[ARC5] An X-1 Story

[Robert Eleazer]

X-1 Story

A friend of mine was working in maintenance at Edwards/Muroc AFB in the late 1940's and he told me of an amusing incident.

They had to fill out monthly reports on each aircraft and send them to Wright Patterson AFB, proving data on flight time, engine run times, and consumables used. 

One day they got an angry call from Wright Patt. It seemed that someone at Edwards did not know how to fill out the reports properly for one aircraft, 6062. The flight times on the aircraft were rather short, to be sure, but the engine run times were absurd, five minutes or less for each flight! Furthermore, if the screwed-up reports were to believed, during those short flights the aircraft consumed huge quantities of fuel, and despite having only one crewmember, equally huge quantities of oxygen. The people out there in the desert needed to get serious about filling out those reports properly!

Of course, the aircraft was the Bell X-1.

Wayne

WB5WSV