No pilot could listen to the tape of Yeager's last ride in the X-1A without getting goosebumps. I've played this tape for audiences and the impact was awesome. One moment, we're listening to a pilot in dire circumstances, battling for his life. In less than a minute, he's back in control and cracking a joke about not having to run a structural demonstration on this airplane.
I don't know of another pilot who could've walked away from that one. Each airplane has its own stability limitations that at some point in speed and altitude registers zero on a stability curve. That apparently happened to Chuck at 80,000 feet, flying at 2.4 Mach. The X-1A began to tumble, pitch, and roll out of control. The gyrations were so severe that there was an indentation on the canopy where he struck it with his head. He bent the control stick.
Chuck knew he was going to die. That is clear from his voice on the tape. He plunged from 80,000 to 25,000 feet before somehow finding the way to save himself, and the moment that he did, he regained his composure. It's the most dramatic and impressive thing I've ever heard.
I took off for Washington around midnight on December 16 in a P-80 Shooting Star and flew all night, landing at Andrews Air Force Base around dawn. The press was waiting. Somehow the word about my new speed record had leaked, even though the secrecy lid was on. The Secretary of the Air Force was going to announce it at the Pentagon later that morning, but the press crawled all over me wanting all the details. The headlines were out. The reporters wanted to know what it was like traveling at two and a half times the speed of sound. I told them I'd let them know after I did it.
After the announcement, the Bell p.r. types grabbed me and sped me all over town for various interviews. They set me up on The Camel Caravan and half a dozen other television shows going balls-out to milk it dry. The NACA bunch just couldn't believe it. Operation NACA Weep really kicked their fannies. The television people were pulling out their hair, scheduled to go on the air the following day with several big and expensive salutes to Crossfield as the fastest man alive. The Air Force brass just purred like a cat being rubbed.
On the way back to Andrews to fly home, one of the Bell executives in the car handed me a big box. "Chuck," he said, "we know it would be illegal to give you a gift of gratitude, but there's nothing in the regulations that prevents us from giving a gift to your wife." Inside the box was a beautiful Persian lamb jacket. "Mr. Bell wants Glennis to have this." I took the fur out of the box and rolled it up. Before taking off in the Shooting Star, I hid it in the nose, a helluva place to hide an expensive fur jacket, but it traveled fine despite high altitude temperatures of minus sixty. Glennis was really pleased. That jacket was a thing of beauty in black and gray and she wore it for many, many years. I had finally got her a fur coat, but I nearly killed myself doing it.
After that ride in the X-1A, the Air Force decided not to try any further speed runs with it, but instead concentrate on high-altitude testing. I never again flew in it, but Ridley, Murray, and half a dozen other pilots did; Murray got it up to 90,400 feet. My speed record stood for nearly three years until Bell's X-2 began its flights at Edwards and cracked Mach 3. By then I was out of the test business.
Even before that wild ride in the X-1A, I had been thinking about doing other things in the Air Force. I wanted to get back into a fighter squadron, enjoy flying only one kind of airplane again, and experience the closeness of squadron life, so different from the dog-eat-dog rivalries in flight testing. I asked Ridley if he could calculate on his slide rule how many more flights it would take before the law of averages made it impossible for me to survive. Jack pretended to figure it out on a pad, then began to laugh. "According to my figures," he said, "Major Charles E. Yeager died three years ago."
To continue to live, a veteran test pilot needs both skill and luck. My skills were fine, but after the X-1A I had scraped to the bottom of the sack labeled luck. It really was only a matter of time before I bought it; I knew it and so did a lot of other people, including a couple of congressmen from back home, who began to pressure the Pentagon to get me away from Edwards before I got killed. It took a while for the pressure to build to the point where action was taken; the word didn't filter down to me for nearly another year. By then I was spending one of the nastiest weeks of my life out in the Pacific, secretly testing a captured Russian MiG under conditions that made me relive the terror of the X-1A for five long days.
OUTFLYING THE RUSSIANS
I'm standing on the wing of a Russian-built MiG 15, hanging over into the cockpit, wiring the explosive cartridges that will blow me out of the seat if something goes wrong. It's pouring rain, and I'm wearing only a flying suit. I'm drenched. Water pours down from my hair into my eyes, making it hard to fix the seat. I'm beat and grim, just flat-out pissed at how close I've come to busting my ass during the past few days. I'm flying the first MiG 15 we've been able to get our hands on, flying it every which way but loose in a tropical storm that's been sitting over this damn island for nearly a week-heavy wind and rain and low ceilings-flying on gauges with a strange metric system, in a strange airplane, flying it higher and faster than any Russian pilot had ever dared. Those bastards know better.
Flying the MiG is the most demanding situation I have ever faced. It's a quirky airplane that's killed a lot of its pilots. We learn as we fly, on a tight time frame, the old man pushing me right to the edge-a fraction further and he will probably lose me. And he knows it.
General Boyd has brought me and Tom Collins, another test pilot, out to the middle of the Pacific because a North Korean pilot named Kim Sok Ho defected in his MiG 15. He received a $100,000 reward for giving us our first opportunity to fly the MiG. We were told to run a complete flight test on it, as if it were a brand new airplane, plot its speed, power, climb rate, and range. The MiG 15 was in combat against our Sabres over Korea, and our intelligence estimates of the Russian fighter's capabilities were the basis for how we engaged them in dogfights. We would discover that our test data matched perfectly with Air Force estimates. A shaky truce was in effect in Korea, but our people thought it could bust any moment; there was a lot of interest in our test.
A white line is painted down the center of the instrument panel. Lieutenant Ho, who is here to brief us, explained that if the MiG gets into a spin we are to shove the control stick against that white line. If the airplane doesn't come out of the spin after three rotations-he put up three fingers to make sure we understood-then "you go," he said, flicking his hand like a guy ejecting. The MiG could not recover from a spin, and the Koreans probably lost more pilots spinning in than from American guns. So, spin testing is a big no-no. One thing I did try-I purposely stalled the sumbitch, just about a foot off the runway and with the gear down. There was no warning light, nothing. I just quit flying and whacked down on the deck.
The MiG is a pretty good fighting machine, but it lacks our sophisticated American technology. It has problems-oscillating, pitching up unexpectedly, fatal spins, no stall warning, lousy pressurization, and a particular warning from Lieutenant Ho not to turn on the emergency fuel pump. That could blow the rear off the airplane; the North Koreans lost four or five MiGs that way. Man, that thing is a flying booby trap, and nobody will be surprised if l get killed.
I'm nearly finished wiring the ejection seat when somebody taps me on the shoulder. I look up and see General Boyd. "Chuck," he says, "come down for a minute. There's somebody I want you to meet." I follow him down off the wing and run through the rain to a staff car and climb inside to meet a four-star general Jack Cannon, head of the Air Force in the Pacific. General Boyd introduces me.