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History of Muroc-Edwards Air Force Base: "Toward the Unexplored" 1967 US Air Force
🕑 Added 2019-09-19 01:44:24 +0000 UTCmore at http://quickfound.net/
TRACES HISTORY OF MUROC DRY LAKE, EDWARDS AFB, CALIFORNIA, AS AN AIR PROVING GROUND AND RESEARCH CENTER SINCE THE EARLY DAYS OF AVIATION. DOCUMENTS EXPERIMENTS IN ROCKETRY AND WITH X-SERIES, V-STOL AND FIXED WING AIRCRAFT. POINTS OUT ROCKET PROPULSION LABORATORY'S WORK IN MISSILE DEVELOPMENT. CITES EDWARDS' PROMINENT POSITION IN USAF SPACE AGE RESEARCH.
Originally a public domain film from the National Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.
The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwards_Air_Force_Base
Wikipedia license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
A water stop on the Santa Fe Railroad since 1882, the site was largely unsettled until the early 20th century. In 1910, Ralph, Clifford and Effie Corum built a homestead on the edge of Rogers Lake. The Corums proved instrumental in attracting other settlers and building infrastructure in the area, and when a post office was commissioned for the area, they named it Muroc, a reversal of the Corum name, due to the presence of a town named Coram.
Conscious that March Field was located in an area of increasing growth in Riverside County, and with the need for bombing and gunnery ranges for his units, base and 1st Wing commander Lieutenant Colonel Henry H. "Hap" Arnold began the process of acquiring land next to Muroc Dry Lake for a new bombing range away from populated areas in August 1932; the last tract was not acquired until 1939. The facility established to support the range, initially called "Mohave Field" for the nearby community of Mohave, was Muroc Field...
On the afternoon of 7 December 1941, the 41st Bombardment Group and the 6th Reconnaissance Squadron moved to Muroc from Davis-Monthan Army Airfield, Arizona, with a collection of B-18 Bolos, B-25 Mitchells, and an A-29 Hudson. On Christmas Eve, the 30th Bombardment Group and the 2d Reconnaissance Squadron arrived from New Orleans Army Airbase, Louisiana, for crew training. On 23 July 1942, the Muroc Bombing and Gunnery Range, Muroc Lake, California, was designated as a separate post (Exempted Status). The name of the facility at the time was "Army Air Base, Muroc Lake"...
Throughout the war years, the primary mission at Muroc was providing final combat training for bomber and fighter aircrews just before overseas deployment...
In spring 1942, the Mojave Desert station was chosen as a secluded site for testing America's first jet, the super-secret Bell Aircraft P-59 Airacomet jet fighter...
The P-59s were tested at Muroc from October 1942 through February 1944 without a single accident and, though the aircraft did not prove to be combat worthy, the successful conduct of its test program, combined with the success of the Lockheed XP-80 program which followed it in early 1944, sealed the future destiny of the remote high desert installation. Muroc would thenceforth become synonymous with the cutting edge of the turbojet revolution in America...
With the end of the war, Fourth Air Force relinquished command of Muroc Army Airfield on 16 October 1945 and jurisdiction was transferred to Air Technical Service Command, becoming Air Materiel Command in 1946. Test work on the Lockheed P-80 Shooting Star was the primary mission of the base for the greater part of the fall of 1945. The Consolidated Vultee XP-81 single seat, long range escort fighter and Republic XP-84 Thunderjet fighter arrived at the base in early 1946 for flight testing. It was obvious even at this embryonic stage of base development that the Army Air Force desert station was destined to become a proving ground for aircraft and a testing site for experimental airplanes.
The success of these programs attracted a new type of research activity to the base in late 1946. The rocket-powered Bell X-1 was the first in a long series of experimental airplanes designed to prove or disprove aeronautical concepts...
In December 1949, Muroc was renamed Edwards Air Force Base in honor of Captain Glen Edwards (1918–1948), who was killed a year earlier in the crash of the Northrop YB-49 Flying Wing...
