April 21, 2006
Scott Crossfield, Fabled Test Pilot, Dies at 84
By DAVID STOUT
WASHINGTON, April 20 — Scott Crossfield, a legendary test pilot of the post-World War II era who was the first person to fly twice the speed of sound, was killed Wednesday morning when his plane crashed in northern Georgia. He was 84.
Mr. Crossfield, who lived in Herndon, Va., just outside Washington, was on a flight from Prattville, Ala., to Manassas, Va., when his single-engine craft when down, the Civil Air Patrol said Thursday. There were thunderstorms in the region at the time. Mr. Crossfield was in good health and good spirits before making the flight, his son-in-law Ed Fleming said Thursday in a telephone interview.
Mr. Crossfield, who was an aeronautical engineer, belonged to the small pantheon of envelope-pushing aviators whose exploits were told in Tom Wolfe's book "The Right Stuff," Another, of course, was Chuck Yeager, who in 1947 became the first pilot to break the sound barrier.
On Nov. 20, 1953, Mr. Crossfield became the first man to fly at twice the speed of sound. At the controls of a rocket-powered Douglas D-558-2 that had been dropped from a B-29 mother ship at 32,000 feet, Mr. Crossfield climbed to 72,000 feet, then dived to 62,000 feet, where his speed topped 1,320 miles per hour.
At the time of his record-breaking flight, Mr. Crossfield was flying out of Edwards Air Force Base in California for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the predecessor of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. In his five years with the committee, Mr. Crossfield logged far more time in the cockpits of rocket-powered aircraft than any other pilot.
In 1955, Mr. Crossfield became the chief test pilot for North American Aviation, where he was the consultant for the X-15, a rocket-powered craft designed to fly to the fringes of space at several times the speed of sound. On June 8, 1959, he made the first of his two dozen flights in the X-15, one of which took him to 1,960 miles per hour — almost three times the speed of sound — and 88,116 feet above the earth, according to NASA.
He had two brushes with death in the X-15. On his third flight, one of the craft's two rocket engines blew up. In the emergency landing, the plane snapped in two just behind the cockpit. Mr. Crossfield was not hurt. Months later, an X-15 engine exploded during a ground test while he was in the cockpit. Again, he walked away.
Mr. Crossfield later became an engineer and researcher for North American. From 1967 to 1973, he was an executive for Eastern Air Lines. In 1974 and 1975, he was senior vice president for Hawker Siddeley Aviation. From 1977 until retiring in 1993, he was a consultant to the House Committee on Science and Technology.
Albert Scott Crossfield was born in Berkeley, Calif., on Oct. 2, 1921. When he was 12, he took his first flying lessons, at a small airport in Wilmington, Calif., where he washed planes to pay for his time in the air, he recalled in a 2001 interview with AVWeb, an Internet aviation magazine.
He was a Navy fighter pilot and instructor during World War II. After the war, he earned bachelor's and master's degrees in aeronautical engineering at the University of Washington. While at Edwards Air Force Base, he helped design the first full-pressure flight suit, which evolved into the suits used by astronauts.
In the 2001 interview with AVWeb, Mr. Crossfield said that the United States should commit itself to having a human presence in space, but that he opposed an international space station because the United States stood to contribute more in knowledge and money than it would get back.
Asked if he agreed with Mr. Yeager that just after World War II was the best time to be a pilot, Mr. Crossfield replied, "The best time to be a pilot is anytime."
He also volunteered an explanation for why he had never become an astronaut. "I have a bad reputation for doing my own thing," he said. "I would turn off the radio if I didn't like the help I was getting from the ground, and the medicine men that were running the program thought that was too independent. They wanted medical subjects, not pilots."
Mr. Crossfield is survived by his wife, Alice; four sons, Tom, of St. Petersburg, Fla.; and Paul, Anthony and Robert, all of Northern Virginia; two daughters, Becky Fleming, of Northern Virginia, and Sally Farley, of Louisville, Ky.; and three grandchildren.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/21/us/21crossfield.html