There is much to be said about the merits of dying “in the right way.” Scott Crossfield, who became the first man to fly at twice the speed of sound in 1953, was killed in the crash of his small private plane in Georgia the past week. It would be interesting to know if Crossfield would have wanted it any other way.

He was 84 and had a long career as a top-level test pilot and aircraft designer. In the 1950s, he and the higher-profile Chuck Yeager dueled for supremacy as the nation’s best Cold War test pilots. Yeager broke the sound barrier in 1947. Only weeks after Crossfield reached Mach 2, twice the speed of sound, Yeager outdid him. Time and again men like Crossfield, Yeager and Kansas’ own astronaut Joe Engle risked their lives to accomplish tremendous feats in aeronautics, feats which have benefited society in innumerable ways.

Said one expert: “Scott was not only the great cutting-edge research pilot : but after that he continued to be a great adviser and participant in all aspects of aerospace.”

There’s no question: Scott Crossfield was courageous. He had 84 outstanding and productive years that helped his nation, and he took great pride in that, the same as Yeager and Engle do.

Perhaps that small plane crash that claimed Crossfield’s life would not have been his choice for departure. Nobody knows what he might have thought. But there was great irony in the fact that the puny plane in which he died was only a shadow of the marvelous machines Crossfield flew, designed and perfected in his great career.