Larry Bell was a great salesman. He was a self-made man, in love with aviation all his life, and by the time he got through selling us on the beauty of his orange beast, we were ready to believe that the X-1 could punch its way through the Pearly Gates and make it back covered with angel's feathers. A lot of what his engineers had to tell us sailed over my head, but not Ridley's: he sat there scribbling notes like teacher's pet. But I understood enough. It was reassuring to learn that the ship was built to withstand stress of eighteen Gs, or eighteen times the force of gravity. But the thin wings were razor-edged to dissipate shock waves, so if you had to jump for it, the only way out was through a side door that positioned you to be cut in half. Crammed inside that small ship were a dozen round fuel containers, stored from nose to tail, making that thing a flying bomb. And you didn't take off in the X-1: you were dropped like a bomb from the B-29 mother ship at 25,000 feet, giving the pilot time to jettison the fuel and dead stick in for a lakebed landing if something went wrong.
"Without fuel aboard, she handles like a bird," Larry Bell told us.
"A live bird or a dead one?" Hoover asked.
Late in the day, we stood in a hangar, open at one end, for a close look at the X-1, which was chained to the ground. I crawled in the cockpit and was invited to fire the engines. You could light them one at a time. I threw a switch, and, my God! A sheet of flame shot twenty feet out the back door. I clapped my hands over my ears against the loudest manmade noise ever heard on earth. I threw a second switch and that damned plane began surging against its chains; the hangar was shaking, and plaster and dust rained down on us. The noise was so fierce I thought my eyes would pop out. Hoover and I laughed in awe. We didn't walk too steady when we left that hangar. I told him, "Pard, I don't know about you but that sumbitch scares me to death." He agreed it was a damned monster. But not Ridley. He wore that engineer's smile, and on the ride back to Wright he said, "God almighty, what a brute-force machine! Those Bell guys have it figured just right. That sound barrier ain't got a chance." Then, for the two high school graduates aboard, he translated into simple English what the Bell engineers had tried to explain.
So I had some idea of what I was talking about when Colonel Boyd sent for me to hear my impressions. "Sir," I said, "that's the most tremendous airplane I've ever seen." He asked me if I wanted to fly in it, and when I said yes, he said, "Okay, Yeager, it's your ride."
Selecting the X-1 pilot was one of the most difficult decisions of my life. If the pilot had an accident, he could set back our supersonic program a couple of years. Looking back, I'm amazed at the freedom given to me to select the crew. I had full authority and didn't have to defend my decision to anyone. And I was well aware that the decision could be historic, so I asked my deputy, Col. Fred Ascani, to sit down with me and review all of the 125 pilots in the flight test division and see what kind of list we could compile. We informed each pilot we interviewed that this was definitely a high-risk project, that most scientists believed that at Mach I shock waves would be so severe that the airplane would break up in flight. Our own Air Corps engineers thought it could be done, but at a very high risk.
I wanted an unmarried man with no family ties, eliminating that part of the risk. I wanted a pilot capable of doing extremely precise, scientific flying. Above all, I wanted a pilot who was rock-solid in stability. Yeager came up number one.
He had a couple of children at the time, but there was no doubt in our mind that he was the one because of his ability to perform and his stability and willingness to follow instructions, and, of course, his tremendous ability as a pilot. We put Chuck under heavy pressure to test his reaction. We interviewed him for more than an hour, with him standing stiffly at attention the whole time. I told him, "Now, Captain Yeager, tell us why you want to be selected and why you think you can succeed." Well, he had thought it through and said, "Sir, I'm sure I can do it if it can be done. And I wouldn't be standing here if I didn't believe the Air Corps could do it." To me, Chuck was the ideal candidate, and I still feel that way twenty-seven years later. We had several other outstanding pilots to choose from, but none of them could quite match his skill in a cockpit or his coolness under pressure. About the only negative was his lack of a college education. That placed me in a defensive position, if my superiors would ever second-guess me-but, fortunately, they didn't. Jack Ridley provided the engineering backup for Chuck, and those two were so close that we knew Chuck would rely heavily on Jack. I've never seen anyone who could explain engineering concepts better than Ridley, who was one helluva engineer and a test pilot himself.
I really did sweat out the crew selection, but in the end I felt we had the best group available to try to do what many thought was impossible. Over the years, I've often been asked if Chuck were the only one who could've successfully flown the X-1. I don't know, but I can't think of anyone who could've done a better job.
Maj. Gen. Fred J. Ascani
I was Colonel Boyd's executive officer in Flight Test back in 1947. Boyd agonized over selecting the X-1 pilot, and uncharacteristically brought me in as a participant while he pondered for three whole days. He treated it like the momentous decision it was. Fighter pilots are the most egotistical bunch in the business. But flight test fighter pilots are a couple of orders of magnitude higher than that, so we didn't lack for candidates who thought they were the logical choice. Nor were fighter pilots ignorant of military rank, and most of them assumed that the senior people in the test pilot stable had the inside track. There was a definite pecking order, and junior men like Yeager had to wait their turn. The competitiveness and rivalry among test pilots was such that, for example, in the short landing phase of a flight test, if a pilot were able to land, say in five hundred feet, you could bet that there would be a series of accidents as other pilots tried landing in three hundred. It was dog-eat-dog.
Well, we all wanted to be somebody, but some got to be somebody more than others. In those days, Chuck wasn't quite a nobody but he wasn't a somebody either, and I mostly knew him by reputation, which was as an extremely proficient pilot, who flew with an uncanny, instinctive feel for the airplane. He's the only pilot I've ever flown with who gives the impression that he's part of the cockpit hardware, so in tune with the machine that instead of being flesh and blood, he could be an autopilot. He could make an airplane talk. Boyd thought that Chuck was the best instinctive pilot he had ever seen.
Piloting and dependability were the two principal criteria in making his decision. Education was not a factor, or else Yeager would have been quickly eliminated. Chuck was very unpolished. He barely spoke English. I'm not referring to his West Virginia drawl; I mean grammar and syntax. He could barely construct a recognizable sentence; the Chuck Yeager who does A.C.-Delco commercials nowadays bears no resemblance to the Chuck Yeager back then. We knew that our choice would become world-famous breaking the sound barrier, and Bovd fretted about the Air Corps' image if its hero didn't know a verb from a noun. He decided that before Chuck would meet the public, I would give him English lessons.