And he was one helluva pilot. He flew practically everything that was being tested at Wright, all the bombers, cargo planes, and fighters. If a test pilot had a problem, you could bet Colonel Boyd would get in that cockpit and see for himself what was wrong. He held the three-kilometer, low-altitude world speed record of 624 mph, in a specially built Shooting Star. So, he knew all about piloting, and all about us, and if we got out of line, you had the feeling that the old man would be more than happy to take you behind a hangar and straighten you out. In later years, he and I would fly together a lot doing test work, and we developed a warm relationship. But one thing had nothing to do with another: whenever I got out of line, he swatted me down. I've got the scars to show for it. Outside of Glennis, he became the most important person I've known. He completely changed my life in ways I never could imagine.
In January 1946, the skies over Wright Field were finally quiet. That's because Bob Hoover and I were sitting in class at the test pilot school on base, taking a six-month course. By far the smartest guy in our class was a skinny little bomber pilot from Oklahoma named Jack Ridley. He had studied at Caltech, and was about ten steps ahead of the others, and a lot more than that ahead of me. The course was a bitch, and it took me a while to get with it because I lacked the academic background. We were taught to reduce data, plot graphs and charts using calculus and algebraic formulas. When I didn't understand something, I'd go to Ridley for help, and he always explained a problem in ways that made it clear for me. As it turned out, Jack would do that time and again in the years ahead, saving my life many times.
The point was to teach you to fly in extremely precise ways, then prepare technical reports reducing the data of your flight into charts and graphs. As test pilots we would be investigating extremely specific performance characteristics of a particular airplane to determine whether or not it met its military specifications. Half a day of classroom work and half a day of flying. The flying part was for me a breeze. We'd crawl into a prop trainer with a test card to record our measurements. The assignment might be to find out the best climbing speed of the airplane. You'd start at 90 mph, hold it exactly, and record the rate of climb-about nine hundred feet a minute at a certain altitude. Then you'd increase to 100 mph and record that rate of climb. Then 110 mph…. Back on the ground, you'd record these three points and calculate a curve that showed the best airspeed-110 mph in that particular airplane. On board your aircraft was a barograph, a smoked drum rotating with two needles showing time and altitude. The barograph paper revealed how accurately you flew. If you performed a perfect rate of climb and descent, the graph looked like the teeth in a saw, and it was called a saw-tooth climb. It meant perfect precision flying. The instructor showed my graph to the class and said, "This saw-tooth climb belongs in a textbook." Because of my flying ability, they took mercy on my academics.
But I came within an inch of being bounced out of test pilot school and out of the service. I took off with my instructor one day in a two-seat T-6 prop trainer to run a power-speed test at 5,000 feet. Suddenly, the master rod blew apart in the engine, and the ship began to vibrate as if it would fall apart. I cut back on the power and began looking down to see where I could make an emergency landing. We were over Ohio farmland with plenty of plowed fields. I didn't want to bail out unless it was absolutely necessary. My instructor, a lieutenant named Hatfield, hadn't done much flying, and I looked back at him in the mirror and saw that his teeth were sticking to his lips. I said, "No sweat. Lock your shoulder harness and make sure your belt is tight because I'm gonna try and make it into one of these fields."
There were two fields on either side, and I started to set myself up on one of them. But I was sinking too fast coming in on a dead stick to make one field, and was really too high to use all of the other field so we came in between the two, directly in the path of a farmhouse, a chicken house, a smokehouse, and a well. Wheels up, we hit the ground, slithering along and went through the chicken house in a clatter of boards and a cloud of feathers. As the airplane skidded to a stop, the right wing hit the smokehouse, turning us sideways, and the tail hit the front end of the farmhouse porch, flipping us around. We came to rest right alongside the farmwife's kitchen window. She was at the sink, looking out, and I was looking her right in the eye through a swirl of dust and feathers. I opened the canopy and managed a small smile. "Morning, Ma'am," I said. "Can I use your telephone? "
Because there was a loss of civilian property, a board of inquiry was held. One of the witnesses was a councilman in a nearby village who claimed that before I crash-landed, I had buzzed down Main Street. Lieutenant Hatfield, who was my passenger, supported my denial, but those four majors on the board seemed hostile in their questioning, and I was scared to death. I could easily have been court-martialed. But the barograph aboard my airplane was my best defense. It clearly showed my altitude at the time of the engine problem, and what we were doing before I hit. Without that thing aboard, I'd probably be back in Hamlin digging turnips.
I was stuck at this damned hearing when my son, Donald, was born and because of it I couldn't get home for a couple of weeks. Andy was also gone when little Jim was born a few weeks earlier. He was off recruiting somewhere while Wily had the baby back in California. The military was the pits for things like that, but there was nothing you could do about it except get out. It was exciting, though, being a father, even if the news came long distance; I told Glennis on the phone that if I were flying at this moment, I'd do three slow rolls down on the deck. When I finally did get back and held Don in my arms, it was one of the big moments of my life. I figured that our lives would settle down as soon as I got test pilot school behind me. Little did I know.
A few months after I graduated from school, Colonel Boyd selected me to be the principal pilot to fly the X-1 and try to break the sound barrier.
FROM NOBODY TO SOMEBODY
German pilots dove for their lives in dogfights-wide-open, straight down power dives-in a desperate gamble to get us off their tails. Sometimes they never did pull out and plowed into the ground. More than once, I almost followed them in. Diving at more than 500 mph, my Mustang began to shake violently and my controls froze. I nearly bent that damned stick straining to pull out. I was lucky that Mustangs were slightly more resistant than the German airplanes to shock waves that form at the speed of sound (Mach 1). Air travels faster across the top curved surface of a wing than across the flat bottom, producing lift. In a steep dive, turbulent air was ripping past my wings at 700 mph or better, while shock waves slammed against my ailerons and stabilizer. At sea level, the speed of sound is 760 mph; at 40,000 feet, it is 660 mph. This buffeting in power dives was called "compressibility" and led to a widely held belief in the existence of a "sound barrier," an invisible wall of air that would smash any airplane that tried to pierce it at Mach 1.