Edwards Air Force Base

Aviation pioneers and enthusiasts will gather May 9 to mark 50 years of American jet-powered flight at a dinner sponsored by the Flight Test Historical Foundation of Edwards Air Force Base. Honorees will include America's first military jet pilot, Lt. Gen. Laurence C. (Bill) Craigie, who flew a Bell Aircraft XP-59A from Muroc Army Air Field--now Edwards Air Force Base--on Oct. 2, 1942, and British Air Commodore Sir Frank Whittle, who was issued a patent for the jet engine in 1930.

To the cognoscenti, Edward H. Fickett was the award-winning architect behind the Port of Los Angeles, La Costa Resort & Spa, Edwards Air Force Base and tens of thousands of airy, affordable tract homes throughout Southern California. To Better Homes & Gardens, he was the " Frank Lloyd Wright of the '50s" -- a visionary who designed mansions for the likes of Joan Crawford and Groucho Marx, and more modest accommodations for regular folks. But to Joycie Fickett, he was simply Eddie, the handsome, life-of-the-party husband who greeted her each morning with an original love song and breakfast in bed. "We laughed every day of our lives together," she said.

Seven lightweight military satellites were found in the wrong orbit nine hours after a Pegasus rocket veered off course as it launched them, the Pentagon said Thursday. U.S. Space Command tracking stations determined that the Microsat communications satellites were in a near-polar orbit ranging from 221 miles to 282 miles above Earth, much lower than the planned 447-mile-high orbit.

A sleek, delta-winged robotic jet took to the skies for the first time above the Mojave Desert at Edwards Air Force Base. Boeing Co.'s experimental drone, dubbed Phantom Ray, flew to 7,500 feet and reached speeds of 205 mph in its first flight. The 17-minute flight took place April 27, but Boeing officials did not confirm details until Tuesday. The Phantom Ray, which resembles a giant boomerang, is being developed by the Chicago company for a variety of missions. Its stealthy design could enable it to slip behind enemy lines to knock out radar installations, clearing the way for fighters and bombers.

Los Angeles residents will be able to catch a pre-dawn glimpse of the space shuttle Columbia as it soars over Southern California this morning, NASA officials said. The shuttle also will be visible in its 178-mile-high orbit on Friday morning as it heads for a Monday touchdown at Edwards Air Force base near Mojave after 14 days of flight, the longest in shuttle history. Columbia lifted off Oct.

Edwards Air Force Base is the nation's premier flight test center, is the place where aviators with "the right stuff," as described by writer Tom Wolfe, "push the envelope"--testing new craft at their technological limits. In an era of base closures and downsizing, the Air Force Flight Test Center has emerged unscathed and has actually grown. Earlier this year, a test wing previously based at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, began relocating to Edwards AFB.

An Air Force helicopter crashed Thursday during a parachute training mission at Edwards Air Force Base, killing three of the five people aboard and injuring the two others, officials said. The cause of the crash was not immediately known. It was the second incident of its kind involving an Air Force UH-1N Huey helicopter this year at the sprawling desert base about 100 miles northeast of Los Angeles. A Huey search and rescue helicopter crashed on a night training mission Jan.

Air Force officials on Monday reported the latest in a series of successful static tests at Edwards Air Force Base of a new, more powerful motor designed to boost the payload capacity of the Titan IV rocket. The 2-minute, 20-second test on Sunday at the Air Force's Phillips Laboratory generated about 1.7 million pounds of thrust with the rocket motor attached to a test stand. The test was the third in a series of five planned since 1992 for the so-called solid rocket motor upgrade.

Two men killed when a leased cargo plane crashed at Edwards Air Force Base on Monday have been identified as Navy Lt. David Garnett, 33, of Houston and Navy Aviation Electrician E-3 Lorenzo Rodriguez, 24, of San Antonio. The MU-2 aircraft was on a flight from the Naval Air Weapons Station at China Lake, where both men were stationed, to Edwards, where it crashed short of the runway on landing.

The bat-winged B-2 Stealth bomber will make its first public flying appearance Saturday at the annual Edwards Air Force Base Open House and Air Show. The one-day event at the flight test center on the edge of the Mojave Desert is expected to draw 250,000 to 300,000 people. B-2s have made only limited public appearances as a static display kept at a distance from spectators. Edwards is home to six of the Stealth bombers and is conducting flight tests with them.

No place tells the story of modern aviation better than the skies over the desolate Mojave Desert surrounding Edwards Air Force Base. This is where a 24-year-old Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier flying a fat orange jet called the Bell X-1 in 1947, and where the sleek rocket-powered North American X-15 became the first airplane to reach outer space in 1963. The space shuttle made its first landings here too. FOR THE RECORD: Drone test pilot: An article in the Feb. 9 Section A about the U.S. Air Force's first drone test pilot described the Bell X-1, in which Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in 1947, as a jet. The aircraft was powered by a rocket engine.

Robert M. White was a 38-year-old U.S. Air Force major and record-setting test pilot at Edwards Air Force Base in 1962 when he joined the elite ranks of America's four astronauts. But Mercury astronauts Alan Shepard, Virgil Grissom, John Glenn and Scott Carpenter went into space seated atop ballistic missiles and returned in capsules that parachuted onto the ocean. White did it as the pilot of a rocket-powered X-15 research airplane, flying nearly 60 miles above the Earth's surface and completing a conventional landing on Rogers Dry Lake at Edwards Air Force Base.

The space shuttle Discovery left California's Edwards Air Force Base on Sunday morning on its cross-country journey back to NASA's Kennedy Space Center. The shuttle is being ferried back to Florida on a modified Boeing 747 known as the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft. The plane was to make several stops for refueling over the course of the 2,500-mile trip -- in Amarillo, Texas, on Sunday and at Barksdale Air Force Base in Shreveport, La., overnight before arriving in Florida today. Discovery and its crew of seven astronauts landed in California on Sept.

The space shuttle Atlantis and its crew of seven returned to Earth on Sunday at Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert, announcing its approach with twin sonic booms. Atlantis circled Earth 197 times and traveled 5.3 million miles before ending its daring 13-day mission to refurbish the Hubble Space Telescope. The shuttle, which landed at 8:39 a.m., had been diverted to California after nasty weather prevented a landing at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

A veteran test pilot was killed Wednesday when an F-22 Raptor, an Air Force fighter plane designed to provide "air dominance" with its missiles and cannons, crashed in the high desert outside Edwards Air Force Base. The pilot was identified as David Cooley, 49, a 21-year Air Force veteran who joined Lockheed Martin Corp., the plane's principal contractor, in 2003. Cooley, of Palmdale, was pronounced dead at Victor Valley Community Hospital in Victorville.

On Oct. 14, 1947, Air Force Capt. Chuck Yeager became the first person to fly faster than the speed of sound. Yeager shattered the sound barrier by reaching 700 mph (Mach 1.06) in a Bell X-1 jet nicknamed Glamorous Glennis, 42,000 feet above the Mojave Desert. In commemoration of the 50th anniversary, Yeager will do it again Tuesday at 10:29 a.m. and at next weekend's annual open house and air show at Edwards Air Force Base, this time in an F-15.

U.S. military base closings were inevitable after the bipolar military standoff with the old Soviet Union came to an end. Few, however, anticipated the extent of the hit that our state would take in these matters, especially after our voters had helped elect the current administration in Washington. A federal commission called for the jettisoning of 35 bases nationwide, but a staggering 20% of them were right here in California. It served notice of another monumental blow to the state's economy.

The departure of the space shuttle Endeavour has been postponed again because of bad flying conditions. It is now scheduled to leave Tuesday morning, NASA said. The shuttle will be mounted atop a modified Boeing 747 jetliner for a piggyback ride home to Cape Canaveral, Fla. Technicians first encountered delays because three of eight custom-made pins used to bolt an aerodynamic cone to the shuttle's tail were too large. Machinists were able to reduce the pins to the correct size and engineers reviewed the work to make sure they would withstand the stress of a cross-country flight.