I laughed. "Well, then, be my guest." But Paul had doubts of his own or he wouldn't have called. He asked me if I would fly Neil up there and attempt a landing. "No way," I said. "Would you do it in a NACA airplane?" he asked. "Hell, no. I wouldn't do it in any airplane because it just won't work." He then asked, "Would you go up there if Neil flew?" "Okay," I said, "I'll ride in the back seat."
I tried my damndest to talk Armstrong out of going at all. "Honestly, Neil, that lakebed is in no shape to take the weight of a T-33," which was a two-seat jet training version of the Shooting Star. But Neil wouldn't be budged. He said, "Well, we won't land. I'll just test the surface by shooting a touch and go"-meaning, he'd set down the wheels then immediately hit the throttle and climb back up in the sky. I told him he was crazy. "You're carrying a passenger and a lot of fuel, and that airplane isn't overpowered, anyway. The moment you touch down on that soggy lakebed, we'll be up to our asses in mud. The drag will build up so high, you won't be able to get off the ground again." He said, "No sweat, Chuck. I'll just touch and go."
And that's exactly what Armstrong did. He touched, but we sure as hell didn't go. The wheels sank in the muck and we sat there, engine screaming, wide open, the airplane shaking like a moth stuck on flypaper. I said from back, "Neil, why don't you turn off the sumbitch, it ain't doin' nuthin' for you." He turned off the engine and we sat there in silence. Not a word for a long time. I would've given a lot to see that guy's face. It was cold, and the sun was moving behind the mountains in late afternoon. Very soon it would be dark and the temperature would drop to below freezing. We were only wearing thin flying suits and the nearest highway was thirty miles away. "Any ideas?" I asked him. Neil shook his head.
Before dark, NACA sent out a DC-3 to search for us. I got on the horn with the pilot and told him to give us time to walk over to the edge of the lakebed, about a mile away. I told him to touch down, but not to stop. "Open the door and keep on moving while we jump aboard." He did a good job, and when we got back to Edwards, Bickel was still there. I don't know what he said in private to Neil Armstrong, but when he saw me he burst out laughing.
NACA was the forerunner of NASA. But whatever their initials, in the old days I rated them about as high as my shoelaces. (Today it is a new breed. I'll take my hat off to any of the NASA pilots flying the shuttle.)
I lived balls-out, flew the same way. I had my own standards, and as far as I was concerned there was no room at Edwards for test pilots who couldn't measure up to the machines they flew. I was harsh in my judgments because a pilot either knew what he was doing or he didn't. The NACA pilots were probably good engineers who could fly precisely, but they were sorry fighter pilots. I was angry at the system which gave the first crack at new airplanes to the manufacturer's own test pilots. Testing should be impartial, but each manufacturer used its own test methods that often exaggerated its airplane's capabilities. There were some excellent civilian pilots, like Lockheed's Tony LeVier and Fish Salmon, Republic's Carl Bellinger, and North American's Wheaties Welsh. Pard Hoover had left the Air Force to join North American. But there were also a lot of duds, who flew new and expensive equipment for the big bonus risk money, their only qualifications being company seniority that gave them first crack at big projects. Frankly, when guys like that drilled a hole in the desert, I felt a lot worse about the airplanes they destroyed.
I had a grudge against those who flew for the money. We military pilots flew for low pay because flying was our way of life. Those guys collected two hundred bucks for every minute they spent above 40,000 feet. What prima donnas! The civilians flew a preliminary test to insure a new airplane's airworthiness. Then the plane was turned over to us. We tested it to verify their data and to determine whether the airplane met its military specifications. Spin testing and dive tests came later on. The civilians were supposed to take those risks and collect their bonuses for doing so. But as soon as I got my hands on a new airplane in that first phase, I did everything to it that could be done. I'd spin and dive test it because I enjoyed the challenge. When the manufacturers saw my data cards, they'd call in their own pilots and say, "Why should we pay you for a spin test when Yeager already did it?' The civilian pilots complained that I was taking the bread out of their mouths, but I could care less. The system rubbed me wrong, and General Boyd finally got it changed after a long, bloody battle. I was out of the testing business when the Air Force took it over entirely
To my mind, those company test pilots were salesmen with a license to fly. Military pilots were impartial. We could not recommend procuring or rejecting an airplane; that decision was made at the highest levels. But we did recommend that airplanes not be procured unless they were changed and improved in certain ways. For example, in 1953, North American delivered to us their new Super Sabre, the F-100, probably the most eagerly awaited new jet fighter of the postwar years, the first that could fly supersonic in straight and level flight. It became the first of what would be called "the Century series" of American jet fighters-the F- 100, the F102, F- 104 and F-105, culminating in the late sixties with General Dynamics' F-111 a swing-wing two-seater that carried eight tons of bombs and rockets at 1,650 mph.
Every test pilot at Edwards drooled for the chance to crawl in that F-100's cockpit, including yours truly. After my first flight, I went over to North American's hangar to talk to Wheaties Welsh, their chief test pilot. "Hey," I said, "you can't fly in formation with this thing It has the damned sorriest flight control system I've ever seen." Wheaties just shook his head. He was an old fighter jock who had shot down Japanese Zeros during the Pearl Harbor attack. "Goddamn it, Chuck, you're just being hypercritical," he insisted. "No, I'm not,' I said. "That airplane just isn't stable." Pete Everest told him the same thing.
Welsh said, "I'll prove to you that you're nitpicking. I'm going to bring in some fighter pilots from the Tactical Air Command, guys who just know how to fight, and let them fly it." And he did. Flying chase with those TAC pilots was wild. They had a ball booming across the sky. "God, this thing really goes," they said, taking it out to 1.33 Mach. When they came in, Welsh asked them, "What do you guys think about the airplane's stability?" Those jocks looked blank. "Huh?" No, they didn't try to fly formation, they just flew balls-out. "Great airplane," they said. "Really hot."
We had a real conflict developing with North American, and Dutch Kindelberger, their board chairman, went to the Pentagon to insist that there was nothing wrong with his Super Sabre and that a few of the Edwards test pilots were nit-picking. He carried with him the statements from the young fighter jocks saying how great the airplane handled. Usually the military test pilots have the final word about whether or not a prototype should go into production. In this case the Air Force, knowing that the Tactical Air Command was panting to get their hands on that hot new fighter, decided that the deficiencies in the F-100 were in the extreme corner of the flight envelope and would be unlikely to cause pilot problems. Dutch won the battle, but, man, did he lose the war.
About two hundred F-100s had been delivered to the Air Force in September 1954, when Wheaties Welsh was killed diving an F-100 at 1.4 Mach. The airplane disintegrated, but the flight recorders revealed it was directionally unstable. The Air Force grounded all the F-100s in its inventory and sent them back to North American. The modifications necessary included a larger tail and a new flight control system, and they almost bankrupted the company. But it took the death of their chief test pilot to make that airplane safe to fly. Was Welsh just being a salesman when he accused us of nit-picking? If so, he was a fool to attempt a structural integrity demonstration dive.