After hearing of Chuck Yeager's recent death, I did a lot of reading on test pilots and their accomplishments. Chuck Yeager, known for breaking the sound barrier, is probably the most famous test pilot outside of a couple NASA astronauts. But outside of that, not many people know much about any other test pilots. Have you heard of Michael Adams? He was the first American in space to die. He flew the X-15 to an altitude of 81 km and on re-entry from suborbital space flight, the aircraft entered a Mach 5 spin imposing 15 Gs on the aircraft causing it to break up and kill Adams. Deaths like these were the normal for test pilots. Edwards Air Force Base experienced a stretch in 1952 where an average of seven test pilots died each month. I can't imagine the mental and physical toll of going to work and seeing so many coworkers die like that.
Adams and other test pilots charted a path that made the space program a success. I web scraped Wikipedia for aviation accidents from 1944 to July 20, 1969 (first moon landing), filtered by American test pilots and made a distribution chart of their age of death. The hover info includes the name of the pilot and the aircraft he died in. This is not an all encompassing list since so many test pilots died and not all of them had records online. You can also see that many records didn't even have the age or name of the pilot, just the aircraft.
"The Right Stuff" was coined by author Tom Wolfe (later made into a movie) who theorized that test pilots and astronaut at the time had something called "The Right Stuff", a certain persona along with mental and physical characteristics required for the job. Chuck Yeager disagreed with this theory, saying that all he did was study everything about aircraft to be a good test pilot.
In the 40s and 50s, pilots were testing out new jet technology in aircraft that had never been flown. As they got closer to the speed of sound, the aircraft would behave erratically, so the term 'sound barrier' was coined, barrier because people didn't think it was possible to break the speed of sound. Many pilots tried and failed, but Chuck Yeager was able to punch through the barrier in the Bell X-1 paving the way for the X-plane program, NASA and the first moon landing.
Below I used a Python package called Mountain Tapir and used it to create a collage of test pilots who gave their life for the advancement of aviation and space.
“So many test pilots gave their life and people don’t know who they were or really even care.”
Technical skills: web scraping, data cleaning, collage maker
コメント