Test pilot still flying over the place where he first broke the sound barrier

Press, 18 May 1984, Page 14

Test pilot still flying over the place where he first broke the sound barrier

By

STAN DARLING,

who was recently a

guest of Air New Zealand in England and Southern California.

The solid, balding man in a blue flight suit walked briskly across the tarmac. The lines on his face cracked wide as he smiled politely at a group who had come out to the California desert to have a look at him and a new jet fighter. For Brigadier-General Charles E. “Chuck” Yeager, retired from the United States Air Force since 1975 but still a test pilot consultant for the Northrop Corporation, it was a normal working day, business as usual.

He had agreed to help brief some New Zealand journalists on the capabilities of Northrop’s new F-20 Tigershark, which is being developed for export sales. First, he and the corporation’s chief test pilot would check the Tigershark’s radar system accuracy in a series of chases over the Mojave Desert. They would fly an F-5F chase and target jet over the Edwards Air Force Base, the Air Force's test flight centre, as the Tigershark — only the second produced and flying so far — homed in on them. For the journalists, the expected treat had been a meeting with Yeager, the legendary test pilot who first broke the sound barrier over this desert in an X-l rocket plane in 1947.

The unexpected treat had been a flyover, in a Northrop private plane used to carry staff between the company’s Los Angeles headquarters and the test facilities, of the space shuttle Challenger. It was sitting out on its own on the dry lakebed where shuttles made all their early landings.

Early that morning, the shuttle had provided a flurry of activity for the base workers as it was diverted from its new landing runway at Cape Canaveral, Florida, because of low cloud there. Now it was parked a long way from the base hangars, being readied for its piggy-back ride to Florida on a Boeing 747.

Journalists had divided loyalties as they flew in and landed on the same lakebed, but they could not get close to the shuttle, and Yeager was right there, mingling. Especially since his recent portrayal in the film “The Right Stuff,” he was better known than most astronauts had ever been. He had not landed on the moon, but he had howled at it convincingly in the movie version of his exploits. Astronauts may be the new flight heroes, but General Yeager had the stuff it took to be one, even if the lack of a college education damaged his chances for selection in

the early days of astronaut training.

For many of us who were kids when he was guiding that rocket plane past a speed mark many thought was an impossible goal, he was the first real astronaut.

He had put his fanny on the line, as he might put it, and kept going out toward the height where the sky darkens and the stars come out, even if it sometimes ended with his plane spinning back towards earth in a mad whirl.

There was no particular ground rules for talking to the test pilots about a fighter plane that Northrop is trying to sell to enough countries, including New Zealand, before it goes into full production. We would watch the Tigershark and chase plane take off as they went into their radar accuracy run, then go back to the hanger offices to see a promotional film — featuring Yeager, as one of the aircraft’s salesmen — before the pilots returned.

We had been warned about one interview with the famous pilot, who visited New Zealand a couple of years ago to fish at Taupo and talk to Royal New Zealand Air Force pilots about the Tigershark and other new generation fighters.

An interview had been cut short when the, reporter kept referring to him as Mr Yeager.

“Son, it took me 15 years to earn this,” the pilot said, referring to his rank. “Interview terminated.” Our time with him would be short, anyway, and we brushed up on our military etiquette.

As we were driven out to the runway where we could watch the jets take off, we were given another warning. “Stay on the road, there’s rattlesnakes and junk out there,” said a Northrop public relations man as we got out of the van. “We don’t need New Zealanders getting bit.” Between takeoffs of the Northrop jets and other aircraft, one visitor noticed a quick movement in the underbrush.

“That’s a lizard,” said the P.R. man. “Snakes slither.”

At the later briefing, Northrop officials made no secret of the fact that they are trying hard to sell their sophisticated new fighter, being produced with no backing of Government funds.

The fighter is not intended for use by United States forces. General Yeager admitted that the Tigershark was “a fine plane to fly,” but he was not out to give it a hard sell that day. “What do you want me to talk

about — politics, sex, or what?” he said, when he met the visitors after returning from the morning’s run. Had the radar checked out?

“Yeah, it worked pretty good,” he said. “The object today is to aim and shoot, and to do it first,” said the man who started his career shooting down German planes during the Second World War. His targets included one of the first jet fighters.

A lot of talk about “survivability” and “smart avionics” surrounds the Northrop fighter, which has shown 97 per cent mission reliability during its first test year. Still, no country has signed a contract to purchase the plane, whose main competition is the General Dynamics F-16 flown by the United States Air force.

“I make a point never to tell a country what to fly,” said General Yeager, who is now 61 years old. Many of today’s company test pilots are in their 50s, and one is 71 years old. “I just tell them about the hardware and what it’s capable of doing.” He praised the Tigershark’s digital read-out display panels, which allow a pilot to keep his eyes front as he performs complex flying and firing manoeuvres. “You crank that thing in and it’s just steady as a rock.”

The weapons management system made a fighter pilot 10 time more effective than he was 10 years ago, he said. Yeager shot down his first plane 40 years ago in a P-51, which had a primitive gunsight that had to be manually ranged. In those days, “Christ, all you did was fit the gun barrel up the guy’s butt and shoot,” he said. "The days of energy management dogfights are going down the tubes. You’re looking at something that is only just beginning. “Everything is just like playing a piccolo,” he said of the wide range of throttle functions available in the new fighter. The way he told it, this was the modern equivalent of Annie Oakley shooting silver dollars from the sky from a distorted, backwards position — and using mirrors. No matter what twists and turns the new plane was doing, its weapons could be accurately locked on to the target. If you wanted new or more weapons, you just added them without making major changes to the aircraft “All they do is just change the software and reprogramme,” said General Yeager, using a language

test pilots would never have dreamed of a few years ago. With computer technology breakthroughs, pilots did not even have to be radar operators the way they used to, but even if everything made it much easier to fly a plane, the pilot also had to do that much more learning to master the new systems. General Yeager said he knew it took “a big hunk of a country’s G.N.P.” to afford an $ll to $l2 million plane like the Tigershark, but that had to be weighed against the 20 years of use the fighter would offer.

“Chuck” Yeager, who was commandant of the Air Force’s Aerospace Research Pilot School, which trained military pilots as astronauts, when he was not yet 40 years old, balanced his career between testing planes and flying them in combat. He even flew many B-57 (Canberra) bomber missions in Vietnam.

He was a technical adviser on “The Right Stuff’ film. For one thing, he said, he made sure that Sam Shepard, the actor who played him, sat the right way round in the cockpit.

Yeager had no qualms about the way he was portrayed in the Hollywood version of test piloting, and had seen the movie several times already. “It pretty much told it the way it was,” he said, then thought it over for a second and smiled: “It made it interesting.”