The first "real" movie I worked on was "the Right Stuff," where my job was assistant to the Unit Publicist (a very good job, because Tom Gray had been involved in the movies since his first stint as UP working on "Dr. Zhivago." You always get ahead in the movie business when someone several steps up the ladder ahead of you gives you a "hand up.") I ended up driving my childhood hero, Chuck Yeager, around. Be careful what you ask for. My childhood hero was not who I had fantasized he was. I'll leave it at that, but you can Google his marriage to She Who Will Not Be Named (since she cruises the net looking for people badmouthing her) and get an idea of what was what. I think the best thing I can say is to quote a well-known Aviation Hero who told me "If he hadn't married Glennis, no on would pay attention to anything he ever did."

We had a full-scale mockup of the X-1, which was an education. No one bigger that Yeager's 5'6" could get into it (I tried, and my 6'1" frame was caught half in and half out and I needed help to disentangle myself). Just looking at it, you realized that nobody was getting out of that thing in an emergency, not with that hatch right in front of the wing leading edge that would have cut you in half had you tried to bale out.

For those who have seen the movie, the "flying scenes" with the X-1, the X-1A and the F-104 were all "old school." They tried doing computerized motion control, a la Star Wars, and it was all too smooth. Those "flying scenes" with the airplanes were shot with models hanging from wire in a park in Hunter's Point, with two people ahead of the cameraman on the little truck squirting CO2 that became "clouds" the airplane "flew through" Real 1929 technology at work! As to the "hypersonic tumble" of the X-1A, that was the result of the Special Effects Supervisor throwing a big X-1A model off the roof of the 3-story warehouse that was Film HQ in San Francisco down in the Warehouse District out of frustration that nothing was working, and someone in the floor below happening to glance out at the right moment and see it tumble. "Gary! It's tumbling!" So 30 "big X-1As" were made and thrown off the roof of the building, with cameras set in the floors below to catch it, several days of work to get 22 seconds on-screen.

As to the F-104, it was done with about 30 Hawk 1/48 F-104 kits slapped together and painted to look like Tommy's original, that were then tied to helium balloons and photographed in the same park as the other "flights". 30 minutes of film reduced to 15 seconds on-screen.

The one cool thing to wannabee-aviation-historian me was I became friends with Dr. Richard Hallion, then in charge of the Edwards Museum. He let me listen to the tape recordings of the radio calls on the original flights. When Yeager fell 50,000 feet in less than 2 minutes in the X-1A "hypersonic tumble", he was crying for his mother and asking his friends to tell his wife he loved her. He thought he had "bought the farm." As he later explained it to me, he came to after being battered unconscious when he was thrown around the cockpit, with the airplane in an inverted flat spin. "I knew how to get out of that!" When he landed and they got to him he said "If this thing had a seat (ejection), you wouldn't find me here." And even that failure led to success. The reason it happened was the tail was too small. The supersonic shockwaves off the nose blanked the tail when they got to Mach 1.6, and aerodynamically, "the tail came off." And that is why supersonic airplanes ever since have big tail feathers - something has to stick out beyond the nose shockwave, to allow control.

Here's my model of the X-1, done with the 1/32 Revell kit.

5 attached images. Click to enlarge.

Thanks for the "backstory", TC. I remember building the same kit and thought the pilot figure was one of the best I'd seen.

Great topic, Tom! I love these stories about some of the origins of flight and momentous happenings.

Thanks for the "backstory" and the 1st-hand insights. Isn't Dr. Hallion now the Head man at the Smithsonian Museum of Flight (or its' proper name)?

The X-1 was a strangely backward design. The Germans had already proven the swept wing design. Ostensibly, "Swept wings were not used because too little was known about them." Yet, American engineers had the German technology, and the designers of it, at their disposal. It's hard to imagine engineers after 1945 trying to push a straight wing through the sonic region.

I believe the X-1 was the only truly straight wing aircraft with relatively high aspect ratio to achieve this in level flight, discounting the delta wing F-106 with a high angle of leading edge sweep and the very low aspect ratio of the stub-winged F-104. All the pre-century-series, straight wing fighters were subsonic. Flying the X-1 into the unknown regions of supersonic flight must have been scary indeed as reports were the control surfaces of an aircraft locked up due to "compressiblity effect" when entering the supersonic region.

Yeager is only 5’ 6”? He always looks about 6’ In photos.

It's all perspective. 🙂

Me encanto el Yeager de la película,pero leer éstas cosas me gusta mucho más.Tengo mi propio X-1 de 1/72, pero de color amarillo entrenador . En realidad no importa mucho la tonalidad.
Seguir escribiendo cosas así.

I liked the version of Yeager in the movie, but I like reading these things much more. I have my own X-1 in 1/72, but the color is a yellow trainer. In reality the shade doesn’t matter much (to me).
Keep writing things like this.
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I don’t think the translator writes the same as I mean. Sorry I don’t know English. I studied French in school, what can you do...