Book Review: Always Another Dawn

I'd mentioned reading this book a few weeks ago, and even mentioned finishing it weekend before last, but have been too occupied with cleaning up after some small matter to write about it.  So here goes.

Published in 1960, AAD is the autobiography of WWII pilot and 50's test pilot Scott Crossfield, up through the first dawning rays of the Space Age.  As such, the most surprising parts of the book are about America's other space program, which culminated in the X-15 rocket plane.  The book ends with him wondering which direction the U.S. space efforts would take, towards the Mercury program and capsules, or remaining with the X-series wings-and-wheels approach.  Here in 2018 of course we know how things rolled out, but getting the insider's view circa 1960 is fascinating.

There are innumerable other small insights into how the X-series both succeeded and failed over the course of the 1950s.  The Air Force's X-1 of course was a raging success, along with the Navy's D-558 program.  But somehow the R&D momentum stalled out with the X-2 and X-3, leaving the U.S. aerospace industry starved for hard data in the Mach 2+ arena.  Crossfield was there in the thick of these goings-on, and when he got wind of the early design stages of what would become the X-15, he carefully positioned himself to be the main pilot-engineer on the team, in order to guide this ultimate airplane's development around those pitfalls.  All along the way, where Chuck Yeager's autobiography gives the seat-of-the-pants stick-and-rudder USAF man's viewpoint, we get the NACA engineer-who-flies viewpoint in Crossfield's book.  It's a great way of seeing the situation from two completely different sides.  It also spells out for the reader that these planes were emphatically not about daredevil pilots setting records, even though that gets all the press and is mostly what the public sees, but were about them being flying testbeds to sort out how to build the next generations of high-performance production aircraft.

Back to the autobiographical aspects.  While the X-15 story takes up the last 40% of the book, there are the requisite air-struck teenager learns to fly stories, WWII pilot stories, post-war lull stories, etc.  All of these tales are good.  For example, in his first solo flight, Crossfield shows exactly why he would later become a great test pilot by debugging a mysterious banging noise on the plane.  In a more grim note, we get a glimpse of the mindset that would ultimately lead to his 2006 death in – what else – an airplane crash.

By all means, read Yeager's autobiography.  By all means, read (or just watch) The Right Stuff.  But after all that, take a look at the other side of the coin and read Crossfield's Always Another Dawn.  It gives an entirely different view of the same era, and will give a reader fresh insights into this wildly creative time.