On one of these trips, I showed Andy the X-1. He still talks about it. Here was a Top Secret, six million dollar research plane, and the two of us slid back the hangar door and walked in. No guards, no nothing. There were only thirteen of us working on the project, and we were off by ourselves at the south end of the lakebed. There were two big hangars and a few shacks and Quonset huts shimmering in the summer desert sun. The base commander, a bird colonel, ignored us completely. There isn't a film record on any of my first rides because no one bothered to install movie cameras. We weren't exactly warmly welcomed. Colonel Boyd had told me that no one would know that I existed unless or until the flights were successful. I didn't have to be a genius to figure out that they were putting plenty of distance between their own hides and south base to see whether or not the only thing I'd break was my own precious neck.
Yeager, Ridley, and Hoover arrived at Muroc in mid July. The rumor I heard about the two pilots was that they were the most junior guys in the flight test section at Wright and therefore the most expendable in a catastrophe. That was the kind of sour-grapes rumor that I didn't believe. What I did believe was that they were supposedly two of the hottest fighter jocks in the Air Corps, who always flew balls-out. Having been a fighter test pilot myself, that description fit.
The military test pilots were very macho, in some it didn't show as aggressively as in others, but inside they were all the same. They'd rather fly a fighter than do anything else in the world, and they were awfully good at it. They flew daringly, surviving a lot of close shaves that killed some of their buddies. Each was convinced that he was better than a friend who bought the farm. When that happened, one part of them was sorry, another part contemptuous-the idea being that busting one s ass doesn't happen to those who know what they're doing. "Dumb bastard should've known better" was a common attitude. Supreme self-confidence is a big part of a fighter test pilot's baggage, a real cockiness. But they saw enough buddies die to know that what they were doing was a dangerous way to live. So all of them adopted the eat, drink, and be merry attitude, even if they had never heard the cliche. Being a wild character was part of their trade, and there were always plenty of women drawn to their bravery. I'd been around fighter pilots all my life, so I figured I knew Chuck and Bob even before I met them.
Ridley told me that Yeager had made the most perfect saw-tooth climb barograph record ever seen at Wright Field and that Hoover was simply a magician in the cockpit. My first impressions of the two were very different. Hoover was a happy-go-lucky stick-and-rudder man, a helluva good pilot, but Chuck Yeager was all test pilot. He was intent and serious. My job was to hold class every day for two weeks and teach them all that I knew about the X-1. I had been with it from the beginning and knew that airplane inside and out.
I was project engineer on all of Slick Goodlin's flights. Like Chuck, Slick was a superb pilot with all the courage in the world. They also shared an identically cool response to dangerous situations-completely cool to save themselves and their airplane. They were both only twentyfour, but Chuck had more native good sense and didn't care a damn about fame or wealth. The biggest difference between them was Slick's lack of interest in learning about the airplane and its power system. He knew how to fire the rocket engines or how to handle problems by common sense and overall pilot experience. But he depended entirely on the fact that I was in the sky with him, flying chase, and it never occurred to him that the radio might go out. In a pinch, he counted on me to tell him what to do. Yeager would rely on himself. I couldn't teach him enough.
Chuck didn't say much. He sat in class listening, and I could tell from his eyes that he understood everything. When he asked a question, it was always to the point. The guy was an instinctive engineer, born to an innate understanding of mechanics and mechanical systems. He told me that the pressure valve system on board was exactly the same as the one he had worked with helping his Dad in the gas fields of West Virginia. Those first days in the classroom, he was sizing me up. There was a certain skeptical look in his eyes, probably from the feeling that people looked down on him because he lacked their education and background, but, by God, he'd show them. He was immensely competitive and beat my ass off by the hour playing ping-pony. But any feeling of inadequacy he had about being only a West Virginia high-school graduate was nonsense. He used Ridley and me as his professors and wound up knowing nearly as much as we did.
I recall him as a loner-both gregarious and a loner, who needed space by himself, but also needed fun with others. I've seen this loner quality often in those who were topnotch test pilots.
We'd talk during lunch and coffee breaks, and I was amazed to learn about some of the independent research flying he had done, strictly out of his own curiosity. He was fascinated by ground effect. His opinion was that you couldn't fly the Shooting Star jet fighter into the ground while flying just over it. He knew because he had tried it! He flew ten feet or less over the ground to test his theory. No one would ever ask a pilot to try that stunt, but Chuck was aufficiently curious and skilled to pilot that P-80 over a flat lakebed and feel the ground effect for himself- the pressures that build up beneath an airplane as it approaches ground-level. Air compresses under it and it flies differently. He did it carefully; he wasn't about to kill himself, but he wanted to know. On flying and airplanes, his curiosity was endless, and it was his accumulated experience and knowledge that saved his life on several occasions. Yeager could always find that extra option in a critical situation that another pilot didn t know about.
The X- 1 was a complex airplane. It was only thirty-one feet long with a twenty-eight-foot wingspan. It had a high tail with a stabilizer in the fin, well above the wake of turbulent air off the wings at transonic speeds. It had a straight, extremely thin wing to delay the onset of shock waves as long as possible. It was a beautiful airplane to fly, but at least half the aviation engineers I had talked to thought it was doomed. Chuck raised a few questions that I answered uncomfortably, but frankly. He asked whether I thought he could survive a bailout. I told him, no way. He'd be sliced in half by those thin wings. But he never did ask me if I believed in an impregnable sound barrier. At best, I was ambivalent about it, and the only honest answer would have been that if any airplane could do it, it would be the X-1.
Dick Frost taught me all the systems, but without Jack Ridley, the X-1 probably would never have succeeded. Jack looked like a little elf with big ears that stuck straight out from the sides of his head. He was in his late twenties, but his skin was already weathered from the sun and wind, and when Glennis met him, she said, "Jack could pass for a man who is a hundred and three." That was true. He had an Oklahoma drawl and a dry Sooner wit, smoked like a fiend, and was always burning holes in his shirt and tie because he forgot to flick his cigarette ashes. He was small and tough; in college he had been a bantam wrestling champion, and although he was as sweet-natured as any man I've ever known, put a couple of drinks in him and he'd want to take on the biggest and toughest pilots he could find. Andy was the same, and because of those two, we were forever getting bounced off barroom walls. Jack loved to raise hell, but it was a chore getting him going because he pretended to be henpecked. "Jesus, Nell will kill me," he'd protest. But he always went along. He once went out with test pilot Pete Everest and got blasted. Jack was a complete mess when he staggered up on his front porch. Nell greeted him by hurling out a pillow and blanket, then slammed the door in his face.