Flying formation was one of the first things I did to test a new fighter's control systems. A fighter is a gun platform, and the more stable the fighter, the easier it is to hit a target. In these tremendously fast jets, stability and control were critical performance factors. I'd crawl on somebody's wing to see how stable my airplane handled. But like anything else in life or in flying, the most difficult things become easier after you've done them hundreds of times. And a lot of the civilian test pilots working for the airplane manufacturers were barely able to stay in the sky flying the new high-performance jets. They lacked the background and experience of military pilots. We flew everything; they were limited to flying airplanes that their company produced. Many flew bombers or cargo planes in World War II, but through the seniority system became fighter test pilots who might be able to finesse testing a souped up Mustang, but who had no business in the cockpit of a modern jet fighter.
They couldn't fly in formation; they had no background or training. I flew as chase when a civilian test pilot butchered the test of the XF-85 Goblin, a tiny so-called parasite fighter that was carried by a bomber mother ship and launched to defend it against enemy air attackers. The company's civilian test pilot was incapable of staying in formation with me, and when the time came for him to attach the XF-85 to the mother ship by means of a trapeze configuration underneath, I watched him wreck the little parasite, and I was barely able to escort him down to an emergency landing on the lakebed. The Air Force canceled the XF-85 program after only two hours of testing.
It was a shame to see a good program and good equipment ruined by bad piloting. One of the worst accidents at Edwards occurred in the 1960s when another civilian test pilot, completely out of his element trying to fly in formation, rammed his fighter into the prototype B-70 bomber, killing himself, most of the bomber's crew, and wiping out both airplanes. That accident should never have happened. We had reached a point at Edwards where test flying challenged the best of us. There was just no room (or excuse) for underqualified test pilots.
These new airplanes demanded proficiency or they would kill you. By definition, a prototype was an unproven, imperfect machine. It was usually underpowered, had controls that were too light or too heavy, new hydraulic or electrical systems that were bound to fail, and more than a few idiosyncrasies that were certain to bust your ass if you spotted them too late. Some defects were obvious: Convair's Delta Dagger was completely redesigned following the poor performance of its prototype. But other problems, like an unexpected vicious pitch up at high speeds or a dangerous yawing tendency, might be discovered late in a program, only after hundreds of hours of flying time. The test pilot's job was to discover all the flaws, all of the potential killers. It was precise, scientific flying that included stressing an airplane beyond the most violent combat maneuvers.
Testing was lengthy and complicated, resulting in hundreds of major and minor changes before an airplane was accepted into the Air Force's inventory. Even then, airplanes were constantly being changed and improved with higher-performance engines, new electronics and weapons systems, so that a later model easily outperformed the original. But to stay alive testing prototypes, you just had to know what you were doing. You had to learn those systems, especially the emergency systems, ask questions of the engineers, study the damned pilot's handbook that was getting thick like a Manhattan phone directory. But a lot of pilots, civilian and military, weren't interested in doing homework and couldn't be bothered. And a lot of them got caught.
Arrogance got more pilots in trouble than faulty equipment. That's what killed Dick Bong, our top war ace in the Pacific, who became a test pilot. Dick wasn't interested in homework. He crashed on takeoff when his main fuel pump sheared. He had neglected to turn on his auxiliary pump because he hadn't read the pilot's handbook, so he flamed out only fifty feet up. He had no ejection seat, but stood up in the cockpit, popped the canopy and then his chute. The air stream wrapped him around the ship's tail, and he went in with his airplane.
Bong at least had a reason for being arrogant. He was a top war ace. But I never could figure why the most arrogant bunch at Edwards were the NACA pilots. The National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics had got into the flight test business while I was still flying the X-1. They bought a second X-1 and hired civilian test pilots to fly it. I flew it first, checked it out, then turned it over to them. Their two pilots took turns cracking the gear on landing. The X-1 demanded an experienced fighter pilot at the controls, and those two just weren't qualified to fly it. Both of them were later killed. Each time a new X research plane was delivered, the Air Force would fly it first, milk it dry of data, then turn it over to NACA. We did that with the X-3, X-4, and X-5, completely exhausting their capabilities. NACA would poop around with an X airplane for two or three years after we were done with it, acting as if they were discovering secrets of the universe. I thought that some of their pilots were the sorriest bunch in aviation.
By the time I left Edwards in 1954, NACA had assembled a better crew of civilian test pilots who would do important testing in the North America X-15. Scott Crossfield worked for NACA and was the first pilot to fly at Mach 2. He was a proficient pilot, but also among the most arrogant I've met. Scotty just knew it all, which is why he ran a Super Sabre through a hangar.
That stupid accident would never have happened to an Air Force pilot because he would have accepted a few pointers about what in hell was going on with a new airplane. But Scotty wouldn't. His attitude was typical of the NACA bunch: there was nothing worthwhile that a military pilot could tell them. I had been testing the Super Sabre and delivered one to the NACA hangar from the North American plant. The crew chiefs came out with Scotty, who was scheduled to fly it. I handed him all the paperwork and the handbook on the airplane and told him, "Scotty, it will take you about a week to run an acceptance inspection on this airplane. There's a lot to learn, but when you're ready to fly it, give me a call and I'll come over and go through the various systems with you." His reply was, "It has a pilot's handbook, doesn't it? That's all I need."
Well, you look at a guy like that and say, "See ya around." A week later, I received a call from Paul Bickel, NACA's boss at Edwards, asking me to come over to their hangar. There was the Super Sabre, bashed through their hangar wall. "What in hell happened?" I asked. Paul said, "Scotty lost utility pressure." I told him, "That's exactly right! If you lose that on landing, you have no brakes or nose-wheel steering." But Scotty didn't know it, and when he tried to taxi to his hangar, he ricocheted off two parked airplanes and punched his plane through the hangar. I told Bickel, "All your pilot had to do was take five minutes to go through some of the emergency systems before he tried to fly it."
Neil Armstrong may have been the first astronaut on the moon, but he was the last guy at Edwards to take any advice from a military pilot. Neil was NACA's backup pilot on the X-15. One day, Bickel called me to say that NACA was scheduling an X-15 flight and planning to use Smith's Ranch Lake as an emergency landing site. Paul knew me from my early days at Wright, where he had been one of those flight test engineers who thought the X-1 was doomed. But he respected my judgment about the condition of the lakebeds because he knew I'd been flying them since 1945 and knew them like the back of my hand. Smith's Ranch Lake was about 250 miles away, and I told him I had flown over it recently and it was soaked from the winter rains. He said, "Well, my pilots were over there today and they said it's not wet."