General
Joe Engle, Groundbreaking Test Pilot and NASA Astronaut, Dies at 91
He trained under Chuck Yeager and flew an X-15 rocket plane to an altitude of 53 miles. He later commanded the space shuttles Columbia and Discovery.
Joe Engle, the first person to venture to the edge of space in two different winged aircraft — the hypersonic, rocket-powered X-15 as an Air Force test pilot and the space shuttle as a NASA astronaut — died on July 10 at his home in Houston. He was 91.
His death was confirmed by his wife, Jeanie Engle.
Mr. Engle was an Air Force captain in 1962 when he was accepted into the Aerospace Research Pilot School, an advanced training ground for astronauts. It was run by Chuck Yeager, the renowned test pilot who had broken the sound barrier in a Bell Aircraft X-1 in 1947.
But Mr. Engle’s application to join a group of astronaut recruits was pulled by an Air Force officer, who told him that he was being selected for another role; he had to wait until school ended in 1963 to learn that he had been assigned to the X-15 program.
The reassignment “thrilled me to death,” he said in a 2004 NASA oral history interview, “because it was a chance to get into place, to fly into space and to do it with a winged airplane, with a stick and rudder.” And he was still young enough to reapply to NASA in the future.
Five experimental X-15 aircraft were flown 199 times by a dozen pilots from 1959 to 1968, each designed to reach the boundary of space, more than 50 miles above sea level, traveling at speeds of up to 4,520 miles per hour. They collected critical data on the effects of hypersonic aerodynamics on men and machines.
Mr. Engle was the last surviving X-15 pilot.
In 1963, during the first of his 16 X-15 missions, the aircraft’s electrical system malfunctioned, knocking out nearly all the instruments. But Mr. Engle adjusted, took control and glided the plane to a safe landing.
