It was thought that a full-scale airplane with a trained pilot at the controls would yield more accurate data than could be obtained in a wind tunnel. A full-scale, high-speed aircraft was proposed that would help investigate compressability and control problems, powerplant issues and the effects of higher Mach and Reynolds numbers.
#Broken age propulsion how to#
The subject was how to provide aerospace companies with better information on high-speed flight in order to improve aircraft design. And as ominous as it seemed to us then, that was the whole point.Īmerica was at war with Germany and Japan in December 1943 when a conference was called at the fledgling National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA, NASA's forerunner) in Washington.
And when the Mach indicator stuttered off the scale barely 5 minutes after the drop from our mother B-29, America entered the second great age of aviation development.īut with the XS-1, later shortened to X-1, we were flying through uncharted territory, the "ugh-known' as we liked to call it. 1 streaked past the speed of sound that morning without too much fanfare–broken ribs notwithstanding. And now, as iridescent fingers of sunlight gripped the eastern mountain rims, we made ready to take a stab at cracking the sound barrier–up until that point aviation's biggest hurdle. The gifts were a whimsical allusion to a disagreement I'd had the previous evening with a horse. It was just after sunup on the morning of October 14, 1947, and as I walked into the hangar at Muroc Army Air Base in the California high desert, the XS-1 team presented me with a big raw carrot, a pair of glasses and a length of rope. To honor his life, Pop Mech is reprinting that story in its entirety. In November 1987, to mark the 40th anniversary of Yeager's signature accomplishment, he retold the gripping story of how he broke the sound barrier in the pages of Popular Mechanics, as only he could. When Yeager broke the sound barrier, he rewrote the history of aviation and aerospace his "pioneering and innovative spirit advanced America's abilities in the sky and set our nation's dreams soaring into the jet age and the space age," NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said in a statement. Though Yeager would go on to shatter several other speed and altitude records-cementing his reputation as, arguably, America's greatest pilot-it was that historic Mach 1 mark, announced in June 1948, that stands as Yeager's crowning achievement.
Air Force Captain at the time-flew the Bell X-1 experimental plane 45,000 feet over the Mojave Desert, becoming the first person on Earth to travel faster than the speed of sound. Charles Edwood "Chuck" Yeager, the legendary American test pilot, passed away on Decemat age 97, his wife Victoria announced late Monday night.
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