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.