“Hey Ridley, do you have Beemans?”
On a sunny fall morning in the middle of the California desert, a pair of sonic booms echoed loudly across the blue sky, marking aviation’s greatest achievement as the momentum of the jet age propelled America into the space age.
the 14th October 1947then-Captain. Charles “Chuck” Yeager soared faster than anyone before him as he piloted the Bell XS-1 just past the speed of sound.
Launched from the belly of a B-29, the XS-1, called the Glamorous Glennis After his wife, he climbed to 45,000 feet and then flew straight and level over the Mojave Desert floor and reached Mach 1.07.
Chuck Yeager remains the greatest test pilot America has ever known.
The road to Mach 1: Yeager didn’t think it could be achieved
However, in the days leading up to that now-famous date, Yeager doubted that the Air Force could reach Mach 1. Six days earlier, as his XS-1 raced toward that “demon in the sky,” Yeager’s plane had lost control of the elevator. I would try it again.
In 1985, General Charles Yeager published a detailed account of his participation in the XS-1 program as part of his autobiography. Yeager. The book hit bookstores two years after the release of the popular movie The Right Stuff. The film introduced General Yeager to a new generation interested in aviation.
The making of an American legend
Born on February 13, 1923, in Myra, West Virginia, Yeager entered the US Army Air Force (USAAF) at age 18, a few months before the events of Pearl Harbor and the US entry into World War II. He started out privately working as an airplane mechanic and moved on to flight training and earned his wings a month after his 20th birthday.
He became a fighter ace during the war, and was credited with shooting down five German Messerschmitt aircraft on a mission in October 1944. In the final years of the war, Yeager flew the new P-51D Mustang during aerial combat.
When 1947 rolled around, Yeager was still active in the Air Force. An offer from NASA’s precursor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, led him to attempt supersonic flight. The NACA planned its flights, including several hundred pounds of monitoring systems on board the plane to record the performance of the Bell aircraft.
As the ‘orange beast’ approached Mach 1 during previous flights, Yeager encountered an aerodynamic condition in which the air became denser the faster it flew. When the XS-1 reached Mach .95, shock waves of compressed air formed around the plane and the plane’s elevator controls suffered. Yeager referred to this shaking condition as “compressibility,” and he saw this while flying the Mustang at the end of World War II.
The actual speed of sound varies the higher a plane flies. Yeager noted: “At sea level, the speed of sound is 760 mph, at 40,000 feet, it is 660 mph. Yeager and the NACA understood this and modified the tail section of the XS-1.
The flight that changed everything
Two days before Yeager’s ninth powered flight on October 14He and his wife Glennis rode horses after dinner on a moonless night. Yeager’s account of what happened next became a historical footnote. As Chuck and Glennis ran back home, the dark night disguised the closed door in front of them. Yeager’s horse suddenly stopped as it hit the gate and Yeager flew through the air and landed on the ground.
He lay on his back (“I was dumb,” Yeager said) and Glennis ran to his assistant. He had suffered two broken ribs and shoulder pain in the fall. Their planned historic flight was just 36 hours away. The morning after the fall, Glennis took Yeager to a small-town doctor, who bandaged his ribs.
On Tuesday, October 14, 1947, at 08:00 local timeYeager entered the B-29 mothership. The Bell X-1 was under his belly. Once airborne, Yeager was informed it was time and climbed down the sliding ladder inside the B-29’s midsection to enter the Bell aircraft.
As Yeager has said, he asked his friend and B-29 flight engineer Jack Ridley for a stick of Beemans gum. Airmen loved Beemans (it was their lucky gum) and it also served as an antacid. He sat down and, using a broomstick cut to size by Ridley before the flight, Yeager was able to close the Bell’s canopy from the inside to prevent further pain from his broken ribs.
The X-1 was dropped at 20,000 feet and Yeager immediately became pilot when he noticed the plane beginning to stall. He fought the ship and won, then activated four switches in the cockpit to fire the four rocket chambers of the single engine. I was on my way.
It flew to 42,000 feet and then stabilized at 42,000 feet while traveling at Mach .96. “I realized that the faster I went, the smoother the ride,” Yeager noted in his autobiography. Yeager added that the next thing he noticed was that the Mach needle indicator went off scale.
“We were flying supersonic and it was as smooth as a baby’s bottom,” he says in his book. He radioed to Ridley flying miles away in the B-29: “Hey, Ridley, that Machmeter is acting strange; it’s just off the scale for me.” He later added that he felt numb but elated by what had just happened.
He had made that hole in the sky.
Yeager mentioned in his book: “In December 1947, Aviation Week leaked news of the sound barrier flight, but it was not until the following June that the Air Force confirmed it.”
Yeager’s legacy is part of American history
Even after hanging up his uniform, Yeager never stopped flying. During the ’80s and ’90s, he climbed into the cockpits of the Air Force’s newest planes, always drawn to the sky. His favorite was the F-15 Eagle, and it was in an Eagle that he went supersonic again at the age of 89, flying over the Mojave at Mach 1.4 on October 14, 2012, just as he had done in the Bell X-1 six decades earlier. When asked what was going through his mind, he just smiled: “Nothing. Flying is flying.”
While the world marveled at skydivers and new technologies (in the Red Bull Stratos project that same day, Felix Baumgartner jumped from 128,000 feet above New Mexico, free-falling past Mach 1 to become the first person to break the sound barrier without a jet or spacecraft), Yeager proved that courage and curiosity never go out of style.
Today, more than 75 years after its momentous flight, the Bell X-1 remains on permanent display at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington.
Brigadier General Charles Elwood Yeager lived to be 97 years old and passed away on December 7, 2020 in Los Angeles, California.
You can learn more about the legacy of this American hero in his official website.
(Charles Atkeison reports on aerospace and technology. Follow their updates via social media @Military_Flight.)
