Aviation History: In the six years you spent at Edwards AFB, 13 test pilots were killed in accidents involving aircraft. How did you and your fellow test pilots manage to keep an optimistic attitude and enthusiasm with that many disasters?

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Everest: Maybe half of the losses were due to pilot error. The rest were due to aircraft glitches. Of course, you’re sad when you lose a good friend and fellow test pilot, as well as sad for the wives and children they left behind. However, I don’t think there was any loss of enthusiasm. The accidents were a reminder to be more careful. If it was something the pilot did that caused the accident, we wouldn’t repeat it, or if it was due to something in the airplane that couldn’t be controlled, then we’d try and fix that before we went any further. We all loved our work and were all volunteers for it. We never lost enthusiasm.

Aviation History: What were the major differences between the Bell X-1, the X-1A, X-1B and X-ID?

Everest: The X-1A, X-1B and X-ID all had canopies instead of the windshield the first X-1 had. Later on, they put ejection seats in; they also had more fuel capacity and better stability. Also, they could go higher and faster and in general were just follow-on airplanes to the Bell X-1.

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.

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