“On December 12, before the flight at 4:30 AM that morning I went duck hunting. Here’s the transcript with some West Virginian colloquialisms. “At 25K feet I pulled out 60 miles away from the base. I turned up the rheostat to defog the flight suit faceplate. I was hitting high Gs and was disoriented. At 40 degree, I was at full right rudder, 3 Gs. I’d ‘push over’ At 60k feet and I was getting level at 80K feed and I was doing 31 miles per minute. “I was sitting in front of the frozen gas and we didn’t do anything to heat the cabin. On the 4th flight: 0.8 Mach at 45K feet and the pressure suit’s faceplate would fog up and I couldn’t see anything. Bell engineers suspected at 2.3 Mach, it would go ‘squirrelly’ because the shock wave would hit the stabilizer. “On the first of November 1953, I did the first flight, shortly after 50th anniversary (Dec 17) of Wright Brothers’ flight… 4.5 minutes of flight after being launched from B50, 3 engines at 36K feet. “The X-1A used hydrogen peroxide for steam to drive the LOX. The X-5 was the first sweep wing that went into the F111. “The X-3 Needle would dive at 1.06 but was unstable. 94 Mach but if you didn’t back off when it pitched and yawed and rolled… it would go divergent. “There was the X-1, X-2, X-3, X-4, X-15, which were dates of contract but the X-4 was most advanced from Northrop. It took the French, British, and Soviets 5 years to figure it out. We offered $100K and US citizenship for a MiG and a North Korean Lieutenant flew one down. MiGs were better because we shot down 10 to 1 in Korea. I didn’t mind that my flight was `classified’ because we were feeding info into research where we added a flying tail rather than a fixed horizontal stabilizer. I’ve flown lots of GE engines, and I’m glad they sponsor these lectures so you can see how your tax dollars are spent. On Sept 18 the Army Air Force became the US Air Force.” The Machmeter only goes to 1.0 Mach but buffeting stopped at 1.07 Mach. So to the horizontal stabilizer, we put some 3-in-1 oil. I would roll over to 2Gs (gravities) because elevator effectiveness was being lost as the shock wave was moving back but I couldn’t turn. You tell somebody something often enough you start to believe it yourself. It is very dark under the plane, then very bright after I launched and came out from under the B29. There were four switches to ignite each of four engines. “No, that would be cruelty to animals! Actually, the horse ran into a fence,” he said. I asked him afterward if it was true what we saw in the movie “The Right Stuff” that before the flight, he fell off his horse and cracked some ribs. Consequently, the B29 driver got us up to 10K feet, then I climbed in.” We knew about subsonic turbulence from the P51, P80, and P84 in the War. of liquid nitrogen to launch to pressurize the LOX and water-alcohol. I was launched from a B29 from 25-26K feet up. At Muroc, the X-1 used liquid oxygen (LOX) for a 2.5-minute flight. Out of 120 pilots, I, a maintenance pilot, was their first pick. “I got home from the war in January 1945 and graduated in August. Wright Field offered military testers, like me, for ‘free.'” But the Army was spending only $3M for the whole program. Before this, he had gotten just $10K for. Slick Goodwin had negotiated a $150K bonus for 1.1 Mach. In 1944 the Army Air Corp contracted two X-1s from Bell Aircraft Company. NACA, the predecessor to NASA, controlled all research flying. “In 1942-3, Major Cocher at Wright Field conceived the idea of supersonic flight as they were at 60-80% of Mach. When I got in today, I found a penny on the floor from 1950.īell X-1 at the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum 48 years ago was the last flight of the X-1. Was it scary? Heck, usually I got into it several miles up in the air. “This morning before this talk, they put me in a cherry picker and hoisted me up to the X-1. This is a man with “The Right Stuff.” Indeed you saw his exploits in the movie by that name. He told us how he did it in the room next to the gallery where the Bell X-1 rocket plane is hung. On this occasion in 1997, he was speaking at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. I met Yeager on his 50th anniversary of that earlier date in Washington DC, on Octowhen he retired as a military consultant and broke the sound barrier again, this time in an F-15. Chuck Yeager had repeatedly attained supersonic speeds in the Bell X-1.īut it was actually on October 14, 1947, that Chuck Yeager, who died in 2020, broke the sound barrier, Mach 1, for the first time. Captain Chuck Yeager and the Bell X-1 THE HISTORY OF MACH 1
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |