"Yeager"

[fiefoe]

The realm of the Ughknown and the Unexpected:

• All I knew was that Wright Field was a fun place to be, loaded with every airplane in the inventory, and there was plenty of gasoline. It was like Aladdin's lamp with unlimited rubs.
• Bob became a legend: he had about twenty major accidents, all equipment failure, and once made it back into Wright on a dead engine by bouncing his wheels off a passing truck to give himself altitude over a chain link fence.
• David Clark, a corset manufacturer in Worchester, MA, received an Air Corps contract for the first high-altitude pressure suits. 
• The first hard-hat helmets had yet to be built, so I made my own by cutting the top out of a World War II tank helmet. 
• In fact, loaded with fuel, the X-1 stalled at anything below 240 mph, and the climbing speed of the B-29 was only 180 mph. We figured that if I were dropped at a slow speed in a stall, I would probably have time to recover and fire off the rocket engines, as long as I was above 10,000 feet.
• That was an eerie sight; you're carrying six hundred gallons of LOX and water alcohol on board that can blow up at the flick of an igniter switch and scatter your pieces over several counties. But if all goes well, the beast will chug-a-lug a ton of fuel a minute.
• You're looking into the sky. Wrong! You should be dropped level. The dive speed was too slow, and they dropped you in a nose-up stall.
• So, Ridley and I ground tested that stabilizer system every which way but loose. It worked fine, and provided just enough control (about a quarter of a degree change in the angle of incidence) so that we both felt I could get by without using the airplane's elevator.
• Eighty seconds after starting the engines I was at 23,000 feet at 1.03 Mach! 
• During the late fifties at Edwards, a test pilot, diving in a Mach 2 fighter, actually outraced the shells from his cannons and shot himself down.
• Up there, with only a wisp of an atmosphere, steering an airplane was like driving on slick ice.
• And then we started going in four different directions at once, careening all over the sky, snapping and rolling and spinning, in what pilots call going divergent on all three axes. I called it hell.
• The real art to test flying was survival; maybe only a spoonful of more luck and more skill made the critical difference between a live test pilot and a street name.
  

<<