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X-Plane Crashes: Exploring Experimental, Rocket Plane and Spycraft Incidents, Accidents and Crash Sites

by Peter W. Merlin and Tony Moore, Specialty Press, North Branch, Minn., 2009, $29.95.

Frankly speaking, this book could have been a disaster in any hands less sure than these authors’. Peter Merlin is an archivist and historian at Dryden Flight Research Center, while Tony Moore is a museum assistant at the Air Force Flight Test Center at Edwards Air Force Base. It is their experience, and of course their natural interests, that results in an intelligent, thoughtful account of aerospace archeology, chronicling some of the most exotic American aircraft ever built.

The authors cover each incident in context—as with their discussion of how Jack Northrop’s flying wings were developed. Given their understanding of the aircraft leading up to the YB-49, they can provide an excellent explanation of its final flight, when Captain Glenn Edwards lost his life. This in turn provides the necessary background for their account of their “X-hunter” activity in turning up material from the crash site.

The amount and quality of the material Merlin and Moore have found, often decades after a crash, is sometimes surprising, as in their stories of the X-1A, X-15 and XB-70. Well illustrated, and with an appendix of crashes at Muroc/Edwards that is worth the price of the book in itself, X-Plane Crashes has a fascination that cannot be denied.

 

Originally published in the March 2010 issue of Aviation History. To subscribe, click here