Albert Scott Crossfield (02.10.1921-19.04.2006)

[Orionid]

Albert Scott Crossfield został wyselekcjonowany w ramach X-15 grupa 1 (1957) oraz Man In Space Soonest (25.06.1958).

W okresie 08.06.1959-06.12.1960 wykonał łącznie 14 lotów w programie X-15.

Jako dziecko cierpiał na zapalenie płuc i reumatyzm, które przykuły go do łóżka na długie okresy.

W tym czasie zaczął czytać o pilotach i samolotach.

Gdy wyzdrowiał, skontaktował się z mężczyzną pracującym na lotnisku w Wilmington, gdzie 13-letni Scott pobierał lekcje latania od pilotów w zamian za bezpłatną pomoc.

Niedługo potem rodzina Crossfielda przeprowadziła się na farmę w stanie Waszyngton, gdzie w 1939 Crossfield ukończył szkołę średnią Boistfort High School.

Zaczął pobierać lekcje latania na lotnisku Chehalis.

09.1940 Crossfield rozpoczął studia lotnicze na University of Washingtone.

Podczas studiów uniwersyteckich podjął pracę w fabryce samolotów Boeing.

Studiował do momentu, gdy został powołany do Marynarki Wojennej wkrótce po ataku na Pearl Harbor (12.1941).

Ukończył pełny kurs szkoleniowy dla pilotów wojskowych i pełnił funkcję instruktora latania i obsługi broni.
Został przydzielony do lotniskowca U.S.S. Langley.

Do końca wojny we 09.1945 brał udział w operacjach bojowych nad Japonią jako pilot bojowy.

Po wojnie Crossfield powrócił na Washington State University, gdzie w 1949 uzyskał tytuł licencjata w dziedzinie lotnictwa, a rok później tytuł magistra w tej samej dziedzinie.

1950 dołączył do NACA i był pilotem w bazie sił powietrznych Edwards w stanie Kalifornia.

Przez następne pięć lat Crossfield latał różnymi typami szybkich samolotów odrzutowych i rakietowych dla NACA, w tym X-1, D-558 II Skyrocket, X-4, X-5, XF-92A i F-100, wykonując łącznie 87 lotów.

20.11.1953 został pierwszym pilotem na świecie, który osiągnął dwukrotność prędkości dźwięku w samolocie D-558XS-II.

Brał również udział w badaniach nad stworzeniem skafandra do lotów wysokościowych, który później stał się prototypem skafandrów dla astronautów.

12.1955 Crossfield opuścił NACA w dołączył do North American Aviation i natychmiast został przydzielony do programu X-15 jako konsultant-projektant i pilot.

Jeszcze przed rozpoczęciem testów w locie X-15, Crossfield niemal zginął podczas wstępnych testów skafandra wysokościowego, gdy zamiast tlenu do hełmu przez małą szczelinę zaczęły przedostawać się opary utleniacza azotu.

06.1958 został wybrany do szkolenia astronautycznego w ramach programu Sił Powietrznych MISS (Man In Space Soonest).

08.1958 po przekazaniu prac nad pierwszym załogowym lotem NASA program został przerwany.

Crossfield odegrał ważną rolę w projektowaniu X-15 od samego początku jako konsultant i pierwszy pilot doświadczalny w North American Aviation, firmie, która zbudowała ten samolot.

1957 został wybrany do grupy pilotów testujących samolot rakietowy X-15 jako przedstawiciel organizacji wykonawczej.

Był zmiennikiem Ivena Carl aKincheloe Jr..
Z powodu jego śmierci przed pierwszym lotem samolotu rakietowego, Crossfield został pierwszym pilotem X-15.

08.06.1959 pierwszy lot testowy odbył się przez oddzielenie się od samolotu transportowego B-52.

Wcześniej testował samolot rakietowy nie odłączając się od nośnika.

17.09.1959 podczas lotu X-15 nr 2 pomyślnie wykonał swój pierwszy lot z włączonymi silnikami XLR-11-RM5.
Po lądowaniu w komorze silnika wybuchł pożar.

05.11.1959 podczas następnego lotu, nastąpiła awaria układu paliwowego i dolny silnik zapalił się.
Samolot zaczął gwałtownie tracić wysokość, a Crossfield podjął kroki mające na celu zrzucenie paliwa przed lądowaniem.
Udało mu się przeprowadzić akcję ratunkową  w czasie lądowania, jednak z powodu dużych obciążeń podwozie przednie pękło, a kadłub rozpadł się na pół.
Naprawa samolotu rakietowego zajęła 3 miesiące.

11.02.1960 maksymalna wysokość, jaką osiągnął w locie, wynosiła 26858 m.

15.11.1960 X-15 nr 2 odbył swój pierwszy lot z włączonym silnikiem XLR-99, potwierdzając tym samym gotowość samolotu rakietowego do lotów operacyjnych.

12.1960 po przejęciu programu X-15 przez NASA, opuścił program.

1960 została opublikowana jego autobiografia Always Another Dawn.

Pozostawał w NAA do 1967, pełniąc funkcję dyrektora ds. testów i zapewnienia jakości.

1967–1974 kierował programami badawczo-rozwojowymi w Eastern Airlines.

1977-1977 kierował programami badawczo-rozwojowymi w Hawker-Siddleley Corporation.

1977-1993 był konsultantem Komisji Nauki i Technologii Izby Reprezentantów Stanów Zjednoczonych.

1982 Crossfield otrzymał  honorowy tytuł doktora nauk ścisłych od Florida Institute of Technology.

19.04.2006 Albert Scott Crossfield zginął w wieku 84. lat w katastrofie lotniczej, gdy pilotowana przez niego Cessna rozbiła się w górzystym terenie w pobliżu miasta Ranger w stanie Georgia w USA.

15.08.2006 urna z jego prochami została złożona w kolumbarium Cmentarza Narodowego w Arlington w Wirginii.

http://www.spacefacts.de/bios/astronauts/english/crossfield_scott.htm
http://www.astronautix.com/c/crossfield.html
https://www.worldspaceflight.com/bios/c/crossfield-a.php

http://www.kozmo-data.sk/kozmonauti/crossfield-albert-scott.html
https://www.astronaut.ru/index/in_pers2/13_x15-01.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Scott_Crossfield

https://nmspacemuseum.org/inductee/albert-s-crossfield/

19 April 2006. Death of Scott Crossfield, American test pilot while flying a Cessna 210A. He was the first man to fly at Mach 2, in a Douglas D-558-II Skyrocket.

https://twitter.com/ron_eisele/status/1913336653311025583

Albert Scott Crossfield, Jr., Aeronautical Engineer and Test Pilot, 2 October 1921– 19 April 2006.

https://twitter.com/ron_eisele/status/1913336721284161995

ＣＯＮＴＡＣＴ ＬＩＧＨＴ 。 ◯ *・@contactlight69 9:35 AM · Jun 9, 2024
#OTD June 8, 1959: Scott Crossfield pilots the first unpowered flight of the X-15 rocket plane above Edwards Air Force Base, California

https://twitter.com/contactlight69/status/1799706754114056458
K

[Orionid]

Scott Crossfield, Fabled Test Pilot, Dies at 84
By David Stout April 21, 2006

WASHINGTON, April 20 - Scott Crossfield, a legendary test pilot of the post-World War II era who was the first person to fly twice the speed of sound, was killed Wednesday morning when his plane crashed in northern Georgia. He was 84.

Mr. Crossfield, who lived in Herndon, Va., just outside Washington, was on a flight from Prattville, Ala., to Manassas, Va., when his single-engine craft when down, the Civil Air Patrol said Thursday. There were thunderstorms in the region at the time. Mr. Crossfield was in good health and good spirits before making the flight, his son-in-law Ed Fleming said Thursday in a telephone interview.

Mr. Crossfield, who was an aeronautical engineer, belonged to the small pantheon of envelope-pushing aviators whose exploits were told in Tom Wolfe's book "The Right Stuff," Another, of course, was Chuck Yeager, who in 1947 became the first pilot to break the sound barrier.

On Nov. 20, 1953, Mr. Crossfield became the first man to fly at twice the speed of sound. At the controls of a rocket-powered Douglas D-558-2 that had been dropped from a B-29 mother ship at 32,000 feet, Mr. Crossfield climbed to 72,000 feet, then dived to 62,000 feet, where his speed topped 1,320 miles per hour.

At the time of his record-breaking flight, Mr. Crossfield was flying out of Edwards Air Force Base in California for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the predecessor of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. In his five years with the committee, Mr. Crossfield logged far more time in the cockpits of rocket-powered aircraft than any other pilot.

In 1955, Mr. Crossfield became the chief test pilot for North American Aviation, where he was the consultant for the X-15, a rocket-powered craft designed to fly to the fringes of space at several times the speed of sound. On June 8, 1959, he made the first of his two dozen flights in the X-15, one of which took him to 1,960 miles per hour -- almost three times the speed of sound -- and 88,116 feet above the earth, according to NASA.

He had two brushes with death in the X-15. On his third flight, one of the craft's two rocket engines blew up. In the emergency landing, the plane snapped in two just behind the cockpit. Mr. Crossfield was not hurt. Months later, an X-15 engine exploded during a ground test while he was in the cockpit. Again, he walked away.

Mr. Crossfield later became an engineer and researcher for North American. From 1967 to 1973, he was an executive for Eastern Air Lines. In 1974 and 1975, he was senior vice president for Hawker Siddeley Aviation. From 1977 until retiring in 1993, he was a consultant to the House Committee on Science and Technology.

Albert Scott Crossfield was born in Berkeley, Calif., on Oct. 2, 1921. When he was 12, he took his first flying lessons, at a small airport in Wilmington, Calif., where he washed planes to pay for his time in the air, he recalled in a 2001 interview with AVWeb, an Internet aviation magazine.

He was a Navy fighter pilot and instructor during World War II. After the war, he earned bachelor's and master's degrees in aeronautical engineering at the University of Washington. While at Edwards Air Force Base, he helped design the first full-pressure flight suit, which evolved into the suits used by astronauts.

In the 2001 interview with AVWeb, Mr. Crossfield said that the United States should commit itself to having a human presence in space, but that he opposed an international space station because the United States stood to contribute more in knowledge and money than it would get back.

Asked if he agreed with Mr. Yeager that just after World War II was the best time to be a pilot, Mr. Crossfield replied, "The best time to be a pilot is anytime."

He also volunteered an explanation for why he had never become an astronaut. "I have a bad reputation for doing my own thing," he said. "I would turn off the radio if I didn't like the help I was getting from the ground, and the medicine men that were running the program thought that was too independent. They wanted medical subjects, not pilots."

Mr. Crossfield is survived by his wife, Alice; four sons, Tom, of St. Petersburg, Fla.; and Paul, Anthony and Robert, all of Northern Virginia; two daughters, Becky Fleming, of Northern Virginia, and Sally Farley, of Louisville, Ky.; and three grandchildren.

Correction: April 22, 2006, Saturday An obituary headline yesterday about Scott Crossfield, a legendary test pilot who was the first person to fly twice the speed of sound, misstated his age. He was 84, not 85.

https://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/21/us/scott-crossfield-fabled-test-pilot-dies-at-84.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/20/us/pioneering-pilot-is-killed-in-crash.html

Stephane SEBILE @spacemen1969 12:06 AM · Apr 19, 2026
April 19, 2006
Twenty years ago, the legendary Scott Crossfield disappeared in a plane crash - he was 84 years old.
His bio
https://aviation1-spacemen1969.blogspot.com/2011/09/scott-crossfield-1921-2006-usa.html
The interview granted to Space Quotes - Space Memories https://spacemen1969.blogspot.com/2009/12/rencontre-avec-scott-crossfield.html

https://x.com/spacemen1969/status/2045624914938577217

[Orionid]

Na jego cześć została nazwana szkoła Crossfield Elementary School
https://x.com/crossfieldes

2)

Scott Crossfield made aviation history on November 20, 1953, becoming the first person to fly at more than twice the
speed of sound, or Mach 2.

https://www.victor-aviation.com/Scott_Crossfield.php

3) Scott Crossfield: One Amazing X-15 Pilot
By Jeff Richmond August 26, 2024

From his first solo flight, it was clear that Scott Crossfield had the makings of a true test pilot. According to his biographical material, Crossfield demonstrated his analytical flight test skills on that very first solo. His instructor was not available on the designated morning, so Crossfield, on his own, took off and went through maneuvers he had practiced, including spin entry and recovery.

During the first spin, Crossfield experienced vibrations, banging, and noise in the aircraft that he had never encountered with his instructor. He recovered, climbed to a higher altitude, and repeated the maneuver, with the same results. On his third spin entry, at an even higher altitude, he looked over his shoulder as the aircraft spun and saw the instructor’s door flapping. Reaching back, he pulled the door closed. The banging and noise stopped. Satisfied, he recovered, returned to the airport, and completed several landings. In later years, Crossfield often cited his curiosity about this anomaly—and his desire to analyze what was happening—as the true start of his test pilot career. (...)
https://avgeekery.com/scott-crossfield-one-amazing-x-15-pilot/

[Orionid]

Death dodger
By George Spencer | June 2021

Taking risks was second nature for Albert Scott Crossfield. That’s how he became the first man to fly at twice the speed of sound and laid the groundwork to go into space.


Cold December rain swept the remote airfield at Kitty Hawk, N.C. Worry showed in the eyes of test pilot Scott Crossfield, ’49, ’50. He won fame in 1953 as the first man to fly twice the speed of sound. Six years later he piloted the hypersonic X-15 spaceplane. Reporters gave the cocky Crossfield the ultimate nickname—“Mr. Space.”

Now at the age of 82, he faced a new challenge. He had spent four years training pilots to handle another experimental airplane—a replica of the 1903 Flyer, which Orville Wright flew 120 feet 100 years earlier in 1903. Today at a centennial event, it might fly for the first time as President Bush and thousands of spectators looked on.

Crossfield had, as Tom Wolfe put it in “The Right Stuff,” just that—“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 back in the last yawning moment—and then go up again the next day, and the next day, and every day.” Wolfe later told The Los Angeles Times that “Crossfield is the great man who nobody knows anymore [who should be] on the Mount Rushmore for pilots.”


Scott Crossfield scopes out the cockpit of an X-15 rocket plane at the North American Aviation plant in Los Angeles. Crossfield hit a speed of Mach 2.97 in the X-15. Photo by Allan Grant/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images.

Today, as before, the eyes of the nation were on him. When he strapped into the sleek, sinister X-15 on June 8, 1959, for its first flight, America craved a post-Sputnik space-race victory. “We understood we were under the gun to do something for our country and get back our internal self-confidence,” Crossfield said.

Crossfield watched technicians tinker with the antique craft. “You wait and wait and wait. The engines don’t start. The airplane doesn’t work. You’re a month late. Everybody’s on your back,” said Crossfield. “This is the story of my life in flight testing.”

On this bitter morning the plane couldn’t fly. Not enough wind. The replica sputtered to a sandy halt at the end of its rickety launch track.

After testing an earlier model—a 1902 Wright Brothers glider—and surviving a crash four years earlier, Crossfield muttered, “I’ve never flown an airplane as unstable as this.”

No one ordered him to fly the thing—he volunteered. “We didn’t know what the limits of the airplane were,” said Crossfield. “I wasn’t going to ask pilots to do something I wouldn’t do myself.”

He had flown it several times at the end of a tow rope over a grassy runway, each time pushing its performance. One time while 10 feet high going 25 mph., he lost control. Though unharmed, “he went flying ass-over-teacup over the front of the glider,” said Virginia Tech engineering professor Kevin Kochersberger, who attempted the centennial flight.

Years earlier, Crossfield said he prided himself on never bailing out. “It’s a matter of professional integrity, if you please, to get it home—that’s what I’m paid for,” he said.

* * *


Photoillustration by Curtis Dickie


NASA test pilot Neil Armstrong (right) receives the keys to an X-15 rocket plane from North American Aviation test pilot Scott Crossfield (left) as Major Robert White looks on during a meeting of three of America’s premier test pilots in 1961. Photo by Rolls Press/Popperphoto via Getty Images.

In 1927—the year Charles Lindbergh made his historic solo crossing of the Atlantic—a priest arrived at Crossfield’s Wilmington, California, home to administer last rites. Six-year-old Scott had pneumonia and was in a coma. Pictures of airplanes blanketed the walls of his bedroom, almost covering an image of the Sacred Heart. “But what about the Lord?” he asked Crossfield’s parents.

A year after recovering from pneumonia, he came down with rheumatic fever. He had to stay in bed for months. During the next four years, the small, sickly boy was confined to bed-rest for weeks.

“I grew to adolescence in an unusual, isolated environment, finding things to pass the long hours at rest that few other boys do,” he recalled. When he was 9, he rigged a make-believe airplane control stick and rudder pedals to a wicker chair. With a flying manual beside him, “my imagination took me across oceans, into deep valleys and above the mountains. I dreamed of flying from California to New York nonstop and setting a new record,” he wrote in his autobiography “Always Another Dawn.”

Three years later, he got a newspaper delivery route. One stop was a small airfield. He offered the owner free papers in exchange for flying lessons. He never told his parents. For Crossfield, “each flight was a fantastic, wonderful experience, and a tonic.” At age 13, he knew his life’s goal: “I would be not only a pilot but the best damned pilot in the world.”

Around this time, his father bought a dairy farm near Chehalis in Boistfort, Lewis County. Thanks to his chores, Crossfield became a tough teen. After a high school fight, the principal told him, “Scott, don’t wait for the school bus today. Just walk on home right now.”

“I kind of felt I was the first astronaut or at least was way ahead of them.”

               Scott Crossfield in a 1981 interview

As a University of Washington freshman in 1940, Crossfield was a young man in a hurry who wanted to be an engineer so he could understand every aspect of aviation. “A lone wolf on a special mission,” he called himself. He took a heavy course load, lived in “depressing” boarding houses, and worked as a butler and furnace cleaner at a “snooty sorority.”

Returning to UW after World War II—a Navy fighter pilot, he flew the Vaught Corsair but never saw action—Crossfield got his bachelor’s in science in 1949 and flew, so to speak, through his graduate studies, earning his master’s in aeronautical engineering in a year while relishing his job as chief operator of the UW’s Kirsten Wind Tunnel. His thesis, which he bragged might have fewer pages than any other, focused on aviation’s future—swept-wing supersonic aircraft. “He was forward-looking, a driven man,” says former department chair Adam Bruckner.

While finishing school in the UW’s William E. Boeing Department of Aeronautics & Astronautics, he wrote a letter seeking work at Bell Aircraft, maker of the X-1, which broke the sound barrier in 1947. It concluded: “Temperament: reliable, family-man type; even disposition, cool in emergencies. Salary? I would fly the X-1 for nothing, if necessary.”

Receiving no reply, he made an unannounced visit to the chief pilot at the Ames Research Center in San Francisco. He told Crossfield he had no openings but that by odd coincidence, Crossfield’s wife had just called to tell him that her husband had been invited to Edwards, the California test center for experimental aircraft near Death Valley, to interview for a test pilot job at NASA’s predecessor, NACA, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. There, Crossfield said he found “a runway scratched out of the desert” and fliers with a “contagious, pioneering spirit.” He found his destiny.

* * *


President John F. Kennedy meets with a group of X-15 test pilots at a ceremony presenting them with the Harmon Trophy Award on Dec. 1, 1961. Pilots (L-R) Scott Crossfield, Joseph A. Walker and Major Robert M. White received the honor as the world’s outstanding aviators for 1960. Photo by Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

“We’d test the edge of something and find out we were in the middle of a whirlpool,” he told the Royal Aeronautical Society in 1979. His dangerous, yet routine, high-altitude research work meant learning a rocket plane’s limits, landing alive, writing a report and maybe breaking a record in the process. Before the X-15, Crossfield flew more than 100 sky-shredding experimental missions—more hours than any other test pilot—in the X-1, X-4, X-5, XF-92, and the D-558 II Skyrocket, the bullet-shaped white plane he took to Mach 2 (1,291 mph) on Nov. 20, 1953.

He routinely dodged death. On his first X-4 flight, both engines failed. “All hell broke loose at 27,000 feet,” he recalled. The Skyrocket, also on his first flight, lost power, instruments and cabin pressure. As if that wasn’t enough, the windshield iced over, and the cockpit filled with smoke. Once when flying the X-1, which he called “the king of the hot rods,” it pitched, stalled and flipped on its back. Its windshield also iced up. Crossfield “thanked his lucky stars” he wasn’t wearing flight boots. He kicked off an oxford shoe, yanked off a sock, and scraped clear a spot in the windshield with his bare foot.

Then came the X-15, a plane Air & Space Magazine dubbed “the keystone in the bridge between Earth and space.” Crossfield called it the first manned space vehicle. “I kind of felt I was the first astronaut or at least was way ahead of them,” he told NBC in 1981.

The X-15, which Crossfield referred to as “a strange tiger,” was a black dart snuggled under the right wing of a B-52, lofted to high altitude, and dropped to the perilous unknown so its million-horsepower rockets could blast into the heavens and land safely, a feat it did 199 times more than 20 years before the space shuttle.


Test pilot Scott Crossfield joins a rack of flight suits and other gear inside the pilot dressing room at the North American Aviation plant in Los Angeles. Photo by Allan Grant/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images.

Crossfield was the perfect pilot. “He was the first of a new generation of flying aeronautical engineers—an engineer first and pilot second,” says National Air and Space Museum curator Bob Van der Linden. Like Neil Armstrong, who later flew the X-15, Crossfield had the flying skill and steely nerves, plus an engineer’s intuition about human factors and aerodynamics.

Like the Wright Brothers, he was an inventor. Not only did Crossfield help brainstorm the X-15 in 1952, he left NACA in 1955 to work for North American Aviation as its Design Specialist and pilot. “I would be the X-15’s chief son of a bitch … anyone who wanted … to capriciously change anything or add anything … would have to fight me first,” he said.

“The engineers were in virgin territory,” according to National Air and Space Museum curator John Anderson, author of the book “X-15.” The space plane’s pioneering design had temperature-ablating metals on its leading edges to act as re-entry heat shields. The X-15 remains one of the most successful research planes ever built, its Mach 6.7 (4,520 mph) speed record unbroken.

Crossfield also designed the first full-pressure suit in collaboration with a Philadelphia girdle maker. He saw a “glamorous looking” shiny silver fabric at the company and recommended that it replace the khaki space suits for an iconic, futuristic look. When the Pentagon wanted heavy material for the X-15’s seat, Crossfield fought back. Remembering his farm-boy days, he had already contacted International Harvester and had a lighter seat modeled after those on tractors.

Crossfield was a visionary in other ways. In 1952, he suggested attaching an X-15 to the top of a rocket to create an orbital space plane, a strategy NASA formally rejected in 1959. “If we’d continued with the orbital X-15, it would’ve been the research airplane’s natural step up the line,” Crossfield told the Discovery Channel in 1993. “We wouldn’t be worrying about space stations today, they’d be up there.”

Mishaps plagued the X-15. On its first non-powered glider flight, ice frosted its windshield. (On later missions, a plastic windshield scraper would be hung on the control panel.) During the first powered flight on Sept. 17, 1959, Crossfield struggled to land as its nose rose and fell like a rowboat’s bow in stormy seas. Fellow X-15 pilot Milt Thompson, ’53, called it “a terrifying sight.” Crossfield barely touched down safely. His reward on landing? In true 1950s style, an Air Force officer handed him a martini with an olive.

“The thought of a bailout never occurred to me. I’m paid to bring airplanes back, not throw them away.”

             Scott Crossfield, in writings

On the third powered flight, the X-15 caught fire after its rockets exploded at 45,000 feet. “The thought of a bailout never occurred to me. I’m paid to bring airplanes back, not throw them away,” he wrote. Unable to jettison fuel, he landed heavy, causing the X-15 crash land and snap in half.

The flight surgeon, thinking he heard someone radio that Crossfield had broken his back, tried to yank him out. Fearing excessive canopy motion would arm the ejection seat—and unable to communicate because of his helmet—Crossfield battled the doctor for the canopy. “He did not want to be ejected accidentally after surviving an explosion, a fire, and an emergency landing,” Thompson recalled.

When the X-15 got a new, more powerful engine, Crossfield buckled in for a ground test, huge steel clamps restraining his “tiger.” He started the engines and shut them down. When he restarted them, “it was like pushing the plunger on a dynamite detonator,” he recalled. Sixteen thousand pounds of ammonia and hydrogen peroxide exploded, hurling Crossfield and the cockpit 20 feet forward at an estimated 50 Gs. “There was no panic, no fear,” he said. “I was concerned primarily for the safety of other people.”

He joked that flight surgeons loved doing autopsies on test pilots because they were so easy. “When you opened up a test pilot,” Crossfield said, “you found only two operable parts—one at each end and totally interchangeable.”

Contrary to popular belief, test pilots were nearly as famous as Mercury astronauts. After his Mach 2 flight, he was mobbed at a hotel press conference, flashbulbs exploding in his face. Later he found himself seated with movie star Esther Williams. When asked what she thought about being next to the world’s fastest man, she replied, “He hasn’t laid a hand on me yet.”

During his X-15 days the press dubbed him “Our First Man in Outer Space,” even though none of his flights flew that high. “The press refused or couldn’t bring itself to believe me,” he said. “It was always the same: hurry, impatience, no time for thoughtful reflection.”

Because Crossfield worked for North American Aviation, NASA forbade him to push the X-15 to speed and altitude limits reserved for military pilots. Years later, the space agency retroactively gave test pilots who flew above 264,000 feet (50 miles) the title “astronaut.” Crossfield wasn’t eligible. His peak altitude and speeds were 88,116 feet and Mach 2.97 (1,960 mph), though he told friends he violated his orders and punched past Mach 3.

He considered applying for the Mercury program, but an Air Force general told him, according to Wolfe, “Scotty, don’t even bother, because you’ll only be turned down. You’re too independent.” The deciding blow came when he learned the honor of the first flight would go to a chimp.

In the end, he played a major role getting men to the moon. As a systems director at North American Aviation on the Apollo program, he oversaw reliability engineering, quality assurance and systems tests for the command and service modules and the Saturn V’s second stage. Later, he became an Eastern Airlines executive and for 20 years served as a consultant to the House Committee on Science and Technology.

He continued to fly. On April 19, 2006, when he was 84, he left the Prattville, Alabama, airport in his vintage Cessna 210A to fly home to Manassas, Virginia. He hit a Level 6 thunderstorm in northwest Georgia. In his last transmission to air-traffic control, he requested a 180-degree turn. Searchers found his plane’s wreckage in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains. An investigation blamed the crash on his failure to get updated weather information and controllers’ failure to warn him of the storm.

Crossfield loved risk. In his later years, he railed that bureaucracy had stifled progress. Of his early Edwards days, he said “we had an era where we could do pretty much what we wanted. We would stay up late at night figuring out how we wanted to do something, and then we’d go out and do it. Who’s to stop you?

“Our only risk,” he said, “is the fear of risk.”

At top left: Test pilot Scott Crossfield tries out a pressure suit in a heat chamber in an undated photo from the 1950s. Photo from Bettmann Collection, Getty Images. At right, Crossfield poses with the X-15 rocket plane in Los Angeles in October 1958. Photo by Allan Grant/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images.
https://magazine.washington.edu/feature/the-death-dodger-pilot-scott-crossfield-was-never-afraid-to-push-the-limits/

NASA History Office @NASAhistory 4:30 PM · Jun 8, 2024
"My altimeter unwound dizzily: from 24,000 to 13,000 feet in less than forty seconds."
Pilot Scott Crossfield took the X-15 for its first unpowered glide flight #OTD in 1959. In less than 5 minutes, the X-15 glided to the ground from an altitude of about 38,000 feet (11.58 km).

https://twitter.com/NASAhistory/status/1799448802090184809

NASA History Office @NASAhistory 1:00 AM · Jun 9, 2021
Pilot Scott Crossfield took the X-15 for its first unpowered, glide flight #OTD in 1959. On this flight, the X-15 glided to the ground from an altitude of about 38,000 feet (11.58 km) in order to verify the X-15's basic handling qualities.

https://twitter.com/nasahistory/status/1402400048349057024

NASA History Office @NASAhistory 9:00 PM · Sep 17, 2015
#OTD in 1959, Scott Crossfield conducted the first powered X-15 flight http://history.nasa.gov/x15conf/log.html

https://twitter.com/NASAhistory/status/644586622198149120