by Dan Hampton
The day after the transfer there was a meeting, hosted by the military, at Wright Field, to discuss any overlap between the NACA and military programs and sketch out the fastest, safest path to exceed Mach 1. It was decided that the first aircraft, #44-062, would be flown at Muroc because the thin wing raised the critical Mach number, and this offered the best chance for transonic-to-supersonic stability. The second X-1, #44-063, with its thicker wing, would be used by the NACA for methodically gathering transonic flight data. Telemetry for both aircraft would be provided by the NACA, and the agency would have access to all collected data. The additional 500-pound instrumentation package was truly impressive for 1947; among other things this included a five-channel transmitter for all airspeed, altitude, and acceleration readings; 400 distribution orifices to take exact measurements of transonic and supersonic pressures; and a camera to film the main cockpit panel.
The level of cooperation between a contractor, a government research agency, and the military was unprecedented and very promising. Walt Williams, the NACA site engineer in charge, served as liaison. But Colonel Al Boyd left no doubt that this was now a military program and, in light of current world events, there would be no unnecessary delay in exceeding Mach 1. According to James Young of the USAF Flight Test Center History Office, Boyd stated that.” . . . the AMC [Air Materiel Command] program would be progressive and it would be brief.” The colonel knew very well that North American Aviation was nearing the rollout of its new jet fighter and, being an engineer himself, was certain this would be a threat to the X-1. “He knew,” Ken Chilstrom recounted, “that if the Germans had likely gone supersonic in a swept-wing 262, or one of their experimental rocket ships [the Natter], then a better, structurally sound jet with a better engine like the XP-86 could certainly do it.”
Boyd was not territorial, but there was a lot hanging on this program, both professionally and personally. The Army had spent vast sums of money developing Bell’s rocket, specifically to fly faster than sound, so to have a fighter lift off from the ground rather than have to air-drop, then go supersonic with a conventional jet engine would make the whole organization look foolish. In Boyd’s defense, he was also thinking about the military test pilot program, the image of the new Air Force, and the future of experimental flight testing.
Contrary to the Hollywood version, there was considerable preparation for this, as in all test programs. In early July, all three military pilots were sent to Buffalo, New York, to meet Larry Bell and get a look at the aircraft itself. While they were there an engine run of the XLR-11 rocket engine was performed and this was an attention getter. Yeager later recollected, “We didn’t walk too steady when we left that hangar. . . . That sumbitch scares me to death.”
Who could blame him? During the last week in July they traveled out to Muroc to join the X-1, and for an orientation course conducted by Dick Frost, a test pilot himself and Bell’s chief flight test engineer. This consisted of long days discussing systems, aerodynamics, flight profiles, and emergency procedures—everything that was known about the rocket ship. At one point Chuck asked if a bailout was possible and Frost simply replied, “No way.”
On August 6, 1947, a B-29 piloted by Major Bob Cardenas took off from Muroc and climbed up to 25,000 feet. The bright orange X-1 was released and Yeager, with no engine installed, spent the next eight minutes uneventfully gliding down to Rogers Dry Lake. He did the same thing the next day and also on August 8, during the final glide flight. That same day, barely 100 miles to the southwest, another highly significant aviation event was occurring. The XP-86 prototype was rolled out from Mines Field in Los Angeles, then taken apart and trucked over the San Gabriel Mountains to Muroc. Initial Phase I contractor flight testing was to begin very soon at the hands of North American’s chief test pilot: none other than George Welch.
So the final stage was set.
Centuries of aerodynamic theory, decades of flight technology, and years of struggle, war, and hardship for the pilots involved all converged on the roof of the high desert in that summer of 1947. Despite everything that had been in preparation for this, no one really knew what existed for a man in the thin air beyond 0.92 Mach. Bullets and artillery shells could do it, and maybe a long-forgotten German pilot had done it, too, yet nothing was for certain except that a demon lived out there. Maybe a demon of science or aerodynamics, but he could also very well be a demon of fame: or of death.
Nine
The Demon
Naked, except for a pair of English riding boots, she cantered a stallion named Dream of Love around a Sacramento competition ring, shouting as she rode; Florence Leontine Lowe wanted to be seen and heard—and she was. Born in 1901 to a wealthy and prominent California family, it seemed obvious that she would always be different; one of those individuals who are born out of time, and never quite fit in where they are. There is a choice for people like that. They can either conform and be miserable, or they can try to force the world around them to conform with their life. Florence Lowe chose the latter, almost from the beginning.
Inherited temperament and the turn-of-the-century environment did not help—or maybe it did. Her grandfather, Thaddeus Sobieski Lowe, was an adventurer, avid balloonist, and a restless, creative genius. Using his balloons during the Civil War battles of Chancellorsville and Mechanicsburg (among others), Lowe floated over enemy lines spotting for Union artillery while wearing a black frock coat and silk top hat. Frequently shot at by both sides, Lowe is credited with saving hundreds of Union lives. After the war he patented a number of inventions, including a refrigeration unit suitable for ships or railroads and a process to manufacture ice. His success permitted the construction of a 24,000-square-foot mansion on South Orange Grove Avenue, very near the modern Beverly Hills.
Lowe married and his son, Thaddeus Junior, grew up loving the outdoors and especially horses. Unfortunately, in 1893 a wheat shortage and series of military coups in Argentina panicked investors, who started a run on American banks. The elder Lowe lost it all: the family business, mansion, and investment ventures. However, the younger Lowe had married into an old-money Philadelphia family and was able to maintain the lifestyle of an affluent gentleman, which proved fortunate for his daughter. Thad Junior’s mother-in-law built the couple a mansion in San Marino, Pasadena, on South Garfield Avenue and this is where Florence grew up. Riding horses and fishing, she preferred the rough-and-tumble world of boys, which endeared to her to both her father and grandfather, who rarely failed to indulge the child. Her mother believed differently. Young ladies were supposed to be decorous and proper and concern themselves with music, art, and preparation for marriage.
Florence cared for none of these things and rebelled at every chance. “She was a mystery to them,” writes Lauren Kessler in The Happy Bottom Riding Club, “a little girl who had no interest in being a little girl.” Her parents’ solution was a series of private boarding schools, four in eight years, to reform the child. Florence knew she was not the ideal girl, whatever that was, and was always keenly aware of her own mother’s disapproval. As she matured into adolescence, she had a choice: to slide into anonymity as a thick-necked, broad-shouldered, round-faced girl and hope some man, sometime, would marry her, or ride though life as she rode the stallion, and not give a damn what most people thought of her.
She chose the latter.
This would be the girl who fled to Tijuana from the Ramona Convent and the Sisters of the Holy Name, who faked suicide to shock her roommate, and who used imported French lingerie to polish her riding boots. She would be Florence Lowe, who pretended to be the governor of California’s daughter as she rode naked around the ring in Sacramento. Then, in 1919, she met Calvin Rankin Barnes, a high Episcopalian priest and rector of St. James in Pasadena. He was also a bachelor and quite taken with the lively eighteen-year-old girl. When marriage was suggested, Florence, largely to escape her mother, quickly agreed and the couple married in January 1921.
It did not go well from the start.
Neither could consummate the marriage on the wedding night, and a two-day train ride in separate berths did nothing to improve the situation. Neither did their fourth night together at a resort in the Grand Canyon when Calvin insisted on intimacy. His abrupt, postcoital statement—“I do not like sex. It makes me nervous. I see nothing to it, and do not wish to have any more of it”—closed the book on the subject. Hardly an auspicious beginning, it became more complicated when Florence discovered she was pregnant. A boy was born nine months later, whom she named William Emmert Barnes and then promptly turned over to a nurse. Florence did not like motherhood and had never had a good example of it, nor did she enjoy a life without servants, a mansion, her horses, or money. “She had,” Kessler brilliantly writes, “married without love and conceived without passion.” So when time came to leave the hospital, Florence went to her parents’ mansion, not her husband’s rectory.
This began years of a Jekyll and Hyde existence; she discovered sex through a series of lovers and enjoyed the demimonde thrill that accompanied illicit affairs. Florence worked odd jobs during the day, yet taught Sunday school and attempted to play the respectable clerical wife by night.* She tried her hand in Hollywood training horses for the movies and occasionally worked as a stunt double until her mother died in 1923. Her father rapidly overcame his grief and remarried a woman only three years older than his daughter, moving out of town and leaving the San Marino mansion to his daughter. Florence forsook the rectory altogether and resumed life as she had previously known it. Her home, and a Laguna beach house, became wild party spots for the Hollywood elite and those who wished to be. One of them happened to be the future CEO of Western Airlines, and another a young University of California football player named Marion Robert Morrison.*
One day in the spring of 1927, Florence and a few bored friends decided to liven things up a bit by hiring on a banana boat as crew and heading down to South America. The alcohol made it seem a good idea, so Florence dressed like a man and signed on the M/S Camina as a “Jacob Crane.” The boat sailed, eventually putting into San Blas on Mexico’s west coast and herein lay a problem. Several problems, in fact; first was the ongoing political strife in Mexico, and second was the fact that the Camina’s hold was full of guns. After six weeks of confinement, Florence and the helmsman, Roger Chute, escaped. Their plan was to cut across Mexico, get to the coast, and make their way north back into the United States. Chute had a swaybacked nag, but all Florence could find was a burro and she joked that he looked like a modern-day Don Quixote.
“In that case,” Chute replied, “you must be his companion, Pancho.”
“You mean Sancho . . . Sancho Panza.”
Chute laughed. “Ah, what the hell, Pancho or Sancho, you fit the bill. From now on I’m calling you Pancho.”
And escape they did. To Mexico City, then Veracruz and eventually up to New Orleans. From there, the pair crossed Texas and made it back to California in November 1927, nearly seven months after leaving. But Florence was far from content. She had finally decided what she wanted: a life of exotic places and dangerous adventures; and a life of men. There was even a new name to match her new identity: she was, and would now remain, Pancho Barnes.
By the end of the first week in August 1947, the Army X-1 team at Muroc was pleased, or at least most of them were. The X-1 had been glided three times and Yeager was getting familiar with the rocket. The NACA group, however, including their test pilot Herb Hoover, was wary of the military; and the Bell representatives, especially test pilot Dick Frost, were unimpressed. Slick Goodlin had done all this over a year before and made powered flights beginning in December. The Army X-1 did not even have a motor yet and would have to wait a few more weeks due to a shortage of spare parts. In the meantime, the military officers had a visit from Colonel Boyd himself.
He was not a happy man.
Boyd had discovered through Bell and the NACA that Yeager rolled the X-1, twice, on his first glide flight. Herb Hoover had said, “This guy Yeager is pretty much of a wild one . . . on the first drop, he did a couple of rolls right after the leaving the B-29!” It did not end there. During Chuck’s third glide on August 8, he did a short, two-turn spin and then did a little mock dogfighting with Bob Hoover’s chase plane. These antics, in overt violation of the flight test plan, were one reason why military test pilots had not enjoyed a good reputation since the Roaring Twenties and Jimmy Doolittle. Reversing this perception, and altering the reality it had created, was Colonel Albert Boyd’s personal quest—and now it was in dire jeopardy at the worst possible time.
Using the interim delay, Boyd arrived at Muroc to see for himself, assess Yeager, and make his feeling perfectly clear. He granted the young pilot’s desire to fly past the Mach as soon as possible—that was also the Army’s objective—but not by throwing common sense to the winds. If a pilot loses an aircraft and/or kills himself while violating a thoughtfully constructed, clearly stipulated test plan, then there is no way out. It was an unnecessary risk and for such actions there was no defense. A test pilot cannot “cowboy” a plan by making it up as he goes, and that is what Boyd, and the others, knew Yeager had done. He was a fighter jock at heart, not yet a test pilot, and frustrated by the constraints placed on his flying. As Yeager himself admitted, “I’d attend these highly technical NACA preflight planning sessions . . . and not know what the hell they were talking about. But Jack always took me aside and translated the engineer’s technical jargon into layman’s terms.”
Layman?
This was the heart of the problem and Boyd’s big concern: Yeager was not a layman; he was supposed to be a test pilot, and that meant possessing a breadth of knowledge he did not yet have. So the colonel did what pilots do when they’re frustrated and need to blow off some steam: he went to the bar. And why not? Antelope Valley, California, was hardly Manhattan, Piccadilly Circus, the Place Vendome, or anywhere else these men had seen during the war. Los Angeles was about 100 miles away through the mountains, and the road was primitive. There was a nearby desert watering hole called Ma Greens, close to the base, but whenever Boyd was out at Muroc he headed to his favorite haunt in on the West Coast: the Happy Bottom Riding Club, owned by his good friend Pancho Barnes.*
Life had been a roller coaster for Pancho. Always adventurous and easily bored, she found a permanent solution in the spring of 1928: flying. Introduced to an instructor named Ben Caitlin, Pancho took her first lesson that spring and never looked back. A fifteen-minute lesson cost five dollars and she flew continuously, even buying her own aircraft, a sporty Travel Air biplane. As with all pilots who truly love flying, it was freedom and independence, power, a challenge, and in Pancho’s case a way to continuously defy society. “Flying,” she once said, “makes me feel like a sex maniac in a whorehouse.”
She continued living large, and her parties at Laguna were legendary. In addition to the Hollywood types, she now encouraged pilots of all sorts to come eat, drink, and talk flying. Jimmy Doolittle and Roscoe Turner were among her favorites, and Pancho began flying for oil companies and aircraft manufacturers, like Lockheed, on the side. In an age that still largely underestimated women, it was great publicity to have a female pilot and what better way to prove aviation was safe than to have a woman fly the plane? It was on one of these publicity flights out over the Mojave that Pancho saw green between the big dusty smears of Rogers and Rosamond Dry Lakes. It was just a small alfalfa operation belonging to a rancher named Ben Hannam, but she fell in love with the place and immediately saw that on that sunbaked desert anvil the weather was usually good, and there was always a place to land.
Despite the Great Depression, she was able to continue living large for a bit longer, but much of her inherited wealth was in real estate and the California market bubble had definitely burst. Still, Pancho went through money like it was water and by the early thirties she was spending more in one month than three average families spent in a year; stables, horses, two houses, furs, and now airplanes. It c
ould not last, nor did it. She had violated the only inviolate rule of inherited, invested money: never spend the principal. The beach house at Laguna was gone and she was forced to lease the mansion. Her parents were now both dead, her husband was in New York, and Pancho wanted out.
Remembering the alfalfa ranch, the desert seemed to her, as it has to many others, an escape: a barren, simple place to begin again. In an astonishingly bad business move, but utterly normal for Pancho, she swapped an apartment building on North Sixth and Witmer in downtown Los Angeles for Ben Hannam’s eighty-acre alfalfa ranch.* Naming it Rancho Oro Verde, Spanish for “Green Gold,” she quickly discovered that at nine dollars per ton, alfalfa would not support her airplanes and Lincolns, so Pancho did other things. She bought cows, fed them the alfalfa to produce milk, and acquired a dairy. With the dairy, she was able to sell the milk to local schools, the Pacific Borax Mining Company, and the small Army Air Corps detachment on the south side of Rogers Dry Lake. Contracting to pick up garbage at Muroc and the Navy base at China Lake, her hired men cooked the garbage and she fed it to her 300 hogs. Pancho then sold the pork back to the military for meat; obviously, some of old Thaddeus Lowe’s entrepreneurial spirit lived on in his granddaughter. In 1937 she was doing well enough to begin purchasing land, and by 1940 her little spread now encompassed 360 acres in and around both dry lakes.
She also built an airstrip.
Coming into some money after her grandmother’s death, Pancho finally sold the San Marino mansion and devoted herself to her desert “estate,” as she saw it. After the war this had evolved into a sprawling, Spanish-style hacienda with a swimming pool in front, a restaurant and bar, guest quarters, stables, and a rodeo arena. Movie stars, celebrities, politicians, and, increasingly, military pilots from nearby Muroc, or “the foreign legion of the Army Air Corps,” as it was locally called, were always around. If Pancho liked you, then there were big steaks, lots of booze, swimming, and later, the company of hostesses. Being a famous aviatrix commercially involved with the military and having one of the only places for men to relax meant Pancho knew everything that was going on—even things she was not supposed to know.