by Dan Hampton
Nineteen forty-six, then, dawned with hope and promise. “It was a banner year,” Ken Chilstrom remembers fondly. “It was actually the best year for me as a pilot!” Two days after the X-1 glide flight, Colonel Bill Councill lifted off from Daughtery Field in Long Beach, California, turned east, and streaked 2,457 miles across the United States in a Lockheed P-80A-1 Shooting Star. Maintaining an average speed of 584 miles per hour, he made it nonstop to New York’s La Guardia Field in four hours, thirteen minutes, and twenty-six seconds, thus setting a new Fédération Aéronautique Internationale record.* Councill’s feat was significant for several reasons; first, it demonstrated the jet’s capability to safely cross great distances at high speed, and this was not lost on military planners from either side of the Atlantic. Second, the flight fired the imagination of a war-weary public and gave a very clear, exciting look into the future of aviation.
With the most recent war won, the U.S. government and military leadership now seemed determined to never be caught unawares as they had been in 1941 so, to that end, development and testing of new aircraft would include as many combat veterans as possible. Men who had seen what works and what did not, who knew what was important beyond the drawing boards and the boardrooms. Consequently, Fighter Test at Wright Field was now home to many legendary Air Corps pilots from the war. Men like Richard Bong, Don Gentile, “Gabby” Gabreski, and Gus Lundquist. Also pilots like Ken Chilstrom and Glen Edwards who had fought the close-air-support side of the war, and younger pilots like Bob Hoover or Chuck Yeager, who were eager to fly anything they could get their hands on.
Through the spring of 1946, Bell worked out the X-1’s bugs and Chilstrom’s boss, Colonel Al Boyd, picked him for a special mission that, quite pleasingly, closed a loop in aviation history. On the surface, it seemed an annoyance but Ken, who admired Al Boyd like no other man, would have done anything asked by the chief of Flight Test. On June 22, 1946, just three years after he flew a piston-engined fighter into combat over Pantelleria, Ken piloted a Shooting Star jet fighter up to Schenectady, New York, and picked up a letter from General Electric’s corporate office. GE, of course, had been granted the initial U.S. license to manufacture Frank Whittle’s W.1 engine during the war and continued its progress with the I-16 and I-40 jets. Ken’s P-80 was powered by a J33-GE-11 jet engine, and the letter was one of thanks that the Air Corps wanted hand delivered: to none other than Orville Wright, and at the very field that bore his name.
“I landed at Wright and taxied slowly up to the base of the tower,” Chilstrom reflected nostalgically. “There was a black sedan there, all alone. I shut the jet down, climbed down, and pulled the letter out of my chest pocket. It was a little sweaty.” He chuckled. “Anyway, I walked over to the car, and the back window rolled down and there he was—Orville Wright. I thanked him on behalf of the Air Corps, and hoped maybe he’d want to look at the jet, but he never said a word. Never smiled or said anything back. The window went up and he drove away.” Nevertheless, an aviation circle had been completed. The man who struggled into the air off a rail on a sand dune got to watch a sleek, all-metal jet fighter land on the very field where he and his brother had flown open-cockpit, fabric-covered biplanes.
Ken could well afford to dismiss Orville Wright’s rudeness; he had other things to do, because he was now the acting head of the Fighter Test section. There were foreign aircraft to fly, developmental jets, and of course word had filtered down about two new programs: Bell’s X-1 and the XP-86 from North American Aviation. That summer Glen Edwards was already heading to Princeton for a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering, and Gus Lundquist was finishing up at Duke. Chilstrom got the official word to “get three P-80s ready for the National Air Races at Cleveland. It was big deal . . . this was a race Jimmy Doolittle had flown in.”
Indeed it was.
Originating in 1920 with Joseph Pulitzer, the race had gone through many iterations, locations, and names in the past twenty-five years. It had thrilled spectators during the Roaring Twenties and inspired the public during the lean years of the Great Depression. With war looming, the “300 miles of the world’s toughest flying” gave way to the truly tough flying of combat, and the last race was flown in 1939. Now, seven years later, some ninety pilots came together again with turbocharged piston-engined surplus fighters from the war and, for the first time ever, the jet.
Following Bill Councill’s flight, and the exotic, exciting developments in the skies over California and Ohio, a special jet category was added to the race. Only the military had the new aircraft, so it would be an all-military lineup. Three P-80s from Wright Field Fighter Test would compete against three operational Shooting Stars from the 1st Fighter Group at March Field. It was an ideal venue for the Air Corps to showcase its newest weapon and, perhaps more important, to garner official support (and funding) for additional advanced programs.
Not only did Ken Chilstrom get to choose the specific jets, but he also picked the pilots. “Well, myself of course.” He smiled. “I had more jet time than anyone else right then and in those days if a dangerous mission came down, then the guy in charge was supposed to take it.” Each engine was handpicked then carefully primed to get every pound of thrust possible. The guns were removed, and all exterior ports sealed to reduce drag. Also, Wright engineers analyzed the parallelogram race circuit and worked out the optimum airspeeds and g’s for the turns. Chilstrom decided to fly P-80 #44-85123, the same jet Bill Councill used to set the nonstop, coast-to-coast speed record back in January.
But Major Gus Lundquist returned from Duke that summer and, as the military is fond of saying, rank has its privileges. Gus was now also Ken’s boss, so no one thought anything of it when he decided to lead the Wright team, and take the #123 jet. “That’s just how it goes. I smiled and nodded,” Ken recalled. “Gus was my friend, and a helluva good pilot . . . the finest test pilot I ever knew.” Chilstrom would fly #044, and Captain J. E. Sullivan would be the third pilot with P-80 #247.
Out in California, the three 1st Fighter Group Shooting Stars would be led by Major Robin Olds, West Point grad and World War II ace. Arguably the Air Corps’s finest active-duty pilot, Olds despised bureaucracy, politics, and rear-echelon desk jockeys; he was a warrior through and through. “Everyone who mattered liked Robin Olds,” Chilstrom stated. “He was a fierce competitor and a fighter pilot’s fighter pilot. Olds was a combat squadron commander at age twenty-two and had twelve confirmed kills in the ETO. His men would follow him anywhere, women adored him, and he married a movie star.”*
The operational pilots had all their engines tuned to run at better than 100 percent, a dangerous option as the turbines would overheat, but they were every bit as determined to win as the test group. In the midst of all this, the X-1 program suffered a tremendous blow. Bell’s Jack Woolams was planning to race in the piston-engine category in Cleveland, and the company modified a P-39 Airacobra for the event. On August 30, just days before the race, the plane came apart over Lake Ontario and Jack was killed.
However, all test flight programs are more than “one deep,” so Chalmers “Slick” Goodlin became Bell’s new chief test pilot and head of the X-1 flight tests. Slick had been flying since he was a teenager and in 1941, at age eighteen, joined the Royal Canadian Air Force since America was not yet in the war. By late 1942 he was in Europe flying Spitfires, but was then asked by the U.S. Navy to transfer his commission, which he did. Joining their test program, he left the Navy in late 1943 to join Bell.
So over the 1946 Labor Day weekend pilots and planes converged at Cleveland. Goodlin was involved in the race as the co-owner of a P-63 Kingcobra, though he did not fly it himself. George Welch was also there in a P-51D, but was forced out on his third ten-mile lap due to engine trouble. Ken had gremlins too. The Shooting Star had a compact, well-designed cockpit, and it was not unlike the A-36 in those respects—but the jet was sleeker, so the primary panel had fewer gauges, and they were conveniently grouped in threes across his field of vis
ion.
“I’m coming around on the last leg of the race, at 515 mph, in a 60-degree bank right in front of the grandstand,” he recalled. “What a perfect place for something to go wrong . . . and it did.”
Suddenly the stick refused to move. In a heartbeat his entire body tightened, and fear shot up through his gut to squeeze his chest. The jet was still throbbing and there was no lurch or bump, and the earth was still zipping past. Instantly, Ken’s eyes dropped to the big tachometer on the panel’s right edge, then down to the engine temperature . . . slapping the throttle back to IDLE he used both hands to yank the stick left and backward . . . he had to climb! Just yards off the ground at 750 feet per second gave him no time at all to live. He felt the g’s push him into the seat as the P-80s nose lifted and the ground fell away. Still in a right bank, the P-80 zoomed up and away from the crowd and Ken’s eyes danced around the cockpit; no fire light . . . and squinting at a small gauge on the bottom of the pedestal he saw normal hydraulic pressure. Jets flashed past beneath him but there was sky above and he was still soaring away from the people and the unforgiving ground.
No pilot ever won a game of chicken with the earth. Sunlight filled the cockpit and he could smell the fighter . . . hot metal and warm leather from the harness. Sweat rolled over his nose, but he started breathing again and tugged the throttle back a few inches while he figured out what in the hell just happened. Due to the g-forces exerted because of its increased speed, the jet’s ailerons had to be hydraulically boosted, and the pump that did this failed on Chilstrom’s jet. Essentially freezing the stick, roll control was instantly impossible, though the elevators still worked.
“Kinda eye opening at that speed a few hundred feet off the ground,” Ken remembered. “So I chopped the power, pulled back, and zoomed up out of the race. I could see Gus and Robin wingtip to wingtip around the last few turns. Once I got below 200 mph, the ailerons worked manually so I could land . . . but I was out of the race.” Lundquist won it for the Wright Field test pilots, and Robin Olds placed second. Another 1st Group pilot, Captain A. M. Fell, came in third and Captain Sullivan of Wright was fourth. One of the operational pilots, a lieutenant colonel named Petit, was disqualified for cutting a pylon, and Ken was out for his boost pump problem. Incidentally, Robin Olds was so short of fuel he could not taxi back in, and the jet flamed out on the tarmac in front of the grandstand.
Nevertheless, it was a great day to eat popcorn, drink an icy Coca-Cola in the sun, and thrill to the sight of fascinating aircraft racing across the sky. There was no bad news from far-off places, and no War Department telegrams beginning with “regrets to inform you . . .” delivered by Western Union couriers. City lights glowed at night, there was gasoline for everyone, and pilots were dashing heroes inspiring children and reminding grown-ups how good it was to be American. Not that they needed such reinforcement a year after the war ended, but, as Ken Chilstrom summed up that summer, “It felt good to feel good again!”
But the world is never completely docile and despite, or maybe because of, the war’s end, 1946 was no exception. Earlier in the year the United Nations held its inaugural assembly in London and within weeks there were issues. The Soviet Union had occupied large swaths of northern Iran, ostensibly to protect their southern flank from the Germans. In reality, the move had everything to do with securing vast oil deposits, threatening British interests in Abadan, and expanding the Communists’ sphere of influence. Washington supported Iran against the encroachment and used the UN to force the Soviets back.
Moscow was, perhaps understandably, furious. The bald hypocrisy of the issue, which would reoccur frequently over the years, threatened UN credibility from the onset. After all, the Russians reminded everyone, Britain still retained most of its empire while France, which had done nothing to ensure the final victory, similarly retained Indochina, parts of North Africa, and was currently occupying Lebanon and Syria. The Soviet ambassador stormed out on March 26, and the world was fast becoming polarized again. This time it was ideological aggression; Communist socialism against everything else. Actually it was the same struggle: groups of men on both sides who sought to control millions of destinies through a dangerous combination of patriotism, ambition, conviction, and fear. Moscow was adamant and so was Washington; in fact, the USS Missouri was ordered into the Black Sea by way of the Turkish Straits, to prove the point.
In the United States this new fear manifested itself in the form of another “Red Scare.” Anything or anybody remotely suspicious could be, and often was, branded a Communist. Spies were everywhere, the people on both sides were told; and in America, suspicion became so bad that the Federal Bureau of Investigation hired an additional 7,000 agents. For perceptive military officers and government civilians the foreign flash points were also becoming obvious; namely, Korea. The problem, like many others, was left over from the war. All territory controlled by the Japanese was parceled out between the victors, and the division of the Korean peninsula became a prime example of the often well-meaning, but fundamentally ill-informed and arrogant diplomacy characterizing so many Cold War issues. In this case, inexplicably, two relatively junior officers, Charles Hartwell Bonesteel from the Pentagon’s Strategic Policy Committee and Dean Rusk from the Department of State, were allowed to arbitrarily divide Korea.
With no knowledge of the country, and without consulting anyone who knew better, they used a National Geographic map to bifurcate the country along the 38th Parallel; north of the line would be a Soviet Communist zone, and the south would initially be controlled by the Americans. Conflict, given the belligerency and suspicions on both sides, was inevitable. This led to a series of efforts that shaped the policy, science, culture, and geopolitics of the Cold War. It also started an unprecedented arms race that began with the atomic bomb and was accelerated by the quest for supersonic flight. In light of the world situation, pressure to be first took on new significance. The U.S. government therefore needed a place far from prying eyes, and easy to secure, so Bell moved its operation to Muroc for completion of the supersonic flight program.
On December 9, 1946, X-1 #46-063, was dropped from a B-29 over the Mojave Desert, and as the little rocket plane fell clear of the big bomber Slick Goodlin blinked against the sunlight flooding through the top of the cockpit. Unlike a normal aircraft, there was nothing in front of him but a large panel, and forward visibility was extremely limited. Gripping the big H-shaped yoke, he ran his eyes over the switches and gauges as the aircraft glided into open air away from the bomber. There was also no throttle; thrust was controlled by flipping up each of the four rocket motor toggle switches across the middle of his instrument panel and this was the point of today’s test.
Jack Woolams, the previous test pilot, had only glided the X-1 but today Chal Goodlin took a deep breath and, as the San Gabriel Mountains slipped past in the corners of his eyes, he tightened his hands on the yoke and fired the first rocket. As the first chamber of the Reaction Motors XLR11 motor lit off the X-1 began its first powered flight. Using a mix of ethyl alcohol, water, and liquid oxygen (LOX), each motor was capable of producing 1,475 pounds of thrust. When all four were activated, that was 5,900 pounds for roughly four minutes, a relatively long burn made possible by a regenerative cooling method that allowed compressed gas to expand then remove the motor’s heat as it cooled.
By spring 1947, several other significant events had occurred. The original X-1, #46-062, had been modified for powered flight and was being prepared for transport out to Muroc. Bell and Chalmers Goodlin needed to conduct at least twenty additional flights by midsummer in order to fulfill the company’s contract. Then on June 19, Colonel Al Boyd, now chief of the new Air Materiel Command’s Flight Test Division at Wright Field, set an official world speed record by reaching 623.738 mph in a racing version of the Shooting Star.* Though Luftwaffe pilots flying the Me 163 and Me 262 had gone faster during the war, there was no officially accepted proof of this, and the previous world record of 615.78 miles per hour h
ad been set in September 1946, by a Gloster Meteor F.4 flown by Group Captain Edward “Teddy” Donaldson. The modified J-33-A-21 engine used water-methanol injection, which produced over 5,000 pounds of thrust, and as with the air race jets, all ports were sealed and the guns removed. In a precursor of things to come, the wings were also shorter and sharper than on a production model.
For certain, Al Boyd was no deskbound, paper-pushing officer. Born in Rankin, Tennessee, in 1906, Boyd finished college and was commissioned in 1929 just months before the stock market crashed. Serving as an instructor pilot, he scratched out a career during the grim years of the Great Depression at bare bases like Brooks and Kelly Fields. Managing to escape Texas, he was assigned to Hawaii in 1939 and was the Air Corps chief engineering officer when the Japanese attacked. By 1945, Boyd had been named the acting chief of the Flight Test Division for the Air Corps Air Technical Service Command (ATSC) at Wright Field. When the ATSC became the Air Materiel Command in 1946, Boyd was subsequently confirmed as the chief of Flight Test. A no-nonsense sort of officer, Al Boyd had a dry, barely discernible sense of humor and, as a first-rate aviator himself, was greatly admired by his pilots.