Being at Edwards in the 1950s, I was part of the greatest era in research flying in the history of aviation. In less than five years, a whole new air force was dumped m our laps for flight testing, including most of the prototypes of today s supersonic aircraft. The grandparents of the combat planes that fought in the skies over Vietnam in the sixties and seventies were all tested at Ed-. wards in the fifties. I remember Jack Ridley coming back from a check flight in a new swept-wing jet bomber, his engineer's eyes bugged with excitement. "Those bastards haven't just gone back to the drawing board, " he said, " they've started over from scratch." That was about it.
From first light to last light, seven days a week, the desert sky over the Mojave thundered from new and powerful afterburners, an extra kick in the butt that shot us in the sky with a blast of flame and smoke. Man, we were at the center of the world, the only place on earth to be if you loved to fly. The old air force was being scrapped, and a new air force was being born right on our doorstep. Prop planes were obsolete, and the thousands of B-29s and Mustangs that had won World War II were being cut up for scrap, replaced by an air fleet of jet and rocket-propelled supersonic fighters and bombers.
The Air Force didn't have a dime for research and development when the war ended. But then the Cold War with the Russians began to heat up, and when they tested their own A-bomb in 1949, we suddenly had millions to spend to develop supersonic interceptors for air defense. One year later, war broke out in Korea, and our Sabres were dogfighting Russian-built MiGs high over the Yalu River. Combat pilots always exaggerate the performance of the enemy's equipment, and a lot of our guys were insisting that those Russian planes were flying supersonic in afterburner. True or not, the race was on among our airplane producers to build fighters that would outclimb, outspeed, outmaneuver, and outshoot the Russian MiGs. The hangars at Edwards were crammed with their prototypes.
BY the mid-1950s, the one hundred twenty test pilots working for General Boyd had flight tested more than fifty prototype fighters, interceptors, deep penetration fighters, all-weather fighters, day fighters, medium and heavy bombers, helicopters, heavylift cargo planes, and fuel tankers. We flew straight wings, swept-wings, and triangular delta-wings. We grew up believing that an airplane's wings were supposed to be longer than its body, but prototype high-performance fighters arrived from the factory with tiny stub wings thin as razors. We wondered how in hell they would stay in the air.
Everything changed at once. I had carried maybe fifty pounds of electronics in my World War II Mustang, but now new jets had fifteen hundred pounds of sophisticated electronics. Cockpits were right out of Buck Rogers. My old squadron relied on my eyes and Andy's to spot a gaggle of enemy planes. Now, a pilot who couldn't see beyond his kitchen sink saw the enemy from fifty miles away as blips on his cockpit radar screen. I had a couple of minutes to set up an attack on German fighters, but a jet pilot, closing at tremendous rates of speed, would have only a couple of seconds. (During the late fifties at Edwards, a test pilot, diving in a Mach 2 fighter, actually outraced the shells from his cannons and shot himself down.) These new jets would dogfight by radar-locked and heat-seeking missiles. Even as we flight tested these prototype airplanes, others were testing its new weapons. The first batch of heatseekers headed straight for the sun.
How complicated could flying get? The old prop fighter cockpits were kept simple so the average guy could fly in it. The new cockpits, crammed with dials and switches, caused even Jack Ridley to scratch his head. Some Air Force brass at the time talked about eliminating a human pilot altogether, to fly these complex airplanes by computer. I personally didn't think much of that idea. The practical compromise was the two-seater, with the guy in front doing the driving, while the guy in back worked the radar and weapons. But what a time to be a test pilot! BY the summer of 1954, I would be test-flving Lockheed's F-104 Starfighter, the so-called missile with a man that could fly at Mach 2 and climb more than ten thousand feet a minute. The oldest head among us was a brand new learner.
I flew, flew, flew. If I wasn't flying chase for another guy's test program, I was flying a program of my own. I was probably logging more flying time than the entire air force of some damned banana republic, but all of us were. There wasn't even time to be jealous when somebody else was assigned to test a hot new fighter. Wait an hour, and You would get to fly a hot new bomber or the latest X research airplane. The competition among the manufacturers was intense, but for every new airplane accepted into the Air Force inventory, one or two were rejected. Changes came so thick and fast that some airplanes were obsolete even as they arrived at Edwards. That was true of an X research airplane, the X-3, which had seemed so advanced when the Air Force contracted for it in 1945, but which was outperformed by the new jet fighters by the time I crawled in its cockpit in 1953.
There were so many new ways to bust my ass that I lost count. Every day was an adventure with the Ughknown-taking off for the first time in the X-5, with variable swept-wings that could be repositioned in flight to aid in lift or in landing, or with revolutionary pitch controls called elevons that combined the functions of elevator and aileron. I flew the X-4, which combined elevons and speed brakes; in a straight down power dive from 35,000 feet, I could not go faster than 250 mph. I did stability and control testing on that airplane, a semi-tailless research aircraft like the British Swallow that had crashed a few years earlier. Aerodynamicists still thought that the safest supersonic configuration was to leave off the horizontal tail surfaces, where air collides off the wings. Wrong. I got her out to .92 Mach when she began to spin violently. We figured that at .93 Mach she would punch a hole in the desert, so we quit right there and junked her.
I was even test flying our biggest new bomber. General Boyd flew to Edwards in the prototype of the Boeing B-47 Stratojet, our first swept-wing, six-engine bomber, capable of delivering an atomic bomb to its target at the speed of a fighter. He had Boeing's engineers thoroughly brief me on the systems, then he checked me out flying it. The bomber had two seats in tandem under a canopy, and the old man sat behind me while I took off. I did fine until the time came to land. I lined up with the lakebed, put down the landing gear, but that 200,000-pound bomber refused to land. It was so clean aerodynamically that there was absolutely no drag, and we floated forever fifty feet off the deck, while I sweated it out. General Boyd was just chuckling to himself; he knew this would happen and wanted to see how I'd handle it. "Christ," I said to him, "this thing is like a hot-air balloon." "So I notice," he replied. "But how about putting us down on the deck while it's still daylight." I finally did. But I almost ran out of eight miles of lakebed doing it. The old man hopped out. "Okay, Chuck," he said, "it's your test program."
Over the next six months, and in between other testing programs, I did all of the stability and control tests on the Stratojet, flying with their engineers and filling out test cards on its takeoff capacity with heavy bomb loads, its performance at various altitudes, and its flying range. Russ Schleeh teased me about it. "The next time there's a fight at Pancho's between the fighter jocks and the bomber pilots, I expect you to stay neutral." "Bullshit," I told him. "It'll take more than a couple of rides in the Forty-Seven to make me one of you bastards."
But it was funny. When the Forty-Seven became operational a year later, I had more time flying it than anybody else, and with my fighter training I could fly formation by second nature, so the Strategic Air Command asked me to help train their fuel tanker operators in airborne refueling of these big bombers. The KC-97 fuel tankers were filling stations in the sky that extended an attack bomber's range to targets anywhere in the world. They carried thirty thousand gallons of fuel. Airborne refueling was a brand new technique, and the boom operators aboard the tankers needed practice hooking up. For me, it was just simple formation flying, snuggling up to the big tanker and giving each operator ten practice tries. l gave thousands of hookups flying six hours a day, day after day, until it became routine for the boom operators. Not long after, a B-47 set a new record by flying twelve thousand miles during a twenty four hour period, refueled three times by tankers en route.