FAMED TEST PILOT CROSSFIELD DIES IN GEORGIA PLANE CRASH.

Byline: Staff and Wire Services

Legendary test pilot Scott Crossfield, who in 1953 in an Edwards Air Force Base test flight became the first man to fly at twice the speed of sound and later piloted the famous X-15 rocket planes, died at age 84 in the crash of his small plane, authorities said Thursday.

Crossfield's body was found in the wreckage Thursday in the mountains about 50 miles northwest of Atlanta, Ga., a day after the single-engine plane he was piloting dropped off radar screens on a flight from Alabama to Virginia.

``He's really one of the major figures,'' said Peter Jakab, aerospace chairman at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. ``He was not only the great cutting-edge research pilot ... but after that, he continued to be a great adviser and participant in all aspects of aerospace.''

The cause of the crash was under investigation. There were thunderstorms in the area at the time.

During the 1950s, Crossfield embodied what came to be called ``the right stuff,'' dueling the better-known Chuck Yeager for supremacy among America's Cold War test pilots. Yeager broke the sound barrier in 1947; only weeks after Crossfield reached Mach 2, or twice the speed of sound, Yeager outdid him.

The Cessna 210A in which Crossfield died was a puny flying machine compared with the rocket-powered aircraft he flew as a test pilot. During his heyday, he routinely climbed into some of the most powerful, most dangerous and most complex pieces of machinery of his time, took them to their performance limits or beyond - or ``pushed the envelope,'' as test pilots put it - and usually brought them back to Earth in one piece.

Crossfield, who lived in Herndon, Va., and flew regularly into his 80s, was a member of a group of civilian pilots assembled by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the forerunner of NASA, in the early 1950s. Yeager did his test-flying as an Air Force pilot.Crossfield flew Mach 2 on Nov. 20, 1953, when he hit 1,300 mph in NACA's Douglas D-558-II Skyrocket. The plane reached an altitude of 72,000 feet.

After leaving NACA for North American Aircraft, he helped design the X-15 rocket planes and piloted them on their first flights.

NASA Administrator Michael Griffin hailed him as ``a true pioneer whose daring X-15 flights helped pave the way for the space shuttle.''

``We keep talking about test pilots, but there is no such thing as a `test pilot,''' Crossfield said in a 1988 interview with Aviation Week & Space Technology. ``They are all just people who incidentally do flight tests. ... We should divest ourselves of this idea of special people (being) heroes, if you please, because really they do not exist.''

Born in Berkeley in 1921, Crossfield interrupted his studies at the University of Washington to join the Navy in 1942. He learned to fly a variety of aircraft during his Navy service.

The now-83-year-old Yeager, in his book ``Yeager: An Autobiography,'' described friction between the military pilots and the civilian NACA pilots. He groused that Crossfield ``was a proficient pilot, but also among the most arrogant I've met. ... None of us blue suiters was thrilled to see a NACA guy bust Mach 2.''

The competition did not end at Mach 2. On Dec. 12, 1953, just a few days before the 50th anniversary of the Wright brothers' first flight, Yeager bested Crossfield when he flew an X-1A to a record speed of more than Mach 2.4, or more than 1,600 mph.

The upcoming Wright anniversary had weighed on his mind, Yeager wrote: ``The television networks had scheduled special programs about Crossfield and his Mach 2 flight. ... Our plan was to smash Scotty's record on Dec. 12.''

Crossfield and Yeager were among the first five pilots inducted in 1990 into Lancaster's Aerospace Walk of Honor, with granite monuments along Lancaster Boulevard.

Unlike Yeager, a World War II fighter pilot who went into the Air Force with a high school diploma, Crossfield has been described as the first of the modern test pilots - a man with great piloting skills combined with an education in aeronautical engineering.

Crossfield left NACA in 1955 to work for North American Aviation on the X-15.

During his flying career, there were some close calls. On an X-15 flight in 1959, one of the engines exploded. The emergency landing broke the aircraft's back just behind the cockpit, but Crossfield was not injured, according to the Edwards Air Force Base Web site.

Less than a year later, a malfunctioning valve caused a catastrophic explosion during a ground test while Crossfield was in the cockpit. He again escaped injury.

In later years, he was an executive for Eastern Airlines and Hawker Siddley Aviation and a technical consultant to the House Committee on Science and Technology.

``I am an aeronautical engineer, an aerodynamicist and a designer,'' he told Aviation Week & Space Technology. ``My flying was only primarily because I felt that it was essential to designing and building better airplanes for pilots to fly.'' More recently, Crossfield trained four pilots trying to re-enact the Wright brothers' flight on the 100th anniversary of the Wrights' first airplane flight. But in the end, unsuitable weather doomed the attempt to get the replica into the air. The plane plopped into wet sand as the crowd of 35,000 groaned.