X-15: A personal recollection from the summer of 1969.
My personal love affair with the X-15 began when the program was still active, but I would likely not have known that at the time.
Attempting to satiate an utterly insatiable interest in all things that flew, my parents bought me the fabulous coffee table book Aircraft, Aircraft by John W. R. Taylor published in 1967. It must have been close to a first edition. Taylor had set himself no less a task than trying to capture representative images from every moment in the history of aviation with mercifully little text to clutter things up for six year old.
Although I have long since lost track of that marvellous book, of course, I am pretty sure the opening pages showed some of Leonardo da Vinci’s sketches of flying machines which, while plausible, likely were never actually built or flown. Taylor went on to show the hot air balloon flights of the Montgolfiers in Paris, then the pre-Wright, controlled gliding flights of Otto Lilienthal and then, of course, the iconic images of the Wrights at Kitty Hawk. Then came all the post-Wright developmental prototypes and then to the aircraft of World War I and II and then eventually onto jet age aircraft.
I dog-eared every page of that book with my endless, almost compulsive flipping through it over and over again. But the most dog-eared pages of all were the ones right near the end which featured the longest, blackest, pointiest, coolest and most utterly intoxicating aircraft I had ever seen or have ever seen since.
It was, of course, the X-15.
Our family passed through Washington, DC in the summer of 1969. We were late leaving on a very long road trip and its merciless deadlines really should have dictated we do nothing but make haste down the road. However, my late father insisted on a visit to the National Air and Space Museum or at least the forerunner of that before the NASM was housed in its beautiful, dedicated facility on the National Mall which opened in 1976.
What I recall for sure is that based on my obsessive page flipping with Aircraft, Aircraft there was one plane above the Spirit of St. Louis, the Wright Flyer and all others which I wanted to see — the X-15. Memory is a funny thing, though. I was sure I had actually seen it. I have a clear recollection of ‘Rocket Row’ in front of the Smithsonian’s Arts & Industries Building. I also recollect seeing the artifacts inside, including the X-15, and it was all that I had imagined it would be. It’s a story I have told all my life.
I was wrong.
I recently enquired with the kind and courteous curators at the Smithsonian who said, in part: “Our X-15 was first displayed in August of 1976, just a few weeks after we opened. Although some of our artifacts, like the Spirit of St. Louis and the Wright Flyer, were previously displayed in another Smithsonian building and may have been on exhibit in 1969, the X-15 was not among them.”
I’ll just have to go back and see what I now know I never saw nearly 50 years ago.
©2018 Terence C. Gannon
