Word: hardings
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Angeles, lies a strange, unnatural lake. It is eleven miles long and four miles wide, with clearly defined shores and what look like beaches. But, except for a short time after a rare desert rain, the lake has no water. Its smooth and precisely level surface is cement-hard dark-red mud. Its one surface craft is a weathered wooden dummy battleship, built long ago as a bomber target. Above it, in the bright desert sky, thunder the real craft of Muroc Dry Lake...
Demon on the Tail. In the long-ago (to airmen) days of October 1947, the air was like a prison with invisible steel-strong walls. There seemed to be an upper limit to speed. As airplanes flew faster & faster, strange things had happened to them. Hard, unseen fists punctured their metal skins. Mysterious arms reached out of the air to wrestle with their controls. Sometimes a wartime fighter pilot, diving too fast in combat, would feel his stick freeze fast. No matter how he tried, he could not pull out of the dive. Sometimes he did not live to tell...
When a body moves with the speed of sound, the air does not yield smoothly. Instead, hard shock waves (sound waves) form. These are no gentle whispers; they are tough, speeding shells of compressed air, powerful enough under certain conditions to tear an airplane to bits...
...Force's best test pilots, at the bomber's controls. Followed by two F-80 "chase airplanes" (to observe the X-1 in flight), the B-29 circled to 7,000 ft. above the lake. Then Chuck, bundled in a flying suit and topped with a golden, hard-plastic crash helmet, climbed down a retractable ladder and squeezed through the door in the side...
...shot-down man, he just about had his choice of jobs in the Air Force. He tried instructing for a while, but found it dull. Then he got to Wright Field as a flight test pilot. After watching him do the most exacting tests (like landing jet fighters "hard"), Colonel Boyd gave him the X-1 project, which all ambitious test pilots wanted. "Chuck is always cool," says Colonel Boyd. "He never gets excited, and he flies like part of the airplane...