http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article708891.ece
THE TIMES
THE SUNDAY TIMES
From The Times
April 25, 2006
Scott Crossfield
Test pilot who broke the Mach 2 barrier and took part in the X15 hypersonic research programme
October 2, 1921 - April 21, 2006
ONE of that intrepid band of pioneers of hypersonic flight immortalised in Tom Wolfe’s book The Right Stuff (1979), Scott Crossfield was the first man to fly at twice the speed of sound.
On November 20, 1953, in a Douglas D558-2 Skyrocket launched at 32,000ft from the belly of a Boeing Superfortress, he climbed to 72,000ft and then reached speeds of more than 1,320mph in descending to 62,000ft.
In doing so he had beaten that other great pioneer of those early space-race days in the skies above the Mojave Desert, Chuck Yeager, to Mach 2 by a month. Yeager, who had first broken the sound barrier in the rocket-powered Bell X1 in 1947, broke the Mach 2 barrier in December 1953, piloting an X1A.
Unlike Yeager, a redneck fighter jock who gloried in flying by the seat of his pants and had not been to university, Crossfield had a degree in engineering and later participated in the design of the rocket-powered X15 research aircraft. This he subsequently flew to the verges of space in the search for escape velocity.
But, though the heroic pilots of the rocket-plane X programme could not at that time know it, Man was never destined simply to fly into outer space in an aeroplane. The ballistic rocket was to be the way forward. The American aviator was to be beaten into space (and back) in 1959 by a pair of monkeys, Able and Baker, who on May 15 that year reached an altitude of 300 miles in a nose cone on top of a Jupiter rocket, surviving the flight, unlike a hapless predecessor. The first human being in space achieved it similarly — as a human cannonball on top of a rocket, and not as the pilot of a space plane.
Albert Scott Crossfield was born in Berkeley, California, in 1921. Addicted to aviation from an early age, he went up in an aeroplane for the first time at 6, and at 11 was taking flying lessons. He went solo when he was 15.
After high school Crossfield entered university in Washington to read aeronautical engineering. But the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into the war interrupted his studies. He joined the US Navy and trained as a pilot. But he did not fly in combat, most of his service being as an instructor, gunnery officer and on the engineering side.
Returning to Washington University after the war, he took his bachelor’s degree in aero-engineering in 1949, and his masters a year later. For five years at Washington he was also in charge of the university’s windtunnel operation.
In 1950 he joined the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA, the forerunner of Nasa) and was sent as a research pilot to its High Speed Flight Research Station at Muroc Field (now Edwards Air Force Base) in California. Today Edwards is a sleek, well-sculpted military facility and the home to a cast of thousands: pilots, engineers, technocrats and support staff of all sorts. Then it was little more than a runway scratched out of the desert, around which a few pilots lived in tar-paper shacks. These, men of the kidney of Yeager, hard riding and hard drinking, were already making the skies over Muroc resound to the sonic boom.
Crossfield was a man of a very different sort. The image of the test pilot as some sort of cockpit cowboy was not to his taste. He thought of himself as an aero-engineer, aerodynamicist and designer. For him, the flying — and the necessity to fly at the envelope of tolerance — merely came in the wake of that.
For Crossfield Mach 2 was “no big deal”, and he played down the milestone of November 20, 1953. The press did not, however. The authorities had learnt from their folly in having kept the original Mach 1 achievement under wraps for a year, denying Yeager the credit for his feat that would have resulted from immediate release of the data. (Five years afterwards Yeager had even had the galling experience of being invited to the US premiere of David Lean’s film, Breaking the Sound Barrier, and seeing his feat ascribed to a British pilot.) This did not happen to Crossfield. Across the nation he immediately became the “fastest man alive” — and remained so for the best part of a month, until Yeager recaptured that title by flying at 1,612mph on December 12 that year.
