A chase plane is an aircraft that "chases" another aircraft, a spacecraft or a rocket during flight. Safety can be one function of a chase plane; others are to photograph or video the target vehicle, or to collect engineering data from it. Chase planes may be used during test flights, and for many years the best way to ensure the safety of an experimental aircraft was to fly alongside it and observe the flight.
This second airplane's crew would keep a constant lookout for problems with the test aircraft, and if problems did arise they would provide warnings and critical information to the test aircraft's crew and to the mission controllers on the ground. They would also monitor the surrounding airspace for other aircraft that could pose a hazard to the flight, either by straying into their flightpath or threatening any kind of secrecy associated with that particular project.
Since the early days of USAF testing, the chase aircraft have been manned by test pilots just like the experimental planes they accompany, providing a common language and bond between test pilot and observer. The experienced pilots in the chase aircraft could guide distressed test aircraft down to safe landings should experiments go wrong.
Famous quotes containing the words chase and/or plane:
“You know there’s only two things more beautiful than a good gun—a Swiss watch or a woman from anywhere.”
—Borden Chase [Frank Fowler] (1900–1971)
“Even though I had let them choose their own socks since babyhood, I was only beginning to learn to trust their adult judgment.. . . I had a sensation very much like the moment in an airplane when you realize that even if you stop holding the plane up by gripping the arms of your seat until your knuckles show white, the plane will stay up by itself. . . . To detach myself from my children . . . I had to achieve a condition which might be called loving objectivity.”
—Anonymous Parent of Adult Children. Ourselves and Our Children, by Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, ch. 5 (1978)