Chasing was unselfish flying, and there were some pilots who just didn't stay alert. Chuck was a noticeable exception. He flew as balls-out flying chase as he did flying the X-1. As a chase pilot, he was a ten by comparison, most of the others were sixes or sevens. The difference was critical. I know. Yeager saved my life.
I was testing Republic's prototype, the X-F-91, a rocket-propelled experimental fighter, in the summer of 1951. Chuck flew chase on my first flight. We took off at the first light of dawn; I was rolling down the lakebed runway, getting ready to lift off, when he came by in a Sabre and began to fly in formation with me before I was even airborne-superb piloting right from the start. He did a half-roll right above my canopy to check me before I had my wheels up. I had just lifted off the deck and retracted my gear when Chuck radioed, "Man, you won't believe what's coming out of your engine." A moment later I got a fire warning light. "Christ," I said, "I think I'm on fire." He replied, "Old buddy, I hate to tell you, but a piece of molten engine just shot out your exhaust and you'd better do something quick." He meant I should punch off my wing tanks and turn right back onto the runway.
We were about five hundred feet over the lakebed heading out. He said, "Don't you hit my house with those tanks, either." Normally, I would've laughed, but we both knew I was in one helluva bind, too low to eject and my cockpit filling with dense black smoke. The fire in back was tremendous, and I radioed to him, "Chuck, I can't see in here."
"Do a two-seventy to the right and keep it tight," he said in that calm voice. I followed his instructions, got my gear down, and in only a few crisp words, he had me lined up and landing. He staved right on my wing as we touched down. I had that canopy open and hit the ground the minute the ship stopped rolling. I jumped for it just as the tail melted off. Flames and smoke poured into the sky. Chuck was right there and I climbed on his wing. His canopy was open and I just shook my head. "Damn, that was close," I shouted at him. "It really was," he laughed. We taxied up the lakebed with me holding on to his fuselage and met the fire trucks racing toward us in a cloud of dust from seven miles away. From the time Chuck saw my engine start burning until he talked me down took no more than ninety seconds. That's about all the time we had. The X-F-91 had burnt to ashes by the time the fire engines arrived at the scene.
I never lost a pilot while flying chase, but there were many close calls. After I had flown the X4 research airplane, the Air Force turned it over to NACA, and I flew chase for their pilot, Joe Walker. We were climbing together through 20,000 feet, and I was listening to Joe talking with the control center, when it hit me that there was something very wrong. Joe wasn't making sense, and he was slurring his words. Hey, I thought, that guy has hypoxia. And it was going to get worse because we were climbing straight up. Without enough oxygen pilots act drunk and irrational, then black out I flew close to his canopy and saw that his head wasn't rolling from side to side, which probably meant he was getting partial oxygen from his mask. I radioed: "Hey, Joe, be alert. Go to one hundred percent on your oxygen." He replied, "Oh, shut up, will you. I'm trying to fly a program here."
I needed to find a way to slap him back to reality. I said, "Hey, man, I just flamed out. Got me a real emergency. Follow me down." That got through to him, and he went down with me, his head clearing at the lower altitude, although he was dazed. Being typical NACA-arrogant, he was ready to readjust his oxygen mask and go back up. "No way," I said. "Get down on the ground." He finally did.
I flew a lot of chase for the Navy's Skyrocket project in 1951. Bill Bridgeman flew this Douglas rocket plane; he was a former Navy fighter pilot and a good guy. His engine system and flight profiles were identical to the X-1's, so there were dozens of ways I could be helpful during his flights. And poor Bill had some hairy moments. On one early flight he got a fire warning light and black smoke billowed out of his engine. I was right there with him. Man, I knew that terror. "Have you jettisoned your fuel?" I asked him. "No," he replied. I didn't have to ask why. He was scared to dump fuel into the burning engine. I told him to ease back on the throttle to see what happened. The smoke thinned. That meant the fire was inside the jet engine that was carrying him toward the lakebed, not inside the rocket chambers. I told him to turn off the engine and hit the CO2 bottles (his fire extinguisher). The smoke vanished, and the warning light went off, and he was able to glide back, just barely. As we were coming in, a Douglas engineer asked him to fire up the jet again to see what would happen. Christ, we couldn't believe that idiot.
Bill had other nightmares: about to be launched from the mother ship, he saw the pressure drop on his fuel gauge and called for an abort. I heard him loud and clear. Bill turned off all the systems, but the pilot of the mother ship must've had his finger punched down on the microphone transmission key and couldn't hear Bridgeman. He started the countdown to launch with Bill screaming, " Don't drop me." It was horrifying. I was screaming at the pilot, and so were the control guys on the ground, but the Skyrocket was dropped. Bill dropped like a boulder and I dove after him, figuring he had had it. But he managed to crank up and fly right. "Goddamn it, I told you guys not to drop me," he shouted.
It was funny later, much later, as was the time when his troubles came in bunches. He lost his engine and his radio, and his canopy frosted over. I was in a frenzy. How do you talk a guy down who can't hear you? He got his radio back, and I was busy lining him up, crawling under his damned airplane to make sure his gear was down and locked, correcting this, suggesting that, so I didn't notice that the bastard had got his engine started, which immediately started his defroster. I looked and saw him sitting in there with a big grin, watching me struggle to sweat him down. He saw that I saw and began to chuckle. "You were doing so great Chuck I didn't want to interrupt." We were only about fifty feet off the deck. I said, "Okay, Navy, you're on your own from here. Hope you don't screw it up."
Test pilots sometimes just did screw up. Bill once stalled that thing at 30,000 feet, got to pitching violently and went into a straight down spin. The Skyrocket was known to be dynamically unstable and spins were to be avoided. I dove down with him stayed on his wing as he plunged seven thousand fee; in ten seconds. On a deal like that I kept my mouth shut, no radio chatter, because there were dozens of people listening intently, including all of Bill's Douglas bosses on the ground who wouldn't be pleased with his performance. But I knew that the flight data would give him away, so I purposely asked, "How are the stalls progressing?" as if he had planned a stall test. There was an investigation after the flight data was studied and both of us were called on the carpet, but we played dumb to the point where Bill's boss exploded, "You're a pretty cute pair," and slammed out of the room.
Bridgeman did more than his share of good flying, eventually achieved 1.8 Mach. He survived the Skyrocket only to be killed doing leisure flying out to Catalina. For Bill, that trip was like a motorist driving to the Seven-Eleven to pick up a quart of milk. He was probably flying complacent and without his usual alertness. That's when an airplane bites hard.