Word: pilots
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...taken 489 students through static-line jumps--in none of which did the main canopy fail. And he showed me how a parachute works, how the several tough, elastic bands throw the pack open when the rip cord is pulled, and how, at the same instant, the pilot chute (a miniature parachute that pulls the main canopy out) hurtles almost 20 feet into the air by the force of its own compressed spring system...
White's record-breaking flight over California's Mojave Desert (highest previous flight: 47 miles) made him the fifth man to receive NASA's pilot-astronaut badge, awarded to those "qualified to operate or control a powered vehicle in flight 50 miles above the earth." But White is the only man to have won the badge in an airplane rather than a Mercury-caosule, and he took full advantage of the X-15's greater flexibility. Though the X-15 was programmed for 80 seconds of powered flight after it broke loose from the B57 that...
...Korean war broke out. He had kept up his flying in the Air Force Reserve, and in 1951 was recalled to active duty. Though White saw no combat in Korea, he decided to stay in the Air Force. His cool, precise flying won him two years of experimental-test-pilot training. Since 1955. White has checked out four hot jet fighters: the F-86K. F-89H. F-1O2 and F-105B. The 105 nearly did him in. He was booming along at 1,000 m.p.h. when a piece of the intake duct broke off and shot through the entire engine...
Most Serious. White drew the sought-after X-15 assignment in 1958. When Captain Iven Kincheloe died in an F-1O4 crash six months later. White moved up to top Air Force pilot on the X-15 - which has been a flying test bed for developing systems used in Project Mercury. From 1958 until 1960 he trained intensively, often flew jets on "chase" missions when other pilots were testing the X-15. Finally, in April 1960, he took the X-15 up for the first time. Within five months he had flown it to its first world altitude record...
Less flambovant than Fellow Test Pilot Joe Walker (TIME, May11). White is the most serious flyer in the X-15 group. He and his pretty wife Doris live with their three children (one son, two daughters) in a three-bedroom house at Edwards Air Force Base, four miles from the green cement-block flight-operations center where White flies a desk when he is not jockeying X-15s and jets. They entertain only infrequently, take off for the Los Angeles beaches every chance they...