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Bill H. Dana, a NASA research pilot who flew the X-15 rocket plane at record supersonic speeds and tested many of the most innovative and dangerous aircraft ever developed, died on Tuesday in Phoenix. He was 83.
His death, from complications of Parkinson’s disease, was announced by NASA.
Mr. Dana was a West Point-educated aeronautical engineer and military pilot in 1958 when he became one of the first people hired by the newly created National Aeronautics and Space Administration. As one of 12 pilots selected for the X-15 program, he flew 16 flights from 1965 to 1968 in the bullet-shaped rocket plane, reaching speeds of close to 4,000 miles an hour (about twice as fast as a bullet) and altitudes of 300,000 feet — nearly 59 miles above ground, where Earth’s last layer of atmosphere meets the edge of outer space.
“The horizon appeared as a ring of bright blue around the shell of the Earth, with darkness above,” he said in a 2007 NASA interview.
The X-15 program was created to test the limits of human flight endurance and spacecraft maneuverability. Mr. Dana and his fellow pilots were among the first to test pressurized spacesuits, to study the effects of zero gravity on pilot performance and to test jet controls and other mechanical devices for orienting vehicles in outer space.
The program’s most important mission was determining whether a rocket with stubby wings could re-enter the atmosphere, turn off its engines and glide to a landing on an airfield as a plane would, rather than being dropped into the ocean for retrieval by ship, as the Gemini and Apollo craft were.
Such landings, which Mr. Dana and the other pilots accomplished hundreds of times, would make it possible for NASA to begin developing its space shuttle program, sending flights back and forth to manned space stations in orbit.
“Prior to the X-15 flight program, there was considerable reservation about the pilots’ ability to consistently land a power-off, low lift-drag ratio airplane,” Mr. Dana said in a 1998 speech for the Charles A. Lindbergh Memorial Lecture Series at the Smithsonian Institution. But glide-landing the X-15 — which would be the way shuttles were landed — “proved easy,” he said.
All a pilot had to do was start circling at about 50,000 feet, get a good bead on the runway “and descend onto a nominal glideslope.”
Michelle Evans, author of “The X-15 Rocket Plane,” a history published last year, called Mr. Dana one of the space program’s most important pioneers.
“He was a very good test pilot, and one of the 12 fastest men in history” at that point, she said.
William Harvey Dana was born in Pasadena, Calif., on Nov. 3, 1930, and raised in Bakersfield, Calif. After earning a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering from the University of Southern California, he joined NASA as an aeronautical research engineer at the High-Speed Flight Station at Edwards Air Force Base (now NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center) in the Mojave Desert.
He flew more than 8,000 hours in more than 60 aircraft, including helicopters and wingless experimental rocket planes, during his 48-year career.
He is survived by his wife, Judi; three daughters, Jan Dana, Sidney Sparks and Leslie Kirby; and a son, Matt.
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