Legendary Test Pilot, Engineer Found In Wrecked Plane

Scott Crossfield was a name that every boy in the fifties and sixties knew. He was one of several legendary test pilots who regularly swapped positions as the fastest men alive during that period of technological upheaval. But while obituaries and encomiums today will polish the legend of "Scott Crossfield, Test Pilot," he wasn't just a test pilot. As an engineer and engineering manager, he was standing in the back rank of the technical revolution at the same time he was strapped into its hurtling nose cone.

But some lucky aviators saw another side to Crossfield's multifaceted life: he loved to fly and to share his enthusiasm for flying. He was a regular at Oshkosh and other large airshows; he was always willing to lend his famous name to a worth cause. He even signed autographs and posed for pictures, a side of celebrity that gets old quickly, with good grace for over forty years.

Crossfield was a man whose skill, accomplishments, and stories cannot be told in short sound bites and polished phrases... which is why we've split this retrospective into two parts.

In today's segment, we'll tell of Crossfield's days as a test pilot at NACA's High-Speed Flight Station at Edwards AFB, flying a new breed of experimental jets and rocketplanes. Crossfield was the first man to fly at twice the speed of sound... but as you'll see, whether or not he could also claim the title of world's first Mach 3 pilot is the subject of some debate.

NACA

Born Albert Scott Crossfield in Berkeley, CA, in October, 1921, Crossfield grew up in California and Washington during a period when it seemed that airplanes could do anything, and were going to change the world. As a boy, he sold newspapers and washed planes for flight time; one of his early instructors was a Wyoming cowboy who had survived teaching himself to fly. He had started aeronautical engineering studies at the University of Washington, when Pearl Harbor changed young men's plans nationwide. Crossfield joined the Navy as an air cadet. Trained as a fighter pilot, he spent six months overseas but saw no combat. Instead, he spent most of the war as a flight instructor, training others.

After the war he joined the legions of GI Bill students -- in his case, back to the University of Washington. He spent the next three years gaining his Bachelors of Science degree in aeronautical engineering, hanging around the Frederick K Kirsten Wind Tunnel, a groundbreaking engineering aid that remains in heavy use today. On weekends, he still flew for the Navy Reserve and was a member of a display team flying FG-1D Corsairs -- a somewhat unconventional part-time gig for an undergraduate. He followed that with a year of graduate study and a Masters degree, and then took the job that would catapult him from obscurity to legend practically overnight.

It's not hard to imagine how the managers of the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics felt about Crossfield's resume -- naval aviator and graduate-level aero engineer, and still not yet thirty. They snapped him up to work as an aeronautical research pilot at the High-Speed Flight Station at Edwards AFB in the Mojave desert -- since renamed the Dryden Flight Research Center, for the since-renamed National Aeronautics and Space Agency. And Crossfield was soon strapping into the fastest machinery on the planet.

At the High-Speed Flight Station, Crossfield flew the X-1, X-4 and X-5 research planes, and the experimental delta-winged Convair XF-92, that was based on the aerodynamic theories of Alexander Lippisch. But his work with two Douglas research planes built for the Navy, the D-558-I Skystreak and the D-558-II Skyrocket, made him famous. There was considerable rivalry between the Air Force and Navy high-speed flight programs, and while Chuck Yeager was proud to be doing high-speed test on an Air Force officer's pay, many of the NACA guys came, like Crossfield, out of naval aviation.

The jet-propelled, straight-winged Skystreak didn't have the glamor of its contemporary. the Air Force X-1, but it had the jet's advantage over the rocket plane: it could sustain high-speed flight. By the time Crossfield joined NACA, the #1 plane had been retired after being flown only by Douglas and military pilots (it sits in the National Museum of Naval Aviation), and the #2 was destroyed by an uncontained compressor failure and crash on takeoff, killing Howard Lilly. Crossfield was one of eight NACA pilots (including Lilly) who flew 78 test flights in the #3 plane, collecting high-subsonic data. It is at the Marine Corps Air/Ground Museum in Quantico.

The rocket-powered Skyrocket was a different machine. With 35-degree swept wings based on German wartime research, and jet, or mixed jet and rocket, or rocket-only power, it was capable of much higher speeds. It conducted high-transonic research but it is best remembered today for being the first plane to fly at Mach 2. With Crossfield at the controls, the plane made exactly one Mach 2.005 flight on November 20, 1953. Previous flights had peaked at the 1.8-1.9 speed level; to get to Mach 2, Douglas and NACA engineers extended the rocket nozzles, chilled the alcohol fuel so a few seconds' more could fit in the tank, and -- like any good So-Cal hot rodders -- gave the ship a really, really good wax job.

A carefully worked-out flight plan depended on Crossfield's ability to fly precisely. Climbing to 72,000 feet, the plane made a gradual 10,000-foot dive under power, turning height into more velocity. Mach 2.005 is 1,291 miles per hour (2,078 km/h). The plane never flew that fast again -- at NACA, the name of the game -- then-- was gathering data, not breaking records.

Two very valuable D-558-2 programs Crossfield worked on were meant to validate wind-tunnel data on high-lift devices such as leading edge chord extensions (which were found to work in the tunnel, but not on the plane) and the effects of external stores at supersonic speeds (which confirmed tunnel data suggesting that bombs and fuel tanks for Mach 1.5 and up needed redesign from their World War II shapes). 

All three Skyrockets survived and can be found on display today -- Crossfield's Mach 2 mount is in the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, and its two sister ships are at Planes of Fame and on a plinth at Antelope Valley College, both in California.

Crossfield also flew all the other seminal X-planes of the period. He flew the X-1 (XS-1), 46-063, for ten flights (this was the sister ship of Yeager's Mach 1 46-062). He flew the tailless Northrop X-4, which had hairy stability problems nearing the Mach line (Principal lesson learned: don't build planes like this for this speed range). And he flew the swing-wing Bell X-5, progenitor of a generation of variable-geometry aircraft. But then he made a career move which increased his speed, altitude -- and pay.

North American and the X-15

North American Aviation had the inside track to produce a new research plane, although NACA and the Air Force considered proposals from Bell, Convair and Douglas also. The object of the new plane was unprecedented speed and altitude. With his engineering credentials and 87 to 99 high-speed rocketplane flights -- the number varies depending on whether you want to count Skyrocket flights using only the jet engine, but either way, more than any other individual pilot -- Crossfield was a natural for the Inglewood, California-based company.

It didn't hurt that NAA could, and did, pay a great deal more than government service, including bonuses for particularly risky undertakings such as first flights.

With the X-15, for the first time Crossfield wasn't receiving a basically sorted-out airplane from a contractor and then using it in basic research. He was the contractor helping to develop the airplane. His ideas helped shape many of the stability, control, and safety innovations of the Mach 6.7 aerospacecraft that was the X-15. Fellow X-15 pilot Milton O. Thompson credits Crossfield particularly with the speed brakes and the skid-type landing gear, or as NAA termed it, "alighting gear," as it was not used on takeoff (like the X-1, the X-15 air-launched from a mothership, in this case, a B-52).

While Crossfield assumed that he would fly in the whole program, NASA wanted its own pilots to fly the high-speed program. "Paul Bikle, Dryden's director, had the unpleasant task of informing Scott that his participation would end once the aircraft were delivered to the government," Milt Thompson records. And Crossfield's X-15 flying ended in December, 1960, with the delivery of the machines to NASA.

Mach 3, Or Did He?

The NASA-Crossfield relationship is at its testiest over the issue of Mach 3. Pro-Crossfield sources, for instance the AIAA, indicate that Crossfield was the first man to fly three times the speed of sound on November 15, 1960. But NASA records, while recording that as Crossfield's fastest X-15 flight, record it as Mach 2.97 or 1,960 mph. It was the first flight validating the more powerful XLR-99 engine (previous flights used clustered XLR-11s) and Crossfield was only supposed to go to Mach 2.7 and 60,000 feet (he went to 2.97 and 81,000).

On all of Crossfield's last three flights, using the powerful XLR-99, he exceeded the planned Mach number and altitude. Was he trying to set a record? If so, he was at least bending the rules -- the X-15 contract specified that the manufacturer would do demonstration flights only -- the government that was paying the tab was going to get the glory.

Even if Crossfield's claim, and not NASA's data, is correct, then he was not, as often claimed, the first man to travel Mach 2 and Mach 3.

Air Force Captain Milburn G. "Mel" Apt was credited with breaking Mach 3 on 27 September 1956 in the Bell X-2 (Apt subsequently lost control of the aircraft and did not survive), and Joe Walker flew the X-15 to Mach 3.19 on May 12, 1960 -- years, and months, respectively, before Crossfield's claim.

A prominent X-Plane researcher thinks he can explain the discrepancy as an honest error. "I believe [the credited 2.97 Mach] is accurate," NASA Contract Historian Peter Merlin told Aero-News. "I think Crossfield probably read an indicated airspeed of Mach 3.0, but the data later yielded a calibrated airspeed of Mach 2.97."

So the record seems clear... Crossfield was "only" the first man to Mach 2, and he didn't quite get to Mach 3 before Uncle took the keys of the rocketplane away. For those of us punting around in the weeds at Mach 0.1, that's still quite a record.

Part Two of our retrospective on the life of Scott Crossfield will be featured Saturday

FMI: www.nasa.gov  www.dfrc.nasa.gov