There's always a possibility that you can have a catastrophic failure, of course. This could happen on any flight.
Don't say hit and mountain in the same sentence.
One thing every Army pilot knows is that there is no such thing as a routine mission.
It wasn't that the X-1 would kill you, it was the systems in the X-1 that would kill you.
The men and women who make up a plane's crew put their lives in jeopardy each time they fly. It's our job as much as anyone's to make sure we make it as safe as possible up there for them.
And most of these pilots were lost during the first five flights.
I didn't want to crash into the ocean, but from watching Han Solo navigate an asteroid field to watching movies like 'Perfect Storm,' it would always kind of get my adrenaline up, and I knew it was something I wanted to do.
Of the first 40 pilots to fly for the U. S. Air Mail Service ... 31 died in crashes.
