Robert White 1935-2010

[Troy Tempest]

The American pilot who winged his way into space

Robert White was the first pilot to exceed Mach 6, or six times the speed of sound, in 1962 when he flew an X-15 research plane nearly 100 kilometres above Earth and then landed it on a dry lake. White was a 38-year-old US Air Force major and test pilot at Edwards Air Force Base when he joined the elite ranks of Americans in space. But Mercury astronauts Alan Shepard, Virgil Grissom, John Glenn and Scott Carpenter went into space seated atop ballistic missiles and returned in capsules that parachuted into the ocean.

White did it as the pilot of a rocket-powered North American X-15 research plane, flying nearly 100 kilometres above the Earth's surface and completing a conventional landing on Rogers Dry Lake at Edwards Air Force Base. It earned him the distinction of being the first man to earn a winged astronaut rating by piloting a plane in space. White, a decorated veteran of WWII and the Korean and Vietnam wars, died last week in Orlando, Florida. He was 85.

Jim Young, chief historian at the Air Force Flight Test Centre at Edwards Air force Base, said White was "one of the major icons in aerospace history...It's been so many years since his achievements, but they were extraordinary and remain extraordinary to this day." A 1954 graduate of what is now the USAF Test Pilot School at Edwards, White became the first lead air force project pilot for the X-15 flight research programme that was launched by NASA, the air force and the navy. The first flight was in 1958.

During an eight-month span in 1961, White achieved three milestones. on 7.3.61 he became the first pilot to exceed Mach 4. On 23.6.61 he became the first pilot to exceed Mach 5, and on 9.11.61, during the first full-throttle flight of the X-15, he became the first pilot to exceed Mach 6, attaining a top speed of 6590 kmh. Then on 17.7.62 White flew the X-15 to an altitude of almost 100 kilometres above the Earth. "This is a fantastic view" he reportedly radioed while flying weightless.

He said after landing that it was too cloudy to see the ocean, "but I could see the coastline of the western Unites States from well above San Francisco Bay down into Mexico." At a 1962 ceremony at the White House, President John F Kennedy presented the nation's most treasured aviation award, the Robert J Collier Trophy, to White and three fellow X-15 pilots. The X-15 was the forerunner of the space shuttle, which first went into orbital flight in 1981.

"They were flying during a remarkable period in the history of flight," Young said of the X-15 pilots. "When Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier at Mach 1 in the Bell X-1 in 1947, he flew at about 1125 kilometres per hour". Fifteen years later, White flew six times faster.