First Man

by James R. Hansen

  One of the positive results of making his first solo, Neil realized, was financial. Without the need for an instructor, he only had to pay seven dollars an hour instead of nine. But the advantage was theoretical, as only ever more hours in the air would satiate his zest.

  Developing his own piloting technique on the grass fields, Neil “got in the habit of putting the airplane into a substantial slip on final approach where I would come down pretty steep so I could land on an early part of the grass runway and then have plenty of time to roll out and come to a stop.” But “the navy instructors did not like that technique at all,” Neil explains, chuckling.

  It was at the Wapakoneta airport that young Neil first witnessed the darker side of flying. On the afternoon of July 26, 1947, twenty-year-old flying student and World War II navy veteran Frederick Carl Lange struck a power line and crashed his Aeronca Champ in a hayfield. Lange, who had forty-five hours in the air under a GI training program, died at the site from a skull fracture. His passenger, instructor Charlie Finkenbine, survived shock and minor lacerations.

  As luck had it, Neil was on the road back from the Shawnee Council Boy Scout camp near Defiance, Ohio. Dean remembers, “We saw the plane go down [Neil questions whether any of them actually did see it go down]. My dad was driving, pulled off, and we all ran over there and tried to administer first aid.” According to the Lima News, Neil, “jumping a fence, rushed to the aid of the plane occupants. ‘I’m all right, take care of Carl,’ Finkenbine said as Armstrong opened the door to the ship.” The newspaper reported that Lange died in Neil’s arms. But in such a traumatic situation Neil says that he never really knew when Lange died.

  During his career, Neil would become an expert accident investigator due to his ability to pinpoint the cause of a crash. “It was a field at an intersection of roads and they were doing a practice emergency landing. The instructor is always cutting the power and saying, ‘Okay, you’ve lost your engine, let’s see you make an emergency landing someplace.’ What they apparently didn’t see until it was too late was a wire [part of the St. Marys Rural Electrification Cooperative] that crossed the field diagonally with no posts on it. A pilot usually monitors the poles, which are much easier to see, rather than the wires. They came in and hit that wire with their landing gear, and they nosed in. Took a pretty severe impact.”

  Newspapers reported Neil flying with Lange several times, but Neil says he never did, as he is unsure whether he ever knew the Lima native. Some biographical accounts adhere too closely to the Christian magazine Guideposts’ post–Apollo 11 “as-told-to” article from Viola. Entitled “Neil Armstrong’s Boyhood Crisis,” the melodrama had a confused Neil spending a solitary two days in his room reading about Jesus and pondering whether he should keep flying: Neil does not remember doing anything like that. According to June, “I never felt he was affected by it in any way.” Certainly it did not dampen his enthusiasm for flying.

  By the time of Carl Lange’s death, Armstrong had flown two cross-country solos—first to Cincinnati’s Lunken Airport in a rented Port Koneta Aeronca. Round-trip, the flight spanned some 215 miles, each log bookending his sitting for the navy scholarship qualifying exam. To preregister for classes at Purdue University, Neil flew to West Lafayette, Indiana, a flight of about 300 miles.

  Contrast Ned Keiber’s perspective: “The longest cross-country that I ever did was about twelve miles. I could still look over my shoulder and see the airport.” One can only imagine the astonishment of the West Lafayette airport personnel when a sixteen-year-old boy got down out of his airplane, asked for refueling, and started walking toward campus.

  CHAPTER 6

  Aeronautical Engineering 101

  On October 14, 1947, one month after Armstrong started at Purdue University, an air force test pilot—one with whom Armstrong would later fly—broke through the mythical “sound barrier.” The name of the hotshot flier was Captain Charles E. “Chuck” Yeager, and the revolutionary airplane he piloted beyond Mach 1 was the rocket-powered Bell X-1.

  Armstrong does not remember exactly when he heard the news of the first transonic flight over the Mojave Desert of Southern California. Before the military shrouded its transonic research program in secrecy, stories about the X-1’s performance appeared in the Los Angeles Times and Aviation Week. Aeronautics faculty and students nationwide were discussing the meaning of “shattering the sonic wall.”

  For Neil, however, this new era in flight dawned bittersweet. “By the time I was old enough and became a pilot, things had changed. The great airplanes I had so revered as a boy were disappearing. I had grown up admiring what I perceived to be the chivalry of the World War I pilots—Frank Luke, Eddie Rickenbacker, Manfred von Richthofen, and Billy Bishop. But by World War II, aerial chivalry seemed to have evaporated…. Air warfare was becoming very impersonal. The record-setting flights—[John] Alcock and [A. W.] Brown, [Harold] Gatty, [Charles] Lindbergh, [Amelia] Earhart, and [Jimmy] Mattern—across the oceans, over the poles, and to the corners of Earth, had all been accomplished. And I resented that. All in all, for someone who was immersed in, fascinated by, and dedicated to flight, I was disappointed by the wrinkle in history that had brought me along one generation late. I had missed all the great times and adventures in flight.”

  As Armstrong entered college, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), NASA’s predecessor, along with the newly established U.S. Air Force, moved ahead ambitiously to construct new research facilities devoted to transonics, supersonics, and hypersonics (the speed regime, at around Mach 5, where the effects of aerodynamic heating became pronounced).

  Armstrong’s time in the aeronautical engineering program at Purdue University spanned—including a three-year stint in the military—from September 1947 to January 1955. That seven-and-a-half-year stretch saw an astonishing new era of global aeronautical development. Three months after the historic X-1 flight, the NACA activated the country’s first hypersonic (capable of Mach 7) wind tunnel. A few months later, early in Armstrong’s second semester, an army rocket team under Dr. Wernher von Braun launched a V-2 missile at White Sands, New Mexico, to an altitude of seventy miles. Armstrong’s first full calendar year at Purdue witnessed the first flight of Convair’s XF-92 airplane, with its innovative delta wing; the flight of the first civilian test pilot, Herbert H. Hoover (not related to the U.S. president), past Mach 1; the tailless X-4 aircraft’s first test flights; and the publishing of an aerodynamic theory that proved critical to solving the high-speed problem of “roll coupling.”

  Armstrong left Purdue and reported for military duty during what would have been his spring semester of 1949. During those months, the U.S. Army established its first formal requirements for a surface-to-air antiballistic missile system; President Truman signed a bill providing a 5,000-mile guided-missile test range, which was subsequently established at Cape Canaveral, Florida; and a single-stage Russian rocket with an instrument payload of some 270 pounds flew to an altitude of sixty-eight miles. During that summer, as Armstrong took flight training at Pensacola, a V-2 rocket carried a live monkey to an altitude of eighty-three miles (the monkey survived but died on impact); the American military made its first operational use of a partial pressure suit during a piloted flight to 70,000 feet; and the first U.S. pilot ever to use an ejection seat escaped his jet-powered F2H-1 Banshee while speeding over coastal South Carolina at 500 knots.

  By the time he returned to his AE program in September 1952, Armstrong realized that the world of aeronautics was becoming the world of “aerospace.” In 1950, the first missile launch at Cape Canaveral occurred, lifting a man-made object to the highest speed yet achieved, Mach 9. In 1951, the air force started its first ICBM program, forerunner to the Atlas program, which took the first astronauts into orbit. The following year, a centrifuge opened at the navy’s medical aviation laboratory in Johnsville, Pennsylvania, that could accelerate human subjects up to speeds producing 40 g’s. It was an instrument of torture that Armstrong
himself would later endure. In that same year, NACA researcher H. Julian Allen predicted that reentry-heating problems for missiles and spacecraft could be avoided by changing their nose shapes from sharp to blunt. Not just the Mercury, but also Neil’s Gemini VIII and Apollo 11 spacecraft would be built around the “blunt-body” principle. During Neil’s first year back in the classroom, in November 1953, NACA test pilot A. Scott Crossfield in Douglas’s D-558-2 became the first person to fly at Mach 2. When Armstrong left Purdue with his degree a year later, he went to work for the NACA. In fact, Neil became a test pilot at the NACA’s High-Speed Flight Station in California, where he would come to fly the experimental X-15 hypersonic aircraft seven times.

  It was into this new world, one that gave birth to the Space Age faster than most anyone at the time could imagine, that Neil Armstrong found himself immersed by the time he left college in January 1955. It is extraordinary that an individual who lived through such a revolutionary age of flight would have ever thought to trade his present for the past.

  In the early 1940s, fewer than one in four Americans completed high school, and fewer than one in twenty went to college. An eighth-grade education was the average in many rural communities. With the passage of the GI Bill in 1944, the proportion of college-goers began to rise but, by the early 1950s, only to about 25 percent of those who were college-age.

  Neil was only the second person in the history of his family to attend a university, the first being his great-uncle John Koenig, who had earned a law degree. College education as a family first was a precedent shared by many of the astronauts and engineers who were to become associated with the young space program. Both of Neil’s parents, particularly Viola, had encouraged their son to think beyond the education they themselves had achieved. No goal, no sacrifice, was more important.

  It took special efforts for Neil to go to college, particularly to engineering school. Wapakoneta’s Blume High School did not offer all the prerequisites—in particular, trigonometry. So Armstrong and two other engineering-minded students went to Franklin H. Laman, Blume’s principal, who in turn called on Doris Barr, a 1945 graduate of Oberlin College. “I handled trigonometry as independent study,” Mrs. Barr remembered from her Cincinnati retirement home in 2002, since she had taught geometry to all three of the students during their junior years (“Neil was so quiet I hardly knew he was there”). “Neil had very good math skills.” Barr recounts. “He didn’t really need a teacher. I just handed him assignments and talked to him about his answers when he turned them in.”

  Armstrong was acquainted, through his father, with just one engineer—a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a school to which Neil applied and was accepted. The MIT alum (a Dayton resident whose name Neil cannot recall) told Neil “that it wasn’t necessary to go all the way to MIT [830 miles] to get a good engineering education.” Neil instead set his sights on Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, only 220 miles from Wapakoneta.

  Armstrong had heard about the U.S. Naval Aviation College Program’s four-year scholarships. The program required a commitment of seven years: two years of study at any school accredited by the navy, followed by three years of service, after which the student finished his last two years of college. The Holloway Plan—created by Admiral James E. Holloway Jr. (who, incidentally, became the father-in-law of NASA astronaut Walter M. Schirra)—intended, in Neil’s words, “to build up the naval air reserve strength, which [the navy] felt was going downhill because [young men] after the war really didn’t want to do [reserve work] anymore.”

  Armstrong’s medical examination recorded a weight of 144 pounds and a height of five feet nine and one-half inches; doctors categorized his general build and appearance as “athletic,” his posture “good,” and his body frame “medium.” His chest measured a narrow thirty-three inches and his waist a slim twenty-nine inches. His blood pressure was 118 (systolic) over 84 (diastolic). A heart rate of 88 beats per minute standing and 116 beats after exercise first registered Armstrong’s tendency, frequently noted in his years as a test pilot and astronaut, to run a little high.

  The medical form also recorded twenty hours of solo flying time in the past twelve months. At seven dollars per hour in the air, Armstrong had spent $140 (about $1,350 today) on flying since his first solo flight. That the taxi ride from Cincinnati’s Lunken Airport to the downtown test site cost him seven dollars seemed “an astronomical amount of money because I could fly the airplane for seven dollars an hour.”

  Viola Armstrong had raised her son to pursue sound financial goals: “You know, money was scarce, college was expensive, and he knew somehow he had to get to college…. He wasn’t really that interested in a military career. But it was a means to an end, and so…he was going to try it. And, of course, he was one of the ones [a mere fraction of all applicants] selected…. I’ll never forget,” Viola happily related, “I was in the basement getting some fruit to bake some pies, and he called so loud. ‘Mom, Mom!’ It scared me to death and I dropped the blackberries on my foot. I believe I broke my toe—it was black and blue and sore for weeks. And he said, ‘Oh, Mom, they accepted me.’” Neil recalls “great jubilation that I had been accepted and that I had a way to go to college, paid. That was a wonderful deal.”

  According to Neil’s navy appointment letter, dated May 14, 1947, his score of 38 points equated to 592 on Princeton’s Scholarship Aptitude Test (SAT), which would likely have ranked in the top quartile among all college-bound seniors.

  One month before receiving the good news from the navy, Purdue University had admitted Neil. “I just couldn’t have been happier with what I was doing, going into engineering.”

  If Armstrong had chosen MIT over Purdue, his overall education would likely have been more theoretical though not necessarily superior. As David S. Stephenson, one of Neil’s freshmen classmates testifies, Purdue’s AE program was “more nearly a ‘shop-culture’ school than a ‘school-culture’ school.” “Purdue was very hands-on at that time,” remembers Tommy Thompson, another of Neil’s classmates. In their first semester, students in the new School of Aeronautics learned to weld, machine and heat-treat metals, and do sand casting.

  Affirms Donald A. Gardner, yet another student (and Holloway scholar) who began the AE program with Neil in the fall of 1947, “I certainly needed the background provided by the [required] shop courses.”

  “We took all pretty much the standard stuff,” Neil recalls, nineteen credit hours involving eight different classes. Six days a week he had three hours of classes each morning and three hours of lab each afternoon. As Donald Gardner explains, “Students didn’t protest…. The character of the engineering programs in the late forties and early fifties was hard work and plenty of it.”

  Armstrong tested out of freshman English, “which surprised me a lot,” but he still had to take a three-hour English composition course resulting in his lowest grade of the semester, a 4 on a 6-point scale. A 6 was Purdue’s “Highest Passing Grade” and a 3 the “Lowest Passing Grade.” A 2 indicated a “Conditional Failure” and a 1 a “Failure.” (When the university began giving letter grades in the summer term of 1953, a 4 equated to a C grade.) Freshman engineering students at Purdue did not take calculus but instead faced five hours of algebra and trigonometry in the fall followed by five hours of analytical geometry in the spring. Neil earned a 5 in the first and a 4 in the second. Additional courses included General Chemistry, a well known Purdue freshman “flunk-out” course (four credits, grade of 5), Engineering Drawing (two credits, grade of 6), and Welding and the Heat Treatment of Metal (two credits, grade of 5), plus two more requirements: an uncredited weekly series of engineering lectures and physical education (one credit, grade of 5).

  Unlike the other four young men who entered Purdue in the fall of 1947 as part of the Holloway Plan, Neil did not take courses in naval science. Nor did he belong to Naval ROTC (NROTC), instead fulfilling the requirements by playing in the university band (two credits, grade o
f 5), which at the time functioned as a military band.

  Overall, his first-semester grades were moderately good, averaging 4.94 on Purdue’s 6.00 scale. With another nineteen-hour load, his second semester average dipped to 4.36, setting his cumulative GPA to 4.65, equivalent to a low B average. In an age predating grade inflation, Armstrong’s first-year academic performance was solid though not spectacular. As with beginning students everywhere, his freshman year was “kind of a whirl.”

  Tommy Thompson, who came from Rochester, New York, recalls: “Purdue, with an enrollment of something over twelve thousand students, was still dominated by returning GIs. The university [then] had about five hundred students sleeping in the field house. I spent my freshman year in a rooming house across the river in Lafayette. I think there were about six of us that shared a room. Most of the year I biked to classes.” Neil did not room with Thompson, but he, too, resided that first semester in a Lafayette boardinghouse. After that, he rented a room in a house closer to campus, at 400 North Salisbury Street.

  A rare surviving letter written by Armstrong near the end of his second semester details his college routine:

  SundayP.M.

  Dear Mom & Family,

  Thanks for the laundry, letters, & girl Scout Cookies. The other fellows saw them & when I got home last night, they were nearly all gone.

  You don’t have to worry about my getting a job this summer. I amgoing to summer school. It’s an order. I have my schedule for classes all-ready. It is:

  Differential Calculus.

  8–10 A.M.—Mon., Tue, Wed. Thu. Fri.

  Physics

  10–12 A.M.—" " " " "

  Physics Lab

  1–3 P.M.—Tue. Thu.