Word: x
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Wickedly Fast. The out-of-this-world design of Bill Bridgeman's new airplane would scare the daylights out of the ordinary pilot. The X-3 has a long, droopy nose that looks as if it had softened and wilted slightly. High and far to the rear juts a monstrous tail. The fuselage has just enough room for two big jet engines, whose bulky, cylindrical shapes bulge the skin outward. The plane is much bigger than a standard fighter, and extremely heavy for its size: in engineers' lingo it has a prodigiously high "solidarity factor...
...soon as the X-3 was on the runway, the elaborate paraphernalia of modern flight-testing began to unroll around it. Fire trucks sped off and took up stations at one-mile intervals along the eight-mile runway. Two ambulances took positions in the ominous line. Two F-86 Sabre jets, a photographic and an observer plane, took off, blowing clouds of dust across the field. Another F-86 already in the air circled the field and landed. Its pilot was the Air Force's Major "Chuck" Yeager (TIME, April 18, 1949), the first man to fly faster than...
...antennae brought more than voices. In a darkened end of the trailer, newsroom for the X-3's telemetering circuits, engineers stared intently at vertical lines of light on the faces of two oscilloscopes. The "green worms" were connected by electronics with 186 instruments tucked into the X3. Some of the lines crept upward slowly; some kept steady; some lengthened or shortened in quick little jumps. To a practiced eye they told almost everything about the ordeal of the distant X-3 and its watchful pilot. The lines of light measured the air speed and a host...
Phantom Crew. The cramped cockpit of the X-3 has no room for anyone except Bill Bridgeman, but the tense men watching the oscilloscopes can perform all the duties of a well-trained crew. They bend electronically over Bridgeman's shoulders, watch banks of instruments that he would have no time to glance at. They warn him when some unfelt danger is still small, but growing...
Trailer: "Right." Bill headed for the field. Blind Landing. Then came the most dangerous part of the flight. The X-3 lands well above 200 m.p.h., and its little, faired-in windows give its pilot almost no view of the ground as it flashes below. When Bill Bridgeman squared away and headed on a straight-in approach into Muroc, he cautiously opened his landing-gear doors. They buffeted alarmingly. Then he lowered his wheels. The X-3 obviously didn't like...