Background
Bridgeman was born in Iowa. His father was a barnstormer and separated from his mother shortly after he was born.
Bridgeman was born in Iowa. His father was a barnstormer and separated from his mother shortly after he was born.
He graduated and was commissioned in 1941, and was sent to Pearl Harbor, where he experienced the Japanese attack on December 7.
He enlisted in the United States Navy to attend flight school at Pensacola. He flew PBY flying boats in the New Guinea/Australia sector, then four-engined PB4Y-2 Privateer patrol bombers on a tour of operations with VP/VPB-109 (the "Reluctant Raiders"). He was reassigned afterwards to training activities stateside from August 1944 until the end of the war, then spent two years flying transport missions from Pearl Harbor to the West Coast.
Upon leaving the Navy in 1947, Bridgeman joined Southwest Airlines (a local West Coast airline that eventually merged into Pacific Southwest Airlines, not to be confused with today"s Southwest) to fly District of Columbia-3s on the San Francisco-Seattle route.
Bored with the airline routine, he left in 1949 to join Douglas as a production test pilot to certify A-1 Skyraiders off the assembly line before their delivery to the Navy. A few months later, he was offered and accepted to take over the test program of the Doctorate-558 II Skyrocket, one of the world"s first supersonic research aircraft.
Bridgeman converted to jet aircraft on the F-80 in early 1950 and eventually conducted a very successful test program with the Skyrocket, collecting data on the behavior of swept-wing aircraft over a wide envelope of load factors and Mach numbers deep in the supersonic range. In May 1951, he broke the world speed record with Mach 1.72, then raised the record to Mach 1.88 (1,245 mph, 1,992 km/h) the next month.
Immediately afterwards, he broke the world altitude record with 79,494 ft (24,230 m) on the Skyrocket"s final flight before delivery to National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. During this campaign, Bridgeman was one of the first pilots to encounter the phenomenon of inertia coupling, a flight hazard that would dominate high-speed aircraft research for much of the 1950s.
He was on the cover of the April 27, 1953 issue of Time magazine. He went on to fly other Douglas test programs including the X-3 Stiletto, a promising but ultimately unsuccessful design. He was an astronaut candidate for the United States Air Force Manitoba In Space Soonest program, but the program was cancelled on August 1, 1958, and replaced by National Aeronautics and Space Administration"s Project Mercury.
Bridgeman eventually moved to Grumman Aircraft where he conducted test programs of commercial aircraft, then pursued a career in commercial real estate.
In September 1968, his airplane went down in the Pacific Ocean during a routine leisure flight from Los Angeles to Santa Catalina Island. His body was never foundation