Word: muroc
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Died. Robert James Woods, 52, chunky co-founder (in 1935) with the late Lawrence D. Bell (TIME. Oct. 29) of Bell Aircraft Corp., who designed the X-1 jet, the first plane to fly faster than sound (at Muroc, Calif., in 1947), of a heart attack; in Grand Island...
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...
...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 landing on the dry bottom of Muroc Lake...
High above Muroc, Calif, last week, almost 50 years to the day since the Wright Brothers twirled their first pusher propeller, the Air Force's Major Charles E. ("Chuck") Yeager, 30, attained the highest known speed ever to be reached by pilot and plane. His rocket-powered aircraft (released from a B-29 bomber at 30,000 ft. for the run): the experimental Bell XIA, a new relative of the XI, with which Chuck Yeager first cracked the sound barrier in level flight (TIME, April 18, 1949). His speed: more than 1,600 m.p.h., 2½ times the speed...
...Scott Crossfield, 32, pilot for the NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics), which has taken over the famed Douglas Skyrocket, first flown by Test Pilot Bill Bridgeman in 1947. Last week the Skyrocket, with Crossfield at the controls, was dropped from a B-29 at 32,000 ft. above Muroc Dry Lake. After following a careful flight plan (climbing so as to reach high altitude with a minimum expenditure of fuel), Crossfield nosed over and flew practically level under full power. The machmeter, which measures speed in multiples of the speed of sound, went slightly above Mach 2. With...