AD 1963 - The Fastest Man Alive, Part II

AD 1963 – THE FASTEST MAN ALIVE, PART II

SIXTEEN YEARS LATER

When Chuck Yeager had opened his eyes to another black pre-dawn morning, the same way he had done for years, it seemed like just another day. Getting up at the ass-crack of dawn, climbing into a hunk of hurtling metal and hoping your guardian angel could fly faster than you, punching that Sky Demon in the face before you had to punch Elvis.  (That was pilot slang for ejection from an aircraft).  He was still a test pilot, the best of the best; and perched at the top of that great ziggurat in the sky, the pyramid of The Right Stuff.  It was all just another day on the job.

Today was December 12, 1963, and, as he did 16 years earlier when he climbed into the orange bullet that punched through the wall in the sky, Chuck had that same feeling of quiet excitement; that anticipation that he felt when he was about to make history.  He loved his job, and he wouldn't have traded it for anything.  In a strange way, he almost felt more at home strapped into an aircraft, rocketing through the blue at the outside edge of the flight envelope than he did in his own bed.  Of course the danger was always there, the risk of his life; the fear that poor split-second decision could turn him and his expensive aircraft into a charred ball of wreckage on the desert floor. The danger was constant, the risk was given and necessary, and the fear was what kept him alert.  He couldn't disregard those things, but to ignore them and yet still be aware of them is the grace of a pilot.

He got up and went through his usual routine of showering, suiting up in his olive drab jumpsuit and cooking some eggs and bacon, the kids fast asleep, while Glennis did her thing and got ready to fulfill her duty of being the wife of a daredevil test pilot.  All was right with the tiny world of the California high desert, once called Muroc.

The place had certainly been built up in a decade and a half.  The dry, dusty abandoned aircraft hangars with flapping doors and storage tents next to a dusty airstrip were now gone, to be replaced by a sprawling Air Force base with hangars, taxiways and runways that criss-crossed the dry lakebed.  They even had a traffic control tower!  Muroc Dry Lake was now known as Edwards Air Force Base.  The place was so busy every day, it looked like the Chicago airport.  Planes were constantly taking off and landing, and doing touch-off runs to train pilots.  Planes of every size, type and shape, many of them never seen before.   

Edwards, as in 1947, was still a proving ground for the experimental aircraft known as the X-Planes.   Companies like McDonnell-Douglas, Lockheed and Bell Aerospace and a dozen others still had that endless competition to see who could build the fastest infernal contraption ever, and find people crazy enough to take them higher, faster and farther than anybody thought possible.   

Chuck Yeager was one of those pilots.  There was nothing he wouldn't do, or try to do, if no one had ever done it before.  Every time someone set a new speed or altitude record, Chuck would go ahead and try to break it, with or without clearance from base personnel.  He was simply the finest pilot anyone had ever seen.  He had proverbial balls the size of drop tanks.  Nobody could do what Chuck could do and survive.  No one.

So naturally, Chuck had gotten all the hot planes.  He was the first guy to climb in the cockpit when a new one rolled off the production line.  They had to test it after all, to make sure it was safe.  Safe!  As if a hollow shell made of aluminum and steel traveling at 3 times the speed of a rifle bullet with a guy inside it could be safe.   

There was always experimentation and flight testing to be done. The base of the National Committee of Aeronautics had now moved cross-country to Cape Canaveral and was renamed NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Agency.   There was still a flight school at Edwards though, and Chuck still taught there.  He ran the dang flight school.    

When Chuck broke the sound barrier in 1947 there was no media fanfare, no interviews, no press, no nothing.  It was all very hush-hush.  World War II had just ended, and Lord only knew who could be listening in and spying on us.  Could it be the Japs? Or the Commies? (Those filthy Commies!)  

Chuck was the greatest aviation hero in history, and no one outside the pals who used to buy him drinks at Pancho's Fly-Inn even knew what he did.   To America, he was a nobody.

Now the astronauts on the other hand…

Many things had changed in a decade and a half.   The captured German V-2 rockets and the scientists who defected brought with them a wealth of knowledge about high performance machines and pushing the limits, traveling faster than anything. And they were led by this genius and ex-Nazi Dr. Werner Von Braun.  Their development of the V-2 at Peenemunde paved the way for both the American and Soviet manned space programs.  In just 10 years, we had reverse-engineered the V-2 and developed a bigger, beefier intercontinental ballistic missile called the Jupiter-C, which led to the Army missile Redstone.  This rocket propelled a bunch of chimpanzees, Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom into low earth orbit, and began the Space Age for the US.  Now in the center of the public spotlight, NASA had selected the top 7 candidates from the top 300 test pilots around the country: Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, John Glenn, Scott Carpenter, Deke Slayton and Gordon Cooper.  Those lucky boys would get to ride these dream machines into space and be spam in a can.   A lot of the test pilot boys back home who trained with them at the flight school kind of resented the fact that, for all their fancy training, the "capsules" were heavily automated and they were little more than passengers, or "monkeys" in space suits as Gus had put it.   They didn't really "fly" so much as push buttons and flip switches on cue from Mission Control.   

For some reason, Chuck was not on that list.  He was not one of the Lucky Seven.   Why, he couldn't even begin to guess.  He could wax all of their tails in a dogfight and pull enough G's to make them wet their pants without breaking a sweat.  He deserved to be up there.  He worked for it. He earned it. And yet nobody knew his name outside the military.

Then, Chuck and the old boys back home got a break.  Lockheed was trying to get funding to develop a space plane, that is a craft that takes off like a plane and soars up to the edge of space, maneuvers under its own power, and glides back to earth.  They were still in the experimental phase, and started out by modifying existing high-performance fighter jets with rocket afterburners.  This was what the Air Force boys dreamed of.  To actually fly in space and not be spam in a can.  

Right now, the best thing Lockheed had was a brand new high-performance fighter jet, just rolled out of the factory, called the NF-104 Starfighter.

The NF-104 was a powerful machine by itself, but Lockheed mounted a JP4-fueled rocket engine above its tailpipe.  It also featured some hydrogen peroxide reaction control jets in the nose and sides of the craft, because as the aircraft reached the upper limit of the atmosphere, the control surfaces would cease to be effective.  These attitude jets would enable the pilot to fly his aircraft by wire and control it the way the NASA boys do.  But first, it had to get there.

The F-104 had a single large-diameter J79 Turbojet engine that produced an incredible amount of power.  Chuck didn't remember the numbers exactly, but this aircraft was actually very unstable and overpowered. It was shaped like a chrome pencil with short stubby wings like a dart, and this high elevated tail that was almost as wide as the wings.  The slightest twitch of the pilot or control malfunction could put this baby into a flat spin in no time flat, and turn you into a smudge on the desert floor.  Its flight envelope seemed to be outside the limits of human tolerance, and pilot fatalities with it were high.  

The problem lay within the horizontal stabilizer and the wings being too small. The shock wave generated by the short wings could cancel out the stabilizer under the right conditions, causing loss of control of the aircraft.  The powerful engine of the Starfighter meant it could accelerate and actually go supersonic while climbing straight up like a rocket; though at high-alpha maneuvers and vertical angles of attack its instability showed through.  Engineers warned that it would pitch up suddenly at greater than 30 degrees, tilt back over and into a flat spin.  The engine had a nasty habit of stalling, and the only way to restart it was to plunge into a steep dive and 'windmill' the turbine to build up the compression needed to re-ignite.  It took a very good pilot to get that thing on the ground after it had gone up. It was called "The missile with a man in it."

Anyway, the point of the NF-104 program was to train pilots for aerospace flight with a "boom and zoom" profile.  This involved taking off normally until a height of 35,000 to 37,000 feet was attained, reaching a speed of Mach 2, or the "boom," then kicking in the rocket engine for the "zoom", pulling sharply back on the stick and climbing up to the edge of space, where the atmosphere starts to get really thin.  At the peak of the arc, near 120,000 feet, the pilot could experience a couple minutes of zero-g, or weightlessness, just like the astronauts and try out the reaction controls similar to the ones used in the Mercury capsule.  At least in theory.  It sounded like a dream come true for Chuck.  

Of course, he was all about setting new records.  The Russians had set the current altitude record at almost 114,000 feet just two years earlier with an experimental fighter of their own design. Chuck wanted to beat that record, of course not only to beat the Russians; but to re-assert his position at the top of the ladder as the best of the best.  

He had took that dream machine up for a morning test flight, just to "wring her out" as he liked to say.  He wanted to make sure it was safe for the other pilots in his Aerospace Research Pilot School, and he trusted no one with it better than himself.  Personally he thought it was a dangerous aircraft, and he had some small doubts.

He had already taken the NF-104 up for three test flights, slowly and gently nudging the aircraft toward the edges of its capability.  He suspected that the dangerous pitch-up problem would be above 95,000 feet.  So far he had not lost control.  Tomorrow if not today, he was determined to push it all the way and set an altitude record that no one would try to beat.

The results of his morning flight had gone well, he was encouraged.  He had already taken it up to 108,000 feet and the reaction jets worked just fine.  He had gone up at an even steeper angle than recommended, at about 50 degrees, and when the nose tilted up, a squirt from the jet pushed it back down with no trouble.  There was that magic moment as he went over the top, hanging suspended in the blue, perched as if at the top of a roller coaster.  Before it tilted and began the thrilling plunge downward back into the thicker air.  It was a breathtaking experience he longed for.  He couldn't wait to do it again…

"Chuck…Chuck honey!  It's time to go…"

He snapped back to alertness with a slight start at the sound of his wife's voice.  He had his head in the clouds again.  He was sitting at a table, still in his pressure suit minus his helmet, having lunch with Glennis and his mother at the base. He was all suited up because once he put the thing on, it was difficult to get out of.   He must have been lost in his mind for a while.  Lost in all the technical details and flight data, and mentally preparing himself for his big flight this afternoon.  He looked at his watch and saw it was time to get going.  

"Well Ma, thanks for stopping by to have lunch with us.  Good to see you again." He stood up from the table in his odd-looking suit, hoses dangling,  as he hugged his wife and his mother and they kissed him for good luck.  Glennis said what she always said to him before a dangerous flight. "Punch a hole in the sky"  Chuck grinned as he watched them leave.  He was off to work again.

He walked out of the base operations building and stepped out onto the tarmac, clutching his helmet bag as he watched Glennis drive away, kicking up that familiar cloud of dust. It was a warm, sunny, beautifully clear day in December at Edwards.  Clear, and cold.  He looked up and the sky was a featureless blue dome.  Somewhere up there he knew was a threshold, and after he crossed it there'd be black, and stars.  He'd be in space.  He'd be one of them. One of the lucky few.  The rocket boys.

He remembered with a twinge of pain how his buddy Jack Ridley would always walk him around a plane before he flew it, tell him to be careful and "just wring her out a bit" in his mix of flight engineer jargon and cowboy drawl, and Chuck's time-honored tradition of asking him for some Beemans chewing gum before he set out to break a record.  Jack had been killed in a cargo plane crash back in 1957, five years ago.  Chuck was now 40 years old and a Commandant in the Air Force.  He had a bigger house and a better car than that old Army Jeep, and another kid. He was moving up in the chain of command along with the salary increase that came with it, but his life to the American public was largely unknown.  

He got into his own car and drove over to park near the hangar where the shiny aircraft awaited him on the taxiway, fueled up and ready to go.  Even at rest, the aircraft looked like pure speed.  He walked around it for a routine inspection and simply to admire it.  

The X-1 was like a steam locomotive next to the sophistication of the NF-104. If that plane was an orange bullet, this one was a shiny needle.  It was longer, sleeker and twice as fast.  Its mirror-polished chrome fuselage reflected everything; the biege of the concrete, the infinite blue sky and even himself.  The twin turbines for the big J79 engine were set further back on its sides at the leading edge of the short, thin wings.  The only thing breaking its graceful lines was the blunt nozzle of the rocket engine protruding several feet from the rear at the base of the tail, angled slightly upward. The tail was tall, and topped by a delta-shaped stabilizer.  All edges of the plane were sharp like a knife, all curves were smooth and polished. The sharp point of the nose reminded him of a hypodermic syringe.  Like a real Air Force fighter, it was covered in warning decals in the shape of bright yellow arrows pointing at things.  Beware of Jet Blast.  Caution: Intake. Danger.  

Danger. He repeated that word to himself a few times.  He liked that word. It rolled off the tip of his tongue.  Danger was his whole world.  He lived it, ate it, drank it, lived it and breathed it.  He ate up danger and shit out raw courage.  

Only 16 years had passed since he broke the sound barrier for the first time, and ten years since he went past Mach 2 with the X-1A in 1953, a terrifying incident that nearly killed him.  Now speed didn't matter anymore; in fact altitude hardly mattered. Because now the astronaut boys were traveling to outer space.  He knew that if he could push this bird to the limit, and prove a Mach 2 fighter jet could leave Earth's atmosphere, that would make one last big record for the books.  And maybe even change the future of space travel.  To think that a plane could takeoff, zoom into space like a rocket and land again, would blow these NASA geeks and their ballistic missile-riding cowboys out of the water.

Once he was satisfied the plane was flightworthy after aiding the ground personnel in its careful inspection, Chuck climbed the ladder into the cockpit in his orange suit, put his astronaut-style helmet and gloves on, and went through the startup checklist.  The mighty aircraft whined shrilly to life, as he spun up its twin turbines with a whistling noise that was much louder than most aircraft due to the size of its engine.  The startup procedure was complicated, but he had it memorized.  He slowly throttled up and began to move on the taxiway toward the runway.  He had neglected to ask the control tower for permission to taxi.  He heard his helmet radio crackle as the tower urgently asked him his business, and if he filed his flight plan.  He cut in with his unmistakeable voice and responded, 'Naw, I'm just gonna wring her out a bit" He heard a chuckle on the other end as they immediately recognized it was Commandant Chuck Yeager, who outranked just about everyone else at the base.  "Roger, you are cleared to taxi."  Chuck reached up and closed the side-hinged canopy over his head, then pressurized both his suit and the cabin.

He opened up the throttle all the way and built up to takeoff speed.  Then at the last minute as his own wheels left the runway, his chase plane behind him radioed and said one of his wheels had a shimmy and he was aborting.  Oh great. He knew the flight was no go without a chase plane.  Then another very familiar voice cut in.  It was his old war wingman, Bud Anderson.  "Hey Chuck. This is Andy, I'm on your frequency. I'm over the field right now in my T-33 and I'll chase ya as high as I can" "Thanks Andy," Chuck replied.   The T-33 was a trainer version of the P-80 Shooting Star that could barely go supersonic.  Chuck knew there was no way Bud could keep up or follow him to 100,000 feet, but he could at least keep an eye on him from a distance and radio for help if something went wrong.

Chuck felt the ground drop away and roared into the sky above Edwards, just as he had so many times before.  In no time at all, he was 100 miles out at 35,000 feet and over the San Joaquin Valley. There was an echo of the sonic boom as he passed Mach 1, but none of the shaking or instability he felt in slower planes.  Instead of that bone jittering racing-down-a-lumpy-country-road-in-a-sports-car feeling, he just slipped right through that imaginary barrier and surpassed it.  

Time to start the speed run.  He flipped the afterburner switches and was pushed back in his seat by 16,000 pounds of backward thrust. Mach 2 came and went, and he pulled back on the stick to start his climb to 60,000 feet, at which he knew the afterburner would use up its fuel.  There was no way Bud could see him now.  He was already traveling faster than the X-1A ever flew.  It was amazing how this thing knifed so smoothly through the air.  Seventy degree angle and still accelerating.  

At sixty thousand feet the atmosphere began to thin, the intakes weren't getting enough oxygen to ignite the fuel.  The afterburner he knew would flame out.  So this was where the fun began.  He leaned forward, left arm heavy with the g-forces, and flipped the black rocket ignition switch down.  He was slammed back in the seat again, and got a mighty kick in the back as the JP4 and peroxide ignited.  No longer an airplane, he was a rocket now. The desert horizon tilted almost vertical.  He was going nearly straight up into the infinite blue, with the blackness of space still beyond him.  He watched the altimeter as it wound up.  Seventy thousand feet.  Almost eighty.  He heard a complaining whine and saw a warning light for the main engine overheating.  He had it throttled it back to idle, and it was still about to overtemp.  So he shut it down.  With the engine off, the rocket kept going.   He rode it up higher and higher.  He couldn't see the ground anymore, it was at his back.  He was nearing the top of his great arc into the heavens.  Then, its fuel exhausted, the rocket shut down.  But he's still pointed up, still hurtling up out of the atmosphere.  Almost at a hundred thousand feet!  He urged the silver bird to go farther.  Stretch it… stretch it…C'mon…you can do it baby…

Then, it happened.  The gorgeous, magic moment that time seemed to stop.  He saw the blue of the sky dissolve, giving way to black.  The edge of space.  The force of acceleration that pounded him into his seat was gone, it slipped away.  He felt weightless.  Some stars were out.  It was daylight, and he could see stars!  He was a tiny speck in the infinite void.  He was at 104,000 feet.  Suspended above the Earth.  He looked at the pitch indicator, he was still at fifty degrees.  Top of the world, ma. The same pitch up problem he saw before.  Time to bring the nose down and begin the descent.  

He reached for the control stick by his right side to use the peroxide jets.  He stared out the front of the canopy and looked for the cloudy squirt of fluid. It sprayed out, the jets were working, but he was still pitched up, the nose wouldn't budge.  He tried again.  Nothing.  He felt a sickening feeling, a sinking sensation.  Like he was falling backward.  He realized what was about to happen.  The air's too thick.  This morning it was thin at 108,000 feet. Now there's just enough that the jets don't work.  He was teetering on top of the world.  

Then, he fell off.  Just like he was afraid of.   The NF-104 nosed over and fell backward, upside down and began to tumble. He was falling out of the air like he had no wings or tail at all.  Then he was right side up, but his plane broke into a spin.  He was falling like a spinning leaf weighed down by a rock.   His engine was stalled, he couldn't dive to force air into the turbines.  Because he had no control surfaces.  Without air going through the turbines there was no pressure to the hydraulic system.  He had absolutely no control of the aircraft.  It was spinning around its center of gravity, and he was riding a deadly centrifuge.  All the blood rushed to his head as the glistening bird fell.  He was on the outside of the centrifuge.  

He knew he had no way to bail out at this altitude or speed, he had to ride it down to about 40,000 feet where he could try to regain control.  To eject would be suicide, the parachute would get wrapped around his spinning body and fail to open.  He was falling and spinning at a nauseating rate. The gravitational forces built up steadily as he watched the altitude meter spin backwards faster than he thought possible.  He was in a hurtling hunk of steel and aluminum, plunging toward the ground like a rock.  The dead aircraft tumbled and spun, tumbled and spun.  He forced himself to look at the instruments and not the whirling sky and ground. He knew all it would take was one glance and he'd get vertigo and probably black out.  He was already dizzy and fighting to stay conscious.  His breath was coming out in grunts.  

He was falling so fast…nine thousand feet a minute.  He was already down to 25,000 feet, which he knew was actually 21,000 feet from the desert.  The altimeter displayed height above sea level.  In a last ditch effort to gain control, he remembered the braking parachute in the tail used for landing.  Maybe that would stop the spin and point him down so he could restart the engine.  He triggered the chute and it pulled up the rear of the aircraft, tilted the nose down…it seemed to work, then the chute jettisoned and the nose went right back up again.  With horror, he saw the rear stabilizer was stuck in the climb when he lost hydraulics.  The plane immediately went back into a spin.  Twelve thousand feet.  Eight thousand feet to go before he became a very expensive scorch mark on the dry lake.  His head spinning and panting heavily from the forces on his body, Chuck couldn't hear his old wingman Bud trying to reach him.  Seven thousand feet to impact.  Finally the voice came through into his head… "Chuck, that's enough, get the hell out of there"

Chuck had recovered from every flat spin he'd ever been in.  He hadn't bailed out of an airplane since he was twenty years old.   He hated to do it, but it was either save his hide and lose the plane, or lose them both.  Somehow he was able to bend over enough to pull the handle beneath his seat to eject.  The canopy was blown off, his seat belt automatically unhooked and his parachute was pulled.  He was launched out of the fighter and for a second he felt weightless again.  The plane was falling at about the same rate he was propelled upward.  Then he felt a kick in the back as a small explosive charge blew him out of the seat.  Chuck immediately fell again, his smaller drogue parachute chute opening from his backpack, to slow him down enough so his main 'chute could open. The seat fell alongside him at the same rate, so they both were in freefall.  He saw the seat float almost.  The underside of it was glowing red and on fire.  It floated into his parachute lines and the burning seat began to eat into the lines!  At that instant, his big parachute snapped open.  The lines snapping taut like a bowstring knocked the seat away from the 'chute… and something slammed into his head hard, leaving him stunned.  

For a second he didn't know what had hit him.  All he knew was his faceplate was shattered, something cut his eye and it was bleeding inside the suit.  He couldn't see. He heard a roaring sound and half his face was in agony.  He was gasping and inhaling smoke into his lungs.  It smelled like burning rubber.  The inside of his helmet was on fire!  Christ Almighty! The hot stuff from the seat rocket engine ignited the rubber seal around his neck.  His suit activated the emergency oxygen bottle and was feeding the flames with pure oxygen.  It became a blast furnace around his head.  He was suffocating; he had to get air somehow.  He brought up his gloved left hand to his face and jammed it in the hole in his visor, to try and make a scoop to bring in fresh air.  The flames ate away at his glove and then his hand.  Now his index finger was burning, his glove melted!  Imagine the stench of smoke, burning rubber and skin!  He had to breathe and put out the fire; he ignored the pain, all that mattered was air.  He pulled the fused, melted glove and hand away from his face, brought up his other hand and tried to wrench his broken helmet visor open.  It was all ruined and bent out of shape.  With a superhuman strength he forced it open, and the fire went out.  He could see and breathe again, but his left eye was still shut and he couldn't open it. God, his face and hand hurt like hell.  He could see highway 466 underneath him and Route 6, so he knew where he was.  He saw the ground coming up and braced for the landing…it was a miracle his parachute stayed open and didn't burn up.  He hit the ground, hard.

He had to lay there on the hard dry lake bed.  Dazed for a minute, looking up at the empty blue sky.  Then there was a roar as a jet flew by overhead, real low across the desert. It must have been looking for him.  He tried to raise his arm to wave but couldn't.  Then the jet came around for another pass, and he managed to wave.  It was gone.  

Chuck managed to sit up, and then got shakily to his feet.  He bent over and rolled up his parachute, looking at the scorched lines.  They had almost melted together.  With his good hand, he somehow managed to release all the locks on the neckring of his helmet and pull it off. He looked at the ruined helmet in his hands. It was burnt, covered in soot and blood and the visor was shattered.  He stood there, holding his helmet and looking around.  His hand hurt terribly but he couldn't feel his face.  He turned around and saw smoke on the horizon, that must be where his plane hit.  The NF-104 was undoubtedly a big, black burning crater.  He then heard a car engine idling nearby.   A pickup truck had turned off the highway and drove about a mile to see if he was alright.  He saw the door open and a kid running towards him. A young guy, looked about twenty something.

The kid stopped short as he saw USAF Commandant Charles Yeager standing there, smashed helmet and melted parachute under his arm with half of his face burned.  His mouth dropped open and he looked horrified.  He made himself turn away and looked sick.  "You alright? I saw you come down"  Chuck, his voice hoarse and dry, said "Hey…Listen…Listen kid, You got a knife?"  The kid nodded and pulled out a penknife from his pocket, which he unfolded and handed over.  "I gotta do something about this here hand, I can't stand it."  Chuck stood there, calmly digging into his melted glove and cutting it off.  He must have looked like a nightmare.  One whole side of his face was burned black.  His left eye was swollen and encrusted with caked, dried blood. The rest of his face was smeared with melted rubber.  He couldn't tell his hand apart from the glove, they melted and fused together.  He pulled off the glove, and the tips of his index and middle fingers came with it.  The poor kid looked disgusted and threw up.  He managed to exclaim to the Almighty and deliver his diagnosis… "You look awful!"

Yeah, I guess I look awful. I sure feel awful.  What's a guy supposed to say when he falls 100,000 feet out of the sky, punches out of his aircraft and turns a multi-million dollar aircraft into a black smudge in the Mojave desert, ends up with half his head and hand burned to charred meat and his eye almost popping out of his damned face, so some lonesome kid can wander off the highway and gawk at him?

The two of them stood there as a rescue helicopter landed. The medics ran up, amazed to find him still alive and on his own two feet no less, and got to work on him.  He asked if they could do something about his hand, the pain from that was terrible.  They stabbed a syringe through his suit and gave him morphine. They didn't dare take the suit off, they couldn't unzip it or get the neckring off over his wreck of a face.  They loaded him into the gurney and into the chopper, and off they went to the hospital.

Chuck had trouble staying awake from the morphine. Next he knew it, he was in the emergency room and Stan Bear, the flight surgeon, was trying with some firemen to cut his suit's neckring off with bolt cutters.  He woke up and told the guys to look in the pocket of his flight suit where he kept his survival saw he always had with him.  That did the trick.  The flight surgeon had brought his wife in to see him, he was vaguely aware of her presence.  She look horrified.  Stan was gently poking at the scab over his left eye, asking if he could see.  Chuck said he couldn't.  But then he saw a faint spot of light through it.  The surgeon told him the good news was the scab protected his eye and his lungs weren't damaged from the smoke inhalation, but the bad news is he'd have to cut the scab away from his face every four days to keep it from ruining his good looks.  

After that day, the NF-104 continued to fly and train pilots, but the development program it was a part of had been cancelled.  It took a month of agonizing pain, but as it turned out, Chuck was able to use his finger again and his face wasn't disfigured.  He was not only the fastest man alive, but also the luckiest.  Like Icarus he had flown up to try and touch the sun, and fell to Earth in flames, but lived to tell the tale. He returned to teach at the ARPS school and went on to fly for many more years.  He retired as a Brigadier General of the USAF in 1975, but never stopped flying even in his retirement.  He had the most distinguished and decorated flying career of any American, and his name is permanently in the history books.  No one even attempted to take on the Russian altitude record that Chuck had challenged that day. His career as a test pilot didn't end on December 12 1963, and many more of his sonic booms were heard above the desert as he pushed machines to their limits, but never again did he aim as high as the stars.

Bibliography

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