| Edwards Air Force Base300,000 acres of sand, scrub, wind, and heatmay be the most famous military installation in the world. Virtually every warplane that has gone into service with the United States Air Force was flight-tested there, on California's Mojave Desert. There, too, a pilot first broke the sound barrier. And it was there that the shuttle Columbia touched down, the first piloted aircraft to return from a flight in space. |
| But before his name was attached to the facility he knew as Muroc Army Air Field, Glen Edwards was a warm and handsome man who loved women, flying, dancing, and skiing and whose favorite song was "To Each His Own." From a hardscrabble farm in the Great Depression, he joined the U.S. Army in 1941 and served bravely and well at the controls of an A-20 light bomber in North Africa and Italy. When World War II ended, he was a test pilot at Wright Fieldthe best of the best. The assignment was at least as dangerous as flying against German fighters and flak guns, but Edwards relished the work. "Days are not wasted," he wrote in his diary, "if we can 'Get 'em in the blue!'" |
| Postwar, the United States saw itself as the free world's bastion against an inexorably expanding Soviet Union, with nuclear weaponsand the planes to deliver themas freedom's shield. Aircraft designers were transforming their art into a science, as were the pilots who tested those designs, but the pace of change was too rapid for them. Every aircraft was a gamble for the company that built it, for the military service that paid for it, and for the crews who flew it. |
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