That was a very bad day on Edwards. Test pilots are very close: They live and work together like a professional football team; their wives are good friends, and their children are part of the same small world. So a double fatality shatters everybody. Today's test pilots and their families live nearly as close to death as the old-time pilots ever did -- but the new breed fears it more. With rare exceptions, they are married, with at least two children, and in their off-duty hours they live as carefully and quietly as any physics professor. A few ride little Hondas, Suzukis, and other midget motorcycles, but strictly for transportation -- or, as one of the pilots explained, “So Mama can use the family car.” The flight-line parking lot, where working pilots leave their cars, looks no different from any supermarket lot in San Bernardino. Here again, with rare exceptions, the test pilot's earthbound vehicle is modest -- probably a five-year-old Ford or Chevy, perhaps a Volkswagen, Datsun, or other low-priced import. At the other end of the flight line, in front of the test pilots' school, the mix is a bit livelier. Of the 46 cars I counted there one afternoon, there was one Jaguar XKE, one IK-150, one old Mercedes with a V-8 Chevy engine, one Stingray; all the rest were clunkers. A cluster of motorcycles stood near the door, but the hottest one in the lot was a mild-mannered 250 Yamaha.

The midnight roads around Antelope Valley are quiet these days, except for an occasional teen-age drag race. Today's test pilots go to bed early, and they regard big motorcycles with the same analytical disdain they have for hippies, winos, and other failure symbols. They take their risks, on assignment, between dawn and 4:30 p.m. But when their time is their own, they prefer to hunker down in the wall-to-wall anonymity of their one-story, flat-roofed, Levittown-style homes between the base golf course and the officers' club, there to relax in front of the tube with a succulent TV dinner. Their music is Mantovani, and their idea of an “artist” is Norman Rockwell. On Friday afternoons, from four-thirty to seven, they crowd into the officers' club bar for the weekly “happy hour,” where most of the talk is about planes and current test projects. Then, just before seven, they go home to pick up their wives and dress for dinner, again at “the club.” After dinner there will be a bit of dancing to the jukebox or maybe a small combo. Heavy drinking is out of the question; a drunken test pilot is viewed with genuine alarm by the others, who see any form of social excess -- drink, wenching, late hours, any “unusual” behavior -- as an indication of some deeper problem, an emotional cancer of some kind. Tonight's juicer is tomorrow's -- or Monday's -- hangover risk, a pair of slow-focusing eyes or an uncertain hand at the controls of a $100 million aircraft. The Air Force has trained three generations of elite-level pilots to abhor any hint of foreseeable human risk in the flight-test program. The planes, after all, are risky enough, they are the necessary unknown factor in the equation that every test project ideally boils down to. (Test pilots are very hip to equations; they can describe a plane and all its characteristics, using nothing but numbers.) And a cool waterhead knows that an equation with only one unknown factor is a hell of a lot simpler to cope with than an equation with two. The idea, then, is to minimize the chance of a second unknown factor -- such as an unpredictable pilot -- that might turn a simple flight-test equation into a scorched crater on the desert and another wave of donations to the “window fund.”