Paul F. Bikle; Led Advanced Flight Research

Paul F. Bikle, the engineer who guided many of the nation’s most advanced flight programs and whose avocations included setting world records in gliders, has died.

Bikle, who oversaw NASA’s X-15 program as director of the Dryden Flight Research Facility, was 75 when he died Saturday at a son’s home in Salinas. He had been staying there after suffering a heart attack at his own home in Lancaster.

“The aerospace community lost a real expert,” said Milt Thompson, chief of engineering at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. “He was the foremost person in flight research.”

He headed the Dryden facility at Edwards Air Force Base in the high desert north of Los Angeles from 1959 until retiring in 1971.

During his tenure, he oversaw such programs as the X-15 rocket, which pioneered technology later employed to build and fly space shuttles. He also directed the XB-70 research bomber, the lunar landing research vehicle and a series of wingless lifting bodies, forerunners of the shuttle design.

Bikle piloted sailplanes and held the world’s altitude record for soaring--46,267 feet--for more than 20 years.

Bikle graduated from the University of Detroit with a degree in aeronautical engineering. His early flight-testing work included the B-29 bomber at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio in 1940.

Bikle was chosen to head Dryden after a 20-year career in aeronautical engineering with the Air Force. Before joining NASA, he had served as technical director of the flight test center at Edwards.