Charles Yeager And The Sound Barrier

On October 14th, 1947, in the sky, 45,000 feet in the air over the Rogers Dry Lake in the Mojave desert, something remarkable happened that proved many people wrong. For many years, people thought that people weren’t meant to fly any faster than the speed of sound, because they thought that the transonic drag rise would cause any aircraft to be ripped to shreds while flying in midair, but Charles Yeager proved it wrong. Charles flew the Bell Xs-1, named Glamorous Glennis, that was fast enough to break the sound barrier, at Mach 1.05, making him the first person to ever fly past the sound barrier.

The sound barrier; one of the most astonishing features on earth, where a plane flies past the speed of sound and makes a loud, boom sound. The sound barrier is a physical barrier and can be physically broken, when an aircraft, which can withstand the speed, flies at the speed of one Mach, or roughly 757 miles per hour, and creates a loud boom-like sound. Take the Concorde for example. The Concord was the 1st commercial supersonic airliner. Or the North American X-15, which was the fastest manned aircraft in the world, reaching up to speeds as fast as 4,520 miles per hour! Now let’s backtrack to around when Charles Yeager was born. Which was about in the early 1920s. Aviation was just becoming a thing, so it wasn’t really common at the time. This was when people started making airplanes for both military use and commercial use. There is not much to know about the sound barrier in this period, so we’ll just have to catch up to that in a little bit.

Let’s get to Chucky. Charles “Chuck Elswood Yeager was born in 1923 in the city of Myra, in West Virginia, and grew up in the village nearby, called Hamlin, and was raised along with his four other siblings; two brothers and two sisters. He graduated from high school and then attended the Citizens Military Training Camp at Fort Benjamin Harrison in the summer as a teen. He was then enlisted as a private for the Army Air Corps in 1941. In case you were wondering, a private is a soldier with the lowest military rank there is, who is starting basic combat training, and is the most junior rank in the Army (https://www.army.mil/ranks/). That means he started at square one as military personnel. (It is possible to start higher than this rank) When world war two started, he was transferred to Victorville Air Base in California. There, he worked on AT-11’s and received a promotion to Private First Class and Corporal. To fill you in, Private First Class is the third lowest rank in the military, and they carry out orders issued to them and start training with prior experience (https://www.army.mil/ranks/) and Corporal is the fifth, lowest rank in the military, and those personnel are non commissioned officers. The next year, 1942, he was accepted for pilot training under the flying sergeant program. He received his pilot wings and nomination as a flight officer the following year, while in Luke Field, which is in Phoenix, Arizona. He was also promoted from a corporal to a flight officer. After completing his basic training at Ellington Field, in Texas, he served for two months at Mather Field, California, and later at Moffett Field, which is also in California. (http://www.chuckyeager.org/history/184/) His very first assignment was as a P-39 fighter aircraft, in the 363rd squadron in Nevada. From there, Yeager was constantly moving air bases, before going overseas to the UK. While he was in England, he flew P-51s in combat against the Germans, shooting down two planes before being shot down himself on his eighth combat mission over France, which was currently occupied by Germany. He evaded capture when elements of the French Maquis helped him to make his way across the Pyrenees to neutral Spain. By the way, ‘The maquis was one of the many forms of Resistance in France’s fight against the German Occupation and the Vichy regime during the Second World War.’ (Balu 192). In the spring, later that year, he was promoted from Second Lieutenant to Captain. Yeager returned to the United States in 1945 after being in Spain for the summer after he was shot down, to attend the instructor pilot course and subsequently served as an instructor pilot at Perrin Field, Texas. In July 1945 he went to Wright Field, Ohio, and participated in various test projects, such as the P-80 “Shooting Star” and the P-84 Thunderjet. He also assessed all of the Japanese and German fighter aircraft delivered back to the United States after the war. This assignment led to his subsequent selection as a pilot of the nation’s first research rocket aircraft, The Bell X-1.

Yeager continued to fly for the United States Air Force, working as a flight instructor and experimental pilot. In August 1947, Yeager was sent to the Muroc Air Base, in California as the project officer on the Bell XS-1. The XS-1 was a plane created by Bell Aircraft Co. and was designed to be made into a small aircraft with thin, unswept wings, and a streamlined fuselage, which was based on the structure of a 0.50 caliber bullet. Now for the exciting part; on October 14, 1947, The Bell XS-1 was carried up to 25,000 feet by a B-29 Superfortress. It was released from the bomb bay of the Superfortress, over the Rogers Dry Lake in the Mojave Desert, and Yeager, who was already inside, ascended the plane to 45,000 feet and was exceeding the speed of 662 miles per hour, which was the sound barriers speed at that altitude, and shot past the sound barrier with a loud boom, which is what happens when a plane flies past the sound barrier, which is called the Sonic Boom. This led Charles Yeager to become the world’s first supersonic pilot ever. During the next two years, he flew the XS-1 more than 40 times, going 1,000 miles per hour each time, and 21 kilometers. He was also the first American to make a ground takeoff in a rocket-powered aircraft.

Yeager was involved in a couple of accidents in his career. Some of the elements of them contributed to his fame. One of them was in December 1953, when he flew the Bell X-1A at 1,650 mph. (which made him the first man to fly two and one-half times the speed of sound) At Mach 2.4 at 80,000 feet, the aircraft aggressively spun out of control, spinning on all three axes. G-forces sent Yeager’s head into the airplane canopy, which cracked it. The G-forces bent the control stick. He spun down at a gruesomely fast speed of approximately 51,000 feet in 51 seconds, which is about 1,000 feet per second, before regaining control at 25,000 feet. His speed record that day stood for the next three years. Another accident of his was on December 10, 1963, while he was testing the experimental Lockheed Starfighter NF-104 rocket-augmented aerospace trainer at over twice the speed of sound. He narrowly escaped death when his aircraft went out of control at 108,700 feet (roughly 21 miles in the sky) and crashed. He parachuted to safety at 8,500 feet after vainly battling to gain control of the powerless, rapidly falling airplane. In this incident, he became the first pilot to make an emergency ejection in the full pressure suit needed for high altitude flights. Yeager’s compression suit was set ablaze by the burning debris from the ejector seat, which became tangled up in his parachute, which caused the parachute to burn off from the ejector seat, and sent Yeager plummeting to the ground. He survived the fall but required extensive skin grafts for his burns. In 1954, he received the Harmon Trophy Award from General Eisenhower (our former president) for flying the X-1A. In July of 1966, Yeager commanded the 405th Fighter Wing at the Clark Air Base, in the Philippines and flew 127 missions into Southern Vietnam. During the Vietnam War, Yeager, who was now a full Colonel, commanded the 405th fighter wing that was going out from the Philippines, flying 127 air-support missions, and training bomber pilots. In 1973, Yeager became the Air Force Inspection and Safety Center director, in Norton Air Force Base, California. He was elected to the Aviation Hall of Fame the same year. Two years later, Yeager retired from active duty from the U.S. Air Force on March 1, 1975, but he continued to serve as a test pilot for the Air Force for many years after. On October 14, 1997, Chuck Yeager made his final flight as a military consultant, which was the 50th anniversary of breaking the sound barrier in the Bell X-1. He decided to observe the occasion one last time by breaking the sound barrier yet again in an F-15 fighter jet. Charles and his wife now live in Penn Valley, which is 145 miles Northeast of San Francisco. Great life story don’t you think?

Now that people know that humans can fly past the sound barrier, people made many aircraft that were able to fly past the sound barrier. The Concorde was the first supersonic commercial aircraft, which means that it was used to regularly transport people from place to place, like a typical passenger aircraft. It is not in use anymore, due to the cost that it takes to fly the aircraft, and in addition to the crash of Air France flight 4590. The flight was set up for takeoff and was waiting for another aircraft to take off. This aircraft was a Continental Airlines McDonnell Douglas MD-10. As it was taking off, a piece of metal flew off the aircraft onto the runway lane, which the Air France jet was just about to take off on. The aircraft started rumbling down the runway and ran over the piece of metal. The tire on the Front left undercarriage was punctured. A piece of the tire flew off and hit one of the fuel tanks in a weak spot, which caused it to rupture and leak. It set the plane on fire, which caused the engines to fail, and stalled the plane. The plane crashed, and everyone on board perished. The definition of the word “Stall” in this sentence is not like the normal car stall, where the engine stops running. It’s where the plane is attempting to ascend at a very steep angle, and the airplane creates so much drag behind it, that it will just stop, the nose will drop, and the plane just goes into a straight-up free-fall. When an aircraft is nearing a stall, the aircraft initiates a stall warning, and if the pilots do not lower the nose of the plane, it stalls. The airplane is usually uncontrollable and powerless after the aircraft goes into its free-fall, and, in most cases, the plane is so out of control, that it is forced to crash, but there have been some cases where planes have recovered from stalls. Another example of a modern supersonic aircraft would be the Tupolev Tu-144. It was a bit like the Concorde, but you could say that it’s the ‘Russian Version’ of it.

Supersonic flight is one of the most astonishing things that humans have discovered. So many people have flown past the sound barrier, and it amazed people when Yeager went past the sound barrier. It inspired people to make more planes like the X-1. And people out there have wanted to fly past it. To feel the experience. To get the experience. To keep the memory of the experience.

Bibliography

1. Larsen, Klaus LarsenKlaus, et al. “Klaus Larsen.” Chuck Yeager, 30 May 2019, www.chuckyeager.org/history/184/#movie/pubsAnchor.
2. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Sound Barrier.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 16 Mar. 2018, www.britannica.com/science/sound-barrier.
3. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Sound Barrier.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 16 Mar. 2018, www.britannica.com/science/sound-barrier.
4. Balu, Raphaële. “The French Maquis and the Allies during the Second World War.” SpringerLink, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 1 Jan. 1970, link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9781137443502_11.
5. “France in an Era of Global War, 1914-1945 Av Ludivine Broch, Alison Carrol (Bok).” Bokus.com, www.bokus.com/bok/9781137443489/france-in-an-era-of-global-war-1914-1945/.