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Thrust SSC had a straightforward but by no means simple objective: to become the first car officially to beat the Speed of Sound. That you need a suitable car & driver is clear; but you also need a well-organised infrastructure to provide engineering support, finance, transport, “Fodding” (clearing the desert of all stones, bullets, and other nasties for Foreign Object Damage limitation), food/accommodation, and desert security amongst other things. This last is where Pegasus came in; I was approached in February by Paul Renfrew, Thrust’s Security Chief, to “supply” a Quantum 912 for Thrust to use for the trials in Jordan. Now, as you can imagine, I am approached several times a year by pilots who want to use Pegasus aircraft for some wild and totally impractical wheeze - “great publicity for Pegasus” - and mostly the answer is no.
This request was met with my usual reticence until I met Richard Noble himself, and like many other sponsors and service providers, I suspect, I was swept away by the tidal wave of enthusiasm that the man is capable of producing in support of his pet project. He did an excellent sales job, and faster than the speed of sound Pegasus was committed to producing a Thrust coloured Quantum 912 and a pilot to fly it in Jordan. Such was the success of the aerial cover in Jordan that Pegasus now had to produce another Quantum 912 and 2 teams of 2 pilots for the all-out assault on the Sound Barrier. Simon Baker and me would do the first shift, Richard Meredith Hardy and Bill Sherlock the second.
It was always going to be an odd one, an adventure that would etch itself permanently into the brain’s infinitesimal filing cabinet , in the folder labelled “Good Times”. I had had plenty of time to reflect on the possibilities offered by a three week flying trip during the 12 hour flight to Reno via Dallas. What would it be like flying in the desert? Would it be easy to integrate into the Team? - Would there be anyone at the airport to collect me at half past midnight as arranged? There would not , neither was I given any instructions as to where I should go nor how I should get there! If the 2 Rolls Royce taxis that rolled up outside the airport underlined the slightly surreal circumstances I found myself in, my chosen hotel with its glitzy Las Vegas style decor and three floors of gambling machines merely confirmed that I had indeed entered another world. Next day I hired a car, then set about finding out where the Black Rock desert was; no mean task since road maps did not appear to exist and even the car hire staff had no real idea except it was “Up North of Reno...”
About 2 hours later I was rolling into Gerlach, a small town - it would be a village in the UK, but that distinction does not exist over there - with a population of 350 that was the base for both Teams. The drive up had left me in no doubt I had now formally entered the Wild West (Gerlach T-shirt: “Where the pavement ends, the West begins”). Traffic jams? I had not seen a car for the last 70 miles. Culture shock for the boys from Blighty? The impression that Nevada was trapped in a curious time-warp was reinforced by the non-stop stream of 60s/70s American rock on the local radio station. If they’d ever heard of Hip-hop, house, rap or any other type of electronically generated music, they were not letting on: Team members over 25 were secretly pleased.
Unknown in the landspeed racing world until Richard Noble put it on the map in 1982-3, Black Rock desert played a large part in the settlers migration westwards 150 years ago. More recently it has become an annual haven for several hundred thousand serious oddballs at the Burning Man Festival (they make the Glastonbury Festival crew look like the Teddy Bear’s Picnic), it is used by the military as a firing range and for low flying practice, and local yahoos use it to fall of their motorcycles at high speed.
The desert boasts a pretty impressive set of vital statistics: Elevation: 4000’ amsl. Overall length: 80+ miles. Length of the flat surface: 20+ miles. Thrust track: 13 miles. Desert Width: 12 miles at the North end, 4 miles at the South end. Surface: totally flat, white, compacted sand. Dust particles: less than 2 microns - that is very small indeed.
The scale of the place took some getting used to, and in certain conditions it was quite easy to become spatially disorientated. Imagine being able to fly for 10 miles in any direction at 1’ above the surface; doing 60 consecutive landings and take offs without a single turn; or doing a qualifying cross-country between Black Rock and Gerlach without needing a map, or any nav planning! Pilots who have done such things will tell you it is very difficult, through lack of reference, to land a seaplane - or to force land a land plane - on a totally flat sea. The desert was the same: there are no reference points at all in a landscape of such scale that your eyes often defeated your brain; the glare, the mirages, the wildly varying lighting conditions and the occasional dust storm all play their tricks; and you had to use your altimeter quite regularly when near the ground to back up the signals from your brain - it was dauntingly easy to get it wrong, Human Factors being what they are....
In the first few days there were two types of sorty, early and late. These terms were relative, since they both seemed pretty damned early to me, being more of a night bird than an early riser! Early was up at 4.30, breakfast at 5.00, on site by 6.00 and flying by 6.45, late just 2 hours later; painful at the time, but well worth it when your wheels left the ground and you were greeted with the smoothest flying - if the winds were light - that you are ever likely to get. Some days I did not touch the controls for several minutes as Simon Baker and I patrolled our sectors at no more than 500’ for about 90 minutes in anticipation of the next run. We would look out for anything that moved - dust trails were the giveaway - and report back to Jane Millington, Andy Green’s girl friend and former Air Traffic Controller. She would then transfer the message on the ground frequency for the nearest mobile unit to investigate; in general the system worked exceptionally well - Jane became known affectionately as the “desert witch” by the spectators who listened in on scanners to her cool but commanding radio style with increasing admiration for her ability under stress - but there were some sublimely comic moments.
“Pegasus Black to Pit Station, bandit 5 miles NW of Mile 9.” “Pit, roger, investigate and report.” “Black, wilco.” 5 minutes later: “Pit Station, Black. That bandit is the judge!” It was this same Phil the Judge, landyachter, boozer extraordinaire - I don't think I ever saw him “sober as a judge” - and allround good sort who was my first passenger in the desert; he kindly volunteered his knowledge of the desert micromet to us, gained during years of landyacht racing - probably pissed - showing us exactly what sort of wind to expect where and why; he then planted some marker flags which we would use to estimate wind strength and direction. To those used to the almost boringly predictable wind flow systems in the South of England it was an eye-opener; shifts of 75 degrees, even 180 degrees on occasions, were by no means uncommon. And typically, the Thrust team had chosen to establish their base in the very worst area of the desert for low-level turbulence; despite the best efforts of the Judge to convince them, they were not about to move! And it was this same Judge who was later to “try” two hacks from the Daily Telegraph - last bastion of middle England righteousness, you will recall - for some alleged nocturnal vehicular insobriety in the desert. And it was he who went searching for the miscreants who let off a few rounds of a pistol in the main street after a particuarly taxing night in the Black Rock Bar. Well, it was the Wild West!
Once the various members - both airbourne and ground-based - of Thrust security team cottoned on the fact that it was not worth chasing everything that moved on the desert because it was usually one of their own people, things developed into a pretty slick routine. Truth to tell, after a few days of punctillious policing by the Team there were few notable security incidents to report, the wheeled cowboys having rapidly got the message that desert access during runs was simply not an option. The airbourne cowboys were another matter; despite grave warnings of “Civil enditement for an aerial offence deemed to be in breach of the Notam blah blah blah” broadcast by the Desert Witch on the airbourne frequency, there were a number of incursions by spamcan jockeys for us to deal with. And there was a 3 legged coyote intent on crossing the tracks minutes before a run that I convinced to turn back to the scrubland by taxiing 3.5 miles behind him!
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In the first week most practice runs were done in the morning; as time went on and confidence in Thrust grew, it was found that the car was relatively insensitive to the winds that got up everyday at about 11.00am, unlike Spirit of America. Flying conditions remained good for a surprisingly long time when the wind was in the South, but usually after 14.00 the wind would get up to about 20 knots and there were massive convective gusts. In addition the wind would rotor over a neighbouring 4500’ mountain, and flying would become pretty unpleasant. If the wind was in the North, however, we found that we could fly all day without undue stress; it was choppy, for sure, but no worse than a typically summer’s day in England, despite temperatures climbing in the nineties, at least initially. It was refreshing to get airbourne in shorts and a `T-shirt when all those on the ground were hiding from the sun. Three weeks later there was a dramatic drop in temperatures which meant that Richard Meredith Hardy and Bill Sherlock rarely flew without an Ozee.
“So what was it like then?” - meaning how did you feel when this monstrous car rushed past at 700+mph just 500ft below - is the question the 4 pilots have been asked most frequently; “Awesome” is almost invariably the reply. In the early days, with runs of 500+mph, it just looked bloody fast. Simon had seen it all before in Jordan, but to me it was a novel experience. First you saw the dust plume as Thrust fired up; then it started to roll, very slowly at first so as not to hoover up half the desert through the Spey engines; from about 150mph it really started to go - 150 to 250 took just 4 seconds! - and it continued all the way to 600+ mph at 1.5g of acceleration.
Andy Green was an extraordinarily precise driver. Not only did he manage to stay absolutely on line, but also he managed to fulfil each run profile to the letter. He was always within a few mph of the chosen maximum speed for each run - unlike Craig Breedlove who seemed to have absorbed some of the Wild West culture from the local environment and drove to whatever profile he felt like at the time! - and he even managed to stop within a few metres of the calculated stopping point, at least when the parachutes functioned properly; this was important since it saved a lot of time for the turnaround.
As the runs got faster, the excitement grew correspondingly both amongst the Thrust crew and the Press.
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November 1997
Most recent revision 09 January 1998