by Dan Hampton
Zornig, Hermann, 187, 187n
Zuebert, Hans, 2
Photo Section
Austrian physicist Ernst Mach’s astounding 1887 schlieren photograph that clearly reveals shockwaves forming on the bow of a supersonic projectile.
The author with one of two surviving Ba 349 “Natters.” This one is stored in the National Air and Space Museum’s Paul E. Garber Facility in Suitland, Maryland. (Courtesy of the author)
Luftwaffe test pilot Lothar Sieber. There are unproven rumors that Sieber exceeded Mach One in a Natter on March 1, 1945, as he plummeted to his death.
The Bell XP-59A Airacomet, America’s first jet fighter, in flight over Rogers Dry Lake during the fall of 1942. (Bell Aircraft archives)
Captain George Welch in his P-38 Lightning, at war in the Pacific. Welch survived 348 combat missions and was credited with 16 confirmed aerial kills. Welch’s WWII service is also notable for the fact that he was one of the very few American pilots to get airborne on December 7, 1941, during the attack on Pearl Harbor; credited with four kills on that day, Welch received the war’s first Distinguished Flying Cross, a distinction he shared with his comrade Kenneth Taylor. (National Museum of the U.S. Air Force)
Flight Officer Chuck Yeager with the original “Glamorous Glen,” a P-51B, in early 1944. Yeager would fly 64 combat missions and end the war with 12.5 confirmed aerial victories. (National Museum of the U.S. Air Force)
North American A-36 Apache. North Africa, 1942. Ken Chilstrom flew this air-to-ground version of the P-51 Mustang during 80 combat missions over Sicily and Italy. (National Museum of the U.S. Air Force)
XS-1 under construction at Bell Aircraft’s factory, 1945.
The XS-1 offered a unique opportunity for transonic aerodynamic research. Shown here is a wide and varied array of recording and research packages displayed across nearly the entire wing. (NASA)
Bell X-1A with military markings after the USAAF took over the project in June 1947. Yeager is first on the right near the cockpit hatch. (Guy Aceto Collection)
The second X-1 of three built by Bell. The black Xs on the fuselage are utilized for photo calibration. (Guy Aceto Collection)
South Base of Muroc Army Air Field next to Rogers Dry Lake. The regular army (and later air force) used this area while the secret programs were conducted on the much smaller North Base. (Guy Aceto Collection)
What passed for an Officer’s Club—Muroc Army Air Field, circa 1945. The military gave little thought to comfort or entertainment, which was one reason why Pancho’s Happy Bottom Riding Club was so popular. (Guy Aceto Collection)
The Happy Bottom Riding Club was the focal point of social life around Muroc in the late 1940s. The pilots loved it, and their wives hated it—there were no secrets here about any of the military classified programs. (Guy Aceto Collection)
The Happy Bottom hostesses were obvious attractions for men forced to live in spartan conditions and very often separated from their families. Pancho Barnes is seated in the middle with the dog on her lap. (Guy Aceto Collection)
Bell test pilot Jack Woolams. Wearing a bowler hat and gorilla mask, he would often sneak up on conventional military aircraft in the XP-59 jet. The first pilot of the XS-1, he was killed in August 1946 while preparing for the first postwar National Air Races. (Guy Aceto Collection)
Jack Woolams and the XS-1. He was the only pilot to fly the rocket plane over Florida, and made its first powered flight on December 9, 1946. (Bell Aircraft archives)
Chalmers “Slick” Goodlin took over as Bell’s chief test pilot after Woolam’s death. Eager to fight, Goodlin became the youngest commissioned officer in the Royal Canadian Air Force and flew Spitfires in England until late 1942. Returning to the U.S., he became a Navy test pilot before joining Bell, and made 26 flights in the XS-1 before the program was turned over to the USAAF. (Bell Aircraft archives)
The racing version of the Shooting Star, the P-80R, roaring past a speed marking station at Muroc Army Air Field. (National Museum of the U.S. Air Force)
Colonel Al Boyd, June 1947, after setting a world speed record of 623.7 mph in a P-80R Shooting Star, returning the honor to the U.S. after 24 years. Rightfully called the father of the U.S. Air Force test pilot program, and as chief of the Flight Test Division at Wright Field, Boyd was Chilstrom and Yeager’s commander. (National Museum of the U.S. Air Force)
Major Ken “K.O.” Chilstrom after delivering the first piece of mail by jet aircraft in June 1946 to Orville Wright. Ken was chief of the Fighter Operations Section and the Flight Test Division’s first choice to fly the XS-1, but he declined the offer to run the USAF YP-86 Sabre test program. (Colonel John Chilstrom)
George Welch, with his distinctive red flight helmet, flying the North American XP- 86 Sabre over the Mojave Desert. Destined to become the mainstay of USAF fighter aviation during the Korean War, the Sabre was quite capable of supersonic flight while diving, which Welch officially accomplished on November 13, 1947. It was an open secret around Muroc and Pancho’s that he had flown past Mach One in the XP-86 on at least one occasion prior to the official USAF X-1 flight of October 14, 1947. (Guy Aceto Collection)
Three of a kind. North American’s legendary XP-86, the enigmatic test pilot George Welch, and his classic MG sports car in Los Angeles, 1947. (National Museum of the U.S. Air Force)
With its four-minute fuel supply, the X-1 had to be air dropped at altitude in order to accelerate to Mach One. An early loading technique was to raise the carrier aircraft, a B-29, on jacks and secure the rocket plane to its belly. (Guy Aceto Collection)
Jackie Ridley at Muroc. A first-rate test pilot himself, Ridley had the background in aerodynamics that Yeager lacked. Possessing a master’s of aeronautical engineering from Caltech, Ridley personified what the new USAF sought in its postwar test pilots; a solid mix of experience and formal education. (National Air and Space Museum)
Piloted by Jack Woolams, the XS-1 prepares to drop over Pinecastle, Florida, in 1946. (National Air and Space Museum)
Like the fighters he’d flown in Europe, Chuck named X-1 #6062 after his wife, Glennis Dickhouse Yeager. (NASA)
X-1 cockpit. The Machmeter is second from the right on the top row. Note that there is no feasible way for a pilot to bail out once the door on the right side is locked. (National Air and Space Museum)
Photographed by Bob Hoover from a P-80 chase plane, the X-1 lights off its Reaction Motor rockets over the Muroc Test Range. (NASA)
“The needle of the machmeter fluctuated . . . then passed off the scale.”: The original supersonic flight test report written by Captain Chuck Yeager on October 14, 1947. (National Air and Space Museum)
Reaction Motors XLR11 rocket engine. The four rockets were fueled by a mix of ethyl alcohol, water, and liquid oxygen to produce 5,900 pounds of thrust. This gave the X-1 roughly four short minutes of powered flight, thus necessitating an air launch procedure from the B-29 mother ship. (National Air and Space Museum)
George Welch over the Dry Lake in North American’s YF-100A Super Sabre. Repeating his performance with the XP-86, Welch took the F-100 supersonic during its first flight on May 25, 1953 over Palmdale airport. (Guy Aceto Collection)
North American YF-100A with Welch in the cockpit. George would disregard stability warnings from USAF test pilots Chuck Yeager and Pete Everest regarding the small vertical tail, and perish on October 12, 1954, when his Super Sabre came apart in flight. (Guy Aceto Collection)
Northrop YB-49 “Flying Wing.” This one was a sister ship to YB-49 #42-10238, which crashed on June 5, 1948, killing Major Glen Edwards. Edwards was Ken Chilstrom’s best friend and also passed on the X-1 program in order to complete a master’s of aeronautical engineering at Princeton. Muroc Air Force Base would be renamed Edwards AFB in his honor. (National Museum of the U.S. Air Force)
Bell X-1 #6062, first aircraft to officially pass the speed of sound, forever airborne in the National Air and Space Museum. (National Air and Space Museum)
About t
he Author
DAN HAMPTON is the New York Times bestselling author of Viper Pilot, Lords of the Sky, The Hunter Killers, and The Flight. During his twenty years (1986–2006) of service in the US Air Force, Colonel Hampton received multiple Distinguished Flying Crosses with Valor, a Purple Heart, and numerous other citations. He is a graduate of the USAF Fighter Weapons School, USN Top Gun School (TOGS), and USAF Special Operations School.
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Also by Dan Hampton
Nonfiction
The Flight
The Hunter Killers
Lords of the Sky
Viper Pilot
Fiction
The Mercenary
Copyright
CHASING THE DEMON. Copyright © 2018 by Ascalon, LLC. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Cover design by Owen Corrigan
Cover art by Roy Grinnell
Image on title page courtesy of NASA
Photograph by John Carnemolla/Shutterstock
Digital Edition JULY 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-268874-3
Version 06192018
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-268872-9
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* A glossary of potentially unfamiliar aviation and military terms appears here.
* Each motor generated 1,102 pounds of thrust.
* Mutke remained a fahnrich, an officer cadet, all through the war because he would not join the Nazi Party. Surviving the war, he finished medical school and became a gynecologist.
* Those interested in the scientific underpinnings of mechanical flight should review the appendix, “Aerodynamics 101.”
* A Parisian foot is 1.0657 times the standard U.S. measurement.
* 1,426 fps for an American .69-caliber flintlock with a 120-grain load utilizing a 412-grain ball.
* A stained-glass window in the vestry of Malmesbury Abbey shows Eilmer and his “glider.”
* The A320 wingspan is 117.4 feet with a wing area of 1317.5 square feet.
* Illinois’s Chanute Field, later Chanute Air Force Base, was named in his honor.
* The name was a mistranslation of ancient Greek. Aerodrome means a place from which aircraft are flown, not an aircraft itself, as Langley believed.
* In fact, the wing-warping mechanism was included in the Wright Flying Machine patent filed on March 23, 1903. No. 821,393 would be granted on May 22, 1906.
* See John D. Anderson’s superb analysis of this in The Airplane: A History of Its Technology, pp. 102–104.
* The 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry, of the U.S. 1st Division was led by Major Theodore Roosevelt Jr.; he was so concerned for the welfare of his soldiers that, at his own expense, Roosevelt purchased new boots for every man. Returning to military service for World War II, Roosevelt was the oldest man at fifty-six (and the only general officer) to come ashore by sea with the first wave of the invasion.
* Additionally two silvers were won for the Ladies Single Figure Skating and Men’s Ice Hockey, respectively, and a Bronze for Ski Jumping.
* Lansdowne would die nearly six years later while commanding the USS Shenandoah.
* As a B-24 pilot, Jimmy Stewart went into combat himself in December 1943 with the 703 Bombardment Squadron. In parallel with his movie career, he remained in the USAF Reserves and eventually reached the rank of brigadier general.
* Always in danger from naval blockades, Germany began researching synthetic replacements for gasoline during the Great War. The Bergius process permitted the conversion of coal (one resource which Germany possessed in abundance) to synthetic oil. This trend of innovative and advanced research would continue through World War II.
* The younger Boulton’s middle name is a tribute to James Watt. Seventy-two years into the future, the Boulton-Paul Defiant fighter, nicknamed the “Daffy,” would see action during the Second World War.
* Santos-Dumont donated half the proceeds to his crew and gave the other 50,000 francs to the poor.
* He flew 722 feet in 21.5 seconds on November 12, 1906.
* Wilbur declined to compete against Curtiss, whom he loathed, and was convinced his ideas would be stolen.
* Blériot utilized the control stick invented by his countryman Robert Esnault-Pelterie, rather than the cumbersome multilevered Wright system.
* The garage was located at Sixty-Sixth Street and Columbus Avenue beneath the St. Nicholas ice skating rink.
* The very prize that Charles Lindbergh would win by crossing nonstop from New York to Paris in 1927.
* Post also published numerous magazine articles, authored a book titled Skycraft, and starred in an opera: The Man from Paris.
* America’s entry into World War I finally ended the whole mess when the government mandated cross-licensing of all patents relative to war production in order to streamline effort.
* The result was the Liberty L-12.
* Through some very convulsed phrasing, bonds, and other measures, Germany was actually scheduled to pay about half this amount. Nevertheless, it was unsustainable and payments were regularly defaulted until 1932 when they ceased altogether.
* It still wasn’t enough for several countries. Germany finally paid its debt in October 2010, while Great Britain ceased making payments on its $4.4 billion Great War debt in 1934.
* It became the Grand Ole Opry in 1927.
* It was a magnificent Wright Whirlwind J-5C that took Lindbergh from New York to Paris in May 1927.
* Soucek would go on to fight in World War II and was the executive officer of the USS Hornet when it sunk in 1942. He died in 1955 and NAS Oceana was dedicated in his honor.
* Eight days, fifteen hours, and fifty-one minutes.
* Other enrollees included actors Robert Mitchum, Raymond Burr, and Walter Matthau; future U.S. representative Ed Roybal, and baseball legend Stan Musial.
* At Cranwell, Whittle also authored Sea Power in the Pacific, where he predicted a Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.
* British patent No. 374,206.
* The initial patent expired in 1935, and Whittle could not afford the £5 renewal fee so it lapsed. The investment banking firm of Falk & Partners provided the backing, and one of the directors was Sir Maurice Bonham-Carter, grandfather of the actress Helena Bon
ham-Carter.
* The ridiculous downgrade was rumored to be as result of taking off without orders, and because they ignored the staff officer at Wheeler.
* Four thousand seven hundred nineteen P-39s made it to Russia. About 1,100 were still flyable at the end of the war, and at least 1,030 had been shot down.
* Five torpedo bombers and two dive-bombers. America’s first official ace-in-a-day was Lieutenant Frank Luke, U.S. Army Service, who shot down a Halberstadt reconnaissance plane, two Fokker D.VII fighters, and a pair of observation balloons on September 18, 1918.