Always another dawn

A misty rain, typical of Seattle in the spring, fell across the lush green campus of the University of Washington that afternoon. It was 1947. I don’t recall the exact date beca...

In the spring of 1950, a few months before Commencement, I began to lay final plans for my move into the aviation world. The way the deck was stacked, it did not appear a ripe t...

A harsh, bitterly cold December wind, gathering momentum over miles of flat desert, lashed the ramp behind the NACA hangar. I buttoned my jacket close and bowed my head as I pus...

We were sitting in his office, which faced the NACA hangar workshop. His tone lacked enthusiasm. His whole attention seemed focused on the pencil he was twirling between his fin...

“Getting it made” was very important to me, and always will be. The quest for perfection is a compulsion with me, and has been since boyhood. One reason may be my unusual herita...

I believe the fact that I was told I would never be physically able to fly was the single greatest spur in my life. I was a healthy baby, but all this changed rather abruptly on...

I went to Boistfort High School, a consolidated country school about nine miles from our farm. There were fifty-six pupils in the whole school, quite a contrast to the big 3000-...

In retrospect, the brief twenty months of my life from September, 1940, when I left the farm, to May, 1942, seem a disjointed period, a tumultuous time of change and challenge....

I served in the Navy four years, until I was twenty-four. I never achieved my goal of engaging the enemy plane-to-plane over the Pacific. After winning my wings I was waylaid as...

The last fourteen months of my active Navy service amounted to a determined but futile endeavor to get to war. This crazy-quilt travelogue took me from Corpus Christi to Jackson...

During my four years at the University of Washington in Seattle after World War II, I kept strong ties with Naval aviation. In early 1946 I helped organize a reserve squadron, V...

During my four years at the University of Washington, from 1946 to 1950, the free-thinking, curious, intellectual atmosphere was a pleasure and a delight to me. I ate it up. Mos...

It was a sparkly clear spring day in the desert, about eight months after I joined NACA at Edwards. When the Air Force B-29 mother plane reached 8,000 feet, its pilot, Captain P...

THE DESERT SPRING had fused almost imperceptibly with early summer. The temperature climbed to a routine 105 degrees in the shade. Edwards became a hell of wind and sand. The wi...

The success of the Navy-sponsored Skyrocket caused great consternation in the Air Force camp at Edwards. Suddenly two of Bell’s rocket planes were made ready--or _almost_ ready,...

I eyed the new ship skeptically. White as a lily, it was the X-5, another product from Bell. The ship was powered by a single jet engine, and from a distance it appeared fairly...

“What’s the situation on the X-1-A?” Williams asked. I had just come from an inspection of the ship, which was being readied for flight in the Edwards Air Force hangar.

November 20, 1953, was a cold, blustery day on the desert. I arrived at the ramp before daybreak, shivering from the frigid wind and weak from a bad dose of influenza. I had sle...

I had been expecting the coup de grâce at any moment. Chuck had been scheduled to fly the X-1-A on the day after my Mach 2 flight in the Skyrocket. But when I logged Mach 2, the...

Over the swiftly passing years the face of the Edwards base had dramatically changed. The Air Force, NACA, and civilian contractors had erected modern, air-conditioned offices,...

During my first five years at Edwards NACA achieved a remarkable safety record. No NACA pilot had bought the farm; no airplane had been lost through accident. This was due partl...

I drove slowly, gaping at the pale green hangar-sized North American production buildings strung along the south edge of Los Angeles International Airport like some titanic frei...

Building number 20, a relic of World War II, stood across the street from the main North American engineering offices, almost lost in a towering cluster of manufacturing buildin...

We gathered close around Charlie Feltz’s desk in the garret. In two months our team had grown, seriously crowding our temporary quarters. Feltz now had two assistant project eng...

At sea level, where most of us live, man breathes a mixture of twenty per cent oxygen and eighty per cent nitrogen. As man moves up higher into the thinning air, the percentage...

“And that, gentlemen, is the story of the X-15 to date.” My assistant switched on the lights in the briefing room. The group I was addressing--the fifth that month--was part of...

Harrison (“Stormy”) Storms, Chief Engineer of the Los Angeles Division, who had sparked the initial management-level interest in the X-15 project, remained aloof from the day-to...

The impasse in the perfection of the full-pressure suit was primarily in the restraining material or “tire” which holds the inflatable rubber “inner tube” against the pilot’s sk...

In mid-1957 two severe hurricanes struck the X-15 project within a matter of weeks. As they roared through our working space, we launched a series of crisis meetings beneath bat...

A CENTRIFUGE is a large word to describe what is essentially a simple piece of machinery. A centrifuge is a seat, cockpit, capsule, or gondola mounted on an arm which whirls aro...

We, among others, had anticipated Sputnik but utterly failed to predict its profound impact on the minds of all men. When it came, on October 4, 1957, we were astonished by the...

By January of 1958 the X-15 team had moved into high gear. North American’s F-100 contract was running out. The production space was absorbed by the jigs and dies for our three...

By the fall of 1958 Edwards Air Force Base had matured to the world’s foremost flight-test laboratory. It was busy and businesslike. Skilled, schooled Air Force test pilots, fly...

My mental alarm clock, a handy, precise instrument which seldom failed, woke me at exactly 0500 on the morning of March 10, 1959. Charlie Feltz was snoring loudly, deep in sleep...

Until now, I like to think, the story of the X-15 was in essence an array of engineering problems without equal or magnitude in the history of aviation. I have deliberately trie...

At 0730 on April 1, I climbed into the X-15 cockpit, ready for a second “captive” flight. Although we had learned a great deal on the first, none of us felt the ship was quite r...

We were turning over Rosamond Dry Lake at 38,000 feet for a final run to the launch point, within sight of the Edwards base and Rogers Dry Lake, where if all went well we would...

X-15 number two, identical in appearance with X-15 number one, was anchored to the concrete ramp in the engine-test area. Her fuel tanks were brimming. In the big forward tank t...

On the morning of September 17 the weather at Edwards was as blustery as it usually is in the rainy season in December. There was a heavy cloud layer hovering near the edge of t...

Jack Allavie in the B-52 called our altitude. It was about fifteen minutes before launch, October 10, twenty-three days after the first powered flight and the fire, my ninth tri...

Five days after the second successful powered flight we were airborne again. On this flight we deliberately loitered at altitude over Edwards to simulate the long trip to the X-...

The year 1959 was a shake-down ride for the X-15. In her first year at Edwards the ship was carried aloft fifteen times. Two of these trips were planned captive flights with no...

The big single-barrel XLR-99 rocket engine designed to blast the X-15 on its ultimate mission to the fringes of space arrived in California in April, 1960, about a year and a ha...

The explosion of X-15 number three had a curious impact on me personally. For the first time in my flying career I was foggy-minded. I could not recall immediately exactly what...