Famed test pilot found in wreckage of plane

Crossfield was first man to fly at twice the speed of sound

RANGER, Georgia (AP) -- Scott Crossfield, the hotshot test pilot and aircraft designer who in 1953 became the first man to fly at twice the speed of sound, was killed in the crash of his small plane, authorities said Thursday. He was 84.

Crossfield's body was found in the wreckage Thursday in the mountains about 50 miles northwest of Atlanta, a day after the single-engine plane he was piloting dropped off radar screens on a flight from Alabama to Virginia. There were thunderstorms in the area at the time.

The cause of the crash was under investigation. Crossfield was believed to be the only person aboard.

During the 1950s, Crossfield embodied what came to be called "the right stuff," dueling the better-known Chuck 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. (The man and the speed machines)

Yeager, reached at his home in California, said he was "sure sorry to hear" about Crossfield's death, but he wondered whether the pilot's penchant for taking risks might have been his undoing.

Crossfield was flying "in very bad weather," Yeager noted.

During their days as test pilots, he said Crossfield "being a civilian, had a lot more freedom than we did, as military guys. ... Sometimes he exceeded his capability and got in trouble."

Asked for an example, the 83-year-old Yeager said: "Flying in weather that he should have never been in."

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.

"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 ... but after that, he continued to be a great adviser and participant in all aspects of aerospace."

Crossfield, who lived in Herndon, Virginia, and flew regularly into his 80s, was a member of a group of civilian pilots assembled by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the forerunner of NASA, in the early 1950s. Yeager did his test-flying as an Air Force pilot.

Crossfield flew Mach 2 on Nov. 20, 1953, when he hit 1,300 mph in NACA's Douglas D-558-II Skyrocket. The plane reached an altitude of 72,000 feet.

After leaving NACA, he had a major role in the development of the X-15 rocket plane and piloted it on several of its early test flights in the early 1960s.

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

"We keep talking about test pilots, but there is no such thing as a `test pilot,"' Crossfield said in a 1988 interview with Aviation Week & Space Technology. "They are all just people who incidentally do flight tests. ... We should divest ourselves of this idea of special people (being) heroes, if you please, because really they do not exist."

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."

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.

Born in Berkeley, California, in 1921, Crossfield interrupted his studies at the University of Washington to join the Navy in 1942. He learned to fly a variety of aircraft during his Navy service.

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

On October 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. ... None of us blue suiters was thrilled to see a NACA guy bust Mach 2."

The competition did not end at Mach 2. On December 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. ... 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 November 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 December 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.

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It goes without saying that I am heartbroken about this . . .

God Rest His Soul . . .

Very sad.........but better than him dying in his sleep.

Yep, I bet he'd want to go out no other way!!

When growing up in LA, I loved to hear the sonic booms the X-15 program generated. I still have a booklet about the X-15 I bought from the National Scholastic Reader. It was in that book I read about Scott Crossfield one of the X-15 pilots. About twenty years ago, I had the pleasure to visit Wight-Patterson AFB air museum, including two different X-15 planes.

Crossfield was one of the giants of aviation, as Andy said; he died doing what he did best.

He is definatly one of my heroes . . . I hate to hear of his passing. I guess you could say that " He Augered In " . . .

Hey Jet, I came across the article of the last Boeing plane being produced in Long Beach, CA. It's a few post down on this page. I think you'll be stoked on the pictures and what not...

Yeah . . . Thank You Very Much for That Link . . .

Scott Crossfield was sort of a hero of mine. I'm upset that this happened, but he died doing what he loved.

Very sad indeed. One of my boyhood hero's. RIP Mr.Scott. X

It appears his plane was struck by lightning . . .

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'Right Stuff' pilot killed in Georgia

Drew Jubera, Don Plummer And S.A. Reid - Staff

Friday, April 21, 2006

One of the country's legendary space cowboys, who test-piloted rocket planes in the 1950s that cleared the way for the nation's space program, died Wednesday when the 1960s-era single-engine plane he still flew at age 84 dropped out of a dark North Georgia sky and crashed in a piney gully during a thunderstorm.

Scott Crossfield, the first man to fly a plane at two times the speed of sound, was featured with other barrier-busting test pilots in Tom Wolfe's best-selling book and Oscar-nominated movie "The Right Stuff." He was viewed by his peers as an integral part of an exclusive club of rocket jockeys considered as fearless as they were adept.

Crossfield's death near Jasper, on his way home to Virginia from Alabama, was seen by many who knew him as tragic, ironic and somehow fitting. Never seriously injured in the air during years of flying his era's riskiest missions, Crossfield once derided trying to eject from a tumbling rocket plane as "committing suicide to keep from getting killed."

"We have a saying: 'There are no old, bold test pilots,' " said Robert Crippen, a former astronaut who in 1981 piloted the country's first space shuttle. "Nobody knows how he's going to exit the world, but going out flying would probably be the way Scott would have picked to exit.

"He was a test pilot's test pilot," Crippen added. "He was on the point of the spear as far as aviation was concerned, providing the lead to break sound barriers and previous barriers we hadn't challenged before."

Crossfield's body was found Thursday amid the wreckage of his Cessna 210A in a remote area of Gordon County, aviation authorities said.

He was alone in the plane --- the way he preferred it, friends and peers said --- when it crashed late Wednesday morning after leaving Prattville, Ala., bound for Herndon, Va., according to Capt. Paige Joyner of the Civil Air Patrol.

The aircraft, which left the suburban Montgomery airfield about 9 a.m., was last seen on radar about 11:15 a.m. Wednesday about 10 miles southwest of Ellijay, flying at 11,500 feet, said Kathleen Bergen, spokeswoman for the Federal Aviation Administration.

Strong thunderstorms, with hail nearly 1 inch in diameter, were reported in the area at 11:30 a.m.

'The plane just lit up'

One resident near the rural crash site was on his porch during the storm when he spotted the plane and saw it get hit by lightning.

"The plane just lit up, and then it went up a couple thousand feet and wheeled around," said Gene Stone, 66, who lives a few hundred yards from the crash site, near the border of Gordon and Pickens counties, about 70 miles north of Atlanta. "I thought it was heading back to the Gordon County airport, but then it sounded like the engine just cut off, and it went over the top of the pines as fast as it could."

Stone said it crashed in a swale filled with young pines and briars. Crossfield's family declined to comment when contacted by telephone just hours after searchers made the tragic discovery. Ed Fleming, his son-in-law, said it wasn't unusual for Crossfield to travel to places like Alabama.

"He does speeches around the country," Fleming said. "He was still very involved in aviation issues."

Judy Rice, a national Civil Air Patrol outreach director, said Crossfield was at Alabama's Maxwell Air Force Base to talk to graduating cadets about his past experiences as a pilot and engineer and to meet with CAP officials about a biannual national teachers' conference on aviation and space education. Rice said the two went over his well-equipped plane and his instrument flight plan and also checked the weather. Crossfield, she said, had a special computer in the craft, which he filled with oil before takeoff.

She insisted that the weather had to be a factor in his crash. Crossfield, Rice said, was an excellent pilot --- even at age 84.

"He is so sharp. I know how detailed he was," she said.

"Being a pilot, Scott and I talked about how we wanted to go when it's our time," added Rice, his friend for eight years. "We don't want to go in the bathtub. We don't want to go in a car. We don't want to hurt our plane, but we'd want to go in the air."

Despite his legendary reputation, the low-key Crossfield didn't fit Hollywood's swashbuckling, daredevil depiction of a pioneering test pilot in the mold of Chuck Yeager, a war hero who was the first to break the sound barrier and became a national household name. A 1957 magazine profile said a casual observer might mistake the slight, conservatively barbered Crossfield on the street for a "supermarket manager or a golf pro."

"He was not a guy to throw a white scarf around his neck and hop into a plane," Crippen said. "He was an engineer and a test pilot, capable of evaluating things from a technical standpoint."

"He was a good test pilot," Yeager said.

Added Ron Kaplan, executive director of the National Aviation Hall of Fame, in which Crossfield was enshrined in 1983: "His personality was not given to grandstanding. When he broke Mach 3 [three times the speed of sound, or about 2,283 mph], he did it out of his competitive fire with fellow pilots. He didn't promote it. He wasn't even supposed to do it --- he might've been reprimanded. The last thing he wanted was to be on the front pages."

Love of flying born early

Crossfield was born on Oct. 2, 1921, in Berkeley, Calif. His father was a petroleum engineer, and Crossfield took his first flight on an oil company plane at age 6, deciding then on a career in aviation.

He began flying lessons at 12, without his parents' knowledge, and took as role models that era's famous test pilots, Eddie Allen and Jimmy Doolittle.

After serving as a pilot instructor during World War II, he earned degrees in aeronautical engineering from the University of Washington.

Crossfield then joined the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (which became NASA in 1958) at Edwards Air Force Base, and for the next five years flew virtually every experimental aircraft around. He broke Mach 2 (two times the speed of sound, or 1,522 mph) on Nov. 20, 1953.

Crossfield then helped in the conception and design of the X-15, the most advanced rocket plane of its day. He once called test piloting "a kind of continual rodeo where you were not allowed to get thrown."

As a manned space mission approached, according to Wolfe's "The Right Stuff," Crossfield was told he was "too independent" to be an astronaut, and was asked instead to help choose men to pilot the program.

"Crossfield was the most prominent of the rocket pilots, now that Yeager was no longer at Edwards ...," Wolfe wrote. Yet Crossfield was told "Project Mercury just wasn't suited for the righteous brethren of yore, the veterans of those high desert rat-shack broomstick days when ... the pilot huddled in the hangar with the engineer and then went out and took the beast up and lit the candle and reached for the stars and rode his chimney and landed on the lake bed and made it to Pancho's in time for beer call."

After his final flight in 1960 in an X-15, Crossfield worked as a systems director for North American Aviation. He went to Eastern Airlines in 1967 as vice president for research and development.

From 1977 to 1993, he served on the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science and Technology as both an outspoken critic and cheerleader for the space program.

Wolfe said that had NASA not been pushed into the Mercury program by the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik, it would have continued with the program Crossfield piloted and he could have been the first American in space.

"He was on the leading edge of what, except by an accident of history, would have been the frontier of aviation," Wolfe said by phone from New York. "Suddenly all of that was flushed aside. Here was a man who one moment was at the top of the highest frontier, when suddenly the curtain was pulled."

Yet Crossfield's legacy, while largely unknown to the public, appears secure among his fellow pilots.

"You don't break frontiers going into space by all of a sudden a big door opens and you walk through. You've got to take steps," Crippen said. "Scott took the steps required for us to be able to fly into space."

JB,thanx,that was good reading. X