ON A PEDESTAL
Chuck Yeager was a car tinkerer, and I was always tinkering with model trains. I remember driving out to his place one Sunday morning to borrow some tools. We went into his garage, and I was startled to see the Collier Trophy, which he had received at the White House, sitting there on his work bench. He was using the most prestigious award in aviation to store his nuts and bolts.
The X-1 made me famous. The awards, medals and plaques began piling up, and at first, collecting them was fun. All that was asked of me was to show up at places like the White House in a freshly pressed uniform, smile for the birdie, collect the Collier Trophy from the President, shake his hand, and say thank you. Or go with Glennis, who was dressed to the nines in an evening gown and looked gorgeous, to attend a classy banquet in Dayton, where the International Aviation Federation presented me with a one-pound solid gold medal. We stored it in a bank vault.
The flight was compared in importance to Lindbergh's solo across the Atlantic in 1927, but I received no ticker-tape parade down Broadway-nothing like it. By the time the Air Force announced the flight eight months later it was old news to official Washington, and a couple of other pilots, including Colonel Boyd, had also punched through Mach 1. But there were big headlines about it, and reporters came out to our house, scaring the hell out of the boys who were awakened from their nap to have flashbulbs popped in their sleepy faces.
I felt the flight should have received recognition sooner than it did, but figured it was kept secret to give us time over the Russians to develop a moving tail on new fighters then on the drawing boards. I was a little miffed, but not like Larry Bell, who wanted the prestige for his company, or like ol' Pancho, who called pals like General Doolittle and General Spaatz and told them that by the time the Air Force got off its ass, the Navy would probably have flown out to Mach 2.
"Those assholes in Washington are blowing this whole thing," she complained to me. "You're getting a royal screwing." I told her, "Well, up theirs. My flight is in the history books, and that's the whole nine yards for me. All the other crap doesn't mean a thing." That was how I felt about it.
Hell, I was being practical, not modest. Movie stars put up with all the demands that go with fame because it means bucks. As a blue suiter I wasn't going to get a dime out of the deal. And being famous with the public meant absolutely nothing to a guy living out in the middle of the Mojave Desert. The public wanted heroes, and to me, I was just a lucky kid who caught the right ride. But then, I was naive as could be, living a cloistered life out at Muroc, where the flying was fun and the living was easy.
It was a tight little circle. My life was flying and pilots. I didn't spend a whole helluva lot of time doing or thinking about anything else, unless it was quail hunting at Hansen's Ranch near Jawbone Canyon, or fishing for golden trout high in the Sierras. At a party we were like a bunch of damned doctors, talking a lingo no outsider could understand; our wives would say, "Oh, God, pilot talk again." We were an obsessed bunch, probably worse than other military pilots because we were so isolated. About the only civilians we knew were company test pilots, who flew in to run test programs. The outside world was mostly a place we flew over. But that quickly changed.
Being famous didn't serve any useful purpose for me as far as I could tell. The only compliments that really mattered came from guys like Larry Bell, Dick Frost, and Jack Ridley, who had been intimately associated with my flights. The only reward that really mattered came from Colonel Boyd, who assigned me the testing of the XF-92, the experimental prototype of the first deltawing airplane. Convair pioneered delta-wing configuration, and if this prototype proved itself in testing, they would proceed with the F-102, the Air Force's first delta-wing supersonic jet fighter.
The old man raised hell with Convair because their own test work proceeded so slowly, their chief test pilot had flown the airplane for almost a year, but was so spooked by the XF-92's supersensitive handling characteristics that he refused to take off if the wind was blowing at more than ten miles an hour. He had only had it out to .85 Mach and landed it no slower than at 170 mph. The Air Force yanked it away from Convair and gave it to me shortly after my supersonic flight.
The controls were the first to be hydraulically operated, so light there was hardly any feel. My comment after flying in it for the first time was that it would be easy to handle if the damned stick were eighteen feet long. It was a tricky airplane to fly, but on only my second flight I got it out to 1.05 Mach, and coming in, I decided to see how slow I could land it, and kept pulling up the nose until it was pointing at a forty-four-degree angle of attack. I was amazed and landed at a speed of only 67 mph, more than 100 mph slower than Convair's pilot-a good example of how experience in high-performance aircraft pays off. I had hundreds of hours more flying time in jet fighters than he did.
In its own way, the XF-92 was as interesting and challenging as the X-1, so I had plenty to keep me busy without worrying about medals or recognition. In fact, I was busy on this program when the Air Force announced my supersonic flight in June 1948. The first trophies and awards meant a lot because they were so prestigious in aviation. I figured there would be a few more awards, then back to business as usual. Then I got a phone call from some colonel at the Pentagon, setting up a personal appearance schedule around the country and telling me I had to make speeches. I said to him, "Colonel, I'm only a fighter pilot. I don't do speeches."
He set me straight in a hurry. The orders to go out and give speeches came directly from the Chief of Staff's office. "And you'd better get used to it, because dozens of business and civic groups are asking for you." Hearing that got me hot. "Sir," I said, "you've got the wrong guy. I'm not some damned preacher. I can't just pick up and go make a talk in the middle of a test program. I'm flying eight hours a day on the new delta-wing."
"I'm not arguing with you, Captain," he replied. "Travel orders are being cut and that's that. You will attend these functions-every one of them."
Give speeches! Me! I hated English worse than any other subject because I had to stand in front of the class and give a book report. I thought, "No way, goddamn it. No way I'm gonna do that." I'd rather fight a flame-out on the deck than battle a talk in front of a strange audience. I was self-conscious about my lack of education, my bad grammar; I was just a pilot, not a stump-winding politician. Man, I was terrified, so I called Colonel Boyd at Wright Field, hoping he could protect me against the Pentagon because he wanted to keep me flying instead of running around the country. But he wouldn't take my call. Colonel Ascani told me, "We've already got the word, Chuck. You're going to have to bite the bullet. General Vandenberg thinks you're great p.r. for the Air Force and Colonel Boyd isn't about to argue with him."