I trusted Jack with my life. He was the only person on earth who could have kept me from flying the X-1. As committed as I was to the program, and with all that was riding on these flights, if Jack had said, "Chuck, if you fly in that thing, you're not gonna make it," that would have been it for yours truly. Jack was brilliant. He had been the prize pupil of Dr. Theodore Von Karman, the great Hungarian aerodynamicist, while a graduate student at Caltech. But he was also one sharp cookie who could spot a flaw in a flight profile or an engineering design before anyone else. Colonel Boyd told me, "Use Ridley. I'm sending him out there with you because you can always trust his judgment." And I always did.
At Muroc, we had to deal with a high-powered team of scientists and engineers from the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), the forerunner of the space agency. Those guys were in charge of the five hundred pounds of monitoring instrumentation aboard the X-1 and ultimately had a lot to say about the pace of our flights-how quickly we attempted to breach the barrier. It was clear that the NACA guys had expected Boyd to send out his most senior people, both in experience and education. Instead, Jack and I were just captains, Hoover a lieutenant-and the two pilots had never had any college. NACA wasn't thrilled.
I'd attend these highly technical NACA preflight planning sessions and postflight briefings and not know what in hell they were talking about. But Jack always took me aside and translated the engineers' technical jargon into layman's terms. There was no way I could communicate with Walt Williams, who headed the NACA team. He had a reputation for being pompous. But when Jack spoke, it was the only time that any of Walt's colleagues ever saw him listen intently to somebody else. Everyone listened to Jack that way. He had a lot more practical knowledge of what we were doing than any of the others. So, Jack is the one I relied upon, I really felt that he was my life-insurance policy. When he explained something, I usually kept asking why until I understood it thoroughly. If I had my own opinion, we'd discuss it and argue until we both agreed. Because he was also a good pilot and was so practical, we were always on the same wavelength. Ridley knew me so well that when I described something that was happening with the X-1, he knew immediately what we were getting into. Without having him close at hand, I'd have been lost.
There was one incident with Jack that cemented my trust in him. We had only been at Muroc a few days, when a training command pilot out of Luke Air Force Base had run out of fuel and made an emergency landing on a small strip out on the desert somewhere. These little strips were all over, constructed during the war as a hedge against a Japanese invasion of the West Coast, and were designed as emergency strips for prop fighters. The airplane that had run out of fuel was a P-84 Thunderjet, needing a longer runway to take off again with a load of fuel aboard. So, Jack said to me, "Come on, let's go out there and see what we can do about it." I can still see him standing next to that jet on that small runway working his slide rule. He calculated exactly how much fuel we'd need to get the jet back to Luke, then he carefully paced off the exact spot where I should fire jet boosters to lift off, driving in a stake at that point. He said, "I've given you ten feet of runway to spare. That should be plenty." A crew brought in the boosters and the fuel, and I took off, fired the boosters at the marker, and was airborne with ten feet to spare. After that, if Jack had told me, "No sweat Chuck, I've left you three inches," that would've been fine by me.
Jack was so convinced that the sound barrier was breakable that he eased my own fears. He said flat out, "The only barrier is bad aerodynamics and bad planning. Bell has designed the perfect ship for this program, and we're not gonna make any mistakes getting there." Period. Sure, I was neryous. But it was a good kind of neryousness-the neryousness of flying a completely different kind of airplane for the first time, of wanting to learn everything about it before I crawled inside, and psyching myself not to screw it up. It was the tension of wanting to get it over with as quickly as possible and getting back in one piece. I was intimidated by that orange beast, but Jack put me right about that too. He said, "Aw, bullshit, Chuck. You make quick friends with every new airplane that you fly. After a couple of flights in the X-1, you'll be in love. She won't bite you without any warning." He knew what he was talking about.
There was another guy who knew what he was talking about too, because he had already flown the X-1 twenty times. Slick Goodlin was still around, and Pancho Barnes, who ran the Fly Inn bar and restaurant at the edge of Rogers Dry Lake, arranged for Hoover and me to meet Slick at a dinner at her place, and have him brief us about flying the X-1. We had a steak and a couple of drinks. I said, "I was hoping you could tell me a few things to know about flying that bugger." Slick said he'd be glad to check me out in the X-1 as soon as the Air Corps made out a thousanddollar contract. I told him, "Well, Slick, if you flew that thing, I guess I can, too." Pancho was really ticked at him.
The first flights would be nonpowered, familiarization flights, scheduled for the middle of August. I'd be dropped at 25,000 feet from the B-29 mother ship, without any fuel aboard, and glide back down and land on the lakebed. That way, I could get a feel for the ship and its handling, as well as practice glide landing, which is how we landed even on powered flights. Any remaining fuel was jettisoned, and I glided in. Dead-sticking in was a must because of a lightweight landing gear that could not withstand the heavy load of a ship carrying fuel. And it was also safer that way. X-1 fuel was volatile.
I didn't eat much breakfast the morning of that first flight. I was out early watching them load the X-1 under the B-29, by backing it into a cross-shaped pit and pulling the bomber over it. Then the X-1 was hoisted up and hooked to the B-29's bomb bay with a bomb shackle. I'd fly in the B-29 until we got to altitude, then climb down a ladder to enter the X-1. Ridley would lower the cabin door, which I locked into place, then I would settle into the tiny cockpit and wait to be dropped like a goddamn bomb. The cockpit was pressurized with pure nitrogen that was nonflammable, so I had to be on 100 percent oxygen at all times. We had no backup oxygen system, that's how you did business in those days. A lot of the times, you'd get a leaky oxygen mask and land groggy. And we had only one battery to activate the radio, the propellant valves, the instrumentation, and the telemetry system. No backup battery, either. So, I guess that Colonel Boyd wasn't out of line when he suddenly sent for me just before I left for Muroc. Because I lived on base and Glennis wasn't around he just assumed I was a bachelor. Somehow he learned I was married and a father and he really looked perturbed. I told him because I had a family I would fly more cautiously than an unmarried pilot.
"This is a highly risky project," he said. "Have you considered what might happen to your family?"
"Yes, sir," I said, "I plan to bring them to Muroc as soon as we can find some housing."
I was good at watching out for myself in a cockpit. The only trouble was that with the X-1, there was so much to watch out for.
How we dropped the X-1 never varied from the first glided flight to the final powered run. Once everything was squared away on the ground, I stored my helmet inside the cockpit because I didn't want to carry it coming down the ladder. The first hardhat helmets had yet to be built, so I made my own by cutting the top out of a World War II tank helmet which fit like a protective dome on top of my skull and put four straps and a snap on my pilot's leather helmet, which was fitted around the dome. Then I carried my parachute and boarded the mother ship. I would sit on an apple box behind Maj. Bob Cardenas, the pilot, and Ridley, the copilot, as we taxied out and took off. We took off early in the morning, so that the sun would not be in my face when I landed on the dry lakebed. Cardenas kept his climb within gliding distance of Rogers Dry Lake. His flight plan called for him to climb to 25,000 feet, then back off for some forty miles to pick up speed, but always stay within gliding distance of the lakebed. He then dropped the nose into a twenty-degree diving angle until he reached 240 mph indicated. Then he gave me a countdown of ten and dropped me.