The USAF Aerospace Research Pilot School at Muroc, now Edwards air force base, which he ran from 1962, offered a state-of-the-art simulator that covered every stage of a space flight, from take-off to landing. Applicants swarmed in, and a bare 1% made it, since even fine grades on paper cut little ice with him. Astronauts, like pilots, had to know the machinery they were riding in, how to fix it and how to get back safely, not rely on some bunch of engineers. Like him, they basically had to be mechanics. Over the years he became well-known, but it was an intermittent sort of fame. After the war he was celebrated as West Virginia's leading ace. After breaking Mach in 1947, hardly a month passed without some magazine running an article about him.

In the 1960s, when he was running the research-pilot school, he once did 163 talks in a year. He was a draw at any air show and at the Indy 500, where several times he opened proceedings in the pace car, gunning it with joy. Still, people didn't match the name to the face, he thought, until he did the acDelco car-parts commercial on TV; and then when, in 1983, his Mach exploits appeared on cinema screens in “The Right Stuff”, the film of Tom Wolfe's book about the band of pilots. He had helped on the book, going through crash reports, which Wolfe kept getting wrong. As for the film, it was just entertainment, pretty much fiction, from Sam Shepard's dark handsome face to all those blue skies outside the windows. So when he was asked, as he was annoyingly often, whether he had the right stuff, as a test pilot and generally, he gave a downto-earth answer. Rather than being the most righteous, with the moxie, the reflexes, the experience, the coolness, to pull it back in the last yawning moment, as Wolfe wrote, he just knew all about his planes, and had worked his tail off learning it. A mechanic's answer which, as ever, hit the nail on the head.

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