Everything You Need To Know (And Probably Don’t) About The X-15 Flight Shown In The Opening Scene Of “First Manâ€The Aviationist
David Cenciotti
Nov. 14, 2018
There is much more in Neil Armstrong’s flight, the longest X-15 flight in the entire research program, than a movie can show.
If you haven’t done it already, I would suggest you to reserve a few hours and watch “First Manâ€.
The movie opens with a pretty intense scene showing Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) piloting a North American X-15 during a test flight. Although the hypersonic rocket-powered research aircraft built in three examples and capable of Mach +6 speed appears only for a few minutes at the beginning of the movie, I think most of our readers will find it interesting to know something more about the opening scene’s flight.
Beware: spoilers ahead.
The first question that came to my mind during the movie were: what was the goal of that test flight? and, did the test go exactly as depicted in the movie?
In order to find an answer to these questions I asked some help to Paul Raveling, who runs an extremely insightful website at sierrafoot.org, with a section completely dedicated to the X-15 Hypersonic History. I was already in contact with Paul, who had provided a lot of interesting information about Delamar Dry Lake and the other emergency landing sites for the X-15, so it was natural to me to ask him for additional details.
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https://theaviationist.com/2018/11/14/everything-you-need-to-know-and-probably-dont-about-the-x-15-flight-shown-in-the-opening-scene-of-first-man/