Hot-Nosed Jet

In the cramped cockpit of the black, needle-nosed little aircraft shackled under the right wing of a B-52 jet bomber. Air Force Major Robert White threw a releasing switch, moments later pulled back on his throttle. By the time he returned to earth, Test Pilot White, at the controls of the U.S.'s experimental rocket plane X-15 over California's Mojave Desert, had flown faster than any human before him. His speed of 2,905 m.p.h. was nearly 4 1/2 times the speed of sound and 630 m.p.h. faster than he had flown Feb. 9.

Moreover, White demonstrated the performance of the X-15's monstrously powerful new engine and proved that the aircraft could be maneuvered accurately with its stainless-steel skin getting close to red-hot.

The single combustion chamber in White's X-15 was rated at 57,000 Ibs. of thrust--as against a total of 16.000 Ibs. for the four chambers of earlier X-15s engines. For a few seconds it generated 70% of its rated thrust, and White thrilled to its surge. Then he throttled back to a more prudent 50% and put the X-15 into a 30DEG climb. When he reached level flight at 75,000 ft., the X-15 spurted ahead. White slipped it sideways and wiggled its rudder to test control--and the strange airplane responded precisely. He shut off the engine after 125 sec. of operation. This was the instant of greatest speed: Mach 4.43.

Skid Landing. Coming down, White put his plane into a cautious glide that permitted it to slow to Mach 3. Then he opened his speed brakes: four doorlike vanes near the tail that open into the air stream to add drag. They brought him down to Mach 2, which is strolling speed for the X-15. He decelerated gradually to subsonic speed, was soon in position for his landing approach at Rogers Dry Lake. Three miles from the touchdown point, he jettisoned the fin under the tail to clear the landing skids, and skidded to a clean landing on the smooth lake bed at 200 m.p.h. Total freeflight time: six minutes.

Major White's chief comment on the flight was to remark happily that everything had gone well. But if the X-15 itself could have talked, it might have complained about the heat of the flight. A thermocouple inside the wing recorded 675DEG F. Yet the structure did not fail, and the engineers are confident that it can take its design temperature of 1,200DEG F., reach Mach 6 and climb to 50 or perhaps 100 miles.

Future Debt. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which is testing the X-15, emphasizes that it is a pure research airplane with no immediate applications. But it is no secret that the X-15 is an important step toward controlled re-entry from space. The first humans who return to earth from an orbit will probably depend on parachutes to lower them gently to a passive landing. This is the approach of U.S. Project Mercury and presumably of the Soviet man-in-space program. A more ambitious approach is to glide the returning space craft down through the atmosphere on red-hot wings and steer it undamaged to a desired landing strip. The Xis is no space craft, but when the first true space craft makes a controlled landing, it will owe a considerable debt to pioneering Major Robert White and his hot-nosed little airplane.

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