B2 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.FRIDAY, AUGUST 30 , 2019
workforce.
When it comes to the g ig
economy, there are plenty o f
discussions about w hether f olks
like Liza should be able to
demand b etter working
conditions. Darn straight w e need
to pay attention to Liza.
Out West, eight o ut of 10 Uber
drivers who talked to professors
studying this a t the University of
California at L os Angeles told
them that heck yeah, t hey’d like
some protection.
Don’t t urn off on this, because
it’s a lot more than Uber drivers
who are part o f this new age of
labor rights d iscussion.
The folks a t the National
Bureau of E conomic Research
conducted a massive study o n the
gig e conomy that c ame up with
the s tartling conclusion that “94
percent of the net employment
growth i n the U.S. economy f rom
2005 to 2015 appears to have
occurred i n alternative w ork
arrangements.”
That m eans m ost of the n ew
jobs out there now — and t he jobs
many of our kids will have — are
gigs, whether t hey’re a nalysts,
coders o r dog w alkers.
Time to start thinking again
about what t he Knights
demanded 150 years a go.
pe [email protected]
Twitter: @petuladapply f or a job. I ’m g oing
everywhere, I don’t e ven have a
watch because I went to the
pawnshop giving my j ewelry
away j ust to make ends meet, a nd
I have my r ent c oming up and I
have no money to pay for i t,” F aye
Smith, a security guard a t the
Smithsonian, s aid during t he
shutdown in January.
GoFundMe was f illed with
proud w orkers s uch as Smith
explaining how a shamed they
were to ask for $10 or $20
donations to h elp pay mortgage,
college t uition o r medical
expenses when their paychecks
stopped coming a t a time in t heir
lives when they were vulnerable.
Smith received a lot of donations
after h er story appeared on local
TV. At least 1,000 other workers
got zero, their tales of woe and
dead fundraising accounts
haunting t he Internet.
The folks who passed the Ta ft-
Hartley Act in 1947, a law t hat
forbids federal workers from
striking, a pparently d idn’t
envision a Congress that would
abuse t he shutdown as often a s
our elected officials abuse i t today.
A lot of the federal workers
survived with a side hustle — the
gig e conomy. A nd this m ay b e a
huge part o f their future as this
administration makes more
moves to shrink t he federalshutdown in U.S. history. Workers
from diplomats to security guards
went 35 days w ithout pay. A lmost
forgot a bout that, didn’t you?
“We’re going to food banks. I
am going to McDonald’s t rying tojoin — the federal workforce — is
a precarious gamble.
This year, we saw the s teak-
and-cocktail Capitol Hill crowd
use w orkers a s political f ootballs
in the longest g overnmentagents with few or no s afety n ets
out t here.
Right h ere in Washington, it’s
clear that what was once the
safest, most stable a nd cautious
place f or the super-safe w orker toCivil War nation: an eight-hour
workday. Equal pay for e qual
work for both s exes. A proper
share o f the wealth the work has
created.
Those w ere s ome of the goals of
the Knights of Labor, a secret
society t hat was essentially t he
nation’s f irst labor organization.
“The recent alarming
development a nd aggression of
aggregated wealth, which, unless
checked, will invariably l ead to
the p auperization a nd h opeless
degradation o f the toiling masses,
render it imperative, if w e desire
to enjoy the b lessings o f life, that
a check should be placed upon its
power and u pon unjust
accumulation,” b egan the
preamble of the Knights.
Sound familiar?
The Knights faded away, b ut
they began a movement t hat’s just
as crucial today a s it was i n 1869.
The federal minimum w age
stands at p overty level, $7.25 an
hour.
We’re nowhere near equal pay
for w omen a nd men.
And although the n umber is
hard to pin down, a recent Gallup
survey found t hat more than a
third of t he American w orkforce
has b een swallowed up by t he gig
economy. That’s a lot of free
DVORAK FROM B1
“I’m in a spin,” Adams radioed.
“Say again,” a ground controller
replied.
“I’m in a spin,” t he pilot repeat-
ed.
Thompson was in the control
room and recalled thinking:
“What the hell do you mean you’re
in a spin? How can you spin travel-
ing 3,500 mph? There’s no such
thing as a hypersonic spin.”
There was no further voice con-
tact with Adams. The X-15 came
apart as it fell.
A few seconds later the pilot of
a chase plane radioed: “I got dust
on the lake down there.”
The X-15 had crashed.
A search party w as organized t o
look for the pieces, and a helicop-
ter quickly f ound t he cockpit with
Adams’s body still in it.
What had gone wrong?
“My personal conclusion,”
Thompson wrote, “was that Mike
was thrown off the bull, and the
bull killed him.”
[email protected]Fr om Retropolis, a blog about the
past, rediscovered, at
wa shingtonpost.com/retropolis.er, faster and farther,” van der
Linden said, as he stood overlook-
ing the plane before it was m oved.
“They knew very little about hy-
personic flight and so they built
this strictly as a test vehicle.”
“The challenges... were re-
markable,” he said. “A erodynam-
ics was a problem. Flight control
at very high altitude was a prob-
lem. When you’re so high in alti-
tude the flight control surfaces
don’t work. Hypersonic speed.
The air does funky things.”
In his 1992 book, Thompson,
the test pilot, recounts the radio
transmissions during the final
moments of Adams’s fateful X-15
flight. At an altitude of about
260,000 feet and going 3,500
mph, Adams started losing con-
trol of the plane.
The nose of the plane drifts
slightly to the right, and then
more dramatically to the right as
the plane streaks ahead.
As the nose continues to drift
sideways, Adams radios that the
plane feels “squirrelly.” The plane
turns completely around so that
it’s facing backward while hur-
tling forward.times the speed of sound — about
4,600 mph — and reached an
altitude of 365,000 feet, said van
der Linden.
The museum’s plane “only did
4,000 mph,” he said. “It’s plenty
fast. It got as high as 250,000,
300,000 feet.”
The X-15 was a research aircraft
developed in the late 1950s to
study the effects of hypersonic
speed — roughly five times the
speed of sound — and high-
altitude flying.
It was built of super heat-
resistant nickel alloy called
Iconel-X, which gave it its dark
color. And it was equipped with
small “attitude rockets” in the
nose and wings, much like the
space shuttle 20 years later.
They were designed to control
the aircraft at ultrahigh altitudes,
where the air is so thin the wings
are not effective.
Among the test pilots was Neil
Armstrong, later to be the first
man on the moon, who made
seven flights in the Smithsonian’s
X-15.
“This was all part of NASA and
the Air Force’s p ushing to go h igh-son Mitchell said.
Three X-15s were built. The
Smithsonian has the first. The
National Museum of the U.S. Air
Force says it has the second one
built. The third was destroyed inAdams’s crash. The planes made
199 flights between 1959 and 1968
out of Edwards Air Force Base in
California.
The second plane flew at sixIt was also a bull, Thompson
recalled of his hair-raising flight
in 1965. “When it decided to do
something on its own, it did it.
There w as nothing you could do to
stop it. I had momentarily lost
control of the bull.”
While T hompson regained con-
trol and landed safely that Janu-
ary day in 1965, two years l ater, on
Nov. 15, 1967, pilot Michael J. Ad-
ams did not. His X-15 went into a
spin, was torn apart, and he was
found dead on the desert floor.
It could also be dangerous on
the ground.
On June 8, 1960, the late test
pilot and Herndon, Va., resident
Scott Crossfield was sitting in an
X-15 for a ground test when the
engine blew up. He was lucky and
unhurt. (Crossfield, then 84, was
killed in 2007 when his Cessna
was ripped apart in a storm over
northeast G eorgia.)
The X-15 is being stored in a
Smithsonian facility at Dulles In-
ternational Airport, said Zachary
Guttendorf, a supervisory mu-
seum specialist. It will probably
be in storage for the next four
years, museum spokeswoman Ali-tail and “U.S. Air Force” on its
fuselage, it was a reminder of the
days when pilots called it “the
bull,” a nd it took them on harrow-
ing, sometimes deadly, rides.
The aircraft started rolling vio
lently back and forth. At the same
time, it was pitching up and
down. I was being thrown against
the straps with tremendous force.
I was flying at almost 4,000 mph
and the aircraft was totally out of
control. I happened to glance out
the window during one oscillation
and everything was black.
— Te st pilot Milton O. Thomp-
son
The Smithsonian’s X-15 had
hung from the ceiling of the mu-
seum since its opening in 1976. It
was lowered for the first time in
43 years on the evening of Aug. 21,
one of 40 airplanes t hat have been
moved out of the popular mu-
seum on the Mall as the building
undergoes a seven-year renova-
tion.
The museum remains open,
with other f amous a ircraft such a s
Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St.
Louis and the 1903 Wright broth-
ers’ Flyer still on display.
But the X-15 holds a unique
place among aircraft.
Its flight was a controlled ex-
plosion. It was carried like a huge
bomb, shackled to the wing of a
B-52 “mother ship.” The pilot sat
in an ejection seat that suggested
the electric chair, in front of a fuel
compartment containing 2,400
gallons of liquid oxygen and anhy-
drous ammonia.
At about 40,000 feet, the X-15
was dropped, the engine was “lit”
and the airplane streaked away,
marked by a looping white con-
trail.
The engine burned up its fuel in
about 90 seconds. It pushed the
plane so fast that the NASA insig-
nia near the cockpit often burned
away i n flight, and t he nose had to
be cooled with liquid nitrogen so
it didn’t melt.
And when the X-15 came back
to earth, it landed with a nose
wheel and rear skids that left a
rooster tail of dust on the dry lake
bed strip before it came to a stop.
“It was, and still is, the fast
highest-flying piloted airplane in
history,” scientist historians John
Anderson and Richard Passman
wrote in their 2014 book, “X-15:
The World’s Fastest Rocket Plane
and the Pilots Who Ushered in the
Space Age.”
The engine was liquid-fueled
and had a throttle. But it operated
best when the throttle was wide
open and being fed 30 gallons of
fuel a second, according to
Thompson’s 1992 memoir.
“It’s the world’s f irst hypersonic
aircraft,” s aid Bob van der Linden,
the Smithsonian museum’s cura-
tor of special purpose aircraft.
“This is in essence an early version
of the space shuttle.... It’s f ast....
And it’s really sharp-looking.”
RETROPOLIS FROM B1
X-15 heads for storage during Smithsonian renovations
PETULA DVORAK
The gig economy has swallowed the U.S. workforce, and it’s time to take action
JIM PRESTON/SMITHSONIAN NATIONAL AIR AND SPACE MUSEUM
Staff and contractors lower the North American X- 15 for the first time in 43 years in the Boeing Milestones of Flight Hall at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum
on the Mall. On Tuesday, the rocket plane was plucked by a crane, lowered backward onto a truck and driven off into storage.MICHAEL S. WILLIAMSON/THE WASHINGTON POST
During the government shutdown in January, people line up at a pop-up distribution center set up for
federal employees.“This was all part of
NASA and the Air
Force’s pushing to go
higher, faster and
farther....
The challenges...
were remarkable.”
Bob van der Linden, the
Smithsonian museum’s curator of
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