The North American Aviation X-15 was a revolutionary aircraft that forever changed the landscape of aviation and space ...

Bold, black and blazing fast: The North American X-15 was a plane unlike any other. And although it first flew over 60 years ago, it is still the quickest manned aircraft ever to fly.

The second X-15 rocket plane (56-6671) is shown with two external fuel tanks which were added during its conversion to the X-15A-2 configuration in the mid-1960’s. SPLOID is delicious brain ...

The second X-15 rocket plane is shown with two external fuel tanks which were added during its conversion to the X-15A-2 configuration in the mid-1960's. X-15 Cockpit . NASA/U.S. Air Force .

North American ultimately won the bid in the fall of 1956, and had just 30 months to deliver the first X-15. But the aircraft’s evolution was far from over; it evolved even after it started flying.

Early on the morning of Sept. 17, 1959, test pilot Scott Crossfield, an aerospace engineer who also helped in the X-15’s initial design, sat in the rocket plane’s cockpit and waited.

Retropolis Smithsonian’s legendary rocket plane heads for storage during renovations. The X-15, once the world’s fastest, highest-flying piloted aircraft, has hung from the rafters of the Air ...

On the X-15-3 the morning of Adams’ final flight, his seventh in the rocket aircraft, there were seven experiments on board, all classified as scientific, separate from the X-15 program.

LOS ANGELES - Famed research test pilot Bill Dana, who flew the X-15 rocket plane and other pioneering aircraft during the birth of the space age, has died at age 83.. Dana died Tuesday at an ...

Well, this is just like that but six times better. The X-15 is the fastest manned aircraft, having reached a speed of Mach 6.7 or about 7,200 kilometers per hour, a feat it attained on October 3 ...

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Famed research test pilot Bill Dana, who flew the X-15 rocket plane and other pioneering aircraft during the birth of the space age, has died at age 83.

Famed research test pilot Bill Dana, who flew the X-15 rocket plane and other pioneering aircraft, has died at age 83. Word of Dana's death on Tuesday was announced by NASA's Armstrong Flight ...