A great scene - except it never really happened!
I had my first doubts about Wolfe's account when I discovered that Chalmers "Slick" Goodlin was a Pittsburgh area native, born in nearby Greensburg on January 2nd, 1923 and raised just down the road in New Alexandria, where he learned to fly as a teen (and legend has it he would sometimes deliver newspapers from the open cockpit of a plane). A real Pittsburgher wouldn't think twice about squeezing their employer for every nickel they could get, but something didn't ring true about the rest of the story: Goodlin had already agreed to make the flight - a Pittsburgher would sooner root for the Browns than back out of a deal!
In late 1940 with WWII well underway in Europe and the U.S. still on the sidelines, a very young Chalmers Goodlin headed north to join the Royal Canadian Air Force in hopes of making it into combat over England. Goodlin joined the RCAF on his 18th birthday, picked up the nickname "Slick" for his flying skills and made his way to England as a pilot instructor. In late 1942, well after Pearl Harbor, the Navy somehow discovered a U.S. citizen flying for the Canadians in England, and asked him to return to the U.S. to train as a test pilot. Goodlin ended up in Florida flight testing most every plane the Navy flew - and thinking being away from the action wasn't as much fun as he had thought.
And then in December of 1943, in the middle of the biggest war ever, with less than 1 year of service, Goodlin was somehow released from the Navy to become a test pilot for Bell Aircraft. Exactly how that happened is open to speculation, but it probably had a lot to do with Larry Bell.
Bell had worked his way up through the Martin and Consolidated aircraft companies, eventually becoming a vice president. In 1935 Consolidated decided to relocate from Buffalo, New York to California, and Bell took the opportunity to start his own company in New York. Bell knew lots of rich and powerful people, including General Hap Arnold - commander of the US Army Air Force (USAAF) during WWII. Arnold had seen the Gloster Meteor flying in Britian and was convinced that jets were the future of air warfare; he gave Larry Bell the job of building the first US jet and by late 1942 it was flying out of a tiny airfield in the California desert - a place that would someday be Edwards Air Force Base. Which is a long way of saying that if Larry Bell needed a test pilot in 1943, he would have no problem springing one from the Navy.
Fast forward to 1946 and Goodlin was one of a very few test pilots at Bell Aircraft, second only to Jack Woolams. Bell had a contract to build the XS-1 - a rocket powered research plane designed to break the sound barrier - in a joint project between the civilian National Advisory Council for Aeronautics (NACA) and the US Army Air Force.
The project quickly become a den of infighting. The NACA saw it as a giant science experiment; they had the planes wired with sensors and planned to generate mountains of incremental data over dozens of flights. Bell Aircraft was expecting to earn a pile of money for performing the test flights. And the USAAF, facing massive post-war budget cuts, just wanted to take over the flying as quickly as possible.
Then while the project was just starting, Jack Woolams crashed his P-39 air racer into Lake Ontario at 400+ mph while preparing for the Cleveland Air Races. Overnight, 24 year old Chalmers Goodlin became the lead test pilot for the XS-1, making a handshake deal with Larry Bell to take over Woolams contract, which included a hefty bonus for breaking the sound barrier. Its not clear how much the bonus actually was; the often quoted $150,000 figure may have included other flying Woolams was to perform - and of course there was a chance Goodlin might not live to collect it. But still it was a lot of money for 1947.
Over the next 8 months, Goodlin would make 26 flights in the two XS-1s, including the first powered flights, eventually pushing out to mach 0.8 in the spring of 1947. And then things got really interesting. In the midst of the constant wrangling over how many test flights Bell would perform, in July of 1947 the USAAF became the US Air Force. By August, Goodlin was out and Yeager was making his first flight in the XS-1. You can draw your own conclusions, but here are mine: having Air Force personnel break the sound barrier became an obvious way to give a bit of credibility to the fledgling service, and help establish the careers of the senior officers running the project. Hap Arnold had retired in 1946, greatly reducing Larry Bell's ability to pull strings, and the hefty bonus promised to Goodlin became a handy excuse for canceling Bell's contract. Even if Goodlin had offered to fly for free he wasn't getting the flight.
So if you see an X-1 on a contest table without the "Glamorous Glennis" decal take a closer look; it might not be a mistake!
