Scott Crossfield, who died at 84 Wednesday when his single-engine Cessna crashed in mountains north of Atlanta, was an aircraft engineer and test pilot, who in 1953 became the first person ever to reach Mach 2, or twice the speed of sound.

Despite the multiple records he set for speed and altitude during a decade of test piloting in the 1950s and early 1960s, Crossfield regarded the pursuit of records for themselves as foolish, and was outspoken in denying the swashbuckling image of test pilots popularized by everybody from headline writers to Tom Wolfe in “The Right Stuff.”

“About the best test pilot I ever knew wasn’t the convivial, party-going type at all,” Crossfield once said. “His main interest outside his work was raising apricots.”

Crossfield’s main interest was designing and engineering high-performance aircraft, and he regarded his role as test pilot as a logical extension of that role. Among the aircraft he helped engineer and fly were the X-1, X-4, X-5, XF-92A, and the D-558-I. It was in a D-558-II Skyrocket that he used to set the Mach 2 mark. Flown to 32,000 feet by a Boeing P2B Superfortress “mothership,” Crossfield’s plane was dropped clear of the bomber. He fired up its rocket engine, climbed to 72,000 feet, and then dove 62,000 feet, at which point the speed indicator read 1,327 mph, or Mach 2.01. Eleven minutes after his flight began, Crossfield landed at Edwards Air Force Base, home to the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (a precursor to NASA), and told reporters that the only thing he felt was “sort of like a stomach ache and a touch of the flu.” It was pretty much another day at the office for Crossfield.

The Air Force Captain who had been the first man to fly at Mach 1, Chuck Yeager, exceeded Crossfield’s mark a month later. Crossfield himself claimed to have been the first to hit the Mach 3 mark several years later in an unofficial run in the X-15. But it was the engineering design on the X-15 that was of primary interest. He was unperturbed when, in 1959, an X-15 test engine exploded in flight, necessitating a crash landing in which Crossfield was uninjured. In 1960, another X-15 engine exploded during a test-fire while Crossfield was in the cockpit. Again he was uninjured despite being thrown 30 feet in the air. Although it showed consistently promising results (except for the explosions), the X-15 was eventually shelved before it could achieve Crossfield’s ambition of it being the first plane in space.

The future belonged to NASA and its rocket launches that were controlled by computers and technicians on the ground instead of by pilots. Crossfield refused to join NASA and thought its approach to space was literally misguided. “They wanted medical subjects, not pilots,” he sniffed in a 2001 interview with AVweb, an online aviation magazine. “We made what I consider a terrible mistake. When we created NASA, we legislated the separation of aeronautics and space.” America got out of the aviation research business, and its highest-performing planes, like the SR-71 and the X-15, ended up in museums. There was a moment of optimism when President Reagan proposed the X-30, the National Aero-Space Plane, in the mid-1980s, but that project died as well.

Still, Crossfield held out optimism for a future that included pilots in outer space, and he was not interested in robotic missions to Mars or anywhere else. “My attitude is that flight is a human endeavor – so if it isn’t manned, the hell with it,” he told AVweb.

Crossfield was raised in Southern California, the son of a petroleum chemist. He took his first flight at age 6 in an oil company biplane, and was hooked on aviation from that moment on. He took his first flying lessons at age 12. Crossfield interrupted his education to serve as a Navy flight instructor during World War II; he then earned a masters in aeronautical science at the University of Washington, in 1950, and went to work as a test pilot and engineer at NACA.

Crossfield left NACA in 1955 to join North American Aviation, which was the prime contractor on the X-15 project. He also worked on the Apollo command and service modules, and the Saturn II booster. Crossfield then worked in a variety of civil aviation jobs for a decade before becoming a staff member of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science and Technology in 1977. He retired in 1993.

Crossfield did little flying of any kind after the demise of the X-15 until, at his wife’s urging, he purchased a single-engine Cessna 210 in the late 1980s. He loved puttering around in it, sometimes attending test pilot reunions or fly-in airshows around the country.

In 2003, in honor of the centennial of flight, he trained a group of pilots to fly a replica of the original 1903 Wright Brothers plane. Ever the DIY engineer, he first trained himself to fly the Wright Brothers’ training glider. On one flight, it yawed out of control. A wing tip struck the ground and Crossfield, 81 years old at the time, was thrown 25 feet by the impact. He dusted himself off and got back to work mastering the tetchy controls. Sadly, when the big day came on December 17 to re-enact the original flight, bad weather grounded the replica, hardly the first time in his career Crossfield’s vision was stifled by factors out of his control.

Albert Scott Crossfield

Born October 2, 1921, in Berkeley, Calif.; died Wednesday when his plane crashed in Ranger, Ga.; there were thunderstorms in the area at the time, and the accident is under investigation.