DRYDEN TEST PILOT AMONG INDUCTEES TO HALL OF HONOR.

Byline: Jim Skeen Daily News Staff Writer

NASA research pilot Ed Schneider was named on Wednesday to a ``who's who'' of U.S. Navy test pilots.

Schneider, 49, was inducted into the James B. Taylor Jr. Memorial Carrier Aviation Test Pilots Hall of Honor aboard the USS Yorktown, now a floating museum in Charleston, S.C.

Now the chief test pilot at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Dryden Flight Research Center, he was inducted along with retired Rear Adm. Edward Feightner and retired Adm. John Hyland.

On active duty with the Navy from 1968 to 1983, Schneider in 1973 became the youngest graduate of the Naval Test Pilot School in Patuxent River, Md.

While in the service, he served as an engineering test pilot and instructor test pilot at the Naval Air Test Center in Maryland. He later served as the F-4 program manager and senior test pilot at the Naval Aviation Depot near San Diego.

Schneider left the Navy to join NASA in 1983.

At Dryden, he serves as the project pilot for the SR-71 High Speed Research Program. He also is project pilot for the F-18 Active Aeroelastic Wing aircraft, the F-18 Systems research aircraft, the NASA B-52 launch aircraft and the NASA Learjet.

Schneider's NASA work included participating in the F-8 Fly-by-Wire, the FAA/NASA 720 Controlled Impact Demonstration and the F-14 Automatic Rudder Interconnect and Laminar Flow research program.

Schneider has logged more than 6,000 hours in 83 types of aircraft. He also is a fellow and past president of the Society of Experimental Test Pilots.

The Hall of Honor is named after a Navy test pilot who flew 461 types of aircraft and was killed while flight-testing an XF4F-6 Wildcat fighter before World War II.