Plot
The experimental X-15 program at Edwards Air Force Base involves test pilots: civilian Matt Powell (David McLean), Lt. Col. Lee Brandon (Charles Bronson) and Maj. Ernest Wilde (Ralph Taeger). The cutting edge high-speed program is ramrodded by project chief Tom Deparma (James Gregory) and US Air Force Col. Craig Brewster (Kenneth Tobey). As the test pilots prepare for the planned launch of the rocket plane from a Boeing B-52 Stratofortress mother ship, they experience emotional and physical problems, which they share with their wives and sweethearts.
Test after test results in setbacks, including a near disaster when an engine explodes during a ground test and engulfs the X-15 and its pilot in flames, but finally the X-15 begins to set records in speed and altitude for a piloted aircraft. When the X-15 "flames out" on a high altitude run, after guiding the X-15 to a safe landing, saving Powell's life, Lt. Col. Brandon, flying a chase plane, is killed in a crash. Powell himself takes the X-15 into outer space for the final test.
Read more about this topic: X-15 (film)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)