Slick Goodlin dead at 82

Vince,

Actually Slick wanted normal pay for a test pilot for the work he was
doing. It may well have been that the Air Force used the pay excuse to
make sure one of its pilots, rather than the factory test pilot, a
civilian, got the official record. Tom Wolfe in the book _The Right
Stuff_ treated Goodlin very shabbily and elevated a pretty much
otherwise regular test pilot who happened to have a monumental ego to
hero status. By denigrating Goodlin, who was extremely good and had
done some pretty incredible things (and went on to do some very amazing
things) Wolfe built up Yeager. There were quite a few pilots, civilian
and military, who were in line and willing to fly the X-1 because it
was getting a massive amount of publicity during the developmental
flights by the Bell factory pilot, Goodlin. (Bell had a rep for having
some of the best test pilots in the business-Boeing hired Tex Johnston
from Bell to be its chief of flight test.) During the late '40s
through the '60s the Air Force made sure its active duty pilots were
flying when records were "officially" set. However, what they didn't
talk about was that for all of the speed runs, a factory test pilot had
made the run a few days earlier, without the FAI observers present, to
confirm that the airplane would perform as advertised. The Air Force
did not want any surprises when the official observers were present.
Al White, who was chief of flight test for North American in the X-15
and XB-70 days, wrote a book about his experiences, including making
speed runs in the F-100 and F-107 a few days before the Air Force's
test pilot would repeat the run for the official record. He thought it
was interesting that the factory pilots could often get a few more
knots out of the airplane than the Air Force pilot on the record
setting day.

Interstingly, Wolfe and others failed to mention that the chief test
pilot for North American at the time, George Welch (who was one of the
few pilots who shot down Japanese airplanes over Pearl Harbor on Dec 7,
- later died when an upper right hand corner of the Vn diagram - max
speed, high G - test of an F-100 went horribly wrong), had exceeded the
speed of sound several times in the prototype F-86 in the two weeks
prior to Yeager's flight. But, the Air Force wanted the credit for the
first and made sure one of its pilots instead of a civilian pilot got
the publicity. North American was not allowed to instrument the
airplane for official speed until after Yeager did his thing. Yeager
was the first to go supersonic in level flight, and rightfully gets
credit for that, however, the F-86 did so in a dive, and actually went
through the transonic range much more smoothly than the straight wing
X-1.

It's sad that because of one book that glorified one guy whose
reputation in the test pilot community is lousy for letting his ego put
test programs at risk, also managed to effectively smear the reputation
of someone who was exceedingly good in his own right and went on to do
some humanitarian work that was most impressive.

All the best,
Rick