[Infowarrior] - RIP, Scott Crossfield

[Richard Forno]

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/267471_Crossfield20ww.html

Famed aviator Scott Crossfield dies in plane crash

Thursday, April 20, 2006

P-I STAFF AND NEWS SERVICES

Scott Crossfield, the University of Washington graduate who was the first
man to fly at twice the speed of sound, was found dead Thursday in the
wreckage of his single-engine plane in Georgia.

Crossfield, 84, dueled with Chuck Yeager a half century ago in piloting
rocket-powered aircraft. He helped design and then piloted the X-15 rocket
plane. He was a legend to aeronautic students at the UW, but he considered
his cutting-edge career an ordinary profession.

Air-traffic monitors had lost radio and radar contact with Crossfield
Wednesday as he was en route from Alabama to his Virginia home.
Thunderstorms were reported in the area.

The cause of the crash, about 50 miles northwest of Atlanta, is under
investigation. Crossfield was believed to be the only person aboard.

"We're in a state of shock," said Adam Bruckner, chair of the UW's
Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. "He was sort of a hero here to
our department, our students, our faculty and others.

"What better role model can you imagine than someone who flew the greatest
and the latest and then helped design an even better one?"

Crossfield, 84, a native of Berkeley, Calif., enrolled at the UW in 1942,
interrupting his studies to serve as a Navy fighter pilot and instructor
during World War II. He returned to Seattle to earn a bachelor's degree in
1949 in aeronautical engineering and a master's degree in aeronautical
science in 1950. He worked in the UW's Kirsten Wind Tunnel from 1946 to
1950.

After graduate school, he joined the National Advisory Committee for
Aeronautics (NACA), the predecessor of NASA, as a research pilot.

The Cessna 210A in which Crossfield died was a puny flying machine compared
with the rocket-powered aircraft he flew as a test pilot. During his heyday,
he routinely climbed into some of the most powerful, most dangerous and most
complex pieces of machinery of his time, took them to their performance
limits or beyond -- or "pushed the envelope," as test pilots put it -- and
usually brought them back to earth in one piece.

Six years after Yeager broke the sound barrier, Crossfield set the Mach 2
record in November 1953, going twice the speed of sound and reaching about
1,300 mph in a Douglas D-558-II Skyrocket. The plane reached an altitude of
13.6 miles.

He left NACA in 1955 to help North American Aviation design and build the
X-15, then flew the unproven aircraft in dangerous tests to test its
airworthiness. He piloted the rocket plane more than a dozen times, reaching
a maximum speed of Mach 2.97 -- about 1,960 mph -- and climbing 16.7 miles
above Earth in 1960.

In a 1988 interview with Aviation Week & Space Technology, he downplayed any
talk of heroism.

Test pilots are "all just people who incidentally do flight tests,"
Crossfield said. "It is a profession just like anything else.5 In my mind,
we should divest ourselves of this idea of special people (being) heroes, if
you please, because really they do not exist."

The early days of the research airplane program had much less bureaucracy
than later years, Crossfield said in the same interview. "For instance,
there could be a day where I would do an X-1 launch early in the morning,
fly the X-4 over lunch hour, and do a D-558-II launch in the afternoon. That
was not a typical day, but there were days of that type. We were very
versatile in our operation in those days."

During the 1950s, Crossfield embodied what came to be called "the right
stuff," dueling Yeager for supremacy among America's Cold War test pilots.
Yeager broke the sound barrier in 1947. Only weeks after Crossfield reached
Mach 2, or twice the speed of sound, Yeager outdid him.

"He's really one of the major figures," said Peter Jakab, aerospace chairman
at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. "He was not only the great
cutting-edge research pilot 5 but after that, he continued to be a great
adviser and participant in all aspects of aerospace."

NASA Administrator Michael Griffin hailed him as "a true pioneer whose
daring X-15 flights helped pave the way for the space shuttle."

In "The Right Stuff," Tom Wolfe's history of the dawn of the space age,
Wolfe portrayed Crossfield, Yeager and other members of the brotherhood of
test pilots as possessors of "the right stuff," which the author defined as
"the ability to go up in a hurtling piece of machinery and put his hide on
the line and then have the moxie, the reflexes, the experience, the
coolness, to pull it back in the last yawning moment -- and then to go up
again the next day, and the next day, and every next day."

(During an interview on "The Early Show" on CBS in 2003, Crossfield said he
would "not endorse anything that was in ŒThe Right Stuff.'.")

The first group of seven NASA astronauts was selected in 1959. Bob Jacobs, a
NASA spokesman, said Thursday that Crossfield never applied, though he did
some engineering work on the Apollo space program. Many test pilots sneered
at the Mercury program and did not consider it real flying; they regarded
astronauts as little more than "Spam in a can" because their capsules were
controlled from the ground.

Attempts to break the sound barrier in the years following World War II
involved high stakes and some big egos.

On Oct. 14, 1947, Yeager finally reached the landmark, pushing his orange,
bullet-shaped Bell X-1 rocket plane past 660 mph over the Mojave Desert in
California. His feat was kept top secret for about a year.

The now 83-year-old Yeager, in his book "Yeager: An Autobiography,"
described friction between the military pilots and the civilian NACA pilots.
He groused that Crossfield "was a proficient pilot, but also among the most
arrogant I've met. 5 None of us blue suiters was thrilled to see a NACA guy
bust Mach 2."

The competition did not end at Mach 2. On Dec. 12, 1953, just a few days
before the 50th anniversary of the Wright brothers' first flight, Yeager
bested Crossfield when he flew an X-1A to a record speed of more than Mach
2.4, or more than 1,600 mph.

The upcoming Wright anniversary had weighed on his mind, Yeager wrote: "The
television networks had scheduled special programs about Crossfield and his
Mach 2 flight. 5 Our plan was to smash Scotty's record on December 12."

Nowadays, the best fighter jets can fly well over Mach 2.

Crossfield left NACA in 1955 to work for North American Aviation on the X-15
project, including its first flight, an unpowered glide, in 1959. Other
early X-15 test flights were made by pilots Joe Walker and Robert White.

In one of his test flights, Crossfield reached about three times the speed
of sound on Nov. 15, 1960, in an X-15 launched from a B-52 bomber. The plane
reached an altitude of 81,000 feet.

There were some close calls. During an X-15 flight in 1959, one of the
engines exploded. The emergency landing broke the aircraft's back just
behind the cockpit, but Crossfield was not injured, according to the Edwards
Air Force Base Web site.

Less than a year later, a malfunctioning valve caused a catastrophic
explosion during a ground test while Crossfield was in the cockpit. He again
escaped injury.

In later years, he was an executive for Eastern Airlines and Hawker Siddley
Aviation and a technical consultant to the House Committee on Science and
Technology.

"I am an aeronautical engineer, an aerodynamicist and a designer," he told
Aviation Week & Space Technology. "My flying was only primarily because I
felt that it was essential to designing and building better airplanes for
pilots to fly."

More recently, Crossfield had a key role in preparations for the attempt to
re-enact the Wright brothers' flight on the 100th anniversary of their feat
on the sand dunes near Kitty Hawk, N.C. Crossfield trained four pilots, and
one of them, Kevin Kochersberger, was selected for the Dec. 17, 2003,
attempt.

But in the end, unsuitable weather doomed the attempt to get the replica
into the air. The plane plopped into wet sand as the crowd of 35,000
groaned.

Among his many honors, Crossfield was inducted into the National Aviation
Hall of Fame in 1983.

P-I Reporter John Iwasaki contributed to this report by The Associated Press