Bill & the Little Beast

(See Cover)

In the chill of the desert dawn, a weird airplane, painted as white as a new refrigerator, was wheeled out of a hangar at Edwards Air Force Base, California, and towed at funeral-slow speed toward the level, eight-mile runway of Muroc Dry Lake. The plane was the Douglas X3, a radical, dangerous experiment in sustained supersonic flight. Most of the small gallery of onlookers--pilots, engineers and Douglas executives--had seen it many times before, and presumably most of them had confidence in it. But few could have escaped some twinges of misgiving as the strange, sharklike craft (see sketch above) was prepared for flight.

Every flight test of an experimental airplane is a blood-chilling drama. It has its hero, the test pilot, to dominate its climax like the matador of a bullfight. It has a troop of villains: the unseen devils of the air that claw at the untried plane, shake it, spin it, hammer it, try to tear it to ribbons. Some tests are extra tense. The maiden flight of the X-3 a few months ago was one of the touchiest in aviation history. The pilot: Bill Bridgeman, a husky, clear-eyed airman who had already flown faster (1,238 m.p.h.) and higher (79,494 ft.) than any other man.

Wickedly Fast. The out-of-this-world design of Bill Bridgeman's new airplane would scare the daylights out of the ordinary pilot. The X-3 has a long, droopy nose that looks as if it had softened and wilted slightly. High and far to the rear juts a monstrous tail. The fuselage has just enough room for two big jet engines, whose bulky, cylindrical shapes bulge the skin outward. The plane is much bigger than a standard fighter, and extremely heavy for its size: in engineers' lingo it has a prodigiously high "solidarity factor." But all it has for wings are thin, knife-edged trapezoids no bigger than dining-room tables. Even squatting on the ground it looks wickedly fast, but its wings, apparently as rudimentary as the wings of a penguin, do not look as if they could lift it into the air.

As soon as the X-3 was on the runway, the elaborate paraphernalia of modern flight-testing began to unroll around it. Fire trucks sped off and took up stations at one-mile intervals along the eight-mile runway. Two ambulances took positions in the ominous line. Two F-86 Sabre jets, a photographic and an observer plane, took off, blowing clouds of dust across the field. Another F-86 already in the air circled the field and landed. Its pilot was the Air Force's Major "Chuck" Yeager (TIME, April 18, 1949), the first man to fly faster than sound. He would fly "chase" on the X3, watching for the beginnings of trouble. As he taxied up to the line, other jets took off, and soon Muroc echoed with the clattering scream of their engines.

Dressed in a "blast suit," Test Pilot Bridgeman, the human star of the show, got down from a green Ford and walked lithely toward the X3, the mechanical star. Technicians swarmed over the aircraft, giving it a last check. A flight surgeon stopped Bridgeman, examined him closely to make sure he was O.K. Both plane and man, were pronounced ready for flight.

Grinning quickly at the flight surgeon, Bridgeman walked to the X3, stooped, and squatted directly under it. He eased himself into a seat that hung on an elevator below the plane's belly. Mechanics bolted him into the seat, tightened broad straps across his chest, shoulders and knees. An aerodynamicist checked their job with meticulous care. Then Bridgeman turned a knob, and the elevator lifted him slowly into the X3.

Let Her Go. While Bridgeman checked his instruments, people and cars began to pull back to a prudent distance--and with good reason. When the X-3's afterburners are roaring full, they send out cones of destructive sound that can pop eardrums. Soon Bridgeman started both jets, and they drowned out the lesser sound of Yeager's F-86. When he cut in the afterburners a few moments later, an awesome roar rolled across the lake. The X-3 came to violent life. It bucked and shook and howled like a trapped hyena. This was the signal for Yeager to take off. His Sabre sped down the runway.

Inside the bucking X3, Bridgeman pressed hard on the brakes while the plane struggled and shook. "Boy, she wanted to go," he recalls. "She wanted to go something bad. I was all set, so I let her go." Over the interplane radio he called to Yeager in the air ahead of him: "When you gotta go, you gotta go. Let's go, Chuck!"

He released the brakes, and the X-3 began to roll, its tailpipes' blast clawing great chunks out of the lake's hard surface. After a long run it was still on the ground, but the stunted wings were beginning to grip the air. The wheel struts grew longer as the aircraft lightened on its feet. The Sensible Thing. "Strut extended," Yeager said encouragingly over the interplane radio. His Sabre dipped low to watch the critical takeoff. The X-3's wheels lifted clear of the ground at last.

"Clean, very clean," said Yeager, and Bill Bridgeman got up his landing gear. The X-3 was airborne on its tiny wings, and one of the engineers on the ground began to weep. "It seemed the sensible thing to do," one of his companions explained. "More than blueprints went into that airplane."

Soon the X-3 and Yeager's Sabre were only a couple of thundering dots above the desert horizon. But to the jittery listeners gathered around a trailer near the hangar, they seemed eerily close. The trailer's roof bristled with antennae, and over them streamed a flood of news from the distant airplanes. Out of a loudspeaker, mixed with cracklings, hums and silences, came the voices of Bridgeman and Yeager.

Bridgeman: "Where are you, Chuck? Stay off my engine." (Stick just off to one side and watch me.)

Yeager: "Right on your tail, son. Just looking up your tailpipe."

The antennae brought more than voices. In a darkened end of the trailer, newsroom for the X-3's telemetering circuits, engineers stared intently at vertical lines of light on the faces of two oscilloscopes. The "green worms" were connected by electronics with 186 instruments tucked into the X3. Some of the lines crept upward slowly; some kept steady; some lengthened or shortened in quick little jumps. To a practiced eye they told almost everything about the ordeal of the distant X-3 and its watchful pilot. The lines of light measured the air speed and a host of air pressures all over the plane. They told the position of wheels, flaps and control surfaces. They rode herd on scores of temperatures inside and outside the engine and on the skin of the plane itself. They detected the first feeble flutters of a vibrating tail or wingtip. Every motion and tremor of the X3, as it rode high above the desert's Joshua trees, was written down continuously in lines of light in the trailer.

Phantom Crew. The cramped cockpit of the X-3 has no room for anyone except Bill Bridgeman, but the tense men watching the oscilloscopes can perform all the duties of a well-trained crew. They bend electronically over Bridgeman's shoulders, watch banks of instruments that he would have no time to glance at. They warn him when some unfelt danger is still small, but growing.

As the echoing voices crackle over the channels, and the lines of light rise and fall on the scopes, the men in the crowded trailer feel warm identification with the man in the air. They leave the ground when he does, hurtle through the sky in his ungentled airplane. Their hearts skip a beat when his does--and sometimes before. Their muscles tense with his. Bill Bridgeman feels the same intimate way about his phantom crew miles away on the ground. "They're right with me," he says, "watching every little thing. I don't even have to ask them. They'll tell me if any thing's wrong."

Much went wrong on the first flight of the droopy-nosed X3, but not much may be told about it. During its first attempt, it did not fly faster than a modern jet bomber, and at this speed, far below its design speed, its penguin wings probably gave it little margin of stability. After a stint of unstable flopping and wobbling, the engines began to act up. The phantom crew in the trailer sensed the danger instantly.

"I think you should bring it back," one of them warned Bridgeman.

Bridgeman: "You want me to bring it home?"

Trailer: "Right." Bill headed for the field. Blind Landing. Then came the most dangerous part of the flight. The X-3 lands well above 200 m.p.h., and its little, faired-in windows give its pilot almost no view of the ground as it flashes below. When Bill Bridgeman squared away and headed on a straight-in approach into Muroc, he cautiously opened his landing-gear doors. They buffeted alarmingly. Then he lowered his wheels. The X-3 obviously didn't like it.

Bridgeman to Yeager: "This thing doesn't want to stay in the air."

Yeager: "Doesn't seem to, does it?"

Slanting swiftly down toward the great brown lake, the X-3 wobbled a little.

Yeager flew close beside it, playing seeing-eye dog to its blind pilot.

"Good attitude, Bill," he said. "You've got eight feet [off the runway]. Let her down a little more. You've still got eight feet." Slowly the speeding X-3 sank down toward the speeding ground. "Five feet," said Yeager. ". . . One. Now hold her right there. Nice job. The runway is clear for seven miles ahead."

The wheels touched at howling speed, throwing the rubber off their nylon tires and the X-3 shot for miles across the level lake.

"Thank you, Chuck," said Bill as he rolled out and slowed. "Thank you very much."

He was back on the ground. He would be safe for a while--until the next and faster flight, and the faster one after that.

Impressive Calm. The man who does this sort of job over & over again is 36 and bald. Bill Bridgeman has bright blue eyes, which seem more intent because of deep little airman's creases spraying out from them across his bronzed cheeks. He stands 6 ft. 1 1/2 in. tall, and has the big-shouldered build of a lifeguard. (During his college vacations he did serve as a lifeguard at Santa Monica beach, where lifeguarding is ranked among the decorative arts.)

Bill's most impressive characteristic is his calm. He moves with accurate grace, and his nerves work like a telephone exchange that never gets a wrong number. He never gets excited, never blows up. He almost never uses even the milder cuss words.

These rock-steady traits did not grow out of a conventional childhood. Bill was born in Ottumwa, Iowa (present pop. 33,631), of English-Dutch ancestry. His parents (his father was an airman too) separated when he was a baby, leaving him to be raised by his paternal grandmother. When he got pneumonia, she took him to California to build up his health.

As a high-school boy, he was a laggard student, liked most to swim and tramp in the mountains. He played football fairly well, but he gave up field sports when he was accidentally hit on the head by a South Pasadena shotputter.

Only when Bill got interested in flying did he begin to shine. To enter a military flying school he had to have college credits, which he earned without much trouble at

Pasadena Junior College and U.C.L.A. At the Navy's school at Pensacola, Fla., he learned to fly with the greatest of ease. When he made a perfect score in a landing test, the school's toughest instructor sourly remarked: "I've never given anybody a perfect rating, and I'm not going to start with you."

Bill got his Navy wings and commission in October 1941, and was shipped to Pearl Harbor. His skipper made him officer of the day for Sunday, Dec. 7, with the remark that "nothing happens here on Sunday." The something that happened that Sunday--the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor--allowed Ensign Bridgeman to distinguish himself in the only possible way that day by not getting wounded.

For 18 months of war, Bill thirsted for action and got none. He flew seaplanes--lumbering Catalinas--from Australia but much of the time he waited for airplanes that did not arrive or would not fly. At last his frustration stirred up stomach ulcers, and he was shipped back to Treasure Island Naval Hospital near San Francisco.

"Dear Franklin . . ." After three months of brooding and flying a hospital bed, Ensign Bridgeman wrote a letter to President Roosevelt, beginning "Dear Franklin . . ." and demanded transfer to an active job. He told his secret to an admiral's wife who did welfare work in the hospital. She turned white and ran to the commanding admiral of the San Francisco Naval District. In old-line Navy custom, such conduct by an ensign was almost as shocking as mutiny.

Bill is not sure what happened, except that the admiral called Washington on the telephone and tried to explain "the unfortunate circumstances concerning a letter sent to the President." But two days later, Bill got high-priority "expedite orders" usually reserved for captains and admirals.

During the rest of the war, Bill got plenty of action. He flew bombing missions all over the Pacific with Buzz Miller's famous "Reluctant Raiders." He was slightly wounded by flak over Truk, but came through the war in tiptop shape and a lieutenant commander.

About this time he got married. Six years later he had the marriage annulled. "Odd, I know," is all he will say about it.

Twelve Hours in Jets. Out of the Navy, Bill worked for airlines but tired of the routine and joined Douglas as a production test pilot, checking out finished airplanes before delivery. After a year of this, he got transferred to the more stimulating (and better paid) job of experimental test pilot.

Douglas' Skyrocket had just been completed, but no pilot had been assigned to fly it. Bill's chief weakness in going after the job was that he had never flown a jet plane, and the rocket-pushed Skyrocket was a sort of superjet. He got checked out in an F-80, and in twelve hours of jet flying he convinced Douglas engineers that he was the man to entrust with the precious Skyrocket.

No one regretted the decision. In 60 dangerous but splendidly executed flights, Pilot Bridgeman flew the Skyrocket faster and higher than any other plane has flown. He met new perils of the air, e.g., "supersonic yaw" and heating, and brought the Skyrocket back again & again to its base. Death often brushed his shoulders, but the Skyrocket is still intact, and it has accumulated enough data about high-speed flying to keep designers figuring for years.

It was natural that Bill was considered for the even more dangerous job of testing the X3.

The new assignment did not change his personal way of life, except that it gave him considerably more money ($20,000 instead of the $9,000 that production test pilots make). When not busy at Muroc, or studying the mathematics, aerodynamics and other subjects that modern test pilots need, Bill is what Californians approvingly call a "beach bum." He lives in a small, pleasant shack squeezed between the Pacific Coast Highway and the rocky shore two miles north of Monica. He swims, water-skis, sails, chases fish underwater with a spear, dives for spiny lobsters in the kelp beds, pries abalones off rocks. In quiet moments he sits on his porch, a high dive from the water, and feeds bagels to sea gulls. It is a pleasant life for a relaxing warrior, but always some odd airplane is waiting behind the mountains.

Brute Force v. Guile. Bill Bridgeman does not love the X3: "It's a nasty little beast," he says, "and the Skyrocket was a queen." But the Douglas engineers who designed X-3 come fiercely to its defense. The X3, they explain with indignant passion, is designed to do something that has never been done before. It is intended to reach high supersonic speed, probably Mach 2 (1,320 m.p.h.), and still show some of the essential characteristics of a real airplane.

The rocket planes (the Bell X-1 and the Douglas Skyrocket) that really "broke the sound barrier" sacrificed everything to speed. They used rocket motors, which burn something like a ton of fuel a minute. To hang up their speed and altitude records, they had to be carried off the airfield by bombers and dropped off in thin air at 35,000 ft. The longest supersonic flight so far (by Bridgeman in the Skyrocket) lasted only 100 seconds. This impractical "brute force" method, say the X-3's engineers, was all right for the first tests in supersonic flight, but it is not enough.

The X-3's objective is much more ambitious. Instead of smashing the sound barrier by brute rocket force, it will attempt to sneak through it with aerodynamic guile. It takes off from the ground, as a proper airplane should, and its comparatively economical jet engines are counted on to give it considerable time at high speed. If successful, it may father a line of true and useful supersonic airplanes.

The objective, easy to state, is fantastically hard to attain. The air behaves strangely and stubbornly at Mach 2. Inconspicuous projections or badly designed curves can eat up thousands of horse power. Shock waves must be outwitted or they will beat on the airplane like hammers or hold it back like a wall. Every part that faces forward must be sharp-pointed or knife-edged. Blunt shapes can be forced through the stubborn air at Mach 2, but only at enormous cost in power and fuel.

Menacing Beauty. Starting in 1944, the Douglas engineers, financed chiefly by the Air Force, and advised by the N.A.C.A.

(National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics), explored dozens of possible designs, including unlikely patterns with the tail in front or no tail at all. They studied 700 wing sections. They called in physicists and mathematicians. According to one Douglas man, 32 1/2 man-lifetimes were poured into the design of the X3.

Slowly the plane took shape, progressing from tables of figures to blueprints, to mockups, to a thing of menacing beauty in metal and shining white lacquer. But for eight years the X-3 did not fly. Some flaw or unforeseen difficulty was forever showing up. Until a few months ago, the X-3 was not considered ready to be risked in flight.

Some of the faults were designed away; others were removed by improvements in engines, materials or manufacturing methods. New aerodynamic knowledge, much of it flowing from the wind tunnels of the N.A.C.A., told Douglas engineers how to improve their design.

No one could tell them how to make a supersonic airplane fly safely at slow speeds, i.e., below 650 m.p.h. At Mach 2, very small wings will give sufficient lift. If they are made bigger, to give lift at low speed, they stir up too much drag. So the tiny wings of the X3, designed for efficiency and minimum drag at very high speed, make the ship unstable and cranky when it is flying below the speed of sound. This is one reason why Bill Bridgeman quietly denounced the X-3 as a "nasty little beast." When he does, one of the Douglas designers retorts: "What do you expect? The X-3 wasn't built to hover."

Heat Barrier. Beyond the problems of design and control lies an even more serious obstacle. Some experts believe that heat will defeat all attempts of men to fly for long at twice the speed of sound. Rocket planes like the Skyrocket do not encounter the "heat barrier"; they do not fly long enough to heat up seriously. But the X3, expected to fly at high speed for a considerable period, is another matter. Its designers had to build into it resistance to the floods of heat caused by its own motion,

The problems involved were staggering. Aluminum alloys lose much of their strength at 300DEG F., so large parts of the X-3's skin, especially parts that get heat from the engines as well as from outside, are made of titanium. The cabin, which must be kept at a temperature where a man can sit, is cooled by a refrigerator powerful enough to air-condition an average movie theater. The refrigerator accounts for 10% of the empty weight of the X3, and absorbs 2,600 horsepower from its engines. Despite all this cooling, the windows of the cockpit (which must be glass, not plastic) are expected to get hot enough to burn Bridgeman's hands.

Airman Bridgeman views the "heat barrier" calmly. He does not seem alarmed by the prospect of flying an airplane whose windows are too hot to touch. He is not optimistic, either, about the ultimate outcome. "The sound barrier," he says from experience, "wasn't too bad. It was sort of like jumping over a fence. But the heat barrier is like fighting your way into a thicket of thorns. The farther you get into it, the more thorns stick into you."

Problematic Plan. Not all airplane designers believe that the X-3 has a chance of reaching the speed for which it was designed. It is underpowered, they say, and, without complete redesign, it cannot use the bigger engines that are coming along. Bill is noncommittal. Neither liking nor trusting his little beast, he still intends to fly it with high professional competence, however tricky its character. The plan for Bill Bridgeman and the X-3 is many more flights, perhaps 40 of them, gradually increasing the speed to the maximum. Some of the flights are sure to be unpleasant, but Bill does not worry much. The flights will not come very close together; after almost every flight the X-3 is torn apart to remove some of its hazards. Between flights, Bill can enjoy his considerable salary, hunt for abalone on the surf-foaming rocks, and enjoy the guest of the evening in his beach house. If he worried overmuch, he would not be a test pilot.

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