Famed test pilot and aviation pioneer Scott Crossfield, the first man to travel at twice the speed of sound, died when his plane crashed in the American state of Georgia, the Civil Air Patrol said on Thursday. He was 84.
Crossfield was flying from the southern state of Alabama to Virginia when his single-engine Cessna disappeared from radar in northern Georgia on Wednesday morning, Paige Joyner of the state’s Civil Air Patrol said in a statement.
“There were no survivors,” Joyner said.
A giant in the history of aviation and space flight, Crossfield became the first man to reach Mach 2 — twice the speed of sound — on November 20 1953. He set the record when he took a Douglas D-558-II Skyrocket to a top speed of 2 078kph.
Born in 1921 in Berkeley, California, he served as a fighter pilot and flight instructor with the US Navy in World War II before studying aeronautical engineering and becoming a groundbreaking test pilot.
He survived more than one close call in dangerous flights of experimental aircraft, including the X-15 rocket powered research aircraft. He took the X-15 “to the fringes of outer space”, the Civil Air Patrol said in a tribute.
Based at Edwards Air-Force Base in California, Crossfield flew for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, which was later replaced by the United States space agency Nasa.
Nasa called Crossfield’s death a “tragic loss” and hailed his contributions to the space-flight programme that grew out of his breakthroughs as a test pilot.
“Scott Crossfield was a true pioneer whose daring X-15 flights helped pave the way for the space shuttle,” Nasa administrator Michael Griffin said in a statement on Thursday.
“Nasa remembers Scott not only as one of the greatest pilots who ever flew, but as an expert aeronautical engineer, aerodynamicist and designer,” he added.
Several aircraft flown by Crossfield now hang in flight museums and actor Scott Wilson portrayed him in the 1983 film adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s chronicle of the birth of the space programme, The Right Stuff.
In 1993, Crossfield was honored with the Nasa Distinguished Public Service Medal for his contributions to aeronautics research over a career that spanned five decades. — AFP