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Wright is still growing. Its researchers are deep in nuclear physics (atomic airplanes are in the offing), and a new $3,000,000 laboratory will soon be built. But the often-rainy weather of Ohio is better for farming than for flight testing, and the country around houses too many innocent bystanders. A nightmare of Wright authorities is the possibility of dropping a skittish new airplane into downtown Dayton. So Wright has set up distant colonies to perform specialized functions.
Fabulous Lake. Most of the airplane flight testing is now done at Edwards Air Force Base on the Mojave Desert, Calif., a fabulous place where Muroc Dry Lake (so wondrously flat that it curves like the earth) offers 65 square miles of landing area and a 22-mile runway. At Muroc, where the sky is almost always blue, and there is no nearby city to worry about, prototype airplanes make their maiden flights, followed through the sky by radars and theodolites and loaded with instruments that report every strain and flutter by radio-telemetering. Here the world's speed and altitude records (1,650 m.p.h. and 90,000 ft.) by Major Arthur Murray were made in the Bell XiA. Muroc's most spectacular current project is testing the Bell X2, a souped-up rocket job that is expected to do better than 2,000 m.p.h.
Successful tests at Edwards and Wright are enough to convince the Air Force that it ought to accept a new airplane. When production models appear, another series of tests begins at Florida's Eglin Air Force Base, 50 miles east of Pensacola, where the Air Proving Ground flies them under every possible condition and evaluates in detail their military value. Eglin, a cluster of many flying fields, occupies a 465,000-acre reservation that was formerly a national forest. It roars all day and sometimes all night with the latest airplanes taking off and landing.
Arctic Jungle. Most conspicuous feature at Eglin is the Climatic Hangar, a hulking, thick-walled building with massive doors that can be rolled away on rails. Its interior, big enough for a 6-36 (wingspread 230 ft.), is cooled to the temperature (65° F.) of a cold snap in Alaska. Airplanes and other equipment, including items submitted by the Army and Navy, are put in this giant deepfreeze and "cold-soaked" for days. Then every detail of their operation is tested elaborately by men in Eskimo parkas. All sorts of bugs show up. Lubricants freeze; gaskets leak; insulation grows brittle and cracks; metal parts contract and twist out of line. Only when such defects have been spotted and corrected is an airplane safe to fly at extreme altitudes or from arctic bases.
The Climatic Hangar has other tortures for new equipment. One room can simulate an arctic blizzard, complete with howling wind and sandblasting snow. Other rooms are as hot as the tropics. One of them is hot and humid, like a jungle, and dusted with spores of voracious fungi purveyed by the Bureau of Standards.
Spacious though Edwards and Eglin are, they are not spacious enough for some of the operations of Air Force scientists. Rockets and guided missiles are much too fractious to be tested anywhere near a thickly populated area. So for missile work the Air Force has Holloman Air Force Base in an empty part of New Mexico and Patrick Air Force Base on the coast of Florida.