Bill Bridgeman William " Bill " Barton Bridgeman ( 1916 – September 29 , 1968 ) was an American test pilot who broke aviation records while working for the Douglas aircraft company testing experimental aircraft . In July 1951 , the United States Navy announced that the Douglas Skyrocket ( D - 558 - II ) piloted by Bridgeman had " attained the highest speed and altitude ever recorded by a piloted plane . " On August 15 of the same year , he set a world record with a speed of Mach 1 . 88 and an unofficial record height of . Bridgeman was born in Iowa . His father was a barnstormer and separated from his mother shortly after he was born . He was raised in Malibu , California by his paternal grandmother . He enlisted in the United States Navy to attend flight school at Pensacola . He graduated and was commissioned in 1941 , and was sent to Pearl Harbor , where he experienced the Japanese attack on December 7 . He flew PBY Catalina flying boats in the New Guinea / Australia sector , then four - engined PB4Y - 2 Privateer patrol bombers on a tour of operations with VP / VPB - 109 Squadron ( the " Reluctant Raiders " ) . He was reassigned afterwards to training activities stateside from August 1944 until the end of the war , then spent two years flying transport missions from Pearl Harbor to the West Coast . Upon leaving the Navy in 1947 , Bridgeman joined Southwest Airlines ( a local West Coast airline that eventually merged into Pacific Southwest Airlines , not to be confused with today ' s Southwest ) to fly DC - 3 s on the San Francisco - Seattle route . Bored with the airline routine , he left in 1949 to join the Douglas Aircraft Company as a production test pilot to certify A - 1 Skyraider s off the assembly line before their delivery to the Navy . A few months later , he was offered and accepted to take over the test program of the D - 558 II Skyrocket , one of the world ' s first supersonic research prototypes . Bridgeman converted to jet aircraft on the F - 80 in early 1950 and eventually conducted a very successful test program with the Skyrocket , collecting data on the behavior of swept - wing aircraft over a wide envelope of load factors and Mach numbers deep in the supersonic range . In May 1951 , he broke the world speed record with Mach 1 . 72 , then raised the record to Mach 1 . 88 ( 1 , 245 mph , 1 , 992 km / h ) the next month . Immediately afterwards , he broke the world altitude record with 79 , 494 ft . ( 24 , 230 m ) on the Skyrocket ' s final flight before delivery to NACA . During this campaign , Bridgeman was one of the first pilots to encounter the phenomenon of inertia coupling , a flight hazard that would dominate high - speed aircraft research for much of the 1950s . He was on the cover of the April 27 , 1953 issue of " Time " magazine . He went on to fly other Douglas test programs including the X - 3 Stiletto , a promising but ultimately unsuccessful design . In 1955 , he recounted his experiences test - flying the Skyraider and Skyrocket in a successful memoir , " The Lonely Sky " , written with Jacqueline Hazard , whom he married shortly after the book was published . He was an astronaut candidate for the United States Air Force Man In Space Soonest program , but the program was cancelled on August 1 , 1958 , and replaced by NASA ' s Project Mercury . Bridgeman eventually moved to Grumman Aircraft where he conducted test programs of commercial aircraft , then pursued a career in commercial real estate . In September 1968 , his airplane went down in the Pacific Ocean during a routine leisure flight from Los Angeles to Santa Catalina Island . His body was never found .