RIP Scott Crossfield
CNN has confirmed the death of Scott Crossfield in the crash of a small aircraft in the mountains of Georgia at the age of 84.
As his bio indicates when anyone says “test pilot” you should think of Scott Crossfield and Chuck Yeager.
There’s a certain irony in the man who walked away from some of the most horrendous accidents in test flight history at the controls of some of the fastest aircraft ever built, died as the result of a crash in a Cessna, but he was still flying his own plane at 84.
8 comments
I thought the same thing when I heard of his death
Sad. I remember reading about Crossfield and Yeager in my childhood. Though I never had “the right stuff” medically even to get a private pilot’s license, I remember trying to imagine what flying such aircraft as they flew must feel like. Some may see irony in Crossfield’s death in a Cessna, but really, how else would he have preferred to die than in a plane, at a ripe old age? R.I.P., Scott Crossfield.
Slightly off-topic, did you see this piece about a pilot trapped for five hours in an F-22A (on the ground) by a faulty cockpit latch? Post is complete with pictures. Sigh.
Welcome, POP, your new digs are certainly more subdued.
In a lot of ways, it was fitting, but I think he would have preferred to have corkscrewed into the planet at Mach 2.
NASA has film of the two accidents he had in the X-15s. The one of the engine explosion is the scariest thing any pilot can imagine.
Regarding the F-22, what kind of idiot accepts a fighter that doesn’t have an external canopy release for the crash crew to use. That is a safety requirement. You will see the panels on all other fighters marked with a red “RESCUE” arrow. $200K to replace the canopy and clean up the cockpit, just criminal.
$200K to replace the canopy and clean up the cockpit, just criminal.
Agreed, but it’s still cheaper than leaving the pilot in there! I admit the image of those men taking chainsaws to the canopy made me raise my eyebrows… it’s not the tool one thinks of first for repairing sophisticated fighters.
They aren’t chainsaws, they are gas engined reciprocating saws, large jig saws if you will, with a 4 to 8 inch blade. The plastics used in the canopy gums up blades if you let them get hot, so you drip a fluid on them to lubricate the blade and cool them.
The rescue crews use metal cutting saws for everything, and the auto-spraying keeps down the danger of sparks.
I stand corrected. Actually, I sit… oh, never mind!
The only thing I’ve ever used to cut plastic of any sort is an X-acto knife, and the only plastic is the Delrin (or its equivalent) that they use for modern harpsichord plectra (and sometimes even for the jacks they ride on). In the old days, they used condor quills, and a good friend’s husband, who happens to be one of the best harpsichordists in the world, still insists on quills (typically turkey) for the feel and the sound. I have to admit, quills certainly are easier to work with the knife, but in use they break if you look at them crooked, and I’m a lazy guy. Voicing plectra is a slow job; it involves removing amounts measured in fractions of a millimeter with each knife stroke… which means that so far I haven’t had to use any fluid to cool the blade, though occasionally I have to cool my language. 🙂
I would think the canopy latch is something you’d never want to see malfunction. Are you saying, Bryan, that there is no external way to release the canopy in an emergency on an F-22? Was that an economy measure? or a stupidity measure?
Steve, I haven’t seen any rescue arrows on the fuselage of the F-22, so they aren’t there. How anyone who has ever designed a modern fighter could fail to put them in is beyond me. I can only assume that they are using composites for the external skin of the aircraft and didn’t include them in the molds.
This is going to result in change orders and extra costs on this already over-budget aircraft.
We don’t need this aircraft, nor do we need the joint strike fighter. What they add can be provided by improvements in the weapons systems and avionics.