Higher and higher it flew—80.000 ft.
. . . 100.000 . . . 150,000 . . . 200.000.
Roaring into a hell-hot 3.443 m.p.h.. it peaked into a graceful arc. seemed to hover uncertainly for a brief moment, then hurtled downward. Minutes later, its tail skids carved a high rooster tail of dust in the wind-slicked silt of Rogers Dry Lake in California. The plane stopped. “Well.” said Test Pilot Joe Walker as he threw off the switches in the cockpit, “there’s that one for today.” In his X-15, Walker had just streaked to a new altitude record for manned planes: 246.700 ft.—46.7 miles above the earth.
Dramatic as it was, the flight that sent the rocket-powered X-15 to new heights last week was hardly more dramatic than Walker’s career. Since 1945. when he joined the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (it was then called the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics), Joseph Albert Walker. 41, has flown more hot planes than any other test pilot. Walker has taken the X series. beginning with the X-1 through a hair-raising number of tests, nearly quadrupling speed and altitude records.
First Ride. Gary Cooper could have played Joe Walker. Walking as though he were wearing cowboy boots. Walker lards his speech with sounds like “Yup,” “I reckon.” and “Haw!” and claims that he is just “a physicist who travels.” He grew up on a 200-acre farm near the Pennsylvania coal-mining town of Washington.
“I don’t know that I was ever a confirmed farmer.” he drawls. “But you grow up doin’ somethin’, and you don’t shake it. Physical inactivity just bugs me no end. and that’s somethin’ you don’t suffer from on the farm.”
The farm didn’t hold Walker for long. He went to Washington and Jefferson College in Pennsylvania, studied physics, graduated with a B.A. degree in 1942. Even before that, he had fallen in love with flying. “Whenever an airplane went by, everythin’ stopped for me.” In his senior year at college, he and a friend decided to try their wings at a grass airfield at Waynesburg. The event had something of the character of a corn-silk smoking session behind the barn. “I tell you,” he says, “there was a lot of foot-draggin’ on the way. I kept wonderin’ out loud if we weren’t goin’ the wrong way. if we oughtn’t to turn around. But we went up. finally, in a yellow, two-seat Piper Cub. The pilot kept me up there for half an hour, lettin’ me take the stick and whip us through a few turns and glides. After that first ride, there wasn’t any doubt what I was goin’ to do.”
Names & Numbers. He did it first in a P-38 fighter in World War II. A weather reconnaissance pilot in the Fifteenth Air Force in Italy, Walker flew 58 missions over German-held territory around the Black Sea. Austria and Southern France.
“We didn’t worry much about German fighters, but we had a couple of morale machine guns strapped on in case we had to tangle with ’em. Actually, flyin’ in the war was more fun than flyin’ today. I felt we were livin’ pretty high off’n the hog. The P-38 was a fine airplane, but hell, today there’s no such thing as walkin’ out there casually with your flyin’ boots and your scarf trailin’ over your shoulder, jumpin’ in and blastin’ off. Flyin’ machines are too danged complex today.” In 1944 Walker was mustered out of the Air Force with the D.F.C. and seven oakleaf clusters, “mainly for lastin’ through 58 missions, I think. Haw! Actually, they said it was because I did a superior job.”
Within a few years, Walker had joined the small cadre of topflight test pilots at California’s Edwards Air Force Base. There the day-to-day flying in unproven craft is shrouded with a cloak, striped with courage and death. The pilots remember the names and the numbers of colleagues who have folded their wings. They speak of Howard Lilly, who stacked in on take-off in his D-558-I. They remember the “beautiful” flight profile that Air Force Captain Milburn Apt flew just before they dug him and his X-2 out of the desert floor near the base, and they recall the death of famed Test Pilot Iven Kincheloe Jr., who flamed out in an F-104.
And yet they fly. Joe Walker, who has felt the breath of death more than once, says, “You can’t give a lot of thought to the danger. It’s there, I reckon. About all you can do is hang onto that old cliché about the danger in crossin’ the street or drivin’ on the highway. If everybody worried about it, nobody’d do a danged thing.”
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