Carl Bellinger, Test Pilot, Dies
Carl Bellinger, a veteran test pilot who flew at Edwards Air Force Base in the days when it was known as Muroc AFB, has died at Antelope Valley Hospital in Lancaster after being injured in a car accident.
He was 73 and died last Monday of injuries he suffered March 17.
A 1938 Yale graduate who began flying as a teen-ager, Bellinger first went to work at Republic Aviation in Farmingdale, N.Y., as a test pilot. He flew the prototypal P-47s and by 1949 had become chief experimental test pilot and then manager of the Farmingdale test site.
He was one of the first pilots to use an ejection seat in an emergency situation, when the plane he was flying exploded over Long Island Sound in 1948. He bailed out at 7,000 feet and landed in the water.
Bellinger was then assigned to test operations at Muroc, where Chuck Yeager, the first flier to break the sound barrier, remembered him in his autobiography as an “excellent civilian pilot.”
Bellinger retired in 1976, and had been publications chairman for Cockpit, a publication for the Society for Experimental Test Pilots.
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