William Barton Bridgeman (June 25, 1916 – September 29, 1968) was an American test pilot who broke aviation records while working for the

Douglas Aircraft Company The Douglas Aircraft Company was an American aerospace manufacturer based in Southern California. It was founded in 1921 by Donald Wills Douglas Sr. and later merged with McDonnell Aircraft in 1967 to form McDonnell Douglas; it then operated as ...

, testing experimental aircraft. In July 1951, the United States Navy announced the D-558-II Skyrocket piloted by Bridgeman had "attained the highest speed and altitude ever recorded by a piloted plane". Subscription required for full article. On August 15 of the same year, he set a world record with a speed of Mach 1.88 and an unofficial record height of . Bridgeman was born in

Ottumwa, Iowa Ottumwa ( ) is a city in and the county seat of Wapello County, Iowa, United States. The population was 25,529 at the time of the 2020 U.S. Census. Located in the state's southeastern section, the city is split into northern and southern halves b ...

. His father was a barnstormer and separated from his mother shortly after he was born. He was raised in Malibu, California by his paternal grandmother and majored in geology in college, receiving his Bachelor of Science degree from the University of California. He enlisted in the United States Navy to attend flight school at Pensacola. He graduated and was commissioned in 1941, and was sent to Pearl Harbor, where he experienced the Japanese attack on December 7. He flew

PBY The Consolidated PBY Catalina is a flying boat and amphibious aircraft that was produced in the 1930s and 1940s. In Canadian service it was known as the Canso. It was one of the most widely used seaplanes of World War II. Catalinas served w ...

flying boats in the New Guinea/Australia sector, then four-engined PB4Y-2 Privateer patrol bombers on a tour of operations with VP/VPB-109 (the "Reluctant Raiders"). He was reassigned afterwards to training activities stateside from August 1944 until the end of the war, then spent two years flying transport missions from Pearl Harbor to the West Coast. Upon leaving the Navy in 1947, Bridgeman joined Southwest Airways (a local West Coast airline that eventually became Pacific Air Lines, not to be confused with today's Southwest) to fly DC-3s on the San Francisco-Seattle route. Bored with the airline routine, he left in 1949 to join Douglas as a production test pilot to certify

A-1 Skyraider The Douglas A-1 Skyraider (formerly known as the AD Skyraider) is an American single-seat attack aircraft in service from 1946 to the early 1980s. The Skyraider had an unusually long career, remaining in front-line service well into the Jet Age ...

s off the assembly line before their delivery to the Navy. A few months later, he accepted an offer to take over the test program of the D-558 II Skyrocket, one of the world's first supersonic research aircraft. Bridgeman converted to jet aircraft on the F-80 in early 1950 and eventually conducted a very successful test program with the Skyrocket, collecting data on the behavior of

swept-wing A swept wing is a wing that angles either backward or occasionally forward from its root rather than in a straight sideways direction. Swept wings have been flown since the pioneer days of aviation. Wing sweep at high speeds was first investigat ...

aircraft over a wide envelope of load factors and

Mach number Mach number (M or Ma) (; ) is a dimensionless quantity in fluid dynamics representing the ratio of flow velocity past a boundary to the local speed of sound. It is named after the Moravian physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach. : \mathrm = \frac ...

s deep in the supersonic range. In May 1951, he broke the world speed record, achieving a speed of Mach 1.72, then broke the record again, reaching Mach 1.88 (1,245 mph, 1,992 km/h) the next month. Immediately afterwards, he broke the world altitude record with on the Skyrocket's final flight before delivery to NACA. During this campaign, Bridgeman was one of the first pilots to encounter the phenomenon of

inertia coupling In aeronautics, inertia coupling, also referred to as inertial coupling and inertial roll coupling, is a potentially catastrophic phenomenon of high-speed flight which caused the loss of aircraft and pilots before the design features to counter it ...

, a flight hazard that would dominate high-speed aircraft research for much of the 1950s. He was on the cover of the April 27, 1953, ''Time'' magazine. He appeared as a contestant on the '' You Bet Your Life'' radio program on October 29, 1952. He went on to fly other Douglas test programs including the

X-3 Stiletto The Douglas X-3 Stiletto was a 1950s United States experimental jet aircraft with a slender fuselage and a long tapered nose, manufactured by the Douglas Aircraft Company. Its primary mission was to investigate the design features of an aircraft ...

, a promising but ultimately unsuccessful design. In 1955, he recounted his experiences test-flying the Skyraider and Skyrocket in a successful memoir, ''The Lonely Sky'', written with Jacqueline Hazard, whom he married shortly after the book was published. He was an astronaut candidate for the United States Air Force Man In Space Soonest program, but the program was cancelled on August 1, 1958, and replaced by NASA's Project Mercury. Bridgeman eventually moved to Grumman Aircraft where he conducted test programs of commercial aircraft, then pursued a career in commercial real estate. In September 1968, he was the pilot of a routine air-taxi flight from Los Angeles to Santa Catalina Island when his Grumman Goose amphibian went down in the Pacific Ocean. His body was never found.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Bridgeman, Bill 1916 births 1968 deaths Accidental deaths in California American aviation record holders American test pilots Aviators from Iowa Aviators killed in aviation accidents or incidents in the United States Flight altitude record holders People from Ottumwa, Iowa United States Navy pilots of World War II Use mdy dates from August 2011 Victims of aviation accidents or incidents in 1968 Military personnel from Iowa