"They were called test pilots, and no one knew their names..."

That's a snippet of Levon Helm's drawling opening narration to the great movie The Right Stuff. I mention it because this week Scott Crossfield was found dead in the wreckage of a small single-engine plane in northern Georgia.

Crossfield was one of the great test pilots of the postwar era, second only to Chuck Yeager in fame and standing. He was the first man to fly at Mach 2, and then Mach 3, and (along with Yeager and other pilots like Jack Ridley and Slick Goodlin) was part of the fraternity of “shit-hot rocket aces” that flew out of Edwards AFB in the late 40s and early 50s — and haunted Pancho Barnes's colorful Happy Bottom Riding Club.

In The Right Stuff, Crossfield was protrayed by Scott Wilson as a quiet, well-mannered civilian pilot — a close comrade and friendly competitor to Yeager. Neither Crossfield nor Yeager were considered as candidates for the Mercury program, and the film makes a point of cutting back to Pancho's dusty saloon every so often, where the aging test pilots sip whiskey and listen in silence to radio coverage of the first space missions.

With Crossfield's death, Yeager is the last of the Edwards AFB “mad monk squad” — Jack Ridley died in a plane crash in 1957, Gus Grissom in the 1967 Apollo 1 fire. Pancho Barnes died in 1975, Deke Slayton in 1993, Gordo Cooper in 2004, and Slick Goodlin just last October.

It's good to know, at least, that Crossfield was still flying at age 84, and (morbidly) romantic to hear that he died in the cockpit like so many of his comrades (classically immortalized as pictures on the wall behind Pancho's bar):