Into the Unknown

The pilots and engineers at California's Edwards Air Force Base knew Captain Milburn G. Apt as a quietly amiable man who liked nothing better than puttering in his garden and playing with his kids. At 32, he had 3,500 hours' flying time, a good World War II combat record, and seven years of flight-test training to his credit. It was a record that a few weeks ago brought him one of the Air Force's top test assignments: a chance to pilot the world's fastest (an estimated 2,000 m.p.h.), highest-flying (almost 24 miles) airplane, the Bell X-2--and join the tiny corps of pilots whose job it is to explore the deep purple edges of outer space.

By the time Mel Apt was ready for his first flight, the X-2 had gone through her paces 20 times at the hands of other pilots; they knew her whims and fancies so well that the testers decided it was unnecessary for Apt to make the once routine series of dead-stick glide tests before he was allowed to cut in the rockets. So at 30,000 feet over Edwards one day last week, Test Pilot Apt was dropped in the X-2 from the belly of a B50 bomber. Smoothly, he touched off the rocket engines and roared up into the sky. Two minutes later, he was in trouble; the X-2 hurtled to earth 20 miles to the northeast. Apt was found dead in the mangled wreckage, his body still in the cockpit.

The Air Force could say only that ground contact had been maintained briefly with Apt but "suddenly stopped--and we don't know what happened."

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