A friend of mine who worked at Convair Ft Worth on the B-58 told me of the first USAF flight of the airplane. An all-USAF crew came to Carswell AFB for the first non-contractor flight of the airplane; at that point they only had about three of them built. The airplane the USAF crew was supposed to fly broke at the last minute and so Convair was forced to give them their precious heavily instrumented test bird. They had been flying the airplane for months only to inevitably discover that most of the instrumentation had failed to work. The test program was months behind schedule as a result and the flight analysis team was starved for data.
The Convair engineers cautioned the Air Force crew that the airplane had to be considered as still quite experimental, so to be very careful. Use afterburner only for takeoff. Do not exceed 20,000 ft and stay below Mach 1.
To the engineer's horror the Air Force crew took off in AB, stayed in AB during the climb, leveled off still in AB. They far exceeded Mach 1. They went to over 50,000 ft. All the while the Convair engineers were screaming "No! No! Don't do that!" over the radio. When the B-58 landed the enraged engineers ran out to the airplane, screaming at the USAF crew and threatening to strangle them.
And then.... They found that well over 90% of the instrumentation HAD WORKED! They had data coming out of their butts! The flight test program instantaneously went from well behind schedule to far ahead. The flight analysis people had all the data the could want.
They took the first Air Force B-58 crew out and got them the best steak Texas could provide and, reportedly, the finest available female company as well.