Heroes!-----What it was like to fly the baddest airplane the world has ever known | Ars Technica

What it was like to fly the baddest airplane the world has ever known | Ars Technica

• “The X-15 was the most demanding airplane I’ve ever flown."

"...The US Air Force and NASA developed the X-15 to better understand flight under extreme conditions, including reentry through the Earth’s atmosphere. 
Yet more than half a century later, the exceptional plane still holds the world record for speed by a piloted, powered aircraft after William Knight flew the vehicle at Mach 6.70 in 1967.

The X-15 program also boasts an exclusive club of pilots—only a dozen aviators can claim to have flown the aircraft, which made 199 flights in total. 

(They were all men, given the era.) 

Another X-15 pilot, Joe Engle, also went on to a remarkable career at NASA. 

Slated to land on the Moon during Apollo 17 alongside Eugene Cernan, Engle got booted from that mission for largely political reasons so that a scientist, Harrison Schmitt, could be added to the final Apollo mission. 

Later, Engle would command the second space shuttle mission.

Engle is also the last of the X-15 pilots still alive. 

So to mark the 60th anniversary of the X-15’s first powered flight, during which Scott Crossfield took the plane up to 52,000 feet on September 17, 1959, Ars spoke with Engle about flying the baddest airplane the world has ever known. 

Spoiler alert: It was thrilling...."

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