Rider in the Purple Sky

Major Howard Johnson, 38, U.S.A.F., made a casual stop at a cafeteria one morning last week, drank a cup of black coffee, then went on to work at the Lockheed Aircraft Corp. plant in Palmdale, Calif. There, at Air Force Plant 42, ruddy, husky (5 ft. 8 in.. 170 Ibs.) Pilot Johnson squirmed into a pressure suit, picked up his helmet, oxygen mask and parachute, walked out to a dainty, needle-nosed F-104A Starfighter, a silvery sliver of jet aircraft with short (7 1/2 ft.), knife-edged wings. Johnson checked the plane carefully: 5,000 Ibs. of fuel, no armament, a special package of instruments whose faces stared at a 35-mm. movie camera. His preflight check done, "Scrappy" Johnson "just got into the plane and took off." Mission: a new high-altitude record.

Major Johnson had already made six trial flights into the 75,000-and 85,000-ft. altitudes. This time was for keeps; the flight would be measured officially both by the instrument package in the plane and by radar and theodolite cameras tracking it from the ground. Screaming down the runway, the Starfighter lifted off at 9:40 a.m.; Johnson headed westward toward Santa Barbara, climbing steeply. At 35,000 ft. he kicked in his afterburner, turned east, still climbing. He leveled off at 45,000 ft., poured straight ahead at about 1,000 m.p.h. As he reached the instrumented altitude-measuring range at Edwards Air Force Base, he pushed the Starfighter to full throttle and raised the nose sharply.

Higher and higher into the purpling sky streaked the Starfighter--50,000 ft., then 60,000, then 70,000. Laconically, Johnson radioed Edwards tower, made certain that the radar trackers still carried him on their screens. Now, 80,000 ft.: Johnson's pressurized cockpit altitude was 45,000 ft., and his pressure suit automatically inflated with oxygen from a bottle beneath his seat. His afterburner had long since lost nearly all its thrust, but Johnson kept coasting up. At length he knew that he could no longer hold the nose up in the thinning atmosphere, slacked off on the stick, nosed up and over, began the long drop down. He had shot 91,249 ft. up into the sky--about two miles higher than the previous world's record.*It had taken precisely 27 minutes.

*Bell Aircraft's X2, carried aloft by a mother plane, reached 126,000 ft. The previous world's record (unofficial) in ground-to-air flights--80,190 ft.--was made a fortnight ago by a French Trident 06.

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