Bill & the Little Beast

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In the chill of the desert dawn, a weird airplane, painted as white as a new refrigerator, was wheeled out of a hangar at Edwards Air Force Base, California, and towed at funeral-slow speed toward the level, eight-mile runway of Muroc Dry Lake. The plane was the Douglas X3, a radical, dangerous experiment in sustained supersonic flight. Most of the small gallery of onlookers—pilots, engineers and Douglas executives—had seen it many times before, and presumably most of them had confidence in it. But few could have escaped some twinges of misgiving as the strange, sharklike craft (see sketch above) was prepared for flight.

Every flight test of an experimental airplane is a blood-chilling drama. It has its hero, the test pilot, to dominate its climax like the matador of a bullfight. It has a troop of villains: the unseen devils of the air that claw at the untried plane, shake it, spin it, hammer it, try to tear it to ribbons. Some tests are extra tense. The maiden flight of the X-3 a few months ago was one of the touchiest in aviation history. The pilot: Bill Bridgeman, a husky, clear-eyed airman who had already flown faster (1,238 m.p.h.) and higher (79,494 ft.) than any other man.

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." But all it has for wings are thin, knife-edged trapezoids no bigger than dining-room tables. Even squatting on the ground it looks wickedly fast, but its wings, apparently as rudimentary as the wings of a penguin, do not look as if they could lift it into the air.

As 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 sound. He would fly "chase" on the X3, watching for the beginnings of trouble. As he taxied up to the line, other jets took off, and soon Muroc echoed with the clattering scream of their engines.

Dressed in a "blast suit," Test Pilot Bridgeman, the human star of the show, got down from a green Ford and walked lithely toward the X3, the mechanical star. Technicians swarmed over the aircraft, giving it a last check. A flight surgeon stopped Bridgeman, examined him closely to make sure he was O.K. Both plane and man, were pronounced ready for flight.