Edwards Air Force Base

Edwards Air Force Base occupies the western Mojave Desert around Rogers Dry Lake, north of Los Angeles. The hard, flat lakebed has been a natural runway for decades. What began as Muroc Army Air Field in the 1930s became the center of U.S. military flight test. In 1949 the installation was renamed for Captain Glen W. Edwards, killed the previous year testing the YB-49 flying wing.

Edwards is where the Air Force and NACA—later NASA—pushed aircraft past the speed of sound and into the edge of space. Chuck Yeager’s 1947 X-1 flight, the X-15 rocket plane, lifting-body research that shaped Shuttle landing concepts, and countless fighter and bomber test programs used the lakebed and the instrumented ranges around it. NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center (now Armstrong Flight Research Center) grew on the same lakebed complex.

Late in the ARIA story the fleet’s last station was Edwards. The 452d Flight Test Squadron operated highly modified C-135 and C-18 aircraft there for DoD, NASA, and operational flight test—telemetry gathering, treaty verification, spacecraft launch support, ballistic missile defense tests, electronic combat work, and related missions. Advanced Range Instrumentation Aircraft and Cruise Missile Mission Control Aircraft were part of that special-mission mix.

Edwards remains the Air Force Test Center’s flagship base: a place where new air and space vehicles are cleared for the fleet, and where the culture of measured risk, instrumentation, and range discipline that ARIA lived by is still daily work.

Milestones

1. 1933–40sMuroc — Bombing and gunnery range activity grows into Muroc Army Air Field beside Rogers Dry Lake.
2. 1947-10-14Breaking the sound barrier — Capt. Charles E. Yeager exceeds Mach 1 in the Bell X-1 over the Edwards range.
3. 1949Edwards AFB — The base is renamed for Capt. Glen W. Edwards.
4. 1959–68X-15 — The X-15 program flies from Edwards toward the edge of space.
5. 1990s–2001ARIA at Edwards — ARIA and related special-mission aircraft operate under the flight test wing at Edwards late in the program.

Summary original to flyARIA.com. Photograph: NASA. Works of the U.S. Government are generally in the public domain in the United States; credit does not imply endorsement.

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