FASTER THAN THE SPEED OF SOUND! #OTD 1947 USAF Capt. Chuck Yeager Breaks Sound Barrier!

Captain Charles E. Yeager, 5/1948, NARA ID 542345.

XS-1 in flight, speed of sound GIF, NARA ID 295649.

FASTER THAN THE SPEED OF SOUND! #OTD 1947 USAF Capt. Chuck Yeager breaks sound barrier!

Yeager made history on Oct. 14, 1947, when he climbed out of a B-29 bomber as it ascended over the Mojave Desert and entered the cockpit of an orange, bullet-shaped, rocket-powered experimental plane attached to the bomb bay. The plane was a Bell Aircraft X-1, at an altitude of 23,000 feet, and when he reached 43,000 feet, history’s first sonic boom reverberated across the floor of the dry lake beds. He reached 700 miles an hour, breaking the sound barrier. His initial response to this incredible feat?

After all the anticipation to achieve this moment, it really was a letdown. There should’ve been a bump in the road, something to let you know that you had just punched a nice, clean hole through the sonic barrier. The Unknown was a poke through Jell-O. Later on, I realized that this mission had to end in a letdown because the real barrier wasn’t in the sky but in our knowledge and experience of supersonic flight.From Yeager’s memoir:

XS-1 control panel, online here. 

Yeager, safely on the ground, reviews his records at the National Archives at College Park, 9/16/2013.

Author Tom Wolfe described "Right Stuff" legendary aviator, WWII fighter ace and USAF General Yeager as “the most righteous of all the possessors of the right stuff.” His bio reads like a Harrison Ford/Nicholas Cage/Tom Cruise adventure film hybrid, especially given that Yeager:

Had only a high school education.

Got airsick his first time in plane.

Enlisted at age 18 as a mechanic, and 2 years later was a pilot

Not only did he break the sound barrier, he did so with 2 broken ribs!

Pilot’s Notes from the Ninth Powered Flight of the XS-1, NARA ID 295644

Yeager was a fighter ace in WWII, shooting down 5 German planes in a single day and 13 total. He was shot down over occupied France in March 1944 and rescued by the French resistance. In appreciation, he showed them how to make homemade bombs! Read his incredible personal account here.

Escape and Evasion Case File for Flight Officer Chuck Yeager, NARA ID 305272.

He became a test pilot after WWII, at what became Edwards Air Force Base. Not only did he break the sound barrier, he did so with 2 broken ribs! He’d fallen off a horse and broke two ribs the night before the flight, and went to a civilian doctor rather than risk not being able to attempt the flight. Because of the secrecy of the X-1 project, Yeager’s achievement was not announced until June 1948. He continued to serve as a test pilot, and in 1953 he flew 1,650 miles per hour in an X-1A rocket plane.

He was the first commandant of the USAF Aerospace Research Pilot School and trained astronauts and test pilots for the Air Force. But given that he only had a high school education, he could not be an astronaut.

He flew 414 hours of combat time in the Vietnam war - 127 missions while training bomber pilots. He was promoted to Brigadier General in 1969.He retired from the Air Force in 1975, but continued to work for the Air Force until 1995. President Reagan appointed him to the Rogers Commission, the body that investigated the 1986 Challenger Shuttle disaster. Yeager died on December 7, 2020, at age 97.

Yeager was very modest about his accomplishments:

All I know is I worked my tail off learning to learn how to fly, and worked hard at it all the way. If there is such a thing as the right stuff in piloting, then it is experience. The secret to my success was that somehow I always managed to live to fly another day. Yeager’s memoir.

More online:

Chuck Yeager – Evader, March 1944, Text Message blog by archivist David Langbart.