Scott Crossfield, Aviation Pioneer

There's an old saying in aviation: "There are old pilots, and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots." Scott Crossfield may have been the exception to that rule. Crossfield died yesterday at 84 while flying his Cessna 210 near thunderstorms in Georgia. Here's some info from the LA Times obituary:

NASA Administrator Michael D. Griffin said in a statement that Crossfield "was a true pioneer whose daring X-15 flights helped pave the way for the space shuttle."

As a civilian test pilot, Crossfield had what writer Tom Wolfe, in his famous history of early American rocket flight, called "the right stuff": "the ability to go up in a hurtling piece of machinery and put his hide on the line and then have the moxie, the reflexes, the experience, the coolness, to pull back in the last yawning moment — and then to go up again the next day, and the next day, and every day."

"Crossfield is the great man who nobody knows anymore," Wolfe told The Times on Thursday, adding that the original Mercury astronauts overshadowed test pilots such as Crossfield who helped make the manned space program possible.

"Here they were at the very leading edge of flight tests in these rocket airplanes, and when the astronauts were selected and it was determined that they just had to shoot somebody into space like a human cannonball, all the attention went to the astronauts.

"Otherwise, Crossfield would be on the Mount Rushmore for pilots."

A former Navy flight instructor during World War II, Crossfield joined the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics — the predecessor of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration — at its High Speed Flight Research Station at Edwards Air Force Base as a research pilot in 1950.

Over the next five years, he flew most of the experimental aircraft being tested at Edwards.

It was on Nov. 20, 1953, that Crossfield became the first person to fly at twice the speed of sound — in a the Douglas D-558-2 Skyrocket.

Crossfield, who was battling the flu, and the Skyrocket were carried aloft by a B-29 bomber and dropped clear of the bomber at 32,000 feet. After climbing to 72,000 feet, he dove to 62,000 feet, where he broke Mach 2 at a speed of 1,290 mph.

The Skyrocket was never designed to go Mach 2, Crossfield told the Washington Post in 2000, and test pilots like him were not supposed to set records.

An airline pilot once told me that it was his life's goal to have an equal number of takeoffs and landings. It's too bad that an aviation veteran like Crossfield is going to come up one landing short.