The hair-raising story of the first pilot to bail out of an airplane at supersonic speed—and live to tell at least part of the tale—was released this week by North American Aviation, Inc.
On Feb. 26, Test Pilot George Smith, 31, left his bachelor apartment in Manhattan Beach, Calif, to buy groceries. It was a Saturday, and he was not supposed to be working, but he stopped at the North American plant to turn in some test-flight reports. Just as Smith headed toward his battered Mercury to go home, Dispatcher Bob Gallahue asked him to flight-test a new F-100A jet fighter so that it could be delivered to the Air Force. Pilot Smith put on his flying gear, got into the cockpit, checked instruments and controls. He noticed that the fore-and-aft stick movement, which raises or lowers the nose of the aircraft in flight, was slightly stiff, but he thought nothing of it at the time.
Nose-Heavy. Taking off with his afterburner bellowing full blast, Pilot Smith shot out over the Pacific and pointed his plane upward to test its rate of climb. He broke through cloud cover at 8,000 ft. At 35,000 ft. he approached the speed of sound, still climbing, and felt his ship get slightly nose-heavy. He tried to correct it but could not. Something had gone wrong with the plane.
At 37,000 ft. the airplane nosed over. Smith fought his stick, trying to pull it back and get the nose up again. He braced his feet against the rudder pedals and pulled with all the strength of his 6-ft.-1-in., 220-lb. body. The stick would not budge, and the airplane's path steepened into a dive. Smith called the airport tower over his radio: "Lost hydraulic pressure. Controls frozen. Going straight in." By then his dive angle was almost vertical. A pilot in an F-100 saw him head toward the cloud deck. "Bail out!" he begged by radio. "Bail out, George!"
Smith realized without prompting that he was in deadly trouble. He was diving much faster than the speed of sound. He knew that if he bailed out, the hard-fingered wind might rip him to shreds. Smith killed his engine and put on his speed brakes. The hiss of the wind filled the cockpit. His sleek aircraft was losing altitude faster than it was losing speed.
When he ripped through the cloud cover at 8,000 ft., Smith realized that he had two alternatives, neither of them good. "I knew that I had no chance at all by bailing out," he says, "but I preferred this to getting washed away by sand on the bottom of the ocean."
Clap of Sound. As soon as he made his decision, he blew off the canopy—and an enormous sound, like the clap of a big gun, struck into the cockpit. It may have been this sound that has frozen many a pilot who has jettisoned his canopy and then ridden down to death. Perhaps it was a shock wave; no one is sure. But it frightened Pilot Smith as he had never been frightened. Terrified, he crouched forward (the wrong position for ejection). He does not even remember pressing the trigger that shot him out of the aircraft. The last thing he recalls is a glimpse of the machmeter, which read Mach 1.05. This is 777 m.p.h. at his altitude of 6,500 ft.