Speed Deed

We’ve seen some speed in this century. In 1903 over the dunes of Kitty Hawk, N.C., Orville Wright, belly down in his biplane, blistered 852 feet in less than a minute. Twenty-six years later, Fritz Von Opel, a German auto maker, blasted nearly two miles in 75 seconds in a rocket-powered plane. Amazing.

Then, 50 years ago Wednesday, the seemingly impossible happened: Charles E. “Chuck” Yeager cracked the speed of sound itself in the X-1 rocket plane over the Southern California desert. (To mark the anniversary, the retired brigadier general broke the barrier again this week, at the controls of an F-15 fighter.) The era of supersonic flight, now routine and just an occasional bothersome boom, was born. Some military planes now blast around at Mach 3, triple the speed of sound.

So what Andy Green, a British Royal Air Force pilot, did Wednesday over a mile-long course on Nevada’s Black Rock Desert might not seem spectacular in terms of speed--around 760 mph--but you do have to consider that he broke the sound barrier driving a car.

That’s right, four wheels on the ground. But a whole lot under the hood, two 110,000-horsepower Rolls-Royce jet engines.

You might ask why Wright, Von Opel, Yeager and Green would risk their necks breaking speed records. They ask, “Why not?”