The Purple Decades

by Tom Wolfe

  The X–1 looked like a fat orange swallow with white markings. But it was really just a length of pipe with four rocket chambers in it. It had a tiny cockpit and a needle nose, two little straight blades (only three and a half inches thick at the thickest part) for wings, and a tail assembly set up high to avoid the “sonic wash” from the wings. Even though his side was throbbing and his right arm felt practically useless, Yeager figured he could grit his teeth and get through the flight—except for one specific move he had to make. In the rocket launches, the X–1, which held only two and a half minutes’ worth of fuel, was carried up to twenty-six thousand feet underneath the wings of a B–29. At seven thousand feet, Yeager was to climb down a ladder from the bomb bay of the B–29 to the open doorway of the X–1, hook up to the oxygen system and the radio microphone and earphones, and put his crash helmet on and prepare for the launch, which would come at twenty-five thousand feet. This helmet was a homemade number. There had never been any such thing as a crash helmet before. Throughout the war pilots had used the old skin-tight leather helmet-and-goggles. But the X–1 had a way of throwing the pilot around so violently that there was danger of getting knocked out against the walls of the cockpit. So Yeager had bought a big leather football helmet—there were no plastic ones at the time—and he butchered it with a hunting knife until he carved the right kind of holes in it, so that it would fit down over his regular flying helmet and the earphones and the oxygen rig. Anyway, then his flight engineer, Jack Ridley, would climb down the ladder, out in the breeze, and shove into place the cockpit door, which had to be lowered out of the belly of the B–29 on a chain. Then Yeager had to push a handle to lock the door airtight. Since the X–1’s cockpit was minute, you had to push the handle with your right hand. It took quite a shove. There was no way you could move into position to get enough leverage with your left hand.

  Out in the hangar Yeager makes a few test shoves on the sly, and the pain is so incredible he realizes that there is no way a man with two broken ribs is going to get the door closed. It is time to confide in somebody, and the logical man is Jack Ridley. Ridley is not only the flight engineer but a pilot himself and a good old boy from Oklahoma to boot. He will understand about Flying & Drinking and Drinking & Driving through the goddamned Joshua trees. So Yeager takes Ridley off to the side in the tin hangar and says: Jack, I got me a little ol’ problem here. Over at Pancho’s the other night I sorta … dinged my goddamned ribs. Ridley says, Whattya mean … dinged? Yeager says, Well, I guess you might say I damned near like to … broke a coupla the sonsabitches. Whereupon Yeager sketches out the problem he foresees.

  Not for nothing is Ridley the engineer on this project. He has an inspiration. He tells a janitor named Sam to cut him about nine inches off a broom handle. When nobody’s looking, he slips the broomstick into the cockpit of the X–1 and gives Yeager a little advice and counsel.

  So with that added bit of supersonic flight gear Yeager went aloft.

  At seven thousand feet he climbed down the ladder into the X–1’s cockpit, clipped on his hoses and lines, and managed to pull the pumpkin football helmet over his head. Then Ridley came down the ladder and lowered the door into place. As Ridley had instructed, Yeager now took the nine inches of broomstick and slipped it between the handle and the door. This gave him just enough mechanical advantage to reach over with his left hand and whang the thing shut. So he whanged the door shut with Ridley’s broomstick and was ready to fly.

  At 26,000 feet the B–29 went into a shallow dive, then pulled up and released Yeager and the X–1 as if it were a bomb. Like a bomb it dropped and shot forward (at the speed of the mother ship) at the same time. Yeager had been launched straight into the sun. It seemed to be no more than six feet in front of him, filling up the sky and blinding him. But he managed to get his bearings and set off the four rocket chambers one after the other. He then experienced something that became known as the ultimate sensation in flying: “booming and zooming.” The surge of the rockets was so tremendous, forced him back into his seat so violently, he could hardly move his hands forward the few inches necessary to reach the controls. The X–1 seemed to shoot straight up in an absolutely perpendicular trajectory, as if determined to snap the hold of gravity via the most direct route possible. In fact, he was only climbing at the 45-degree angle called for in the flight plan. At about .87 Mach the buffeting started.

  On the ground the engineers could no longer see Yeager. They could only hear … that poker-hollow West Virginia drawl.

  “Had a mild buffet there … jes the usual instability …”

  Jes the usual instability?

  Then the X—1 reached the speed of .96 Mach, and that incredible caint-hardlyin’ aw-shuckin’ drawl said:

  “Say, Ridley … make a note here, will ya?” (if you ain’t got nothin’ better to do) “ … elevator effectiveness regained.”

  Just as Yeager had predicted, as the X—1 approached Mach 1, the stability improved. Yeager had his eyes pinned on the machometer. The needle reached .96, fluctuated, and went off the scale.

  And on the ground they heard … that voice:

  “Say, Ridley … make another note, will ya?” (if you ain’t too bored yet) “ … there’s somethin’ wrong with this ol’ machometer …” (faint chuckle) “ … it’s gone kinda screwy on me …”

  And in that moment, on the ground, they heard a boom rock over the desert floor—just as the physicist Theodore von Kármán had predicted many years before.

  Then they heard Ridley back in the B—29: “If it is, Chuck, we’ll fix it. Personally I think you’re seeing things.”

  Then they heard Yeager’s poker-hollow drawl again:

  “Well, I guess I am, Jack … And I’m still goin’ upstairs like a bat.”

  The X—1 had gone through “the sonic wall” without so much as a bump. As the speed topped out at Mach 1.05, Yeager had the sensation of shooting straight through the top of the sky. The sky turned a deep purple and all at once the stars and the moon came out—and the sun shone at the same time. He had reached a layer of the upper atmosphere where the air was too thin to contain reflecting dust particles. He was simply looking out into space. As the X—1 nosed over at the top of the climb, Yeager now had seven minutes of … Pilot Heaven … ahead of him. He was going faster than any man in history, and it was almost silent up here, since he had exhausted his rocket fuel, and he was so high in such a vast space that there was no sensation of motion. He was master of the sky. His was a king’s solitude, unique and inviolate, above the dome of the world. It would take him seven minutes to glide back down and land at Muroc. He spent the time doing victory rolls and wing-over-wing aerobatics while Rogers Lake and the High Sierras spun around below.

  On the ground they had understood the code as soon as they heard Yeager’s little exchange with Ridley. The project was secret, but the radio exchanges could be picked up by anyone within range. The business of the “screwy machometer” was Yeager’s deadpan way of announcing that the X—1’s instruments indicated Mach 1. As soon as he landed, they checked out the X—1’s automatic recording instruments. Without any doubt the ship had gone supersonic. They immediately called the brass at Wright Field to break the tremendous news. Within two hours Wright Field called back and gave some firm orders. A top security lid was being put on the morning’s events. That the press was not to be informed went without saying. But neither was anyone else, anyone at all, to be told. Word of the flight was not to go beyond the flight line. And even among the people directly involved—who were there and knew about it, anyway—there was to be no celebrating. Just what was on the minds of the brass at Wright is hard to say. Much of it, no doubt, was a simple holdover from wartime, when every breakthrough of possible strategic importance was kept under wraps. That was what you did—you shut up about them. Another possibility was that the chiefs at Wright had never quite known what to make of Muroc. There was some sort of weird ribald aerial tarpaper mad-monk squadron up on the roof of the
desert out there …

  In any case, by mid-afternoon Yeager’s tremendous feat had become a piece of thunder with no reverberation. A strange and implausible stillness settled over the event. Well … there was not supposed to be any celebration, but come nightfall … Yeager and Ridley and some of the others ambled over to Pancho’s. After all, it was the end of the day, and they were pilots. So they knocked back a few. And they had to let Pancho in on the secret, because Pancho had said she’d serve a free steak dinner to any pilot who could fly supersonic and walk in here to tell about it, and they had to see the look on her face. So Pancho served Yeager a big steak dinner and said they were a buncha miserable peckerwoods all the same, and the desert cooled off and the wind came up and the screen doors banged and they drank some more and bawled some songs over the cackling dry piano and the stars and the moon came out and Pancho screamed oaths no one had ever heard before and Yeager and Ridley roared and the old weatherbeaten bar boomed and the autographed pictures of a hundred dead pilots shook and clattered on the frame wires and the faces of the living fell apart in the reflections, and by and by they all left and stumbled and staggered and yelped and bayed for glory before the arthritic silhouettes of the Joshua trees. Shit!—there was no one to tell except Pancho and the goddamned Joshua trees!

  Over the next five months Yeager flew supersonic in the X-1 more than a dozen times, but still the Air Force insisted on keeping the story secret. Aviation Week published a report of the flights late in December (without mentioning Yeager’s name) provoking a minor debate in the press over whether or not Aviation Week had violated national security—and still the Air Force refused to publicize the achievement until June of 1948. Only then was Yeager’s name released. He received only a fraction of the publicity that would have been his had he been presented to the world immediately, on October 14, 1947, as the man who “broke the sound barrier.” This dragged-out process had curious effects.

  In 1952 a British movie called Breaking the Sound Barrier, starring Ralph Richardson, was released in the United States, and its promoters got the bright idea of inviting the man who had actually done it, Major Charles E. Yeager of the U.S. Air Force, to the American premiere. So the Air Force goes along with it and Yeager turns up for the festivities. When he watches the movie, he’s stunned. He can’t believe what he’s seeing. Far from being based on the exploits of Charles E. Yeager, Breaking the Sound Barrier was inspired by the death of Geoffrey de Havilland in his father’s DH 108. At the end of the movie a British pilot solves the mystery of “the barrier” by reversing the controls at the critical moment during a power dive. The buffeting is tearing his ship to pieces, and every rational process in his head is telling him to pull back on the stick to keep from crashing—and he pushes it down instead … and zips right through Mach 1 as smooth as a bird, regaining full control!

  Breaking the Sound Barrier happened to be one of the most engrossing movies about flying ever made. It seemed superbly realistic, and people came away from it sure of two things: it was an Englishman who had broken the sound barrier, and he had done it by reversing the controls in the transonic zone.

  Well, after the showing they bring out Yeager to meet the press, and he doesn’t know where in the hell to start. To him the whole goddamned picture is outrageous. He doesn’t want to get mad, because this thing has been set up by Air Force P.R. But he is not happy. In as calm a way as he can word it on the spur of the moment, he informs one and all that the picture is an utter shuck from start to finish. The promoters respond, a bit huffily, that this picture is not, after all, a documentary. Yeager figures, well, anyway, that settles that. But as the weeks go by, he discovers an incredible thing happening. He keeps running into people who think he’s the first American to break the sound barrier … and that he learned how to reverse the controls and zip through from the Englishman who did it first. The last straw comes when he gets a call from the Secretary of the Air Force.

  “Chuck,” he says, “do you mind if I ask you something? Is it true that you broke the sound barrier by reversing the controls?”

  Yeager is stunned by this. The Secretary—the Secretary!—of the U.S. Air Force!

  “No, sir,” he says, “that is … not correct. Anyone who reversed the controls going transonic would be dead.”

  Yeager and the rocket pilots who soon joined him at Muroc had a hard time dealing with publicity. On the one hand, they hated the process. It meant talking to reporters and other fruit flies who always hovered, eager for the juice … and invariably got the facts screwed up … But that wasn’t really the problem, was it! The real problem was that reporters violated the invisible walls of the fraternity. They blurted out questions and spoke boorish words about … all the unspoken things!—about fear and bravery (they would say the words!) and how you felt at such-and-such a moment! It was obscene! They presumed a knowledge and an intimacy they did not have and had no right to. Some aviation writer would sidle up and say, “I hear Jenkins augered in. That’s too bad.” Augered in!—a phrase that belonged exclusively to the fraternity!—coming from the lips of this ant who was left behind the moment Jenkins made his first step up the pyramid long, long ago. It was repulsive! But on the other hand … one’s healthy pilot ego loved the glory—wallowed in it!—lapped it up!—no doubt about it! The Pilot Ego—ego didn’t come any bigger! The boys wouldn’t have minded the following. They wouldn’t have minded appearing once a year on a balcony over a huge square in which half the world is assembled. They wave. The world roars its approval, its applause, and breaks into a sustained thirty-minute storm of cheers and tears (moved by my righteous stuff!). And then it’s over. All that remains is for the wife to paste the clippings in the scrapbook.

  A little adulation on the order of the Pope’s; that’s all the True Brothers at the top of the pyramid really wanted.

  Yeager received just about every major decoration and trophy that was available to test pilots, but the Yeager legend grew not in the press, not in public, but within the fraternity. As of 1948, after Yeager’s flight was made public, every hot pilot in the country knew that Muroc was what you aimed for if you wanted to reach the top. In 1947 the National Security Act, Title 10, turned the Army Air Force into the U.S. Air Force, and three years later Muroc Army Air Base became Edwards Air Force Base, named for a test pilot, Glenn Edwards, who had died testing a ship with no tail called the Flying Wing. So now the magic word became Edwards. You couldn’t keep a really hot, competitive pilot away from Edwards. Civilian pilots (almost all of whom had been trained in the military) could fly for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) High Speed Center at Edwards, and some of the rocket pilots did that: Scott Crossfield, Joe Walker, Howard Lilly, Herb Hoover, and Bill Bridgeman, among them. Pete Everest, Kit Murray, Iven Kincheloe, and Mel Apt joined Yeager as Air Force rocket pilots. There was a constant rivalry between NACA and the Air Force to push the rocket planes to their outer limits. On November 20, 1953, Crossfield, in the D—558—2, raised the speed to Mach 2. Three weeks later Yeager flew the X—1A to Mach 2.4. The rocket program was quickly running out of frontiers within the atmosphere; so NACA and the Air Force began planning a new project, with a new rocket plane, the X—15, to probe altitudes as high as fifty miles, which was well beyond anything that could still be called “air.”

  My God!—to be a part of Edwards in the late forties and early fifties!—even to be on the ground and hear one of those incredible explosions from 35,000 feet somewhere up there in the blue over the desert and know that some True Brother had commenced his rocket launch … in the X—1, the X—1A, the X—2, the D—558—1, the horrible XF—92A, the beautiful D—558—2 … and to know that he would soon be at an altitude, in the thin air at the edge of space, where the stars and the moon came out at noon, in an atmosphere so thin that the ordinary laws of aerodynamics no longer applied and a plane could skid into a flat spin like a cereal bowl on a waxed Formica counter and then start tumbling, not spinning and not diving, but tumbli
ng, end over end like a brick … In those planes, which were like chimneys with little razor-blade wings on them, you had to be “afraid to panic,” and that phrase was no joke. In the skids, the tumbles, the spins, there was, truly, as Saint-Exupéry had said, only one thing you could let yourself think about: What do I do next? Sometimes at Edwards they used to play the tapes of pilots going into the final dive, the one that killed them, and the man would be tumbling, going end over end in a fifteen-ton length of pipe, with all aerodynamics long gone, and not one prayer left, and he knew it, and he would be screaming into the microphone, but not for Mother or for God or the nameless spirit of Ahor, but for one last hopeless crumb of information about the loop: “I’ve tried A! I’ve tried B! I’ve tried C! I’ve tried D! Tell me what else I can try!” And then that truly spooky click on the machine. What do I do next? (In this moment when the Halusian Gulp is opening?) And everybody around the table would look at one another and nod ever so slightly, and the unspoken message was: Too bad! There was a man with the right stuff. There was no national mourning in such cases, of course. Nobody outside of Edwards knew the man’s name. If he were well liked, he might get one of those dusty stretches of road named for him on the base. He was probably a junior officer doing all this for four or five thousand a year. He owned perhaps two suits, only one of which he dared wear around people he didn’t know. But none of that mattered!—not at Edwards—not in the Brotherhood.

  What made it truly beautiful (for a True Brother!) was that for a good five years Edwards remained primitive and Low Rent, with nothing out there but the bleached prehistoric shrimp terrain and the rat shacks and the blazing sun and the thin blue sky and the rockets sitting there moaning and squealing before dawn. Not even Pancho’s changed—except to become more gloriously Low Rent. By 1949 the girls had begun turning up at Pancho’s in amazing numbers. They were young, lovely, juicy, frisky—and there were so many of them, at all hours, every day of the week! And they were not prostitutes, despite the accusations made later. They were just … well, just young juicy girls in their twenties with terrific young conformations and sweet cupcakes and loamy loins. They were sometimes described with a broad sweep as “stewardesses,” but only a fraction of them really were. No, they were lovely young things who arrived as mysteriously as the sea gulls who sought the squirming shrimp. They were moist labial piping little birds who had somehow learned that at this strange place in the high Mojave lived the hottest young pilots in the world and that this was where things were happening. They came skipping and screaming in through the banging screen doors at Pancho’s—and it completed the picture of Pilot Heaven. There was no other way to say it. Flying & Drinking and Drinking & Driving and Driving & Balling. The pilots began calling the old Fly Inn dude ranch “Pancho’s Happy Bottom Riding Club,” and there you had it.