Customer Reviews

Hypersonic! The Story of the North American X-15

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I admit it- if it was built by North American, I'll usually like it.
But Jenkins and Landis have scored big with this book.
The X-15 was the most sucessful X-plane. but so much was unknown about what it did in it's 199 flights, and the fact is-it's successes were not yelled from the top of the N.A.A. plant at Los Angeles!
Everyone who loved that aircraft felt that there was a void until recently. The Apogee book and this one especially, tell the story about how we pursued entry into space with wings. "Hypersonic" is the book that future Historians will be using to learn about the fantastic feats that the X-15 accomplished. This volume and the follow up scrapbook are long overdue homage to those first early days of manned spaceflight!
This is THE must read book about the X-15!

I am one of the authors, and was a bit concerned by a point raised in Mr. Reid's review. I appreciate that he liked the book, and I truly hope he enjoys it.

However, if Mr. Reid feels the binding is causing him concern, I suggest he contact the publisher. I have had my book (I get an advance) for a while now and have not noticed any cause for concern, and my copy has been extensively looked through by a lot of people. This printer generally turns out a very superior product, and I know that the publisher was excited by this book and would not have scrimped on the binding. Perhaps Mr. Reid simply somehow received a defective copy.

I urge Mr. Reid to call Specialty to resolve the issue. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy reading it and looking at all the great photos Tony managed to find for it.

This is a fabulous book about the X-15, one of my favorite planes/spacecraft. It is full of beautiful illustrations and great text; it is an absolute must-have if you are in the least interested in the X-15 and the early space program.

This is by far the best book I have ever seen on the X-15 project. The extensive flight log alone is worth the price of the book. The amount of detail in the text is staggering and many of the hundreds of photos were new to me. It is also very helpful that all of the photos are dated and linked to specific flights. I am also looking forward to the companion volume, containing another 400 photos, which will be published later this year.

This research work was obviously a labor of love and reverence for the authors. They gave credit where it is due, from the pilot astronauts, research scientists, program managers, air force personnel, senior engineers, technicians, and even a handful of glad-handing politicians.
For the first time, the reader wil learn details of the B-52 mothership personnel.

The photo-documentation is vast; I find it hard to believe that a companion volume ("Scrapbook") was needed for photos and illustrations beyond Hypersonic!'s coverage.

For modelers, the AFFTC blueprint on page 179 is definitive data on the X-15 fuselage. Info in the text will enable accurate reproduction of wing and tailplane structures.

Hypersonic! will remain the standard reference volume on the X-15 for decades to come.

Today when the space shuttle is about the only advanced thing going, it is hard to imagine what was really going on almost fifty years ago. Then a remarkable airplane was built in a very short time and flew 199 times to set records that still stand.

Funded by the Navy, Air Force and NASA, three X-15's were built. They carried pilots high enough to earn them astronauts wings and to set one speed record after another.

Here in almost 300 pages is the complete story of the X-15 that starts with the conceptual blueprints of the four bidders (Bell, of the X-1 fame; Douglas, of the SkyRocket, Stiletto); Republic; and of course North American, the winner of the competition. It goes from there through each flight until the last in 1968. There are over 500 photographs of everything from the people, every detail of the plane, and of course of the flights.

This is the definitive story.

This is possibly the best book ever written about a research airplane. Perhaps best of all, it has forewords written by two X-15 pilots. The book covers the events leading up to the NACA deciding to build the airplane, the process that the military went through to fund it and the evolution of the configuration. The book takes the program all the way through finding the lakebeds that served as emergency landings sites and the development ifh the radar stations that tracked the X-15. The book contains hundreds of absolutely stunning photographs that I have never seen before and excellent color profiles of both the X-15 and the NB-52 carrier aircraft. This is a "must buy" for anybody interested in the X-15.

Collaboratively compiled and written by aviation experts Dennis R. Jenkins and Tony R. Landis, Hypersonic: The Story Of The North American X-15 is an immensely detailed and comprehensive look at the North American X-15, the fastest airplane ever built, and the only vehicle ever flown by a pilot (instead of by a computer) into space and back. 500 black-and-white photographs, 50 color photographs, and 100 line drawings (including some never-before-seen images), are deftly paired with an in-depth commentary on both the history and the technical specifications of this superb aircraft. Hypersonic is a most memorable tribute to the predecessor of the Space Shuttle and an invaluable contribution to Aviation History reference collections.

Not to take from old Chuck's efforts, but I've always thought the X-15 was the more interesting program. It's amazing the level of accomplishments they made, yet the X-15 is far from being as well known to the public as some other programs in aviation. If you like the X-15, this is definitely the book. It's not the kind of book you just fly through and look at the photos, then throw on a shelf... It is definitely worth your while to take the time and really read through the details of how the aircraft worked, what the Pilots went through, and how the milestones were achieved technically. The flight log in the back is amazing in it's detail, evening listing the chase aircraft and chase Pilots involved in each mission. I purchased it along with the X-15 Scrapbook, and they work well together.

As one of the other reviewers noted, there are such a collection of previously not widely published photos that for that reason alone, X-15 enthusiasts should add this book to their collection.

While the quality of the typesetting, graphs and especially the photos is extremely high, I have some serious concern about the quality of the perfect binding. I treat my references gently, but this one already has me a bit concerned about the pages staying with it after even a bit of usage.

However, even if I had to use this loose-leaf, it would be added to my collection right away. Hard to imagine that such a trove of "good stuff" was not previously published.