The story of Chuck Yeager's wild ride in the Bell X-1A
By Dr. James Young

___The time was December of 1953. It was a time when, as Scott Crossfield later recalled, Edwards AFB could be compared to “an Indianapolis of the air.” Indeed, it was even more than that, he concluded, because it was “an Indianapolis without rules” where he and his peers “lived with the feeling that everything we were doing was something that probably had never been attempted or even thought of before.”
___ It was an age when the limits of time, space, and the imagination were being dramatically expanded and, while now recalled as a kind of “Golden Age” by many of those who lived through it, it was also a time when the hazards encountered in flight testing were far more commonplace than they are today.