"In Contrails over the Mojave" George Marrett takes off where Tom
Wolfe's "The Right Stuff" ended in 1963. Marrett started the Air
Force Test Pilot School at Edwards AFB only two weeks after the
school's commander, Col. Chuck Yeager, ejected from a Lockheed
NF-104 trying to set a world altitude record. He describes life as
a space cadet experiencing 15 Gs in a human centrifuge, zero-G
maneuvers in a KC-135 "Vomit Comet," and a flight to 80,000 feet in
the F-104A Starfighter. After graduating from Yeager's "Charm
School," he was assigned to the Fighter Branch of Flight Test
Operations, where he flew the latest fighter aircraft and chased
other test aircraft as they set world speed and altitude records.
Marrett takes readers into the cockpit as he "goes vertical" in
a T-38 Talon, completes high-G maneuvers in an F-4C Phantom, and
conducts wet-runway landing tests in the accident-prone F-111A
Aardvark. He writes about Col. "Silver Fox" Stephens setting a
world speed record in the YF-12 Blackbird and Bob Gilliland testing
speed stalls in the SR-71 spy plane, but he also relives stories of
crashes that killed test pilot friends. He recounts dead-sticking a
T-38 to a landing on Rogers Dry Lake after a twin-engine failure
and conducting dangerous tail hook barrier testing in a fighter jet
without a canopy. A mysterious UFO sighting in the night sky above
the Mojave Desert, known as "The Edwards Encounter," also receives
Marrett's attention. Whether the author is assessing a new
aircraft's performance or describing the experiences of test pilots
as they routinely faced the possibility of death, this look at the
golden age of flight testing both thrills and informs.
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