Word: everests
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Dawn was breaking over Edwards Air Force Base at California's Muroc Dry Lake when the husky, dark-browed test pilot chugged up to the flight line in a battered model A Ford coupe. Lieut. Colonel Frank K. Everest Jr., 35, wiggled into his girdle-tight high-altitude suit, picked up his crash helmet and headed for the runway where a four-engined B50 waited. Clamped tight to the B-50's fat belly was "Pete" Everest's aircraft-a sleek, needle-nosed little job with "Bell X2" painted on its sides...
...Pilot Everest climbed aboard the B-50, waved to the waiting crew, sat down behind the pilots. Engines rumbling, then roaring, the B50 gathered speed, rose into the brightening sky. Everest waited until the B50 had labored to 30,000 ft., snugged down helmet and oxygen mask for the last time, then walked aft and let himself down into the cockpit of the silent...
...position, and Pete Everest had swiftly checked instruments, controls, oxygen. Into the mike in his mask he began to count the seconds before the drop: "Five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one. Drop me, dad!" The bomber pilot pulled a lever, and the X-2 plummeted away...
Within seconds, the plane's Curtiss-Wright rocket engine-powerful enough to drive a Navy cruiser-cut in with a roar. Violently the X-2 shot forward. Everest brought up her nose and began an accelerating climb to 70,000 ft. There, under the deep-purple sky, he leveled off, fired up all the rocket power he had and set out for his goal: 2,500 m.p.h.. 850 m.p.h. faster than man had ever flown. The machmeter danced upwards-2.1. 2.2, 2.3. But something was wrong. Trouble in the X-2's engine was holding her down...
...Everest decided to go ahead anyway. When the rocket engine took its last gulp of alcohol, water and liquid oxygen, he was screaming through the sky at 1,900 m.p.h. (close to mach 2.9). far from his goal, but also far above the previous record of 1,650 m.p.h. set in 1953 by his friend, Major Chuck Yeager. Exactly 20 minutes after he had been cut loose from the B-50, Pete Everest, gliding toward the field, was overtaken by a supersonic F-100 that had been left far behind by his wild ride, and escorted to a dead-stick...