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Crash kills pilot who hit Mach 2 milestone

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published April 21, 2006

RANGER, Ga. - Scott Crossfield, the hotshot test pilot and aircraft designer who in 1953 became the first man to fly at twice the speed of sound, was killed in the crash of his small plane, authorities said Thursday. He was 84.

Mr. Crossfield's body was found in the wreckage Thursday in the mountains about 50 miles northwest of Atlanta, a day after the single-engine plane he was piloting dropped off radar screens on a flight from Alabama to Virginia. There were thunderstorms in the area at the time.

The cause of the crash was under investigation. Mr. Crossfield was believed to be the only person aboard.

During the 1950s, Mr. Crossfield embodied what came to be called "the right stuff," dueling the better-known Chuck Yeager for supremacy among America's Cold War test pilots. Yeager broke the sound barrier in 1947; only weeks after Mr. Crossfield reached Mach 2, or twice the speed of sound, Yeager outdid him.

The Cessna 210A in which Mr. Crossfield died was a puny flying machine compared with the rocket-powered aircraft he flew as a test pilot. During his heyday, he routinely climbed into some of the most powerful, most dangerous and most complex pieces of machinery of his time, took them to their performance limits or beyond and usually brought them back to Earth in one piece.

"He's really one of the major figures," said Peter Jakab, aerospace chairman at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. "He was not only the great cutting-edge research pilot . . . but after that, he continued to be a great adviser and participant in all aspects of aerospace."

Yeager, reached at his home in California, said he was "sure sorry to hear" about Mr. Crossfield's death, but he wondered whether the pilot's penchant for taking risks might have been his undoing.

Mr. Crossfield was flying "in very bad weather," Yeager noted.

Mr. Crossfield, who lived in Herndon, Va., and flew regularly into his 80s, was a member of a group of civilian pilots assembled by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the forerunner of NASA, in the early 1950s. Yeager was an Air Force test pilot.

Mr. Crossfield flew Mach 2 on Nov. 20, 1953, when he hit 1,300 mph in NACA's Douglas D-558-II Skyrocket. The plane reached an altitude of 72,000 feet.

After leaving NACA, he had a major role in the development of the X-15 rocket plane and piloted it on several of its early test flights in the early 1960s.

"We keep talking about test pilots, but there is no such thing as a "test pilot,"' Mr. Crossfield said in a 1988 interview with Aviation Week & Space Technology. "They are all just people who incidentally do flight tests. We should divest ourselves of this idea of special people (being) heroes, if you please, because really they do not exist."

In The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe's history of the dawn of the space age, Wolfe portrayed Yeager, Mr. Crossfield (played by Scott Wilson in the movie) and other members of the brotherhood of test pilots as possessors of "the right stuff," which the author defined as "the ability to go up in a hurtling piece of machinery and put his hide on the line and then have the moxie, the reflexes, the experience, the coolness, to pull it back in the last yawning moment."

Born in Berkeley, Calif., in 1921, Mr. Crossfield interrupted his studies at the University of Washington to join the Navy in 1942. He learned to fly a variety of aircraft during his Navy service.

Attempts to break the sound barrier in the years after World War II involved high stakes and some big egos.

On Oct. 14, 1947, Yeager reached the landmark, pushing his bullet-shaped Bell X-1 rocket plane past 660 mph over the Mojave Desert in California. His feat was kept top secret for about a year.

The now 83-year-old Yeager, in his book Yeager: An Autobiography, described friction between the military pilots and the civilian NACA pilots. He groused that Mr. Crossfield "was a proficient pilot, but also among the most arrogant I've met. ... None of us blue suiters was thrilled to see a NACA guy bust Mach 2."

Mr. Crossfield was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame in 1983.

[Last modified April 21, 2006, 01:43:55]