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?

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in Aviation History magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

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!

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to