Life was basic out there, but we had fun, too. We'd hunt jack rabbits or drive over to Pancho Barnes's place and ride horses. She served a nice steak, and we had good times-parties and dances and barbecues. The Zabrowskis had a daughter who babysat for us on Saturday nights, which was a great treat for me. Chuck, too. He couldn't stand sitting around. It drove him crazy. He needed action, otherwise he got antsy and bored. And it had to be constant: something going on all the time. And he is still that way. With him, even driving home from a party could be an adventure. If we spotted a coyote in the headlights, off we'd go across a lakebed, chasing the darned thing-and they could run about 50 mph. We'd no sooner gain on the little devil than he'd stop in his tracks and take off in the opposite direction.
Shortly after we settled in, Chuck drove us to the base to show us the X-1. He purposely hadn't told me he named the plane Glamorous Glennis, but there it was, written on the nose. He did that with his Mustang in England, but this was an important research airplane, and I was very surprised. And proud. He said, "You're my good-luck charm, hon. Any airplane I name after you always brings me home." I really think that's why the Air Corps allowed my name to stay on the X-1. Chuck didn't ask permission to do it and they weren't delighted that he had (the officiai pictures of the ship had my name air-brushed out) but none of the brass wanted to interfere with his good-luck charm and perhaps jinx the mission. So Chuck got his way and I had a namesake that one day would be displayed in the Smithsonian, near another famous airplane, the first one flown by the Wright brothers.
FIRST POWERED FLIGHT AUGUST 29, 1947
Shivering, you bang your gloved hands together and strap on your oxygen mask inside the coldest airplane ever flown. You're being cold-soaked Erom the hundreds of gallons of liquid oxygen (LOX) fuel stored in the compartment directly behind you at minus 296 degrees. No heater, no defroster, you'll just have to grit your teeth for the next fifteen minutes until you land and feel that wonderful hot desert sun. But that cold saps your strength: it's like trying to work and concentrate inside a frozen food locker.
That cold will take you on the ride of your life. You watched the X-1 get its 7:00 A.M. feeding in a swirling cloud of vapor fog, saw the frost form under its orange belly. 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.
Anyone with brain cells would have to wonder what in hell he was doing in such a situation- strapped inside a live bomb that's about to be dropped out of a bomb bay. But risks are the spice of life, and this is the kind of moment that a test pilot lives for. The butterflies are fluttering, but you feed off fear as if it's a high-energy candy bar. It keeps you alert and focused.
You accept risk as part of every new challenge; it comes with the territory. So you learn all you can about the ship and its systems, practice flying it on ground runs and glide flights, plan for any possible contingency, until the odds against you seem more friendly. You like the X-1; she's a sound airplane, but she's also an experimental machine, and you're a researcher on an experimental flight. You know you can be hammered by something unexpected, but you count on your experience, concentration, and instincts to pull you through. And luck. Without luck…
You can't watch yourself fly. But you know when you're in sync with the machine, so plugged into its instruments and controls that your mind and your hand become the heart of its operating system. You can make that airplane talk, and like a good horse, the machine knows when it's in competent hands. You know what you can get away with. And you can be wrong only once. You smile reading newspaper stories about a pilot in a disabled plane that maneuvered to miss a schoolyard before he hit the ground. That's crap. In an emergency situation, a pilot thinks only about one thing-survival. You battle to survive right down to the ground; you think about nothing else. Your concentration is riveted on what to try next. You don't say anything on the radio, and you aren't even aware that a schoolyard exists. That's exactly how it is.
There are at least a dozen different ways that the X-1 can kill you, so your concentration is total during the preflight check procedures. You load up nitrogen gas pressures in the manifolds-your life's blood because the nitrogen gas runs all the internal systems as well as the flaps and landing gear. Then you bleed off the liquid oxygen manifold and shut it down. All's in order.
Half an hour ago, we taxied out to takeoff in the mother ship. Because of the possibility of crashing with so much volatile fuel, they closed down the base until we were safely off the ground. That's the only acknowledgment from the base commander that we even exist. There's no interest in our flights because practically nobody at Muroc gives us any chance for success. Those bastards think they have it all figured. They call our flights "Slick Goodlin's Revenge." The word is that he knew when to get out in one piece by quitting over money.
One minute to drop. Ridley flashes the word from the copilot's seat in the mother ship. We're at 25,000 feet as the B-29 noses over and starts its shallow dive. Major Cardenas, the driver, starts counting backwards from ten.
C-r-r-ack. The bomb shackle release jolts you up from your seat, and as you sail out of the dark bomb bay the sun explodes in brightness. 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. You blink to get your vision, fighting the stall with your control wheel, dropping toward the basement like an elevator whose cable snapped. You're three thousand pounds heavier than in those glide flights. Down goes that nose and you pick up speed. You level out about a thousand feet below the mother ship and reach for that rocket igniter switch.
The moment of truth: if you are gonna be blown up, this is likely to be when. You light the first chamber.
Whoosh. Slammed back in your seat, a tremendous kick in the butt. Nose up and hold on. Barely a sound; you can hear your breathing in the oxygen mask-you're outracing the noise behind you-and for the first time in a powered airplane you can hear the air beating against the windshield as the distant dot that is Hoover's high chase P-80 grows ever bigger. You pass him like he's standing still, and he reports seeing diamond-shaped shock waves leaping out of your fiery exhaust. Climbing faster than you can even think, but using only one of four rocket chambers, you turn it off and light another. We're streaking up at .7 Mach; this beast's power is awesome. You've never known such a feeling of speed while pointing up in the sky. At 45,000 feet, where morning resembles the beginning of dusk, you turn on the last of the four chambers. God, what a ride! And you still have nearly half your fuel left.
Until this moment, you obeyed the flight plan to the letter: firing only one chamber at a time, to closely monitor the chamber pressures; if you use two or more, there's too much to watch. If you fire all four, you may accelerate too rapidly, be forced to raise your nose to slow down, and get yourself into a high-speed stall.
Now the flight plan calls for you to jettison remaining fuel and glide down to land. But you're bug-eyed, thrilled to your toes, and the fighter jock takes over from the cautious test pilot. Screw it! You're up there in the dark part of the sky in the most fabulous flying machine ever built, and you're just not ready to go home. The moment calls for a nice slow roll, and you lower your wing, pulling a couple of Gs until you're hanging upside down in zero Gs and the engine quits. As soon as the X-1 rights itself it starts again, but you've been stupid. At zero Gs the fuel couldn't feed the engine, and you might have been blown up. But the X-1 is forgiving — this time.