SKY'S THE LIMIT; FLIGHT TESTS, AEROSPACE SHAPED A.V. DESTINY.

Byline: Charles F. Bostwick Staff Writer

Antelope Valley's future changed on a warm day in September 1942.

Inside an unmarked railroad box car, cocooned in white canvas, was the fuselage for America's top-secret experimental jet fighter, the Bell XP-59 - so valuable it was escorted by armed guard its entire trip from Buffalo, N.Y.

Unloaded at a railroad spur near Muroc Dry Lake, the plane marked the first use of the Antelope Valley for testing a high-performance military airplane - a role that would transform the community from an agricultural to an aerospace community.

Military flight testing created Edwards Air Force Base and led to the establishment of Air Force Plant 42's industrial facilities, employing thousands of workers who filled block after block of tract homes in Palmdale and Lancaster.

Barren and populated by only a few desert homesteaders, under skies clear for months at a time, Muroc had been used since the 1930s for gunnery practice. During World War II, the Army Air Force even built a full-size wooden mock-up of a Japanese battle cruiser - dubbed the Muroc Maru - on Muroc Dry Lake's hard clay surface.

But the clay lake bed also proved excellent for the new underpowered jet fighters, with their temperamental engines. The jets needed a long runway to take off, and the miles and miles of flat hard lake bed gave them a ready emergency landing spot if the engine ``flamed out'' - quit - in flight.

Muroc also was far from prying eyes, ideal for testing a secret warplane.

After the war, the lake bed was remembered again when the Army Air Force needed to test its X-1 rocket plane, intended to be the first aircraft to go faster than the speed of sound - the ``sound barrier'' it was called then, thought by some to be a true barrier that would tear airplanes apart.

The testing continued with new model jet fighters and bombers, machinery for the Korean War, the Cold War and Vietnam. The installation was renamed in 1951 for Capt. Glen Edwards, who died in a 1948 crash of Northrop's futuristic but inherently unstable YB-49 Flying Wing - whose shape would be reborn four decades later as the B-2 stealth bomber.

``Being at Edwards in the 1950s, I was part of the greatest era in research flying in the history of aviation,'' Chuck Yeager, pilot of the X-1 and many other experimental planes, wrote years later. ``In less than five years, a whole new air force was dumped in our laps for flight testing.''

Author Tom Wolfe, in ``The Right Stuff,'' described the base in the late 1940s and early 1950s: ``The place was utterly primitive, nothing but bare bones, bleached tarpaulins and corrugated tin rippling in the heat with caloric waves; and for an ambitious young pilot it was perfect. Muroc seemed like an outpost on the dome of the world, open only to a righteous few, closed off to the rest of humanity.''

The growth over the two decades - first from war, then from industry - made finding a place to live hard in the valley.

``We lived in a two-room house with two lean-to type rooms which served as bedrooms for ourselves and our three children, a girl, 7, a boy, 4, and a girl, six months. We had running water in the house but no hot water,'' Helen Cochran wrote years later about her Palmdale home during the war years. ``Difficult as this time was, we were more fortunate than many people. Some of them were forced to rent what were literally converted chicken houses at exorbitant rates.''

Edwards' flight testing blossomed at the same time as the opening of aircraft manufacturing plants in Palmdale, starting a 1950s population boom that in proportion dwarfed even the 1980s boom.

In 1950 the U.S. government bought Palmdale Airport, which it had built before World War II and used as a military field but later turned over to Los Angeles County.

The government renamed the airport Air Force Plant 42, and in 1953, Lockheed opened a plant there. Other aircraft companies followed: North American, Convair, Northrop, Douglas.

Palmdale's plants assembled and tested the fighter jets of the early Cold War: the F-86 Sabre and F-100 Super Sabre from North American, Douglas' A-4 Skyhawk attack jet, Convair's delta-wing F-102 and F-106 interceptors, Lockheed's T-33 trainer, F-94 Starfire and double-supersonic F-104, and Northrop's F-89.

Boosted by the influx of people hired at Edwards and the assembly plants, Lancaster's population jumped from 3,600 in 1950 to more than 29,000 in 1960. Valley population grew from 23,000 in 1950 to 70,000 in the 1960s. Palmdale jumped from 1,400 in 1940 to more than 11,000 in 1960.

Antelope Valley Hospital opened in 1955. Palmdale started the 1950s with one elementary school, and ended with six, plus Palmdale High School. Construction started on the Antelope Valley College campus, which was to open in 1961.

CAPTION(S):

2 photos

Photo: (1) Pioneering test pilot Chuck Yeager said ``being at Edwards in the 1950s, I was part of the greatest era in research flying in the history of aviation.''

(2) Edwards Air Force Base was home to new model fighters and bombers.

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