Thicket Without Thorns

Dawn was breaking over Edwards Air Force Base at California's Muroc Dry Lake when the husky, dark-browed test pilot chugged up to the flight line in a battered model A Ford coupe. Lieut. Colonel Frank K. Everest Jr., 35, wiggled into his girdle-tight high-altitude suit, picked up his crash helmet and headed for the runway where a four-engined B50 waited. Clamped tight to the B-50's fat belly was "Pete" Everest's aircraft--a sleek, needle-nosed little job with "Bell X2" painted on its sides.

Pilot Everest climbed aboard the B-50, waved to the waiting crew, sat down behind the pilots. Engines rumbling, then roaring, the B50 gathered speed, rose into the brightening sky. Everest waited until the B50 had labored to 30,000 ft., snugged down helmet and oxygen mask for the last time, then walked aft and let himself down into the cockpit of the silent X2.

To 70,000. The B50 was in position, and Pete Everest had swiftly checked instruments, controls, oxygen. Into the mike in his mask he began to count the seconds before the drop: "Five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one. Drop me, dad!" The bomber pilot pulled a lever, and the X-2 plummeted away.

Within seconds, the plane's Curtiss-Wright rocket engine--powerful enough to drive a Navy cruiser--cut in with a roar. Violently the X-2 shot forward. Everest brought up her nose and began an accelerating climb to 70,000 ft. There, under the deep-purple sky, he leveled off, fired up all the rocket power he had and set out for his goal: 2,500 m.p.h.. 850 m.p.h. faster than man had ever flown. The machmeter danced upwards--2.1. 2.2, 2.3. But something was wrong. Trouble in the X-2's engine was holding her down.

Everest decided to go ahead anyway. When the rocket engine took its last gulp of alcohol, water and liquid oxygen, he was screaming through the sky at 1,900 m.p.h. (close to mach 2.9). far from his goal, but also far above the previous record of 1,650 m.p.h. set in 1953 by his friend, Major Chuck Yeager. Exactly 20 minutes after he had been cut loose from the B-50, Pete Everest, gliding toward the field, was overtaken by a supersonic F-100 that had been left far behind by his wild ride, and escorted to a dead-stick landing on the dry bottom of Muroc Lake.

You Can't Stand Still. When they swarmed over the X2, engineers found welcome news. Made of heat-resistant stainless steel and nickel alloy with a specially tempered windshield designed to withstand 1,000DEG F. temperatures, the X-2 was built to probe the "thermal thicket" of supersonic speeds where the heat generated by friction with the atmosphere can turn metal into putty. But there were no thorns in the thicket for the X2. She was untouched.

Last week when word of his record-breaking flight in late July leaked out at the convention of the Air Force Association in New Orleans. Lieut. Colonel Everest was on his way to a new assignment at the Armed Forces Staff College. Everest, a veteran of more than 14 flying years, was not bothered by the fact that another pilot would soon be flying his plane in altitude tests perhaps at speeds faster than his record. "I've accomplished my mission at Edwards." the world's fastest man told his parents back in Fairmont, W. Va., where he decided as a kid to become a pilot, "and you can't stand still."

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