{"id":515297,"date":"2010-04-05T06:20:13","date_gmt":"2010-04-05T10:20:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.xconomy.com\/?p=71650"},"modified":"2010-04-05T06:20:13","modified_gmt":"2010-04-05T10:20:13","slug":"toward-a-new-land-speed-record-a-day-in-the-life-of-the-north-american-eagle-%e2%80%9cturbojet-car%e2%80%9d","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/515297","title":{"rendered":"Toward a New Land Speed Record: A Day in the Life of the North American Eagle \u201cTurbojet Car\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Vehicles<\/a>, aerospace<\/a>, Transportation<\/a><\/div>\n

\t\t\"North<\/a>
\n\t\tThea Chard wrote:<\/strong><\/p>\n

It was just after 10 a.m. on a hazy spring morning as Ed Shadle drove a trailer the size of a semi-truck to the far end of the Spanaway Airport, a quarter-mile active airstrip located 15 miles south of Tacoma, WA. A handful of his 44-person crew, which includes his son Cam and eight-year-old grandson Alex, had already arrived and were busy setting up for the day—a table of coffee and donut holes for the crew and onlookers, a Subaru converted into a mobile data acquisition center, and several barrels of fuel at the ready.<\/p>\n

For Shadle, 68, and his partner and co-owner of the North American Eagle<\/a>, Keith Zanghi, 55, the day\u2019s engine test was just one stop along a more than 11-year journey to build the fastest land vehicle in the world. The goal: 800 miles per hour.<\/p>\n

Shadle and his crew, all based in Washington state, were busy lowering the Eagle, a 56-foot-long tubular car forged out of the fuselage of a Lockheed F-104 Starfighter, from the trailer. The nose and tail cones had been removed for transport, reducing the car to 48 feet in length—just short enough to fit inside the trailer. Other crew members busily prepared the steel cables that would anchor the car to two gravel-filled trucks, weighing 80,000 lbs in all, and to a nearby tree with deep roots—a \u201csafety precaution,\u201d the crew said. This setup procedure was nothing new for them.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve probably been out to this airport maybe 25 times, and we tie up to our favorite tree back there,\u201d Zanghi said. \u201cLuckily it\u2019s not raining. It could be worse.\u201d<\/p>\n

For both Shadle and Zanghi, the thirst for speed was born out of a love of drag racing at an early age. And naturally, like any \u201ctypical teenager of that era,\u201d as Shadle calls himself, drag racing led to more racing at higher speeds, and eventually, flight.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor me, it started back when I was just a kid back in the late \u201840s, early \u201850s. My uncles were all back from World War II and they got into stock car racing—the old jalopies running on dirt tracks. And of course we used to go to the races, so I\u2019d hang out in the pits and watch my hero uncles,\u201d Shadle said. \u201cMy first drag race on a real strip was at an airport. We raced on Friday nights for 50 cents and you could race all night.\u201d Later, in his 20s, Shadle joined the Air Force and developed his career as a pilot.<\/p>\n

\u201cJust like Ed, we all grew up with the space program. The Mercury astronauts were my heroes—the Gemini and Apollo [as well]. All I did was build model airplanes when I was a kid,\u201d Zanghi said.<\/p>\n

\"North<\/a><\/p>\n

The shared passion for flight, speed, and all the machinery behind them brought Shadle and Zanghi together in the 1990s when they both found themselves on a team working to build a vehicle that could break the land speed record. They were beat out, however, by Great Britain\u2019s Richard Noble and Andy Green, who in 1997 achieved the current record of 763.1 mph with the ThrustSSC<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt that time, the record was 633 mph, which is about 140 mph below the speed of sound, so we were building a car that was designed to go sub-sonic.\u201d Zanghi said. When the British team broke the record, their car went supersonic. \u201cAs soon as that happened, we knew our car was obsolete,” he said.<\/p>\n

When their project folded, Shadle and Zanghi decided to team up on a brand new endeavor, and in 1999 they bought the Eagle\u2019s junked F-104 fuselage, without wings, for $25,000. The single-engine supersonic interceptor had its heyday flying with the U.S Air Force from the late 1950s to the late 1960s.<\/p>\n

According to Zanghi, the F-104 had the ideal shape for land speed racing. The body was …Next Page »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

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Vehicles, aerospace, Transportation Thea Chard wrote: It was just after 10 a.m. on a hazy spring morning as Ed Shadle drove a trailer the size of a semi-truck to the far end of the Spanaway Airport, a quarter-mile active airstrip located 15 miles south of Tacoma, WA. A handful of his 44-person crew, which includes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4864,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-515297","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mobile","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515297","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4864"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=515297"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515297\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=515297"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=515297"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=515297"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}