Aviation History: What happened to the X-1C?

Everest: There was an X-1C, but the program got canceled. It was going to be an armored aircraft with guns on it, used for testing only.

Aviation History: Chuck Yeager nearly lost his life in the Bell X-1A. Do you recall what caused him to lose control of that aircraft?

Everest: The X-1A was not too stable at the higher Mach numbers, so on one flight he lost control and started tumbling and spinning. Fortunately, he regained control and got back down safely. It wasn’t anything unexpected; it was just something we found out from going too fast with a bird that shouldn’t go that fast.

Aviation History: You also flew the Northrop X-4, another hybrid sweptwing research airplane. What contributions did the X-4 make to aviation history?

Everest: It was a little, tailless, subsonic airplane. You could only get it up to about Mach .8 or it would come unglued on you. We investigated with it mainly for stability and control, and how that applied without having a tail on it. It was fun to fly, but there wasn’t much to it.

Aviation History: What are your comments on flying the Bell X-5?

Everest: It had about the same performance as an F-86, but it was only built to check out the variable-sweep angles on the wing. We did various maneuvers with different sweep angles. You could sweep the wings from 20 to 60 degrees.

Aviation History: How would sweeping the wing effect the X-6’s performance?

Everest: The more you sweep the wing, the less aerodynamic drag you have and the faster you go. It would only go supersonic in a dive, similar to an F-86, so it wasn’t very fast. For the most part, it was just used for stability and control tests to find out what happened when you changed wing-sweep angles; then, hopefully, a designer would apply that information with later aircraft and figure out which was best for the particular airplane he was going to design and build.

Aviation History: You are most closely identified with the work you did in the Bell X-2. What new information was to be gained from the X-2 program?

Everest: Like the X-1, the X-2 was designed for speed and altitude, only it could go higher and faster. Test pilot Ivan Kincheloe set the altitude record in it–126,000 feet.

Aviation History: What altitude did you reach in the X-2?

Everest: About 67,000 feet.

Aviation History: Were the pressure suits used in the X-2 different from the ‘torture chamber’ suits used in the X-1?

Everest: No, they were the same ones. That’s all we had in those days.

Aviation History: One of the unique features of the Bell X-2 was the pilot ejection system. You could literally blow off the front nose portion of the cockpit to escape, right?

Everest: Yes, you could. It was Captain Milburn Apt who was the only pilot to ever use it. Apt was killed in the last flight of the X-2 program. He ended up in an inverted spin during descent, and we knew that when you blew the front cockpit section off, you’d get a 14-G pressure. The tiny X-2 cockpit was so small that your helmet was touching the canopy on both sides, while your legs and feet were straight out in front of you on the rudder bars; your shoulders touched the canopy rails on both sides. So when Captain Apt was in the inverted spin and blew the nose section off, the 14 or even 15 negative Gs knocked him out. The parachute on the cockpit section worked, but it was just used to slow your descent to a lower altitude so you could pop the canopy off and climb out to use your regular parachute. Unfortunately, Apt recovered consciousness when it was too late to bail out. He managed to get the canopy off but he was then too low to use his regular parachute.

Aviation History: The X-2 was launched or dropped from a Boeing B-50 Superfortress as opposed to the B-29 that would normally launch the Bell X-1. Why was that?

Everest: We started using the B-50s to drop the X-1 later on in the program, as well as the X-1A, X-1B and X-ID, because it could go higher and faster than the B-29. So we then continued to use it to launch the X-2.

Aviation History: In 1953, during a captive test flight over Lake Ontario, Bell Aerospace chief test pilot Skip Ziegler and Bell scanner Frank Walko were killed in an explosion and fire while the X-2 was still mated to the B-50. What went wrong?

Everest: Because everything fell into Lake Ontario, no one knows for sure what happened. Investigators surmised that it might have been an overpressurization of some of the propellant tanks in the X-2. Some early X-1s had a similar problem.

Aviation History: On your third powered flight of the Bell X-2, you broke a previous speed record you had set earlier in the Bell X-1B, reaching a speed of Mach 2.5 as opposed to 2.3. What was the maximum speed the engineers felt the X-2 was capable of?

Everest: About Mach 3.

Aviation History: Will you give a description of what it’s like to make an altitude flight profile in the Bell X-2?

Everest: Well, a lot was expected of you. The flights themselves cost about one million dollars each, so you wanted to be careful and not pull some bonehead stunt like getting off your speed or off your altitude. After the X-2 and B-50 have been mated and you have gone through your preflight checks, at this point you top off your propellants in the X-2 and you’re ready for takeoff. You (the X-2 pilot) would be waiting in the nose of the B-50 during climb-out, because it took about an hour to climb to altitude. At about 9,000 or 10,000 feet you get in the cockpit of the X-2 by first going through the bomb bay section of the B-50. Then the crew puts the canopy on and locks it down. After you’re strapped in, you wait for another half-hour or 45 minutes while the B-50 continues climbing. You then go through a series of checks while pressurizing your tanks. You make sure the propellant tanks are up to snuff and make sure the jettison systems work, so you can jettison the propellants if a problem occurs. You then tell the B-50 crew you’re ready, and they make a turn toward the base and start a dive to try and get up to about 250 mph, which was the drop speed for the X-2. You then start your countdown from 10 to 1 and call ‘Drop!’ The B-50 crew pulls a lever that releases the shackles to the X-2 and you’re off on your own. As soon as you are dropped, you hit your switches to get the rockets going. Once they’re going, as I described with the X-1, you’re hanging on and trying to fly a prescribed flight path to give you the best performance. This isn’t easy to do, because you have to climb and try to get to about 60,000 feet, then level off and perhaps dive a little to try and get the maximum Mach number out of the airplane. You do this until your propellants are exhausted and then head home. Because you’re still at 60,000 feet you make a very gentle turn back because you don’t want to lose control, and you don’t have much control at that altitude. You are still a good distance away from base, past Bakersfield, and as you are gliding back you talk with the chase plane pilots, explaining where you are, so they can pick you up visually and ‘get on your wing.’ After they locate you, they fly close to you, looking you over to make sure no damage was made to the airplane. You then set up your landing pattern and glide on in for a touchdown. All the flights were basically about the same.

Aviation History: I imagine that as a test pilot in the X-2, your reflexes must have to be incredibly fast.

Everest: Things happen so darned fast! It’s just hanging on and trying to do the best you can. If you got up to an altitude where you wanted to ‘push over’ (a maneuver in which the airplane is quickly put into a dive by pushing forward on the elevator control) to get maximum speed, your altimeter was such that its indication was lagging behind, so you started the push over at about an indicated 5,000 feet below where your real altitude was, to compensate. You didn’t want to push over too suddenly because you would unport the tanks where they feed into the rocket engine (negative Gs lift the fuel in the tanks away from the fuel-line port, and fuel stops flowing to the engine). If you unported those and got air into the fuel system, the rockets would shut down. That occurred several times. So you flew very, very gently and did the best you could while flying like a bat out of hell!

Aviation History: How and why did the X-2 program end?

Everest: The program ended after Captain Apt’s fatal flight. The North American X-15 was going to be coming out soon, so there wasn’t any sense to building another X-2. Also, we had achieved what we wanted to with it–we had gone to the airplane’s highest altitude and highest speed. There was more work to be done in areas such as stability to get more data, but there wasn’t enough reason to build another X-2 just for that purpose.

Aviation History: Chuck Yeager went on to head the Air Force Aerospace Research Pilots School to train military astronauts for programs like the Manned Orbiting Laboratory and the X-20 project (Dyne-Soar program). Did you want to be a part of that program?

Everest: No.

Aviation History: Why not?

Everest: I just wasn’t that interested in it. Had I known that we would advance as far as the space shuttle I might have. The early astronaut programs like Mercury were not appealing because you could use a monkey as well as an astronaut to make the flights.

Aviation History: Were you interested in getting into the X-15 program?

Everest: I would have liked to, but it was still several years away from flying and I wanted to do other things.

Aviation History: What did you do after leaving Edwards Air Force Base in 1957?

Everest: I went to school at the Armed Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Virginia. Then I went to Europe as an F-100 squadron commander in Germany. I was then promoted and sent to Tripoli in Libya at Wheelus Air Force Base, where I became commander of a gunnery group. It was basically a training base for dropping bombs and shooting rockets and machine guns.

Aviation History: What makes a great test pilot, in your estimation?

Everest: You have to love to fly, have a sense of adventure, be an excellent pilot and want to do things that are dangerous.

Aviation History: You are quoted as having once said that it was your dream to be the first man on the moon.

Everest: Yeah.

Aviation History: Did many other test pilots during the time you spent at Edwards have the same dream?

Everest: I think so…we never talked about it in that light.

Aviation History: You didn’t see Mercury or Gemini as stepping stones to the moon?

Everest: In a way, yes, particularly when they started putting more funds in for the Apollo program. I would have been interested in Apollo, but by that time I was getting a bit old for that stuff.

Aviation History: Do you think today’s test pilots are the same as they were during your generation?

Everest: They would have to be. Of course, it’s so much more sophisticated, but the computers and engineering knowledge they have make it a much easier job. The engineers today, with their design abilities and computers, know just about everything before the airplane ever takes off. Most of the airplanes today are so unstable that if you didn’t have computerized stability augmentation, you couldn’t fly them–planes like General Dynamics’ F-16 and McDonnell Douglas’ F-15 and F/A-18.

Aviation History: What would happen if the computer stability augmentation system failed due to a computer error?

Everest: It would probably destruct, but they usually have three stability augmentation systems in them. I’m not aware of all they have done to check out what the airplane would do if you lost all three of those systems. However, there’s a very good redundancy.

Aviation History: Of all the hot airplanes flying today, which would you prefer to fly and why?

Everest: I love the little F-16. The F-15 was a big airplane, and the F-16 compared to it is like a Republic F-105 compared to a McDonnell F-4. When I flew the F-15, it seemed so large that I couldn’t get enthusiastic about it. When you get into an F-16, however, you feel like you put it on instead of getting into it. It’s a real performer, too.

Aviation History: What do you do to keep busy today?

Everest: I play golf, fish and do lots of traveling.

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This article was written by Barry E. DiGregorio and originally published in the July 1998 issue of Aviation History. For more great articles subscribe to Aviation History magazine today!

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