Jack Ridley and X1: Breaking the Barrier

I very often talk about Jack Ridley and Bell X1 as my inspiration for the quest to become an aerospace professional. Few people seem to recognize either Ridley or X1. In middle school, I found a book titled "Spreading Wings into the Sky" in my mom's library. The book was a Bangla language translation of a story of a group of American test pilots and engineers trying to conquer the sound barrier, or as New York Times Bestselling author Dan  Hampton puts it, "Chasing the (Sound) Demon." The book tells the story of Bell X1, the bullet-shaped experimental aircraft built by the United States to fly supersonic, and its maverick test pilot, legendary Chuck Yeager.

The book also had snippets of aeronautical engineer Jack Ridley's story – his moving tail solution: to solve the issue of loss of effectiveness of the stabilizer at transonic speed or a cut-off broom handle so that Chuck Yeager can close the X-1's hatch with his broken ribs in the eve of the record-setting flight. Those stories mesmerized me. Unlike most other kids of my age who wanted to be a pilot, I wanted to be an aeronautical engineer. I played hours with my "Geometry Sets," pretending to be a part of Ridley's team in Muroc Army Airfield (now Edward Air Force Base in California), solving X1's engineering problems. A kid born nearly 25 years after the test flights of Bell X1 and growing up eight and half thousand miles away from the dry lake bed of  Mojave Dessert before the age of the internet, finding enough information about X1 or Jack Ridley was more than impossible. I still managed to find just enough information about the program from the documents I collected from the author, who happened to be my mom's university professor.

Twelve years later, I arrived at the University of Oklahoma (OU) to pursue a graduate degree-it was no coincidence that OU is the alma mater of Jack Ridley- the documents I collected from the book author mentioned that Jack Ridley graduated with a mechanical engineering degree from OU in 1939. I always knew this was the university I wanted to go to. Unfortunately, I noticed almost no one in the School of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering at OU seemed to remember who Jack Ridley was and their connection to the X1 program. I was hoping to see a large portrait of Jack Ridley displayed prominently, reminding the next generation of the legacy of OU's aerospace program. However, to me, Bell X1 and Jack Ridley remained the beacon of America's perseverance and ingenuity and the source of deep inspiration to challenge the impossible.

In early 2001 when I came to the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) right out of graduate school, I was naïve and terribly underprepared to understand the complexities of an academic career. All I knew was that I wanted to build an Aerospace Program that would push the frontiers of aerospace technologies and inspire and create opportunities for hundreds of students.  It was a very tall order in an institution that was still struggling to find its research identity and with almost no research infrastructure and mentoring. The journey to building an aerospace program at UTEP was often lonely and treacherous.  My relentless pursuit often created a challenging situation, and I made mistakes that almost derailed my own career.  In all those difficult times, I often went back to the story of Bell X1; it served as the most vital inspiration I needed. Every time I fell, the story of Bell X1 helped me to get back; every time one of my research proposals got rejected, the story of Bell X1 told me to write another one; every time there was an institutional barrier, the story of Bell X1 showed me how to break it, the same way it broke the sound barrier.

In the last decades UTEP Aerospace Center that I founded, trained and placed more than 500 graduates in the aerospace and defense industries. However, most importantly, many of these students who are the first in their families to attend college would not have been in the aerospace workforce if the UTEP Aerospace Center did not create the opportunities. The Center has grown to 40,000 sq-ft research laboratories, two airfields, and 8000 acres of test range.  The Center will be breaking ground for a 70-million-dollar research building this fall and will open new facilities in Huntsville and Youngstown.  Recently we received a significant research grant from the Department of Defense that will allow us to hire another 60 students in addition to the 137 students we already have in our research center. The new grant will enable our students to pursue Digital Engineering and Hypersonic Technologies-the, the new frontier of aerospace engineering.

Aerospace Center dedicates this new initiative to Aerospace Pioneer Jack Ridley. I will tell your story a million more times, Jack Ridley, to inspire a generation of new aerospace engineers the same way you inspired and continue to inspire me.   

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