The Original Jet Set : Pioneer Pilots Return to Edwards to Mark 50 Years Since Historic Flight

On a windy desert afternoon on Oct. 2, 1942, with the country less than a year into World War II, Air Force Col. Laurence (Bill) Craigie became one of the first two pilots to fly America into a new age in the first U.S. jet aircraft, the stubby Bell XP-59A Airacomet.

Standing Friday near the same spot at Edwards Air Force Base to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first American jet flight, the retired lieutenant general recalled his journey as nothing fancy.

“That wasn’t the purpose at that time. We were just feeling out the aircraft,” he said.

“It was a great thrill to be part of it. But it really wasn’t as emotional a flight as you might think,” added Craigie, 90, who became the country’s first military jet pilot by flying the aircraft for about 20 minutes after Bell Aircraft test pilot Bob Stanley’s two flights that day.

About 400 enthusiasts turned out Friday at Edwards, including Craigie and some of the men who witnessed those first flights, to celebrate America’s entry into the jet age and to see the future it spawned--symbolized by the B-2 Stealth bomber and F-117A Stealth fighter flying nearby.

“We believed this was the future at the time, and we were right. I think it’s absolutely fantastic,” said Jerry Henderson, a retired 42-year General Electric employee who helped build the engines for the first XP-59A. He now serves as president of the Jet Pioneers’ Assn., made up of those who took a conscious role--military secrecy barred many workers from knowledge of what they were doing--in preparing the first jet flight.

Henderson, who was working at a GE plant in Massachusetts, didn’t come at the time to Edwards, then known as Muroc Army Air Field.

The country’s first jet was built at Bell’s plant in Buffalo, N.Y., and then shipped by railroad to Edwards in September, 1942. Although the first official flight took place Oct. 2, Stanley, who died in 1977, actually lifted off briefly the day before during high-speed taxi tests.

Despite the breakthrough, the aircraft and its successors never made it into combat in World War II, though it paved the way for jets in the Korean War. The country, and even Craigie’s wife, didn’t learn of the first flights until they were formally announced 15 months later in January, 1944.

Along with the development of the atom bomb and the cracking of German military codes, the XP-59A was one of America’s best-kept secrets of World War II.

To conceal development of America’s first jet, Craigie and Stanley hit upon the idea of attaching a wooden propeller to the aircraft’s nose whenever it was parked outside its hangar at Edwards. The air intakes for its twin jet engines were covered with cloth.

America was the fourth country to fly a jet plane. Germany flew the first jet--the Heinkel He-178--in 1939 and used jets in combat in World War II. Italian and British jets flew in 1940 and 1941, respectively. But Craigie and his colleagues said they take pride in launching America’s premier role in jet aviation.

Retired Brig. Gen. Chuck Yeager, who became the first pilot to break the sound barrier when he flew the X-1 at Edwards in October, 1947, said the XP-59A gave the country “a quantum leap into aviation technology.”

Yeager repeated his supersonic flight Friday in an F-16 for the crowd.

Also Friday, the Air Force recreated the first flight of the XP-59A using a modern jet, the TA-37, that leisurely passed overhead, followed a few moments later by a roaring F-15 supersonic fighter that buzzed the grandstands and then soared vertically out of sight.

“The flame you lit here 50 years ago, we’re just trying to keep it lit and going forward,” Brig. Gen. Roy Bridges Jr., commander of the Flight Test Center at Edwards, told the crowd of old-timers and enthusiasts.

The original XP-59A is on display at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington.