Near dawn, the bar was a wreck with only a few survivors still standing, and my God, there wasn't a cloud in the sky! It was a perfect, beautiful day! We had to fly!
We never compromised a mission no matter what we had done the night before. Not a hangover, not the weather-nothing ever stopped us. But this was rough. Chuck's dad drove him to the base, watched him throw up then climb into his fighter. He asked him, "Son, you do this often? Puke one minute, take off the next?" Chuck said, "No, Dad. This is the first and last time."
Everyone was sucking oxygen like mad. I was in a pressurized bomber and tried to get up as high as I could-about 43,000 feet. We made our run. The object was for the fighters to try to find and intercept us. On the way up, I was talking to Chuck on the radio, telling him about having sandwiches and asking him, "How ya doin', buddy?" I heard him panting, "You son of a bitch." I grinned and raised my nose even higher. Suddenly I looked up, and there's that goddamn Yeager in an F-86. He came in from behind and was practically sitting in the cockpit with me. He said, "Hey, you weenie, gimme a bite of your sandwich. '
There will never be another era like that one. In the sky and on the ground, we lived to the max. Chuck was like most of us: he wasn't ambitious at all; he just stumbled into things. His only ambition was to fly every airplane and fly the hell out of each one. That was about it. But he wasn't easy to know. He and Andy were like close brothers, but with the rest of us, we were Pancho regulars to raise hell with. You had to know Chuck. Certain traits came with the territory. He never did a goddamn thing he didn't want to do, ever. Go hunting with him and he followed his own path. If you wanted to go along, fine; if not, see you around. You make enemies that way, but he never cared. He pissed off Andy and me dozens of times, but if you know Chuck, you know it's coming, and you keep it in perspective because the other side of him really works out; you always have a wonderful time in his company.
Mention his name and I don't think of the sound barrier or any of his other accomplishments. I think of him nose to nose with some bomber pilot at Pancho's. Or racing me for a couple of hundred miles balls to the wall. Or sneaking in booze to me at the base hospital when I was recovering from an accident. I think of him… I think of crazy Pancho, and I think how lucky I was to have shared that time and space, with those people and in that place in the middle of nowhere.
THE FIRE NEXT TIME
The plan was for me to continue flying the X-1 until we had exhausted the airplane's research capabilities while flying supersonic at high altitude. Between breaking the sound barrier and my next flight, there was a two-week delay to overhaul the engine. Meanwhile my ribs healed, and I felt good crawling again into that familiar cramped cockpit on the morning of October 27. I was supposed to go out to 1.08 Mach, but when I was dropped from the mother ship, I just plummeted like a thirteen-thousand-pound boulder. All my electrical controls and switches-dead.
While strapped to the B-29's bomb bay, we ran the X-1's electrical system off the mother ship's battery to save power. Only after being dropped do I discover my main battery switch is out. Without power, I can't actuate the propellant valve or ignite the rockets. Loaded with fuel, I'm able to glide, but I'm falling fast, with no way to land safely.
It looked like a sure splat on the deck, with the only possible way out to jump for it and make it past those razor wings. And that's exactly what would've happened, if not for Dick Frost, who was a great "what if" engineer. He would actually bolt upright in bed, dreaming up "what ifs." And fortunately for me, he is the one who thought, "What if they drop the X-1 and the battery becomes disconnected?" He thought of that before the first powered flight, went out and bought a twenty-five-dollar valve, which he attached to a bottle of nitrogen gas. That way, I could manually open the jettison valve to slowly blow out my fuel.
It didn't take me very long to realize that Dick's valve was all that I had left. It was now or never to expel 604 gallons of fuel. I was down to 10,000 feet and falling, and the emergency jettison was twice as slow as normal. And without radio contact with the mother ship or chase planes, I had no way of knowing whether the emergency valve was really working. I made my turn toward the lakebed at 5,000 feet, and noticed that we were slowing down, which meant I was getting rid of fuel. The question was, how much fuel? All of it or some of it? The landing gear release lever worked, but I had no way of knowing whether or not the wheels were locked down. I needed time to blow out all that fuel; otherwise, I'd land heavy, crack the gear, and probably blow up.
My best chance was to come in at high speed, keep it a few feet above the ground, gradually slow it down, so that if I stalled, I would drop onto the lakebed. And that's what I did: delayed, delayed delayed while only inches above the lakebed, until I could delay no longer and we bounced in. By the time we stopped rolling, Frost came running up. I got out a little unsteady. "Well, pal, I owe you one," I said. Dick laughed. "You sure as hell do, pard, and don't you forget it."
The cause of the electrical failure on board was a tiny deposit of corrosion between one of the battery terminals and a cable connector. It was so minor that a light pull on the cable reestablished contact, and from then on our preflight check included disconnecting the X-1 from the B-29 electrical supply. But this incident was a reminder of how complicated and potentially dangerous these missions really were. There was no way to be too careful, and even when we were, the X-1 kept finding new ways to bite.
We began having a few heart-thumping problems with the bomb shackle release that dropped me from the mother ship. In early November, the crew forgot to pull the safety pin out of the release mechanism. I heard a loud pop, was dropped an inch or two, then just hung there in the bomb bay, the weight of the undropped X-1 straining that shackle with the safety pin bound into it. I was suspended precariously between mother ship and mother earth. The B-29 couldn't continuously maintain the 240 mph dive necessary to keep the X-1 from stalling, but they kept diving while Ridley and Cardenas wondered what in hell to try next. They dove through 18,000 feet, but the X-1 just wouldn't fall free. Cardenas finally decided we were diving so low that it was becoming dangerous.
No choice but to dump the X-1 fuel and land with the orange beast still attached to the B-29's belly, but not with this test pilot still sitting inside. I had to get back out and up that ladder. That was touchy, too, because the X-1 could've dropped while I was climbing out. I scrambled out in record time, joining the others in the cockpit to sweat out the landing. We made it back without any damage, but not by much.
Despite an overhaul of the release system, on the very next flight the same thing happened. This time the safety pin was released, but for some unfathomable reason, the X-1 wouldn't drop. Cardenas dove below 18,000 and had just pulled out, when the X-1 suddenly lurched free. I was caught by surprise, having just started to unbuckle my safety harness. We fell about twenty miles an hour under the stall speed, and I had to fight against that stall real fast. I finally recovered after dropping five thousand feet and ignited the rockets about twelve thousand feet lower than planned.