by Dan Hampton
Chuck Yeager remained in the Air Force. In 1949 he made an attempt to take the X-1 off from the ground and fly past the Mach but it failed, just as predicted, due to lack of fuel. He had already been awarded the Collier and Mackay Trophies and would later be presented with the Harmon Trophy. Yeager flew chase for Jackie Cochrane when she became the first female pilot to fly supersonic, and he would become the first commandant of the USAF Aerospace Research Pilot School in 1962. In 1975 he retired from the USAF as a brigadier general after thirty-three years on active duty; Yeager has since consulted for video-game flight simulators and been the televised face of AC Delco batteries. With the help of Leo Janos, he had an autobiography published in 1985 called Yeager; as of February 2018, Chuck Yeager is ninety-five years old.
It has been said that only the good die young, and this very often applies to pilots like Jack Ridley. Unquestionably the brains behind the USAF supersonic flight test team, Ridley stayed with the X-1 until 1948, then transferred to the XB-47 program. This swept-wing, supersonic jet bomber was the cornerstone of the new Strategic Air Command’s response to a Soviet nuclear threat, and Jack’s practical, problem-solving genius was irreplaceable in getting the aircraft to operational status.
He came back to Edwards AFB after this and remained in place until 1956. During this time, Ridley worked the X-2 through X-5 experimental programs, and the B-52 advanced bomber. As chief of the Flight Test Engineering Laboratory, the procedures he created while fleshing out these aircraft are still in use today. “Jack Ridley was a good pilot and brilliant engineer,” his wife, Nell, would later write. “But he was somewhat forgetful about some the ordinary, everyday things in life. One day he went to work with no insignia on his uniform.” Yet his mind never really stopped working. At the Officers’ Club one night, while engrossed in a conversation with one of his pilots, he scribbled a few figures on a piece of paper and handed it to the next table. Four MIT grad students had been agonizing over a problem and, while barely listening, Ridley gave them the solution.
In 1956, as a testament to his flying and engineering skill, Theodore von Kármán himself nominated the forty-year-old lieutenant colonel to the Flight Test Techniques Panel, part of the Aeronautical Research and Development team charged with consolidating efforts from all NATO countries. A year later, Jack was promoted to full colonel and sent to Japan as part of the U.S. Advisory Group. On March 12, 1957, while flying copilot on a C-47 inbound to Tokyo in bad weather, he died when the aircraft smashed into Mount Shirouma. Colonel Jackie Lynwood Ridley was posthumously inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame, and the Aviation Walk of Honor. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery (Section 1, 236-D).
The boom rolled over the airport, broke windows, and sent the gathered reporters scrambling for cover after the silver fighter streaked past. At less than 1,000 feet, in full afterburner and already past Mach 1, George Welch thundered over the Palmdale, California, airport on May 25, 1953. Six years and seven months after taking up the first F-86 Sabre, he was showcasing North American’s newest jet: the YF-100A Super Sabre. Now the company’s chief engineering test pilot, George had spent some months in Korea during the war as a technical adviser for the F-86. Rumor has it that he flew over twenty combat missions as an “observer,” something not so difficult to arrange for a World War II ace a few years after that war ended. It is also said that Welch shot down a few MiG-15s, though he was as indifferent to keeping score in Korea as he had been in the Pacific so, if true, others got the credit.
The new Super Sabre had problems, though. The military had initiated a program that would speed up the acquisition and fielding of new weapons and, like most bureaucratic solutions, looked good on paper but was short on practical reality. For aircraft procurement, the Cook-Craigie policy essentially meant a new design would be “flown” off the drawing board, and subsequent flight tests would prove the design. This was a major departure from validating the aircraft through a prototype before building production models. Military test pilots like Pete Everest and Chuck Yeager both concluded that the YF-100A had a slow engine response time at low speed and, more dangerous still, longitudinal stability problems. The rudder and horizontal stablizers were too small to deal with transonic airflow burbles, which could induce inertia coupling.
George disregarded the well-found warnings and on Columbus Day, October 12, 1954, he took the ninth production F-100 (#52-5764) on a high-speed, high-g test mission. One item on his test card was a symetrical, 7-g pull at 1.55 Mach, and when he did this, the smooth supersonic flow on top of the wing came apart, resulting in a burbling, disturbed mass of air that blanked out the vertical tail. In an instant the jet began yawing with no way for George to control it, and the fighter rapidly went out of control. Using over 300 pounds of force on the rudder (according to the flight data recorder) he tried to keep the F-100 flying straight but the oscillations deepened. At supersonic speeds this generated forces beyond the aircraft’s structural limits, and the nose broke off.
Somewhere during these few seconds George reflexively pulled the handle and ejected, but not before the canopy bow and instrument panel smashed into his chest. Still traveling at over 700 miles per hour, George came out of the shattered fighter around 20,000 feet and plummeted straight down according to a bomber transiting the area. The parachute deployed, but the force ripped out several panels and he hit the ground hard. Fellow test pilots J. O. Roberts and Bob Baker flew to the crash site and found Welch still alive: barely. He died there on the desert a few minutes later.
George Welch remains an enigma to this day.
A superb fighter pilot, George fought his part of World War II with outclassed aircraft against the best of Japan’s aviators, and he prevailed. He came home sick, exhausted, and victorious when others were just getting started. As a test pilot, George was skilled and confident to the point of recklessness, which is not the path to survival in high performance jets; and he did not survive. For all of his short, adventurous life Welch walked a different path; a prankster and a maverick, he was unquestionably courageous and thoroughly independent.
Yet there was something else eating away at him.
George was one of those lost souls who never made it all the way back from war. Growing up in the Great Depression he had learned how quickly everything could change and, like all combat veterans, he knew the frailty of life, and seemed determined to enjoy as much of it as possible while it lasted. On the day he was killed, his Pearl Harbor wingman Ken Taylor, now an Air Force colonel, was coming to California to persuade Welch to pass the flying torch on to others and take a desk job. His time was up, and his friends were trying to save his life. It would not have worked and, in the event, was too late. George Welch is buried on a quiet hillside in Arlington National Cemetery, flanked by a pair of trees and only a few yards from the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier where, if there is grace for fighter pilots, he may finally be at peace.*
Ken Chilstrom finished the Sabre’s Phase II testing and was the original American military F-86 pilot. The next year, 1948, was a busy time for Ken. He became the first USAF/USN exchange pilot and spent several weeks at Naval Air Station Pensacola getting carrier qualified. In a satisfying twist of fate, he learned the Navy art of takeoffs and landings on the USS Wright (CVL-49), a Saipan-class light carrier named for the Wright brothers.* Ken eventually racked up fifty traps—carrier landings—flying F8F Bearcats with Carrier Air Group Seven aboard the USS Leyte Gulf (CV-32).
Returning to Ohio, he was appointed as commandant of the USAF Test Pilot School and enjoyed roaring around Dayton in a bright red convertible with white sidewalls. Following the success of the X-1 and XP-86 programs, the world of military test pilots was expanding rapidly. Busy as he was, Ken also managed to fall in love. Miss Ruth Bertsch worked for the base public relations office, so she had heard it all from the hotshot pilots at Wright-Patterson. Nevertheless, within a year he proposed to her at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria and they were married. The Air Force then receiv
ed a request from Warner Brothers to provide a technical adviser for an upcoming film about test pilots, and Ken was selected. He, Ruth, and the red convertible got to spend four months in Hollywood with Humphrey Bogart, Eleanor Parker, and Raymond Massey shooting Chain Lightning: it was released in 1950.
Ken was then picked to represent USAF test pilots with their Royal Air Force counterparts, and over the course of several months in the United Kingdom at Boscombe Down and Farnborough he flew twenty-five British aircraft. This year saw the birth of his first son, who he named Glen for his fallen friend Glen Edwards. Ken left for Japan in December 1951 to be the fighter requirements officer for the Far East Air Force (FEAF), returning to the Pentagon three years later as a lieutnant colonel with another son: John Scott Chilstrom. Spending the next four years managing Century Series fighter programs like the F-100 and F-105, Ken was promoted to full colonel and retired in 1964 after twenty-five years on active duty. That same year a daughter was born, Carol Lynn, and the family moved to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.* For the next twenty-two years he held executive positions with General Electric, Boeing-Vertol, and others before again retiring, this time in 1986 from Pratt&Whitney.
Ken Chilstrom has been chasing the demon his entire life; through the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, the Second World War, and into the space age. He nipped at its heels through 147 different types of aircraft and thousands of hours flown during a marvelously exciting career. As his ninety-seventh birthday approaches in April 2018, Ken has not slowed down much and can look back on an equally successful, well-lived life. Every day he can see the effects of the ripples that he, and those like him, caused by their endurance through the 1930s, their victory in the war, and their courage at the onset of the greatest age aviation has ever known. He was a deadly warrior and skilled pilot who became a loving husband and a superb father; Ken Chilstrom was, and is, a good man.
His legacy, his code, is a simple one: faith, family, and love of his country. “I was honored,” he said, “to serve with eagles.” If the chase for the demon is also a pursuit for one’s deepest desires, then Ken did indeed catch the demon, and in doing so won his own race.
Author’s Note
For simplicity, I have generally used the U.S. military equivalent when discussing foreign military ranks and command structure. Use of German, Italian, or Japanese words and phrases has been reduced to the bare minimum as they tend to confuse most readers, though certain distinct unit names have been retained. Much of this book concerns the U.S. Army Air Corps and the USAF test program, so I must ask forgiveness from my brothers with gold wings for limiting the numerous contributions of Navy and Marine aviators. There have been scores of superb pilots from both services involved with flight test, but as carrier aviation is essentially tactical in nature, flying supersonic did not obsess naval aviators as it did the Air Force.
I also beg forbearance from Second World War historians for my abbreviated treatment of pivotal operations in the Pacific, Mediterranean, and the savage fighting throughout Europe toward the close of the war. These were history-altering events about which scores of superb books have been written, but I would remind my colleagues that in this work the war is the historical backdrop that created the men and fostered the aviation advances that make this story possible.
Yet we must not forget that progression into the supersonic age of flight was undeniably facilitated by World War II, and the men who chased this particular demon were products of that war and the unsettled decades preceding that conflict. So to know them, and to understand the technology and challenges they faced in attempting to fly past the speed of sound, it is necessary to understand something of their world and its consequences, both personal and public. In bringing this to life I have had an incalculable asset: Colonel Ken Chilstrom. World War II fighter pilot and veteran of the North Africa, Sicily, and Italian campaigns; graduate of the initial U.S. test pilot course; and chief of the Wright-Patterson Fighter Test Division when the XP-86 and Bell X-1 were being put through their paces. As an author, having a firsthand, eyewitness source to the times and events that shaped our world is phenomenal. As a fighter pilot myself, to sit and listen to an aviation legend who has truly “been there and done that” was awe inspiring. To call him my friend is an honor I will always cherish.
Keep in mind also that just as the birth of modern flight is certainly not a single event, neither is the advent of supersonic flight. True, it was the Wrights at Kitty Hawk on that cold December morning in 1903 who first achieved powered, controlled flight in a heavier-than-air machine, but note the qualifiers. Many other men had flown in one fashion or another, and for centuries they had used gliders, with various types of rudimentary control, to achieve a type of flight. Still others were able to power their craft off the ground but had no control whatsoever over the craft once it was airborne. Later, men attempted to blend what they had learned—to use self-produced power—and it was at this point, along with positive control, that true flight was finally achieved. It is precisely the accomplishment of controlled, manned flight under power that justifiably gave the Wrights claim to the title. Other titles and popular claims to fame may be less certain and we shall take an objective look into this.
Throughout the book I have endeavored to distill aerodynamic concepts into a digestible form for those readers without aviation or engineering backgrounds, and I have included the historical aspects of man’s quest to fly past the speed of sound for those without historical inclinations. My hope is that there is a story here for all of us who share a fascination with aviation.
As for the demon . . .
It existed, and still does. It lives out just beyond the thin air, elusive and tempting, drawing us further and deeper into his domain. A world of unknowns and lofty, dangerous pursuits such as high-altitude flight, global circumnavigation, and, yes, the so-called sound barrier. The latter term is a romantic label for flight beyond the speed of sound, and as such it is attractive to moviemakers or publishers. It has a ring to it, an air of satisfying finality, nearly an absolute, which can only be overcome through extreme courage and skill. There is truth in this, yet the term is utterly artificial for aviators, engineers, or historians, at least in the intellectual sense: no such barrier actually existed.
Or did it?
From another viewpoint the barrier and its demon lived in men’s imaginations and would continue to do so until both man and machine evolved sufficiently to dispel the myth. Indeed, there was a physical barrier, but it was of man’s own making through his misunderstanding of transonic aerodynamics, and the propulsion systems required to push him faster. Once these were achieved the actual event of muscling through Mach 1 was anticlimactic: an inevitable moment in time. But it is here, in the shaping of the men and the struggle to develop the science, that the real story lies. The story of those who chased the demon, in any of his forms, far out into the unknown only to see his shape fade elusively into another undiscovered realm of his world. The demon beckoned men to follow, and still does today, to continue chasing him toward whatever else is out there.
Why were men striving to fly past the speed of sound, past a known, calculated point that, for many, had become a barrier to further flight? How did such a time in history arise that would permit such an endeavor? What caused the very fertile ground of the 1930s and 1940s to be so fertile, and how did the global stage come to be the stage upon which this drama was set? Simply phrased—why then? And equally important, how did the men who chased the demon become the men they were? What events shaped their inherent talents and abilities to the point where the demon of speed—and others—could be successfully pursued?
Lots of questions.
To answer them we must look well beyond the very short, four-minute rocket burst that officially took man beyond the speed of sound during October 1947, into what made that flight, and very likely others before it, possible. We must look at war and peace, politics, science and technology, to examine factors that molded the world w
e inherited and that still impact our lives today. As with other seminal developments we take for granted today, the origins and motivations have often become obscured, idealized, or, worse still, forgotten altogether. At several points in the history of flight and its subsequent quests, credit has not been given to those it is due, but rather to those with the best publicity. I certainly do not impugn those who have gone before; they were brave men who purposely took extraordinary risks, albeit for reasons as different as the pilots themselves.
This work will simply lay out various facts, unburnished by time and without the glitter of legend, to at least encourage readers to pause for thought. To reflect that just because we were taught a thing it does not necessarily mean it is true, and perhaps to remind ourselves that much of what is accepted as historical fact is, in fact, neither history nor fact. Such a luxury is only possible because others have gone before us and done the dirty work, so to speak—men who offered their reputations, suffered the slings and arrows of their peers, and often lost their lives in the pursuit of the unknown.
The unknown; it is an ideal to some, a demon of sorts to others, and always a challenge. There were those who believed the demon in the thin air past the speed of sound did not exist at all, but something, most admitted, was out there. Something that locked up controls, shook aircraft apart, and killed men. Was it only the demon of speed or were there others, and are there still more out there waiting to be found? In chasing this particular demon I have discovered that there is not a single entity; or maybe there is, but it is one who can adopt many faces. A demon of altitude; of power; of war; and, certainly, one of speed. A demon who retreats as quickly as man, with his boundless optimism and eternal cleverness, advances.
