The one word you use in military flying is duty. It's your duty. You have no control over outcome, no control over pick-and-choose. It's duty.
Most pilots learn, when they pin on their wings and go out and get in a fighter, especially, that one thing you don't do, you don't believe anything anybody tells you about an airplane.
That to me is a bunch of crap trying to shoot guys up into damned space. What they're going to do is they're going to wipe out half a dozen people one of these days, and that will be the end of it.
Hey Ridley, that Machometer is acting screwy. It just went off the scale on me.
I have no regrets about my life. People ask, "If you had to do it all over again, would you do it differently?" No. That's speculation.
I don't think about life everlasting. If something doesn't have scientific evidence to back it up, I don't believe it. I'm a straight shooter.
At 42,000' in approximately level flight, a third cylinder was turned on. Acceleration was rapid and speed increased to .98 Mach. The needle of the machmeter fluctuated at this reading momentarily, then passed off the scale. Assuming that the off-scale reading remained linear, it is estimated that 1.05 Mach was attained at this time.
There's no such thing as a natural-born pilot.
It wasn't that the X-1 would kill you, it was the systems in the X-1 that would kill you.
I ran the astronaut school for six years, and I was the commandant and when I finished in '65, 26 of my guys went into space as NASA astronauts that I trained.
As we went through mach one, the nose started dropping, so we just cranked that horizontal stabilizer down to keep the nose up. We got it above mach one, and once we got it above the speed of sound, then you have supersonic flow over the whole airplane, so you have no more shock waves on it that are causing buffeting...You really don't think about the outcome of any kind of a flight, whether it's combat, or any other kinds of flights, because you really have no control over it.
