An American Ace

The finest scientific, engineering, theoretical, aeronautical, military and business minds were chafing.

The war was over and there were planes to be built, fast planes, faster than nearly anyone could have imagined even a decade before. Passenger planes that could leap the Atlantic in three hours. Invincibly swift military fighters. Rockets to the moon, to the planets, to the stars.

But first, everything and everyone was waiting for a 24-year-old West Virginian with a nearly impenetrable drawl to fly through an invisible wall that, many informed people believed, likely would kill him.

It was called “the sonic wall” or, more commonly, the sound barrier. The speed of sound--varying according to altitude but about 660 mph at 40,000 feet--had never been reached by a piloted aircraft. In October 1947, it was considered an absolute, a point--”Mach 1” on instruments--beyond which no piloted aircraft could venture.

In combat and in flight tests, frightening, unpredictable things began to happen at such speeds: Controls would freeze, massive buffeting would occur and airplanes would disintegrate.

But a half-century ago, on Oct. 14, 1947, over a desolate high desert moonscape that was to become Edwards Air Force Base, the most celebrated pilot the United States Air Force ever has produced became the first human to breach the sound barrier, in a garish orange X-1 rocket plane nicknamed “Glamorous Glennis,” after his wife.

And he did it with two broken ribs, the result of an impromptu horse race two nights before.

“Fifty percent of the damn aerodynamicists in the United States didn’t give us a chance of getting above Mach 1,” retired Brig. Gen. Chuck Yeager, now 74, recalled recently. “But we didn’t look at it that way. We had to try. It was like flying in combat: You know you were going to lose some guys, but you figured it wouldn’t be you.

“I didn’t do it for personal benefit,” he said. “I didn’t look at it that way. It was duty. Although it was a major milestone, I didn’t look at it as an accomplishment. I looked at it as another part of the test program.

“What people don’t realize was that the X-1 program was one of about 10 programs that I was [working] on. We were busy as hell. I’d fly the X-1 a couple of times a week but I was flying a dozen damn airplanes a day on other test programs. . . .”

Yeager is inclined to be dismissive when talk ranges close to the subject of personal glory. He was a P-51 ace in Europe during World War II. He flew in combat in Vietnam. He has commanded operational Air Force wings throughout the world. By any yardstick, his career is remarkable.

When he walked into the Muroc Club, a meeting room and cafeteria complex at Edwards recently after piloting an F-15 through Mach 1 in preparation for an anniversary air show at the base next Tuesday, heads snapped around and whispered talk bubbled up: Yeager, Yeager, Yeager. Civilian secretaries asked for his autograph. Strangers clapped him on the back.

He stuck with his standard line: “I don’t pay any attention to it.”

Others do.

“He’s earned the respect and he gets it,” says Jim Young, the chief historian of the Air Force Flight Test Center at Edwards. “Since the passing of Gen. [James] Doolittle, Gen. Yeager is the most visible living icon the Air Force has, the most recognizable figure. And he maintains a schedule that would kill younger guys. There’s something very American about him. He’s as American as Mark Twain.”

*

The X-1, however, was no Mississippi riverboat. Built by the Bell Aircraft Co. of Buffalo, N.Y., it was designed to resemble a .50-caliber bullet, an object that aerodynamicists knew could slip easily through Mach 1. However, it needed wings, a tail assembly, an engine and a pilot, all of which turned the bullet into a potentially deadly flying bomb.

The 31-foot-long X-1 was powered by four rocket engines and fueled by a highly volatile mixture of liquid oxygen and alcohol that together produced a staggering 6,000 pounds of thrust. The wings were stubby razors, only 3.5 inches thick at the thickest point, and the tail assembly was set high over the fuselage to avoid the shock waves that would pass over the wings as the X-1 closed in on the sound barrier.

The cockpit was tiny and spare. Simply getting in was a chore. On all its initial flights, the X-1 was dropped from the belly of a B-29 Superfortress bomber at an altitude of 26,000 feet. This obliged the pilot to climb down into the bomb bay of the B-29 in flight and to wedge himself in. He then had to seal the hatch by shoving hard on a handle with his right hand.

“What most people don’t realize was the tremendous amount of risk Chuck was undergoing,” says Bob Hoover, a legendary combat and test pilot who served as Yeager’s chase and backup pilot on the X-1 project. “If anything went wrong, his chances of survival were slim and none. He was sitting on top of a bomb.”

No one knew that better than Major (now retired Brig. Gen.) Bob Cardenas, the pilot of the B-29. “No one used to say it, but I used to tell myself, ‘Make damn sure you don’t lift the nose wheel more than 10 inches on takeoff,’ ” Cardenas recalls. “You had 600 gallons of liquid oxygen and alcohol in that thing and if I raised the nose wheel too much, I’d scrape the tail of the X-1 and create sparks and . . . doing that just wasn’t a very good idea.”

And taking off was just the beginning. Serious trouble of any kind likely meant death for Yeager. There was no escape from the X-1 in flight. At such terrific speeds, engineers believed that if Yeager so much as stuck his head out of the hatch, he’d break his neck. And even if he could manage to safely push himself out of the hatch, he would be instantly swept back into the razor-like wings and cut in half.

His only physical protection was a leather football helmet (there were no crash helmets in flying in 1947) that he had modified for the purpose with a penknife.

There would be another piece of equipment, even more rudimentary, provided by the third member of the Air Force’s X-1 project team.

Jack Ridley was a captain and former bomber pilot from Oklahoma. He had an engineering degree from Caltech and an instinctive feel for aircraft design and operation. He would be the team’s flight engineer, but it would fall to him to provide the lowest of the low-tech devices that would help propel Yeager through Mach 1.

*

On Sunday, Oct. 12, Yeager and his wife, Glennis, paid a visit to Pancho’s Happy Bottom Riding Club, a ramshackle bar, motel and dude ranch near the end of the main runway. Run by a robust and hard-talking pilot named Pancho Barnes, the club was a favorite of test pilots. That night, the Yeagers hired horses for a ride through the yucca trees at dusk. On their return, Yeager raced his wife back to the corral, believing the gate had been left open. But it had been shut, and unable to see it in the desert darkness, Yeager and his horse crashed into it.

Yeager was thrown and broke two ribs on his right side.

Fearful that an Air Force flight surgeon would ground him, Yeager went to a civilian doctor the next day and had the ribs taped. Then he confessed to Ridley, who realized immediately that Yeager would be in too much pain to close the X-1’s hatch with his right hand. And the cockpit was so small and confining that reaching across with the left hand was impossible.

“I wasn’t worried about flying the airplane,” Yeager said. “Hell, flying the airplane was easy. I wasn’t concerned about the ribs. It was getting the door shut.”

And then Ridley had an inspiration. He visited a nearby hangar, found a push broom, sawed off a length of the handle and tossed it into the X-1’s cockpit. The next morning, still in pain, Yeager climbed down into the cockpit. Ridley, behind him, held the hatch against the fuselage. Yeager grabbed the broom handle with his left hand, reached across his body and used it as a lever to shove the hatch closed.

Minutes later, Cardenas eased the B-29 into a shallow dive. At 10:26 a.m, the X-1--with “Glamorous Glennis” painted on the nose--dropped clear at 26,000 feet. High in the sky ahead, leaving a contrail for Yeager to follow, was Hoover flying a P-80 “Shooting Star” with a camera fitted in the nose.

Yeager fired all four engines simultaneously and bolted ahead. Satisfied all four engines were working, he shut down two and climbed to altitude on the remaining two. He fired all four engines again, climbing and accelerating above .93 Mach. Again he shut down two of the chambers and assessed the X-1’s behavior. He then leveled off and lit one of the remaining engines. Because fuel already had been consumed, the X-1 now was substantially lighter.

*

Yeager streaked past Hoover, who fired off a series of photos that were the first to show the characteristic diamond-shaped shock waves emanating from the rockets. “I was doing .8 Mach,” said Hoover, “and he went by at slightly over Mach 1. It was the first time I’d ever seen those shock waves. The picture I got was on President Truman’s desk the next day.”

Back in the X-1, the Machmeter read .965 briefly and then suddenly fluctuated and jumped off the scale.

Yeager had flown through the sound barrier without a bump.

“I was thunderstruck,” Yeager would write in his autobiography, “Yeager” (co-written with Leo Janos, Bantam, 1985). “After all the anxiety, breaking the sound barrier turned out to be a perfectly paved speedway. . . . Grandma could be sitting up there sipping lemonade.”

Below in Victorville, people heard the characteristic double crack of the sonic boom produced by an airplane for the first time. Fourteen minutes after launch, Yeager smoothed the X-1 in for an unpowered “dead-stick” landing on Rogers Dry Lake.

An immediate blanket of secrecy was ordered thrown over the project. The aviation trade journal Aviation Week leaked an account of the flight in December, but the Air Force and the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA, later to become NASA) released no official account until June 15 of the following year.

Still, the word was getting out. In a front-page story in December 1947, Los Angeles Times aviation writer Marvin Miles called the flight “one of the greatest explorations into the unknown since Columbus,” adding that it opened “a new aerial age of high-speed flights that will rival Buck Rogers.”

It did exactly that.

“This was undoubtedly the most significant event in the history of aerospace that took place between the Wright brothers and the landing on the moon,” says Dick Hallion, the Air Force’s historian.

“It started a revolution in high-speed flight. And that revolution opened up the world as we know it today: a world of international, global air transportation and international, global military air power. That flight was more than just an exercise in personal courage. It set the stage for the world to completely exploit high-speed flight.”

Yeager--still squinty and flinty, ever the pragmatic fighter jock--still prefers to think of the mission as basic: “Break Mach 1, don’t bust your ass and don’t screw it up. That was it.

“Something like that wouldn’t work today,” he added. “It’d take 600 people six months and all kinds of damn safety review boards. We just did what we had to do and it worked.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

X-1 Fact Sheet

* Builder: Bell Aircraft Co. of Buffalo, N.Y.

* Speed: Mach 1 (varies by altitude but about 660 mph)

* Length: 31 feet

* Engines: Four rocker engines that produced 6,000 lbs. of thrust

* Fuel: 600 gallons of liquid oxygen and alcohol

* Design: Built to resemble .50-caliber bullet. Wings were stubby razors, only 3.5 inches at thickest point.

* Initial flights: Dropped from the belly of a B-29 Superfor-tress bomber at 26,000 feet.

*

Tuesday, at precisely 10:26 a.m., Chuck Yeager’s going to do it again.

More than 30,000 feet above a modern Edwards Air Force Base, the retired brigadier general will push his plane over the speed of sound, just as he did as a captain 50 years before.

This time, he’ll be flying an Air Force F-15. Flying chase in an F-16 will be the man who originally flew chase for Yeager on Oct. 14, 1947, Bob Hoover.

The event will be covered by news media but the public is not encouraged to attend, base spokesman Gary Hatch says. Because it is a normal workday on the base, only a limited number of parking spaces will be available.