Home to aviation history

Edwards mantled in aura of glamour, guts, glory

By DON JERGLER
Valley Press Aerospace Writer

For the past six decades, Edwards Air Force Base has quietly played a key role in the cutting edge of research and development in the aerospace world, and at the same time serving as the test crucible for aerial weaponry crucial to the nation's defense.

Conversely, Edwards has been mantled with an aura of glamour, guts and ground-breaking glory.

Many of the nation's most secret flight programs took form at Edwards, while a lion's share of aviation's most noted benchmark events occurred at the base.

The SR-71 Blackbird spy plane, the world's highest-flying and fastest airplane, and its prototypes were tested at Edwards in the early 1960s; they remained one of the nation's best- kept secrets for nearly a decade.

But before and after the Blackbird, an unending parade of milestone aircraft - along with a few hangar queens - have paraded into the skies above Edwards. Aviation and space history is etched in the contrails above the Mojave Desert base that hosts its open house this weekend.

More than a decade before the Blackbird spread its triple-Machplus wings at the dawn of the Cold War - one of aviation's two most significant events unfolded at Edwards.

The world's first sonic boom rang out somewhere over the skies above the high desert when test pilot Charles "Chuck" Yeager piloted the Bell X-1 past the sound barrier on Oct. 14, 1947.

That boom remained largely silent until the feat was revealed to the public nearly three months later, placing Edwards and environs on the map.

It took months for that capstone event to reach the newspapers and the pages of Aviation Week.

"I think it's probably one of the two most important aerospace achievements of the century," said Doug Nelson, curator of the Edwards Air Force Flight Test Museum.

Orville and Wilbur Wright's successful jaunt into the air at Kitty Hawk, N.C., on Dec. 17, 1903, - aviation's first first - was the other achievement, he added.

The X-1 program led to development of other rocket-powered craft, and ultimately to more aerospace milestones, such as mankind's first footsteps on the moon.

"The X-1 breaking the sound barrier here is really where the road to space began," Nelson said.

After the sound barrier fell, Edwards was cast in its longstanding role as a place of heroes and legends. The immortalization of Yeager was followed by several feature films and books about test pilots and their craft.

The base took center stage in "The Right Stuff," a 1983 film based on a Tom Wolfe novel about the birth of the space program.

It was also the primary location for "Toward the Unknown," a 1956 film starring William Holden and James Garner about the trials and tribulations of a test pilot. That film was directed by the legendary Mervin LeRoy, who also directed "The Wizard of Oz."

More recently, the base appeared in several scenes of the Bruce Willis film, "Armageddon," a 1998 end-of-Earth blockbuster.

"Test pilots have always been considered very brave and very intelligent," Nelson said. "You have to be that type of person to be a test pilot. It all builds that mystique. Test pilots are heroes. People look up to them that way. The general public, by and large, is in awe of things like that."

Mission Control

Edwards has maintained a twopronged mission, according to Dr. Jim Young, the base's official historian.

First and most important, Young said, the mission at Edwards has been to test and evaluate systems intended to support the war fighter. Secondly, the Edwards mission has been flight research, or expanding the aviation envelope.

In both respects, it's been a job well done, Young said.

"We broke Mach 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 here," he said.

More aircraft have been tested and more aviation records have been broken at Edwards than anywhere else.

"I can't even count the number of aircraft that have been tested here," curator Nelson said.

According to Nelson, more than 120 aircraft have completed their first flight at Edwards.

"Since the X-1 flew at Edwards," base commander Maj. Gen. Richard "Dick" Reynolds said, "virtually every new weapons system that has gone into the Air Force inventory and the inventory of other services and the inventories of other nations have been flight-tested at Edwards."

For all its successes, there's a rich and untold history behind the glory.

Tales abound with references to a high-pressure world of testing cutting-edge technology and pushing into unknown realms of physics and aerodynamics.

That history includes the names of long forgotten aerospace engineers whose intellect made the nation's borders safe and allowed the human race to fly ever higher and faster.

Those engineers often flew in the experimental aircraft.

"Many of the flight test engineers have not been given the credit they deserve," Nelson said.

That history also includes tales of the tragic.

Capt. Glenn Edwards, the base's namesake, lost his life testing the YB-49 flying wing in a crash on June 5, 1948. Before anyone, Edwards brought the base into the limelight, according to Nelson.

Glenn Edwards also was well received by the Hollywood crowd, Nelson said.

"He was intelligent, he was good looking, he could dance, he could play the piano. He had everything you would want," Nelson said.

Edwards' good looks, outgoing personality and the risky nature of his work made him popular with a number of Hollywood starlets, including Joan Leslie, who was often seen in the company of the young captain, Nelson said.

Another pilot who gave his life to flight testing was NASA test pilot Joe Walker, whose name graces a local middle school.

He died when his F-104 Starfighter chase plane slipped into the jet wash of the XB-70 Valkyrie, a supersonic bomber.

Walker's tiny fighter tumbled out of control, actually rolling across the top of the XB-70, destroying the big bird's vertical tail fins. Walker's plane exploded when it hit the Valkyrie and he died instantly.

Walker was perhaps best known for piloting the X-15 to its peak altitude of 354,200 feet (67 miles), earning his astronaut's wings.

A one-craft Mach buster, the North American X-15 was another record-shatterer at Edwards. Flown above Edwards in a B-52 and dropped into the sky, the X-15 was piloted through Mach 3, 4, 5 and 6.

It was designed for hypersonic speeds - in excess of Mach 5 - and to climb more than 50 miles above the Earth. The X-15 became the first aircraft to actually be piloted into near space.

Configured with a rocket engine providing 57,000 pounds of thrust, the first X-15 arrived at Edwards in the fall of 1958.

The program got underway on March 7, 1961, when Maj. Robert M. "Bob" White, using half the engine's thrust capability, leveled off at an altitude of 75,000 feet to become the first man to exceed Mach 4.

Less than a year later, White piloted the X-15 to Mach 6.04 (4,094 mph). While it had taken nine years to get from Mach 1 to Mach 3, White and the X-15 had claimed three Mach numbers in just eight months.

In October, 1967, flying a modified X-15A-2, Maj. William J. "Pete" Knight, now the Antelope Valley's state senator, took the craft to Mach 6.72 (4,520 mph), the highest speed ever attained in an airplane and a record that still stands today.

Father Murphy

While Edwards is known for making ideas work, ironically it's also the birthplace of the single most recognized symbol of pessimism.

Murphy's Law, which postulates, "If anything can go wrong, it will," was born at Edwards in 1949.

The law was named after Capt. Edward A. Murphy, an engineer working on Air Force Project MX981, a high-speed test track designed to find out how much sudden deceleration a person can withstand.

After finding a transducer wired wrong, Murphy cursed the technician responsible, claiming, "If there is any way to do it wrong, he'll find it," according to Edwards historians.

The project manager, Northrop engineer George E. Nichols, kept a list of "laws." He added this one, calling it "Murphy's Law."

What Nichols did was take an old adage that had been around for years and give it a name.

During a press conference Col. John Paul Stapp - the Air Force doctor who rode a sled on the deceleration track to a stop, pulling 40 G's (40 times the force of Earth's gravity) - credited the good safety record on the project to a firm belief in Murphy's Law and their efforts to circumvent it.

The aerospace industry picked up on Murphy's Law, using the term in advertisements during the ensuing months. It was soon quoted in news and magazine articles.

Stapp also had a phrase, which came to be known as Stapp's Ironical Paradox: "The universal aptitude for ineptitude makes any human accomplishment an incredible miracle."

But the base's journey to becoming the world's premier flight test center was no miracle.

The right stuff

From the beginning, it had the right stuff. By the way, it is a phrase that Yeager himself has said never accounted for much of the test pilot mystique. But it's too late for that now.

In April 1942, officers heading up the Air Force's XP-59 program settled on Edwards after a tour of the country revealed it was the best location to test the nation's first jet airplane. In a way, the XP59 became the nation's first "black world," or secret, aircraft. The plane was so secret because of its revolutionary propulsion system that the test team attached a propeller to the nose so that it would look like a "normal" aircraft.

The isolation, prevailing good weather, an existing rail line and Rogers dry lake bed, the world's largest natural landing strip, made the location irresistible.

Known as the Airacomet, the craft became the nation's first black program. For reasons of national security, information about ongoing black programs is withheld from the public. Planes that have emerged from black world obscurity into aviation fame include the U-2 spy plane, the SR-71 Blackbird, the F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighter and the B-2 stealth bomber.

Code names that attended their development were at once exotic and mundane. Oxcart and Have Blue were two of them.

The XP-50 Airacomet program got under way with taxi tests in September 1942, with the first flight from the North Base occurring on Oct. 1 of that year.

"History is prolonged with what we have done in the last 58 years at the shores of Rogers dry lake," Gen. Reynolds said.

That's not a cryptic statement. It can be argued that the secret U2 overflights of the Soviet Union during the 1950s gave then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower the kind of practical intelligence that kept the world from the brink of nuclear destruction.

It's not too much to say that people who worked in Antelope Valley on black programs helped save the world and civilization as we know it.

But even before the first jet flight, Edwards was alive with flight test activity.

The area had a solid reputation with aircraft manufacturers as early as 1929, when Jack Northrop brought his first prototype for the flying wing to test on Rogers dry lake, according to Young, the base historian.

"It was the first flying-wing type aircraft that he designed," he said.

The craft had tail booms for vertical and horizontal stabilizers and the rest was essentially a wing. The design was the basis for the B2 stealth bomber, which rolled out 60 years later, in 1989.

In 1933, Lt. Col. Hap Arnold - who later became the commanding general for the Army Air Forces - came to what is now Edwards.

Then commander of March Field in Riverside, Arnold wanted to conduct bombing and gunnery exercises. He found it difficult to conduct such exercises over water, the only place to do it at the time, and he got tired of having to rely on the Navy's good will, according to Young.

"He wanted a bombing and gunnery range of his own," Young said. "Here you have the largest natural landing field in the world."

It would be the same landing field that would play host to the space shuttle first and in all the spacecraft's early landings.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves here.

Gen. Arnold sent a team to survey regions and laid out a bombing and gunnery range, which became the Muroc Bombing and Gunnery Range. It was used for training and exercises through the 1930s.

During latter years of World War II, the research and development community pressed for a permanent flight test center at Edwards. Within months after the end of the war, flight testing would become the base's principal mission.

At the same time, in 1946, the X-1 program began.

A small contingent from the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics - which later became NASA - came to Edwards to support testing on the X-1.

The group was under the leadership of Walt Williams, who upon arriving, claimed, " 'There's not another place like this in the country,' " Young recalled. " 'We will be here for a long time.' Of course, he proved to be a prophet. They've been here ever since."

By the late 1940s, a master plan was under way to build the flight test center and create the world's largest runway. Completed in 1955, the runway at Edwards measures 15,000 feet.

No doubt

Doubt has been cast on the actual length of the runway by rumors that the commander of Edwards at the time, Gen. Stanley Holtner, used the last foot of the runway to build a swimming pool behind his house on the base.

Both Young and Nelson dismiss the rumors.

"There's no evidence to confirm that," Young said. "We refer to it as a 15,000-foot runway. I sincerely doubt that the base commander took that cement and had a swimming pool built."

According to Young, Holtner was not relieved of his command and was subsequently promoted to the rank of major general. Serving as the base's commander from 1952 to 1957, Holtner held the Edward command longer than anyone.

With a sterling past behind it, Young forecasts a bright future for Edwards.

"This place has been, and I predict will continue to be, where the U.S. Air Force and the rest of the aerospace community has met the future," he said.

"We will continue to meet the future here. This will continue to be the place where we're on the cutting edge of technology, and that's what this place is about and it has been for nearly six decades."

Young's words ring true.

The F-22 Raptor, designed as the nation's next-generation, 21stcentury, air-to-air superiority fighter jet, is being tested at Edwards.

The most advanced fighter craft ever built, the plane can cruise at speeds up to Mach 1.8 and has a sophisticated array of onboard computers that will address minor flight details, allowing fighter pilots to concentrate on battle.

Both prototypes of the joint strike fighter - expected to be the country's largest ever defense contract - also are set to undergo testing at Edwards.

"People are going to look at (Edwards) as a place of excitement," Nelson said. "There've been so many firsts here at Edwards that you can't even count them. More aviation records have been set in the skies above Edwards than anywhere else."

Uploaded October 17, 2000