Legendary U.S. Test Pilot Killed
Legendary test pilot Scott Crossfield, the first man to fly at twice the speed of sound, was found dead Thursday in the wreckage of a single-engine plane in the mountains of northern Georgia, his son-in-law said.
Searchers discovered the wreckage of a small plane about 50 miles northwest of Atlanta, but the Civil Air Patrol didn't immediately identify the body inside.
Ed Fleming, Crossfield's son-in-law, told The Associated Press from Crossfield's home in Herndon, Va., that family had been told it was Crossfield.
Crossfield's Cessna was last spotted in the same area on Wednesday while on flight from Alabama to northern Virginia. There were thunderstorms in the area when officials lost radar and radio contact with the plane at 11:15 a.m., said Kathleen Bergen, a spokeswoman for the Federal Aviation Administration.
People who knew him well remember Crossfield as a pilot who would push the limits, but not take unnecessary chances, reports CBS News correspondent Bob Orr.
Crossfield, 84, had been one of a group of civilian pilots assembled by the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics, the forerunner of NASA, in the early 1950s.
Retired Marines Gen. Jack Dailey, now the director of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, lavished praise on Crossfield.
"He's truly one of the great pioneers of aviation history. He's flown more airplanes in this museum than any other person — and all of them were experimental," Dailey told CBS News.
"He was one of the first engineer test pilots — an aeronautical engineer pilot who actually, while flying the airplane, had a clear understanding of the design characteristics and perhaps some of the modifications that would be required to achieve the objectives of whatever the test was," Dailey said.
Air Force Capt. Chuck Yeager had already broken the speed of sound in his history-making flight in 1947. But Crossfield set the Mach 2 record — twice the speed of sound — in 1953, when he reached 1,300 mph in NACA's Douglas D-558-II Skyrocket.
In 1960, Crossfield reached Mach 2.97 in an X-15 rocket plane launched from a B-52 bomber. The plane reached an altitude of 81,000 feet. At the time, Crossfield was working as a pilot and design consultant for North American Aviation, which made the X-15. He later worked as an executive for Eastern Airlines and Hawker Siddley Aviation.
When CBS News' The Early Show co-anchor Rene Syler asked Crossfield
at the Dayton Air Show in 2003, he said, "I just love aviation and had a very great opportunity to perform in it… I never thought it was making history, I thought it was making progress.""I was one of those fortunate people whose avocation was my vocation," Crossfield said.
He was a flight instructor right up until the day he died. Just three years ago, at age 82, Crossfield helped to train the pilots who attempted to fly the replica of the Wright Flyer. Crossfield told Orr, "This is not a very friendly flying machine, but we'll get it." Poor weather, however, prevented the take-off.
Among his many honors, Crossfield was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame in 1983.
On Wednesday, his plane had left Prattville, Ala., around 9 a.m. en route to Manassas, Va., not far from his home.