Remembering Scott Crossfield
a personal view
A day after Scott Crossfield died on April 19, 2006 the SierraFoot home page added a photo and a line of text that simply described him as an aerospace pioneer, engineer, research
pilot, and a true gentleman. Many people are well aware of his accomplishments, this note is more about his
character than those achievements. Much of this follows from my one
personal meeting with Crossfield, in late September, 2001 at the Hotel
Bonaventure in L.A.
Starting in the 1950s all test pilots and research pilots were also
engineers. From the X-15 program three people stand out at least as
much for their engineering work as for their piloting: Scott
Crossfield, Neil Armstrong, and Milt Thompson. Crossfield was
influential in starting the X-15 program, and left test flying duties
to work on it for North American Aviation as an engineer with special
insight from piloting experience in several X planes.
Crossfield resumed test flight activities as a North American employee,
shepherding the new and exotic aircraft through its earliest
qualification flights and several adventures. One was the explosion and
fire in the rocket bay on the third powered flight, leading to an
emergency landing on Rosamond Dry lake that buckled the fuselage. A
radio call said that the X-15 had broken its back, but the flight
surgeon heard this as a report that Crossfield himself had broken his
back. Racing to the X-15, he tried urgently to open the canopy to reach
Crossfield, giving the pilot cause for alarm because the ejection seat
was still armed and raising the canopy could have triggered an actual
ejection. A wrestling match to control the canopy ensued between the
two men. Scott described this humorously, envisioning headlines in the
next day's newspaper saying "Flight surgeon killed by blast as test
pilot soars 200 feet over Mojave Desert, clutching parachute to his
chest".
Moving from the role of pilot to that of engineer, Crossfield and
another engineer soon diagnosed the main cause of the structural
failure, finding that it occurred on the second compression of the nose
gear strut, not on the first impact and rebound. The first compression
caused the
oleo's hydraulic fluid to foam, so that there was very little shock
absorption when needed the second time. There was also a question of
whether late gear extension had allowed the strut to extend fully
before touchdown. The publicly given reason, an overweight landing,
could be more easily understood by the public but it wasn't right:
Crossfield had been able to jettison as much
unused alcohol and LOX as was physically possible, and the residual
quantities in the tanks were small enough to keep the X-15 well below
its landing weight limit.
When North American turned over the three X-15s to NASA and the Air
Force for their flight research program it was not possible for
Crossfield to rejoin NASA and to participate as a research pilot. Some
people would have been frustrated that they could not engage in the
major research objectives that they had already been working toward.
Instead, Crossfield honestly expressed pleasure and satisfaction that
he had been able to spend 9 years of his life with the X-15 and that
this enabled others to press on with what proved to be the most
successful and significant of all X-plane research programs.
Scott Crossfield showed exceptional kindness and respect for others. If
he ever pushed the limits of honesty it was to give credit to someone
else when in fact the credit might not always have been due. For
example, he acknowledged respect for Chuck Yeager and credited him with
probably being the only pilot at Edwards who could save the X-1A when
it
departed from controlled flight above Mach 2. Crossfield believed that
Yeager saved it by deliberately applying full pro-spin controls,
ultimately returning the aircraft from a wild tumble to an inverted
spin. That allowed returning to normal flight by way of conventional
spin recovery.
Three years later I asked Yeager about it. It was surprising to learn
that he had not used the recovery technique that Crossfield credited
him for and that entry to the inverted spin was purely by chance. It
turned out to be Crossfield rather than Yeager whose thoughts engaged
on this as an emergency recovery procedure for the X-1A's violent
tumble.
Scott Crossfield was by nature an ambassador of good will, especially
in aviation and space. Perhaps his greatest public visibility was at
the EAA fly-in at Oshkosh, where he appeared for many years. Long ago I
observed to NASA Dryden's historian that it seemed as if whenever a
good photo from the X-15 program turned up there was a really
good chance that Scott Crossfield had already signed it. On the
professional side, he was still active in the Society of Experimental
Test Pilots. He was in fact one of SETP's 6 founders half a
century ago.
At the end of our meeting in 2001 I asked if he could log some X-15
ground instruction time in my own glider logbook. He smiled, asked for
the book, and instead logged something even better: An aborted X-15
flight, with zero time of course because we were in L.A. and 66670, the
#1 X-15, is still hanging in the Smithsonian NASM's Milestones of
Flight Gallery.
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As my meeting with Crossfield ended, on a day only a couple weeks after
9/11, he turned to another retired member of SETP member at the
hotel and asked "How do we get back on combat duty?". I have no doubt
that he was ready, willing and able to to exactly that, to defend our
country, even then at age 81.
Scott Crossfield was not only a distinguished aviator, he was a true
gentleman and a first-class human being.