You know what you're supposed to do, but you know what you're gonna do. You turn off the engine but instead of jettisoning the remaining fuel, you roll over and dive for Muroc Air Base. We blister down shit-heavy, 8 Mach in front of the needle, a diveglide faster than most jets at full power. You're thinking, "Let's show those bastards the real X-1."
Below 10,000 feet is the danger zone, the limit for jettisoning fuel with enough maneuver time to glide down to a safe landing. But we're below 5,000 lined up with Muroc's main runway. And we're still in a dive.
We whistle down that main runway only 300 feet oft the ground, until wc are parallel with the control tower. You hit the main rocket switch. The four chambers blow a thirty-foot lick of flame. Christ, the impact nearly knocks you back into last week. That nose is pointed so straight up that you can't see the blue sky out the windshield. We are no longer an airplane: we're a skyrocket. You're not flying. You're holding on to the tiger's tail. Straight up, you're going .75 Mach! In one minute the fuel is gone. By then you're at 35,000 feet, traveling at .85 Mach. You're so excited, scared, and thrilled that you can't say a word until the next day.
But others said plenty. The NACA team thought I was a wild man. Dick Frost chewed me out for doing that slow roll. Even Jack Ridley shook his head. He said, "Any spectators down there knew damned well that wasn't Slick rattling those dishes. Okay, son, you got it all out of your system, but now you're gonna hang tough." Colonel Boyd fired a rocket of his own. "Reply by endorsement about why you exceeded .82 Mach in violation of my direct orders." I asked Ridley to write my reply. "Bullshit," he said. "You did it. You explain it."
I wrote back: "The airplane felt so good and flew so well that I felt certain we would have no trouble going slightly above the agreed speed. The violation of your direct orders was due to the excited state of the undersigned and will not be repeated."
A few days later the old man called me. "Damn it, I expect you to stick to the program and do what you are supposed to. Don't get overeager and cocky. Do you want to jeopardize the first Air Corps research project?"
"No, sir."
"Well, then obey the goddamn rules."
From then on I did. But on that first powered flight I wanted to answer those who said we were doomed in the attempt to go faster than sound. My message was, "Stick it where the sun don't shine."
Going out to .85 Mach put the program out on a limb because it carried us beyond the limits of what was then known about high-speed aerodynamics. Wind tunnels could only measure up to .85 Mach, and as Walt Williams of NACA was quick to point out to me, "From now on, Chuck, you'll be flying in the realm of the unknown." Ridley and I called it "the Ughknown."
Whatever happened, I figured I was better off than the British test pilots who had attempted supersonic flights in high-powered dives. If they got into trouble, that was it-especially in a tailless airplane like The Swallow. All my attempts would be made in climbs-the power of the rocket over the jet-and that way, if I encountered a problem, I could quickly slow down. But the price of rocket power was flying with volatile fuel. Running four chambers, my fuel lasted only two and a half minutes; it lasted five minutes on two chambers and ten minutes on one. Each minute of climbing we got lighter and faster, so that by the time we had climbed up and over at 45,000 feet, we were at max speed.
Who would decide the max speed of a particular flight? This was an Air Corps research project, but the seventeen NACA engineers and technicians used their expertise to try to control these missions. They were there as advisers, with high-speed wind tunnel experience, and were performing the data reduction collected on the X-1 flights, so they tried to dictate the speed in our flight plans. Ridley, Frost, and I always wanted to go faster than they did. They would recommend a Mach number, then the three of us would sit down and decide whether or not we wanted to stick with their recommendation. They were so conservative that it would've taken me six months to get to the barrier.
I wanted to be careful, but I also wanted to get it over with. Colonel Boyd sided with NACA caution going up only two-hundredths of a Mach on each consecutive flight. Once I flew back with Hoover to see if I could get the old man to agree to speed things up. We met in the evening at his home. But Bob led off by trying to explain why he had been forced to crash-land a P-80 a few days before. I could tell the old man wasn't buying Bob's explanations; those thick eyebrows were bunching up. But ol' Hoover pushed on, becoming emotional to the point where he accidentally spat a capped tooth onto the old man's lap. I decided to have my say at another time.
So I flew in small increments of speed. On October 5, I made my sixth powered flight and experienced shock-wave buffeting for the first time as I reached .86 Mach. It felt like I was driving on bad shock absorbers over uneven paving stones. The right wing suddenly got heavy and began to drop, and when I tried to correct it my controls were sluggish. I increased my speed to .88 Mach to see what would happen. I saw my aileron vibrating with shock waves, and only with effort could I hold my wing level.
The X-1 was built with a high tail to avoid air turbulence off the wings, the tail was also thinner than the wings, so that shock waves would not form simultaneously on both surfaces. Thus far the shock waves and buffeting had been manageable, and because the ship was stressed for eighteen Gs, I never was concerned about being shaken apart. Also, I was only flying twice a week, to give NACA time to reduce all the flight data and analyze it. Special sensing devices pinpointed the exact location of shock waves on any part of the airframe. The data revealed that the airplane was functioning exactly as its designers planned.
But on my very next flight we got knocked on our fannies. I was flying at .94 Mach at 40 000 feet experiencing the usual buffeting, when I pulled back on the control wheel, and Christ, nothing happened! The airplane continued flying with the same attitude and in the same direction.
The control wheel felt as if the cables had snapped. I didn't know what in hell was happening. I turned off the engine and slowed down. I jettisoned my fuel and landed feeling certain that I had taken my last ride in the X-1. Flying at .94, I lost my pitch control. My elevator ceased to function. At the speed of sound, the ship's nose was predicted to go either up or down, and without pitch control, I was in a helluva bind.
I told Ridley I thought we had had it. There was no way I was going faster than .94 Mach without an elevator. He looked sick. So did Dick Frost and the NACA team. We called Colonel Boyd at Wright, and he flew out immediately to confer with us. Meanwhile, NACA analyzed the telemetry data from the flight and found that at .94 Mach, a shock wave was slammed right at the hinge point of the elevator on the tail, negating my controls. Colonel Boyd just shook his head. "Well," he said, "it looks to me like we've reached the end of the line." Everyone seemed to agree except for Jack Ridley.
He sat at a corner of the conference table scribbling little notes and equations. He said "Well, maybe Chuck can fly without using the elevator. Maybe he can get by using only the horizontal stabilizer." The stabilizer was the winglike structure on the tail that stabilized pitch control. Bell's engineers had purposely built into them an extra control authority because they had anticipated elevator ineffectiveness caused by shock waves. This extra authority was a trim switch in the cockpit that would allow a small air motor to pivot the stabilizer up or down, creating a moving tail that could act as an auxiliary elevator by lowering or raising the airplane's nose. We were leery about trying it while flying at high speeds; instead, we set the trim on the ground and left it alone.