EDITORIAL INFORMATION

Details of the MX-324 Project were first released to the public on 12 February 1947, more than 16 months after the project ended. But the wartime secrecy that surrounded it apparently led to the loss or destruction of many of its archival documents. Thus, I had little success initially in uncovering more than the customary bits and pieces published in general works. For a time, I gave up hope of completing a history of this fascinating project. Even Northrop could provide no more than a general summary.

My luck changed in 1990, when decades-old faded and yellowed photo duplicates of two memorandums reports by the Aircraft Laboratory Air Technical Service Command reached me in Beirut. These reports, TSEAL-2-4302-20-5 and ENG-51-4302-20-4, form the bulk of this work.

(Extracted from "Sources", by the author).

GENERAL TABLE OF CONTENTS

-Preface.

-1- The Origins of Project MX-365.
-2- Project MX-334.
-3- MX-334 Test Flights.
-4- Control and Stability Flight Tests.
-5- The Rocket Flights of MX-324.
-6- The Unique Flight of XP-79B.
-7- MX-334, MX-324 and XP-79B Flight Log.
-8- Harry Crosby; John Myers; Alex Papana.

-Appendix: Historical Interviews.

-MX-324 Specifications; Center of Gravity Locations for MX-334; XP-79 Specifications; XP-79B Specifications.

-Sources.

OUR REVIEW

Henry Matthews is one of these few individuals truly in love with the aerospace world ready to put within the others' reach the wide informative background they have accumulated along the years. Data, in most cases, insufficiently documented in the official literature or even almost unknown on the part of the specialists themselves. Matthews, a Fellow of the famous British Interplanetary Society and also author of interesting works such as The Secret Story of the Soviet Space Shuttle, has undertaken the editorial adventure of writing and publishing this and other works that, although not technically perfect, are an essential source for the aficionado to the history of astronautics and space.

The program MX-324, the culmination of considerable efforts in the bosom of the American Air Force seeking to find an opponent to the German plane Me-163 Komet, ended up becoming the first American attack plane with rocket propulsion. MX-324, a direct predecessor of what should have been the operative vehicle, XP-79, did achieve, unlike that one, a substantial experimental life that would later be developed for subsequent projects of a greater import, such as the well known X-planes, that so many records broke in the following years, and that, somehow, constituted the predecessors of the current space shuttle.

The book presents numerous illustrations and reproductions of highly interesting and descriptive photographs, of an extreme rarity. Besides, Matthews makes a good job of describing the origins, vehicles, test flights, etc., for each one of the programs described so far.