Word: yeager
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DIED. Scott Crossfield, 84, civilian aircraft designer and cold war test pilot who in 1953 became the first man to fly at Mach 2, twice the speed of sound--a record that spurred his rival, U.S. Air Force ace Chuck Yeager, to surpass it a month later; in a crash of Crossfield's single-engine Cessna in the mountains north of Atlanta. One of the post--World War II supersonic-jet aviators whom author Tom Wolfe said had "the right stuff," Crossfield dismissed the macho image of his field, saying that for most pilots he knew, the "main interest outside...
...April 20, he and seven other Apollo contractors headed out in a three-car convoy to collect an ERSM employee from the airport. In the lead, driving an unarmored BMW sedan, was James Yeager, an American weapons instructor. His passengers were two former British soldiers, Stef Surette and Mark (who did not want his surname used). The middle vehicle was the company's heavily armored Mercedes, used for transporting VIPs. It held two former British soldiers: Simon Merry at the wheel, and Ian Harris riding shotgun. Bringing up the rear of the convoy was Ahmelman, driving a second BMW; with...
...their right, a white Chevrolet SUV with blacked-out windows sped along a slip road, made a U turn, and stopped about 200 m away, facing the convoy. From its passenger window, a belt-fed machinegun opened fire. The first bullets announced themselves with a puff of dust beside Yeager's vehicle, then a burst hit Ahmelman in the thigh. The videotape from the dashboard camera recorded the sound of bullets hitting the car, Ahmelman crying out, then a chaos of yells, revving cars and machinegun fire...
...thought, 'What the f___ is Johnno shooting at now?''' Yeager would later write in a personal account of the incident. As more bullets chew into the cars, another voice can be heard on the tape shouting "Drive, drive, drive!" But no car moved. Yeager recalls hearing "the distinctive supersonic crack of a round pass through our car inches in front of my face ... Stef yelled, 'I'm hit' and he began emptying a 30-round mag out of his window." Yeager "punched the gas to the floor and the engine raced, but the car stayed stationary...
...Yeager and Mark crawled out of the vehicle on the passenger side and began shooting, while the wounded Surette went on firing out of the side window. "You could see small dots leaving your rifle and rounds pinging off the back of the (attackers') vehicle, and everyone is yelling, 'It's armored, it's armored,'" says Mark, who was shooting across the trunk of the BMW. Surette continued firing until he passed out from loss of blood, while Yeager, unable to see the attackers, blasted away pointlessly at a barricade before running to take cover in a ditch...