High as in altitude. Wandering through the science section of the New York Times in the dying days of October, “A Quiet Trip to the Ozone Hole” caught my attention. It’s about the Perlan Project, which is building a pressurized glider that will ride the standing wave created by the Andes Mountains to 60,000 feet.
Riding the top of the altitude-sapped wave, the plan is to catch the polar vortex, “circulating winds that act like a giant cyclone during the austral winter, delivering a strong uplift.” That should carry the glider, whose wings span 84 feet, to 90,000 feet, where it can study the ozone hole, and set a new altitude record while doing it.
Learning about this private project and existence of the “polar vortex” drove my airplane geek meter into the red. But it didn’t come close to meeting (in print and through the accompanying videos) the project’s chairman, Einar Enevoldson. He started his aviation career by learning to fly gliders in 1947, the year Chuck Yeager, broke the sound barrier.
An Air Force pilot doing an exchange tour with the Royal Air Force, he attended the Empire Test Pilot’s School in Farnborough, England. He went on to fly some truly remarkable aircraft between 1968 and 1986 as a NASA research pilot at the Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base. Among them were the YF-12 (predecessor of the SR-71), the X-24 lifting body, and the funky scissor-wing AD-1 that made its last eight flights in 1982 at EAA Oshkosh.
As I read, my right brain screamed, Why have you never before heard about Einar Enevoldson? My logical left brain replied with another question: Other than the few who are face-to-face friends, how many mass-market test pilots can you name, and how many of them are the World War II-era peers of Yeager?
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