unfolds, as the farm grew so grew Scott Crossfield. This parallel has never occurred to me until now. I arrived there weak and puny and not fully recovered from my childhood illness. But as the months passed--months of hard labor and good healthy food--I no longer pooped out easily or noticed any shortness of breath. I gradually became as strong as an ox. Consciously or unconsciously my father was transforming his own son, as well as a patch of earth. Perhaps somewhere in the unfathomable depths of his mind, my father knew what he was about. I will never know. I never came near reaching perfection, but from the moment I landed on that farm, with one exception, I never again became ill.

As my own strength grew, so did my determination to achieve my life’s ambition. In one sense, the farm was also a denial, a greater one than my illness in Wilmington. I had been transplanted from the center of aviation to a remote outpost. Here in this isolation I developed a great thirst and craving for any news of my interest. This craving, I think, inspired resourcefulness and a sense of independence, which in turn fostered a boldness that might not otherwise have sprouted. I was not trapped in the routine of my interest, nor influenced by mediocrity, nor bound by the usual conventions. My mind was free to try anything that occurred to it.

My room was on the second floor of our big house. After the day’s work, the last chores, I retired there not to dream but to work on model airplanes, or to read magazines and books on aviation, or to go through my files, which, after seven years, had grown to great proportions. I hung a blanket over the window so that my parents could not see the light reflecting on the ground below. There, alone with my thoughts, I worked until two or three in the morning.

Out of this room emerged what I thought was a new and brilliant idea for making a radio-controlled model airplane. Such models are common now, but in those days the concept was fairly _avant garde_. Proudly I revealed my new idea to the son of a friend on the adjacent farm, a young man who was a Doctor of Physics at the University of Washington. He said it would never work. He followed this comment with a general lecture on sizing up and working within one’s capabilities. This lecture served only to convince me that nothing would stand in the way of building that model.

Everything about the model was new and different. My greatest problem was to devise a lightweight structure to carry the enormous radio “payload.” For the fuselage I selected a new and radical method of construction known as “geodetic,” which had been devised and published by a British aeronautical engineer. (Later I learned that the British used this construction to build the World War II Lancaster bomber.) The finished fuselage weighed about half as much as with the usual methods.

The development of the special radio gear, and the devices which would translate a radio signal into a movement of the model’s control surfaces, took months. Knowing little of radio circuits or the theory of radio, I had to start from scratch and teach myself everything--with the help of some ham operator friends. The result, if I may brag, was ingenious. It was as good as, or better than, the units I have recently seen in current radio-controlled models, with transistors and “printed circuits.”

The final product of my labors, a graceful, gullwinged model, weighed a total of seven pounds and was capable of lifting a seven-pound payload of radio gear. In any man’s league this is very efficient aerodynamics. The model flew like a dream and the radio worked perfectly. Then one day during a flight the plane dipped behind a tree which interfered with the radio signal. The ship crashed and was destroyed.

Chapter 7 ►

“_Take Her Up and Try a Spin_”

I went to Boistfort High School, a consolidated country school about nine miles from our farm. There were fifty-six pupils in the whole school, quite a contrast to the big 3000-student schools in Southern California. The superintendent of Boistfort School, Carl Aase, was a most unusual man and to me, at least, a very generous one. For some strange reason my teachers have always made a lasting impression on me. I can recall everything about them, including their names: in kindergarten, Mrs. Wallin; first grade, Mrs. Clark; second grade, Mrs. Meade; third grade, Mrs. Thomas; fourth grade, Mrs. Humphries; fifth grade, Mrs. Paymiller; sixth grade, Mrs. Blossom. And so on.

Carl Aase, an intelligent and resourceful man, became a good friend of my father’s. He visited our farm frequently, but he didn’t let this friendship stand in the way of doing his job, or of administering discipline to incorrigible boys. In this respect, he was quite like my father. Mr. Aase never displayed anger or emotion. Like the other farm boys, when I reached the age of fifteen I was a tough, scrappy youngster. We boys used to fight often, and occasionally Carl Aase would suspend me from school. He was very calm and matter-of-fact about it. “Scott,” he would say, “don’t wait for the school bus today. Just walk on home right now.”

At first I was not an exceptional student. My grades averaged about “B.” They improved later when I was seriously preparing for college. But at sixteen my interests were many and my time too limited for concentrated study on anything but aviation, for which I was not given credit in school. I joined in 4-H Club work and raised several prize dairy animals. I was also intrigued by photography. I converted one of the unused rooms on the second floor of our home to a dark room. I took all the photographs and made the woodcuts for the school yearbook. I had no time for sports such as football, tennis, or swimming, and I haven’t found time for them yet.

The farm and the school absorbed most of my hours. I got up early to do my chores, spent most of my day at Boistfort, in the evening returned to my chores, and then to my private room on the second floor. But there was one other spot to which I was drawn like a metal filing to a magnet: the Chehalis municipal airport. I didn’t get there as frequently as I wanted to. When I went, it was in secret. I didn’t want to trouble my parents with my ambitions to be a pilot. Although he never mentioned it directly, I believe my father hoped I would study law or medicine. A professional education, he thought, was a necessary part of a gentleman’s preparation for life.

The Chehalis municipal airport was a cow pasture adorned with two skeletal airplane hangars, a tiny CAA weather shack, and a tattered wind-sock. It was home for about a dozen old wire-and-fabric airplanes, several of them derelicts and veterans of the first World War, which had then been over for eighteen years. The field was operated by a man named Donahoe, who somehow managed to stay one step ahead of the sheriff. The people who hung about that airport were, I think, typical of the depression era, young and old who almost on faith alone stuck with aviation, consciously and unconsciously knowing its future. Some, like me, were called “airport bums.” Chehalis Airport was a Garden of Eden to me. The pilots to a man were my special heroes.

Whenever I had the money, which was seldom, although the amount required was ridiculously small, I took flight instruction from anybody and everybody. I was lucky to squeeze in one hour a month; many months went by during which I received no instruction at all. It was slow going and I’m not certain that the instruction was top quality. But I was learning, inching toward my first solo flight. It finally came quite unexpectedly, and it turned out to be rather exciting.

“Why don’t you try it by yourself?” one of the pilots said to me one day at the airport. At this time I probably had accumulated about seven or eight hours of flight instruction. A solo flight was technically illegal: I had no student permit. But at Chehalis there was a sort of devil-may-care attitude about rules and regulations. A small knot of airport hangers-on gathered around us. “Yeah, Scotty, take her up and try a spin.” The crowd broke up with laughter.

I crawled into the cockpit of the Curtiss Robin. It was a high-wing monoplane powered by a cranky OX-5, the engine that was used in World War I. Someone spun the prop and soon I was bumping over the cow pasture toward the end of the strip. Without fear or hesitation--indeed, very happily--I gunned the engine and horsed the Robin gracefully into the air. The deep green Chehalis Valley spread out below me. The engine, laboring heavily, took me to 4,000 feet, which was about the ceiling of that airplane.

I flew about over the valley for ten or fifteen minutes, turning, twisting, and tracing lazy eights in the sky. This, I thought, was it, the absolute ultimate! Here man had a new view of his life and the world. He was detached, removed from the detail of it--the mud, the privy, the school fights, the chicken house, the slights and denials. Here, high in the sky, man’s vision was unobscured. He could see far and wide, the whole picture of God’s world, a model of grace and perfection. At the same time there was challenge: a man, a brain, some muscle, and a machine pitted against the air, a basic and important element of that earthly perfection.

I was an ace now, zipping low over the battlefield returning to my aerodrome in France. Then I was Lindbergh, passing over wild Nova Scotia, eight hours out of New York, ready to bank over the cold gray Atlantic. Then I was Benny Howard, poised on the end of the runway at Burbank Airport in tiny _Mr. Mulligan_, ready for an incredible 1500-mile non-stop flight to Cleveland. Then I was Scott Crossfield, setting off in a new plane of his own design to break the Los Angeles-to-New York record.

The long years of denial made these moments far more endearing and meaningful than I can possibly describe. I wondered: did more denial lie ahead? Maybe I had better squeeze every drop out of this flight. Maybe I had better see how far I could go: find out where nerve left off and fear began. Find out, in one fell swoop, if I had it.

“Try a spin,” the crowd had said. Well, while I’m about it, why not? The crazy thought absorbed my attention. I climbed higher. I deliberately pulled the nose up steep and stalled out. The Robin’s right wing dipped. Earth and sky alternated in the windshield. I was spinning.

Suddenly I was aware of a strange and startling noise, a kind of banging, foreign to the ordinary noise of the plane. What was it? Quickly I pushed the stick forward and the rudder pedal hard left and brought the Robin to normal, level flight. The noise disappeared. Was I imagining something? What happened?

I climbed back to altitude and dropped the Robin into a second spin. Once again the fearful racket began. Again I brought the Robin to normal flight. No, I definitely was not imagining the noise. It was not my nerves. It happened when I put the ship into a spin. Curiosity overwhelmed me. What was it?

For the third time I climbed and spun the Robin. This time when the clattering began, I strained and looked behind me, searching for the answer. Then I found it: the rear door of the plane was loose. In ordinary flight the slipstream kept it firmly in place. But in the spin gyrations it was banging open and shut. I laughed aloud at my concern.

Time was running out. I had to land. I banked in a large circle and lined up on the cow pasture. The Robin ghosted down. Her wheels struck the soft grass and she clung. I taxied toward the knot of people near one of the hangars, shut off the engine and climbed out, showing not a trace of excitement or elation. I was as dead-pan as an undertaker.

“How’d it go?” someone asked.

“Good,” I said. I knew they had watched the three spins. There was no need to brag about it.

“No trouble?” Then with a start I realized I was the subject of a practical joke. The crowd _knew_ what happened to the Robin’s door in a spin. I was being hazed, like a college freshman. But I was determined to give them no satisfaction.

“None at all,” I replied. I read disappointment on all their faces.

I returned to the farm and my chores. At the dinner table that night I felt very proud. But I dared not say why.

* * * * *

Carl Lienesch visited us from time to time on the farm. He no longer worked for the Union Oil Company. He had moved to Seattle, where he took a job as a Civil Aeronautics Board inspector. One day he proposed that I go up to Seattle with him to watch the first flight tests of Boeing’s new Clipper.

Compared to anything I had seen, the flying boat looked huge, squatting on Lake Washington, on the eastern edge of Seattle. It had four powerful engines mounted high on the metal wing, and a towering single tail. The test pilot was Eddie Allen.

Eddie Allen would have been quite surprised, I’m certain, to know how much the young man standing on the Lake Washington dock knew about him. By then my files on test pilots matched or surpassed my files on racing pilots and other famous characters in aviation. Jimmy Doolittle was far and away the most famous U. S. test pilot. On the East coast the top dog was James Taylor, who flew mostly for Grumman. On the West coast the top dog was Eddie Allen, who was also Boeing’s Chief Engineer. As I have said, he began his career with the old NACA shortly after World War I. At Boeing his word was considered law. He participated in the design of the airplane he would fly. If he didn’t think a piece of equipment ought to be on an airplane, it wasn’t put on the airplane. There was no great gap between Allen and the airplane designers. He _was_ an airplane designer.

I watched as Allen taxied the mammoth plane through the water. The engines roared to life and the plane plowed through the water gaining speed. Allen lifted it a few feet into the air and splashed it back down again. A short while later he returned to the dock. The Clipper lacked fin area. Allen directed that two additional fins be added to the airplane.

As we were driving back to Chehalis, Lienesch, visibly impressed by the flight, was garrulous. His expensive Auburn was making nearly a hundred miles an hour.

“Now, Scotty,” he said, “if you’re going to get into the aviation business, Allen’s job is the one you want to shoot for. That’s the top of the ladder. You don’t want to be a barnstormer, or a racing pilot, or a military pilot. Get a degree. Be an engineer. Help build the airplanes. Then fly them and find out what you did wrong. Then fix it. That’s a real profession. It has dignity as well as excitement and challenge. You can combine all your energies and focus them toward one single objective: to improve the airplane. Who knows, maybe you might contribute something in this never-ending, restless urge of man to do better.”

I was profoundly impressed.

* * * * *

My father’s limitless energy and meticulous research--his drive for perfection--had a telling effect on the farm as the months rolled by. It was still far from a show place, but it was no longer bruised and battered. The herds were growing and producing. The chickens were profitable and were pointed to as examples by the County Agents. The barn had a new addition. We had stemmed the sea of mud somewhat with gravel walkways. The main house was equipped with an indoor toilet. The farm produced enough money to support us and to send my older sister, Elena Ruth, to the University of California in Berkeley.

Although it appealed to me not at all, I was caught up in the rural way of life and naturally influenced by the people. As the son of an increasingly successful farmer, and naturally competitive, I took some pride in contending with the sons of other farmers. I became a leader in our 4-H Club. My pure-bred Guernsey bull, which I had nursed to a beautiful showpiece, won many prizes at county livestock fairs and brought me an invitation (which I accepted) to represent the State of Washington in the International Livestock Show in Chicago. I was also assured of a scholarship to Washington State College provided I majored in agriculture.

None of this gave me any real satisfaction. My basic interest lay elsewhere and was deeply rooted. I liked to pal around with the farmers’ sons, but they were not my closest friends. Indeed, my really close friends seem a strange lot to me now. I probably fitted in perfectly.

One of my friends was a ham radio operator, Art Beal, who was about forty years old. I first met him when he came to the farm to investigate my weird radio-transmitter signals which were disturbing the airways. He taught me a great deal about radio and helped me build the radio-control model. Through him I met Elden Reed, about twenty-five years old, and Bill Young, about twenty-eight, and blind from birth. All three were avid hams; they never seemed to sleep. All of us, together with a tomboy about four years older than I, Louise Wilrich, became fast friends. Art, Elden, and Louise all learned to fly at Chehalis.

Bill Young was an extraordinary person. He lived on a small pension, alone except for his seeing-eye dog, and picked up extra money tuning pianos. In Nature’s strange way, having denied Bill sight, she developed his ears to perfection. Bill was often the only operator who could pick up signals from North Africa. During the war the Air Force used his cheap home-made gear and sensitive ears to communicate with North Africa when military radio could not get through. I remember the time when a thief broke into Bill’s house, robbed him, and killed his seeing-eye dog. I think that if the rest of us had caught the thief we would have killed _him_.

When we went to the Chehalis airport to fly, or just to shoot the breeze with Donahoe and the other pilots, Bill always came along. However, the airplane was something of a mystery to him. He walked about, feeling the wings, the fuselage, and the propellers. But it was too big and complex and he couldn’t “see,” as he said, the whole concept of the plane. I think this distressed him considerably because in that crowd we talked of little else besides radio and airplanes. Bill’s inability in this regard touched me, because to me Bill was a kindred spirit, a piece of nature’s bruised fruit. I helped him to understand the airplane by bringing along my models. With these miniature versions he could “see” the airplane as a whole.

It was about this time that I began building my own life-size airplane. The idea came to me one day when I read in one of the many aviation publications I subscribed to that a French company, LeBlonde, had produced a very lightweight, efficient gasoline engine of 15 horsepower. One of these engines successfully powered a small plane. There on the farm, over six thousand miles from France and the nearest LeBlonde engine, the seed took root and sprouted. An engine that small ought to be pretty inexpensive, I thought. If I built the airplane, I would find a way to buy the engine.

As my father lacked enthusiasm for my flying, so he viewed with less enthusiasm my plan to build an airplane. I suppose any rational father would try to talk his son out of a scheme like that. But in spite of my father’s advice to the contrary, I was determined to carry the idea through. I worked late at night, drawing up the plans and designing my vehicle, the sum product of a 17½-year-old’s aeronautical know-how and skill with a pencil.

I had long talks with my school principal, Carl Aase, about the material for the airplane. One problem was that the spruce I intended to use in the wing, tail, and fuselage was very expensive. Aase suggested that I substitute Port Orford cedar, which in the old days the Indians used to build canoes. It was strong and flexible, a good inexpensive local substitute. I saved my money and sent away for the cedar. Since I had little money, I spaced the orders far apart.

I enjoyed building anything. This full-scale airplane that could take me into the boundless sky turned into an intense work of love. I doubt that ever in history an airplane was built with such painstaking care for detail. Each piece of cedar--one-inch square strips--was handled like a piece of gold. After steaming it into shape, I sanded it carefully and then laid it in place. Then I tacked it down with glue-coated nails (which I ordered as required, with no allowance for surplus) and mortised each individual joint. As with my models, I strove for perfection. It was slow going. It took months and months to complete the fuselage. Then I saved for more cedar, built some jigs and laid out the wing spars.

Though I worked on the airplane only after my chores were finished, I always felt guilty about the time it took. In a way it was like waving a red flag in my fathers face. He was becoming very attached to his piece of the earth and its mounting production. I believe he hoped I would share his enthusiasm and in time take over. Perhaps because it was a symbol of my conflicting ambition, annoying to my father, I never finished the airplane. It became a kind of unfinished Hangar Queen--in this case Barn Queen. I would meet other Hangar Queens later.

Carl Lienesch convinced me that my approach to my chosen profession should begin with a solid college foundation in engineering. Upon graduation from high school in June, 1939, my plan was to go straight to basic freshman engineering at the University of Washington. But this well-laid plan went astray. I was delayed a whole year by a variety of factors.

In January of 1939, several months before I was to graduate, my younger sister Mary Anne, fourteen years old, was stricken by polio, and after a brief but severe illness she died in an iron lung. She was a pretty girl, already determinedly planning a career on the stage. Her sudden death was a stunning blow to my parents and me. It brought us closer together than ever before. To leave for college then, to leave my mother and father alone on the farm, seemed to me like deserting them. (My older sister was still enrolled at the University of California.)

The farm was simply too big for my father to operate alone. For several years he employed a boy named Harold Jones, who lived nearby, to help with the heavy work. Over the years Harold became another son in the Crossfield home. But in 1939 Harold went away to college to study agriculture, and my father could not afford to hire a full-time employee to replace him. A year later it would be a different story. But now my father obviously needed my help.

After turning these facts over in my mind, I decided to stay home on the farm for one year. At the time it seemed a dreadful decision, an agonizing delay, a frustrating denial. Yet I probably gained by it. In 1940, through the combined efforts of my father and myself, the farm was a going concern. We were able to afford automatic milking equipment and--believe it or not--a tractor. I traded my old Oakland jalopy (bought in high school for $26) for a 1935 Chevrolet and tuned the engine to near-perfection. I filled in some lacking school credits by taking correspondence courses in math, physics, and chemistry from the University of Nebraska. I logged an increasing number of flying hours at Chehalis airport with my constant companions, Art Beal, Elden Reed, Louise Wilrich, and Bill Young.

Chapter 8 ►

_Change and Challenge_

In retrospect, the brief twenty months of my life from September, 1940, when I left the farm, to May, 1942, seem a disjointed period, a tumultuous time of change and challenge. Perhaps because of this it was in some ways the most fruitful. I was about eighteen when it began; by 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, quit again to join the Navy. My course was solidly set straight toward the aviation world. During that important transition in my life, however, new and sharp influences disturbed my compass, causing it to “hunt.” One towering influence was the outbreak of World War II, which in one way or another disturbed the lives of all my contemporaries as well as my elders.

When I left the farm in September of 1940, I marched upon the University of Washington with determined strides, as though I had only a few weeks in which to absorb all it could provide. Thumbing through the catalogue, I signed up for twenty hours of college courses per quarter; this was about twenty-five per cent above the average load. When my counselor discovered that I had to work to pay my way, he advised me to cut my schedule. He might just as well have been talking to a sphinx. I explained that I was accustomed to working long hours and sleeping only a little. He protested again and again, but eventually I won the argument. He gave up to let me find out the hard way.

I was not used to many luxuries, but I must say I had a tough time of it during the first year in Seattle. I lived in depressing boarding houses which served up a monotonous diet at mealtimes, and I worked at odd jobs that I found through the University employment bureau. The first of these was an agonizing experience for a lad fresh from the farm. I was a glorified butler in a snooty sorority house. I tended the furnace, put on a white jacket to serve tables at dinnertime, and washed the dishes--all for twenty-five cents an hour. Later I found a job mowing lawns; then I worked in a gas station; then I became a chauffeur. Finally I turned my skill with a pencil to profit as a part-time draftsman, tracing radio circuits.

The University was a fantastic well of knowledge and intelligent people, and my appetite to devour this knowledge was insatiable. I had neither time nor inclination to make many new friends or to join in the heavy college social life. (For a short time I shared an apartment with two Dekes, one a member of the University crew, but this didn’t work out at all.) I was a lone wolf on a special mission, moving steadily from class to class and part-time job to part-time job. It took hard study to overcome some of the gaps from Boistfort Consolidated School, which was seldom called on to provide college preparatory courses. At the end of three quarters my grades were averaging B. But in one year I advanced one and a quarter years in college.

I went back to the farm for the summer of 1941. It was reaching perfection and the yield was enough so that my father could afford full-time workers. I helped harvest the hay and grain and did other chores, and still found time to smooth out and advance my flying.

As part of the general defense preparedness the government was in the process of converting the old CAA pilot-training program to something new called Civilian Pilot Training (CPT), designed to encourage a great number of young people into aviation. The new program, affiliated with colleges and universities, amounted to a government subsidy for aviation ground school and flight training. Through normal channels it then cost about $200 to get a private license. Under CPT it was free. For me this bargain-basement offer couldn’t have come at a better moment. That summer I promptly enrolled in CPT at Centralia Junior College near Chehalis. Art Beal, Elden Reed, and Louise Wilrich joined me. Unfortunately Bill Young could not join us; but in the evenings he got much of what we had learned second hand.

The flight instructor of our small, almost informal CPT class was a man of about fifty named Elvin V. Puckett, a one-time Montana cowboy with a weather-beaten face and large, strong hands. Years before, having tired of “riding fences” on a horse, Puckett bought a plane and taught himself to fly, thus patrolling the huge ranch boundaries the easy way. He went on to barnstorming, finally settling down in Washington State. Puckett “sat” an airplane as I’m sure he sat a horse, easy, relaxed, natural. Maybe he wasn’t the best instructor in the world, but he taught me one lesson that stuck: the pilot of a plane is captain of his ship and fully responsible for its operation at all times. “No one else should ever be allowed to interfere with the pilot’s controls or to overrule the pilot’s judgment,” he told us.

As luck would have it, it fell to me to stick by that rule to my possible disadvantage on one of the biggest days in my early flying life. Having completed flying with Puckett’s class, now came time for the big test. A Civilian Aeronautics Administration inspector, G. S. Buchanan, climbed into my airplane to pass me or fail me for my private license. When we reached altitude, Buchanan leaned over and pulled the engine throttle to idle.

“You’ve just lost your engine,” he said.

Puckett’s rule ran through my mind. Yet, I thought, here certainly is the exception. I debated. But no, a rule is a rule. There should be no exceptions to rules in the air.

I stared at Buchanan and said: “Keep your hands off the controls of this airplane.”

He stared back.

“When I’m flying this airplane, you are a passenger,” I said. “The passengers don’t handle the controls. If you want to simulate a lost engine, you tell me and _I_ will pull the throttle back to idle.” I pushed the throttle forward to regain air speed, thinking well, that’s that and I fail.

As it turned out, Buchanan found the episode amusing and yielded.

“All right,” he said. “You win. You lost an engine.”

I pulled the throttle back and followed through with emergency procedures for a lost engine. When we got on the ground, Buchanan gave me an “up-check,” meaning I passed.

Officially then I “soloed” in the summer of 1941 and got my license. But at that point I probably had more than fifty hours in the air. Quickly I moved up the grade, accumulating more time and passing official government tests for larger and more powerful airplanes. I bought a one-third interest in a Taylorcraft, but it cracked up on take-off at Tacoma and killed my two partners. It was a funeral pyre. The coins in their pockets were melted.

I returned to the University in the fall of 1941 with my mind made up to stay off the sorority-house butler circuit. My search for a better-paying and more interesting job soon led to Boeing’s Seattle plant, which had just secured enormous contracts to build bombers for the U. S. Air Force and the British. Boeing was desperate for new people. The word was that they were hiring anything that walked. I applied for a job, planning to schedule my college courses around my work. But when I hired on for the seemingly fabulous wage of sixty-two cents an hour as an assembly page clerk--making certain the stockroom numbers were kept up to date--that plan went out the window.

When I got my first look inside the Boeing plant I was fascinated. Everything about it thrilled me: the rattle of rivet guns, the heavy thumping of the presses, the shrill grinding of the saws, the whirling of the lathes. But greatest of all was watching an airplane grow in shape and perfection all in one room: from the confused beginnings of the production line to the end product which rolled out the door. In this environment thoughts of the ivy-smothered buildings at the University were lost. This was action. This was it!

The pace in the plant is best described as frantic. The war was coming fast and the Air Force wanted airplanes yesterday. My job, as it turned out, couldn’t have been better suited to my purposes. I was not tied to any specific point; the whole factory was my domain. As an assembly page clerk, I was called or sent to every part of the plant and production line. Where there is strong interest there is strong retention. Quite soon all the apparent confusion made eminent sense to me, and I became intimately familiar with the problems and techniques of building real airplanes. In this job I was an observer with a free ticket to a great show.

Some time around my twentieth birthday I was promoted to the position of production expediter, a glorified title for a bottleneck-breaker. In my new job I was to chase down certain parts that were not available in time and hand-carry or expedite them through their many processes so that they arrived at the assembly line in the right quantity at the right time. This work led to greater responsibility. Having noted my talent with a pencil, my boss assigned me the task of drawing up special change-orders and engineering change-orders for various small airplane parts. Most of this was “emergency” work, trying to salvage a part from damaged material, or devising a substitute for a part for which no material was available. This job, too, took me to all corners of the plant. I think that in a few months I learned as much as many men who work for years in an aircraft plant assigned to a specific detail. I worked long hours seven days a week and occasionally slept on the drafting table through the remaining hours of the night.

When the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor, my duty was clear. I would have to lay aside my personal ambition and go win the war--in an airplane, of course. The week following Pearl Harbor I visited an Air Force cadet recruiting center and filled in all the papers. A few days later I reported for a physical examination. I flunked it. My pulse rate, possibly an aftereffect of my childhood illness, was too high. It might also have been the result of the long hard hours at Boeing. The Air Force doctor told me to rest up a few days and come back for a second try.

The years of discipline from working on the farm and training under my father paid off. The disappointment was short-lived. I would do something about this. I would not be denied my life’s determination.

I looked up a private physician in Seattle. Everyone, I suppose, was feeling patriotic in those days and they all wanted to help any boy get into the service. The doctor gave me a handful of pills--probably sedatives--and told me to take one before retiring, one on arising, and one just before the physical. The pills did the trick. I passed the physical.

For a long time I was plagued with this high pulse rate on physicals. In due time I learned to control my pulse--to hold it down--almost by yogi. Once I tried the traditional trick of using the depression of a hangover to pass a physical. It worked, but it wasn’t worth it. Certainly this annoyingly high pulse rate never in any way hampered or restricted my endurance and flying ability, which may or may not prove something about the accepted routine of flight physicals.

My boss at Boeing was greatly put out when he learned I had been “called up.” First he offered to get me a draft deferment, and then he insisted on it, declaring I was essential to the war effort. I couldn’t make him understand that I _wanted_ to go. Finally, to preclude drastic action on his part, I simply told him I was in the Reserves and there was nothing he could do about it. My friends at Boeing gave me a small farewell party, and off I went to the wars.

I was back at Boeing a week later working at the same job.

The Air Force shipped me from McChord Air Force Base near Tacoma to Williams Field, a processing center in Arizona. Williams was a madhouse. Evidently every recruiting office in the nation was swamped by boys eager to join the Air Force. The base was saturated with starry-eyed kids. There were no living quarters nor places to feed all these people. The officers in charge shipped me back to McChord. There I was told to go home and wait until there was an opening in a cadet class. While waiting, I returned to my old job.

I waited and waited, wondering if the war would be over before I could get into the service. In the second week of February, with still no word from the Air Force, I went down to a Navy recruiting station. The requirement then for Naval Aviation cadets was at least two years of college. The Naval officers examined my record at Boeing, my University credits, my private flying background (some three hundred hours now), and waived the two-year college requirement. Frankly, I think they were overjoyed to snatch an Air Force cadet. I took three more pills, passed the Navy physical, and was sworn in on February 21, 1942, in Seattle. I then resigned from the Air Force.

The Navy was giving primary training to some of its aviation cadets at Sand Point Naval Air Station in Seattle, a fact that pleased me no end, having briefly glimpsed the parched-earth and desolation at Williams Field in Arizona. I was scheduled to join a Cadet Class at Sand Point on the day I was sworn in, but I was delayed by a ridiculous but, to the Navy, vital matter. I am a “junior,” and that fact was duly published on my birth certificate. I never used the junior in my signature. Thus I filled out my Navy papers “A. Scott Crossfield.” When the discrepancy was spotted, the officers, following meticulous Navy regulations, insisted that my papers be returned and corrected. Because of this I missed my class. My reporting date was postponed until the next class convened on May 7th, two and a half months later.

While waiting, I kept on at my job at Boeing. As before, I worked seven days a week, never hesitating to accept greater responsibility. When I think about it now, I laugh at some of the quick and (to me) awesome decisions I made there. Actually, I suppose, the mind functions pretty clearly between the ages of nineteen and twenty-five. It is not yet encumbered by experience and mistakes, or corralled by conservatism, which is the product of fear of making a mistake. It is bold and aggressive, and difficult to deny.

I believe those nine furious months at Boeing were among the most valuable in my life.

Chapter 9 ►

_Manhood and Maturity_

I served in the Navy four years, until I was twenty-four. I never achieved my goal of engaging the enemy plane-to-plane over the Pacific. After winning my wings I was waylaid as a flight instructor for eighteen months. I very nearly made it. When the war ended, I was in training in Hawaii with a carrier air group for the invasion of Japan.

My Navy tour laid the groundwork for the contribution I made to aviation and the nation years later in a different kind of war. In the Navy I became a professional, disciplined aviator.

Ironically, I almost flunked at the outset. It happened during my two months of “elimination” service in Seattle in May and June of 1942. Like many men who already knew how to fly when they entered the military services, I found my past experience in the air not a help but a hindrance. A civilian pilot is an individualist. In the military a pilot is part of a closely meshed precision team. The adjustment is difficult to make. Civilian pilots learn many “bad habits.” One day my instructor said: “Crossfield, I don’t think you’re going to make it.” I did make it. In fact I never got a “down-check” although there was one close call.

It was a glove that almost did me in. One of our final checks at Seattle was an emergency landing in a small tree-bordered field. My airplane was an old N3N or “Yellow Peril” biplane, built in about 1933. While flying near this field one day my instructor gave me the signal to simulate an engine failure. I throttled back all the way and aimed for the field, calculating my glide-path, intending to make a perfect approach and landing.

I miscalculated. We were quite low when I realized I had undershot the field and would have to open the throttle. My instructor reached this conclusion about the same instant. He moved his gloved left hand to the throttle. As I pushed forward a split second before him, his glove caught and jammed in the throttle bracket. He tried to pull the throttle back momentarily to disengage the glove. Unaware of this mishap, all the while I was pushing the throttle hard forward, wondering what was holding it.

The ground was rushing up fast. I had to land. There was a hole between the trees that looked large enough to squeeze through. We grazed over a barbed-wire fence and penetrated the hole. It was too small. The right wing brushed the top of a tree, making a fearful racket on the taut dope-covered fabric of the wing. The plane bounced on the grass strip and rolled out. My instructor crawled out of the front cockpit, lit a cigarette, and paced about the plane, inspecting the broken ribs in the wing and the torn fabric. I sat in the cockpit awaiting the inevitable. Soon, I knew, I would be headed for a ship as a seaman second class.

I wondered why my instructor was delaying. Then it dawned on me. He was worried that we had damaged the plane so badly that it would fall apart in the air.

“As long as we’re here,” he said, “I’ll just stay on the ground and watch while you make a few precision landings between the markers over there.” This was the next phase of my test, scheduled to be carried out at another field. It was true that it would save time to do these maneuvers at this field. But I had a hunch the real reason was that the instructor wanted me to take that plane up and test-fly it--alone.

Very well, I thought, I’ll do it. I got us into this fix. I gunned the engine and took off. The plane held together and I made the precision landings without further incident. The instructor climbed in and we flew back to main base. He gave me an “up-check,” but I believe I earned it by default--because he was ashamed to report the glove snafu and because I had tested the airplane for him. Thereafter, in the way some men respond to error, I was determined never to repeat that fiasco. In time and with exacting practice, landings became the strongest point of my flying.

We moved from Seattle to the Naval Air Training Center in Corpus Christi, Texas--the big league. What a sight! It was the Boeing plant all over again. The Navy was just gearing for the instruction of aviators on a mass scale. Thousands of people were pouring into Corpus Christi each week. Everywhere new outlying flying fields were being scratched out of the dry, ugly Texas soil. Hangars, maintenance shops, barracks and officers’ clubs, it seemed, were sprouting all across the great expanse of Texas. It was semi-organized confusion on a grand scale. For the next six months, along with the fifteen other members of my cadet class from Seattle, I lived, studied, and flew hard while this transformation was taking place. We paid it scant heed. Our minds were set on learning our profession and going on to war, to the Pacific, where Naval aviators were desperately needed.

The skies over Texas were black with airplanes flown