Author Archive for Tom Crouch

The Long, Lonely Leap

Published by Tom Crouch on August 16, 2010 in Aviation and History.
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August 16, 2010 will mark the 50th anniversary of one of the most memorable aeronautical moments of my adolescence. I can still remember seeing the cover of Life magazine for August 29, 1960 on the newsstand in Medway, Ohio. There was this small figure, clad in a green pressure suit and white helmet, falling toward the sold cloud deck, almost 32 km (20 miles) below. It was one of those images that takes your breath away.

Capt. Joseph W. Kittinger began his “long, lonely leap” by taking a single step out of the open gondola of his Excelsior III balloon drifting 31,333 meters (102, 800 feet) over New Mexico. Trailing a stabilizing drogue chute, he fell from the top of the atmosphere for 4 minutes, 37 seconds, until his main parachute opened at 5,334 meters (17,500 feet). In the thin upper atmosphere near the beginning of his free-fall, he was traveling at over 965 km (600 miles) per hour. As he dropped into the denser atmosphere near 15,240 meters (50,000 feet), his speed slowed to a mere 420 km (250 miles) per hour.

Kittinger

On Aug. 16, 1960, Kittinger stepped from a balloon-supported gondola at the altitude of 31,333 meters (102,800 feet). In freefall for 4.5 minutes at speeds up to 614 mph and temperatures as low as -94 degrees Fahrenheit, he opened his parachute at 5,334 meters (17,500 feet). (U.S. Air Force photo)

“There is a hostile sky above me,” he told ground controllers before the jump. “Man will never conquer space. He may live in it, but he will never conquer it. The sky above is void and very black, and very hostile.” If his pressure suit failed at this altitude, he would lose consciousness within 12 seconds and be dead in two minutes. As it was, he suffered a painfully swollen hand when one of his gloves failed during the jump. Eight minutes after his main parachute opened, he was back on solid ground in the White Sands Missile Range, having set three world records: the highest ascent in an open gondola, the longest free fall, and the longest parachute descent. Fifty years later, no one has ever jumped from a higher altitude.

That moment, while memorable, was only one episode in a long and heroic career. Born on July 27, 1928, Joe Kittinger grew up near Orlando, Florida. He came to aviation via a familiar path that began with a flight aboard a Ford Trimotor with his father, followed by a few years of intensive model aircraft building, culminating in hours spent learning to fly a Piper Cub owned by a returning veteran. After two years at the University of Florida, he enlisted in the USAF and received his wings and second lieutenant’s bars at Las Vegas, Nevada in March 1950.

While on his first flying assignment in Germany, Kittinger was accepted as a test pilot flying F-84G fighters for NATO. That experience led to his next assignment: a team led by Col. John Paul Stapp at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and the Aero Medical Field Laboratory, Holloman AFB, New Mexico, investigating new techniques and equipment designed for use in high altitude, high speed aircraft. Kittinger tested a variety of partial pressure suits, “flew” to altitudes of over 30,480 meters (100,000 feet) in pressure chambers, and served as a test subject for experiments involving his reaction to everything from claustrophobia to extreme temperatures.

Ironically, the balloon, the oldest type of flying craft, was also the natural choice to carry instruments and test pilots to extreme altitudes. During the first flight of Project Man High, on June 2, 1957, Kittinger reached an altitude of 29,260 meters (96,000 feet) in a 3-by-7 foot sealed gondola dangling beneath an enormous helium-filled balloon made of plastic film only two-thousandths of an inch thick.

Joe Kittinger

Joseph Kittinger next to the Excelsior gondola on June 2, 1957

His next assignment was as test director for Project Excelsior, which would test the equipment and techniques that would enable a pilot to parachute from extreme altitudes and survive.  He made his first high altitude parachute jump from an Excelsior balloon at an altitude of 23,286 meters (76,400 feet) in November 1959. It nearly became his last when the shroud lines of a small stabilizing parachute wrapped around his neck. He was able to free himself when his emergency parachute opened at 3,657 meters (12,000 feet). Three weeks later he made a jump from 23,286 meters (74,000 feet) without incident. Then came the unforgettable jump from 31,333 meters (102, 800 feet). For his contributions to the Excelsior program, President Eisenhower awarded Kittinger the Harmon International Trophy for ballooning achievements.

Kittinger spent another two years conducting high altitude balloon research with the Stargazer project, which carried astronomers to high altitudes, before embarking on the first of his three combat tours in Vietnam. His first two tours were with the Air Commandos, flying Douglas A-26 attack aircraft. During his final tour as vice-commander of a fighter wing operating the F-4D Phantom II, he scored a victory over a MiG-21. On May 11, 1972, just four days before the end of his third tour, Kittinger was shot down and spent the next 11 months as a prisoner of war.

Retiring as a colonel in 1978, Joe Kittinger most certainly did not retire from flying. Returning to his native Florida, he flew balloons and antique biplanes for his own air show, Rosie O’Grady’s Flying Circus. He began entering, and winning, gas balloon races and events in 1982, and quickly emerged as a major international competitor. He won the re-established U.S. James Gordon Bennett Balloon Race four times — 1982, 1984, 1985, and 1988, retiring the Cup. Kittinger set a world record for the longest distance flown in a 1,000 cubic meter (35,300 cubic foot) balloon, traveling 3,220 km (2,001 miles) from Las Vegas, Nevada to Franklinville, New York in 72 hours. He combined another world record for the longest distance flown with a 3,000 cubic meter (105,944 cubic foot) balloon with the first solo balloon flight across the Atlantic, traveling 5,701 km (3,543 miles) from Caribou, Maine to Montenotte, Italy, in 86 hours.

Joseph Kittinger has enjoyed an extraordinary career. His decorations include the Silver Star with Oak Leaf Cluster; Legion of Merit with Oak Leaf Cluster; the Distinguished Flying Cross with five Oak Leaf Clusters; a Bronze Star with “V” device and two Oak Leaf Clusters; the Harmon International Trophy; and two Montgolfier Diplomas for achievement in the air. He has logged over 11,000 hours of flight time in 62 different aircraft types. I was especially pleased when the National Air and Space Museum honored him with the Museum’s Trophy for lifetime achievement in 2008. Aerospace pioneer, test pilot, combat aviator, and record-holding sport pilot, Joseph W. Kittinger, Jr., is a genuine American hero.

Crouch and Kittinger

Senior Curator in the Aeronautics Division, Tom Crouch (left) and Joseph Kittinger (right) at the National Air and Space Museum's Trophy Award Ceremony.

Tom D. Crouch is the senior curator in the Aeronautics Division of the National Air and Space Museum.

Runaway Balloons

Published by Tom Crouch on October 21, 2009 in Aviation, History and Stories.
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The afternoon of October 15, 2009 was one of those rare moments when Americans from coast-to-coast were riveted to their television sets by a news story unfolding in real time.  Six year old Falcon Heene was reported to be trapped aboard a helium balloon floating across the Colorado landscape at 7000 feet. The image on the screen was surreal, a strange craft looking like a cross between a Mylar grocery store balloon and a flying saucer, with a small circular structure on the bottom that appeared to be just large enough to house a small child. When the balloon came naturally to earth after a fifty mile flight, however, the boy was not aboard. Had he fallen to his death somewhere along the way? What appeared to be a tragedy in the making came to a happy ending when young Falcon was found hiding in a box where he had hidden to avoid the consequences of having accidently released his father’s experimental balloon. Ultimately, however, matters grew even more complex when local authorities launched an investigation to determine if the entire thing had been a hoax staged by the family.

I was one of very few television viewers who knew that runaway balloons, even runaway balloons with children on board, were big news a century and a half ago. Balloonist Timothy Winchester disappeared in 1855 during an attempt to fly across Lake Erie. Ira Thurston met his end over the same body of water on the afternoon of August 16, 1858 when he was accidently carried aloft by a balloon he was trying to deflate. Even the most experienced aeronauts occasionally fell victim to runaway balloons. Washington Donaldson vanished while attempting to fly across Lake Michigan in 1875. Four years later, seventy-one year old John Wise, who had completed 463 ascents since he first took to the air in 1835, disappeared while attempting the same feat.

Few of those tragedies captured public interest like the accidental aerial voyage of eight year old Martha Ann Harvey and her three year old brother David. The story begins with balloonist Samuel Wilson, who ascended from Centralia, Illinois on the morning of October 23, 1858 and flew twenty miles to a landing in the top of a tree owned by farmer Benjamin Harvey. The farmer and his neighbors assisted Wilson in extricating his balloon, after which Harvey climbed into the basket, hoping to make a tethered ascent.  When he proved too heavy, he placed his three children in the car. The father instructed his oldest daughter to climb out when the balloon still refused to rise, leaving the two youngest children in the basket alone.

Startled to find the balloon rising at last, the inexperienced ground crew lost their grip on the tether line. A dangling grappling hook tore through a rail fence as the craft climbed out of the farmyard. The distraught parents stood helplessly by as Martha’s cries of “Pull me down father!” grew ever fainter. Horsemen immediately set out to alert the countryside, while a party of men and boys tried unsuccessfully to follow the drifting balloon.

The news created a sensation in Centralia. The aeronaut assured everyone who would listen that the balloon would return to earth of its own accord within an hour or two, probably within thirty miles of the take off point. His words were of little comfort, however, as night fell with the children still somewhere aloft.

At 3 o’clock the following morning, Mr. Ignatio Atchison stepped out on his porch to observe Donati’s Comet.  Instead, he saw “an immense spectre rising from the top of a tree twenty yards away.” Approaching closer, he heard a faint voice: “Come here and let us down. We are almost frozen.” The lost had been found.

News of the rescue was announced in area churches that Sunday to “ecstasies of joy.”   The children returned home the next day to be greeted by the discharge of cannon “and a general jubilee.” William Matthews, the local daguerreotype artist, captured an image of the young hero and heroine in their Sunday best. An engraved copy of the photo appeared in the illustrated newspapers of the era, spreading the story of the balloon adventure of the Harvey children across the nation. As in the case of Falcon Heene, all’s well that ends well.

Tom Crouch is Senior Curator for Aeronautics at the National Air and Space Museum.

On This Spot …

Published by Tom Crouch on March 30, 2009 in Aviation, Hidden Treasures and History.
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The millions of visitors who pass through the doors of the National Air and Space Museum each year come to see the real thing, the actual air and space craft that shaped history – from the world’s first airplane to the back-up hardware for the latest robot spacecraft on its way to explore another world. Few if any of our visitors, however, realize that aerospace history was made on the site of the National Air and Space Museum one hundred and forty eight years ago.

On June 16, 1861, the Civil War had been underway for just two months. The first major battle of the war, which would take place near a quiet stream called Bull Run, 30 miles southwest of Washington, was still a little over a month away. At the time, the Columbia Armory stood where the National Air and Space Museum is now located, east of 7th street, at the extreme southeastern tip of the 52 acre plot then known as the Smithsonian Grounds.

The neighborhood was far from being the tourist friendly area of today. The odiferous City Canal carried Washington’s sewage and waste water along the northern edge of the Mall and into the Potomac. Visitors were warned to beware of thieves while out for an evening stroll along the trails that wound through the trees and shrubs covering the marshy Smithsonian Grounds. For over two decades Mary Ann Hall had operated one of Washington’s best known houses of prostitution just one block to the east. Until the abolition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia in 1850, Robey’s notorious slave pen stood one block west of the Armory site, at the corner of 8th and B Street (now Independence Avenue).

Built in 1856, the Columbia Armory housed the District of Columbia’s store of small arms and other military equipment. The Washington Gas Light Company generating plant was immediately east of the Armory, along with a large domed gasometer, or storage tank for the coal gas produced by the plant. It was the combination of the available work space at the Armory and city gas next door that led Smithsonian Secretary Joseph Henry to instruct Thaddeus Sobieski Constantine Lowe to inflate his balloon on this site.

Thaddeus Lowe

Thaddeus Lowe

A New Hampshire man, Lowe (1832-1913), had emerged as one of the nation’s best-known aerial showmen since his first flight in 1857. He made headlines with a giant balloon exhibited in both New York and Philadelphia, with which he hoped to fly the Atlantic. When that plan fell through, and on the advice of Joseph Henry, his scientific advisor, Lowe made a long flight from Cincinnati to Unionville, SC aboard the balloon Enterprise, on April 19, 1861.  Landing only a week after the firing on Fort Sumter, the aeronaut was taken into custody by newly minted Confederates, and was released only after locals recognized his face from accounts of his transatlantic plans published in the illustrated national newspapers of the day. 

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