On May 10, 1967, a very strange flying machine crashed pretty spectacularly in a dry lake in the western US. It was the Northrup M2-F2, and it had just finished a test flight, gliding down from 45,000 feet (14,000 m) at a speed of about 450mph (720 kmh). The pilot was Bruce Peterson.
The strangest thing about the strange flying machine was that it had no wings. Instead it was designed as a “heavy lifting body.” The shape of the fuselage (if it was really a fuselage) was what provided the lift. The craft had rocket engines to assist with both flying and landing, but this flight was in the part of the testing program before the engines were being tried.
One of the problems the test flights found was that without the control surfaces on wings, pilots had much less control over rolling the vehicle from side to side. On his final descent, Peterson experienced a lot of roll, and struggled to keep the aircraft in control. He finally got it back on track, but then ahead of him saw a rescue helicopter hovering in the wrong area — right in his flight path. And the M2-F2 was gliding, so he didn’t have options like flying up over the helicopter. It was also going fast, and there was no time for the helicopter to get out of the way. So Peterson turned away from his flight path and the prepared landing area, and headed for another part of the dry lakebed. It was still nice and flat, but without any markers, it was difficult to judge his exact height.
Peterson took his best guess and fired his landing rockets and deployed his landing gear, but he was just a moment too late and the M2-F2 hit the ground before the landing gear was locked. The crash was extremely violent — there’s video — as the aircraft rolled over six times and finally stopped upside-down. Peterson was injured, but alive, and was taken straight to the hospital. He survived, but lost an eye to a secondary infection. After he recovered he kept flying, and also became a project engineer.
The M2-F2 lifting body program was not secret, and the crash made the news. One person who noticed the story was Martin Caidin. Caidin was also a pilot, but not a test pilot. He was primarily a writer, of novels and screenplays. Peterson’s crash (specifically the video of it) gave him an idea for a science fiction novel about a test pilot who’s badly injured in a spectacular crash (even worse that Peterson) and is healed by implanting bionic devices in his body, including an artificial eye that he can see with (better than before) and an arm and legs that give him superhuman strength. The book (Cyborg) then takes a genre-turn and becomes a spy novel, when the newly-enhanced hero becomes a secret agent for a secret US government agency.
You may have heard something like this before — and if so, it might be because Caidin’s novel became a well-known US television series, The Six Million Dollar Man. It didn’t take long for it to become a whole franchise; Caidin followed up his book with three more, there were several movies, and at least one spinoff tv show. The original show pioneered the cinematic technique of depicting super-fast motion by showing it in super-slow (with sound effects).
More to the point, every single episode of The Six Million Dollar Man began with a recap of the hero’s origin story — and included a brief clip of Bruce Peterson’s actual May 10, 1967 crash. Peterson himself watched the show, but all he ever said about it was that he didn’t really enjoy having his crash replayed on national TV every week.
