THE HISTORY OF MACH 1

Fifty years ago today, October 14, 1947, Chuck Yeager, now Brigadier
General (retired), broke the sound barrier for the first time. I met him
a couple of weeks ago in Washington DC, where he was speaking at the
Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. He told us about how he did it, in the
room right next to the gallery where the Bell X-1 rocket plane is hung.
This is a man with "The Right Stuff." Indeed you saw his exploits in
the movie by that name. This is his story.

    [ I transcribed this in an IMAX theater in the dark on my palmtop. 
      It's a little rough and I didn't understand all the technical parts. 
      He's incredibly sharp for only having a high school education :-]

"This morning before the talk, they put me in a cherry picker and hoisted
me up to the X-1. Was it scary? Heck, usually I got into it several miles
up in the air. 48 years ago was last flight of the X-1. When I got in
today, I found a penny from 1950.

"In 1942-3, Major Cocher at Wright Field conceived the idea of supersonic
flight as they were at 60-80% of Mach. NACA, the predecessor to NASA,
controlled all research flying. In 1944 the Army Air Corp contracted two
X-1s from Bell Aircraft Company. These were flown by Bell pilots. Slick
Goodwin had negotiated a $150K bonus for 1.1 Mach. Before this he had
gotten just $10K for .8 Mach for Phase 1. But the Army was spending only
$3M for the whole program. Wright Field offered military testers, like me,
for `free'.

"I got home from the war in January 1945, and graduated in August. Out of
120 pilots, I, a maintenance pilot, was their first pick. At Mirok,
the X-1 used liquid oxygen (LOX) for a 2.5-minute flight. I was launch
from a B29 from 25-26K feet up. There was 5K lbs. for liquid nitrogen to
launch to pressurize the LOX and water alcohol. We knew about subsonic
turbulence from the P51, P80, and P84 in the War. Consequently [ and
he used `consequently' in almost every other sentence ], the B29 driver
got us up to 10K feet, then I climbed in.

[ I asked him afterwards 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.
"No," he said, "that would be cruelty to animals! Actually, the horse ran
into a fence." ]

"A B80 chase plane followed up. We did a dive in the B29 at 240 mph. There
were 4 switches to ignite each of 4 engines. It is very dark under plane,
then very bright after I launched and came out from under the B29.

"We did 9 flights first. But the 7th flight was .94 Mach and the plane was
pitching up. 'You tell somebody something often enough you start to believe
it yourself.' 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. So to the horizontal stabilizer we put some 3-in-1 oil [ and
developed the `flying tail' ]. The Mach meter only goes to 1.0 Mach but
buffeting stopped at 1.07 Mach. This was on Oct 14. On Sept 18 the Army Air
Force became the US Air Force.

"Now this opened Pandora's Box. We had to hit Mach 2. 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. I didn't mind that my flight was [previously]
`classified' because we were feeding info into research where we added
flying tail rather than a fixed horizontal stabilizer. [This helped the war
plane effort,] F86 vs. MiGs were better because we shot down 10 to 1 in
Korea. We offered $100K and US citizenship for a MiG and a North Korean
Lieutenant flew one down. It took the French, British, and Soviets 5 years to
figure it out [the flying tail]. 

"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. The DH108 went to .94 Mach but if
you didn't back off when it pitched and yawed and rolled... it would go
divergent.

"The X-3 Needle would dive at 1.06 but was unstable. The X-5 was the first
sweep wing that went into the F111. We could sweep 20-60 degrees.

Mach 2:

"The X-1A used hydrogen peroxide for steam to drive the LOX. It weighed not
12K lbs. loaded/6K lbs. empty, but 15K lbs. loaded/5K lbs. empty and could
go 4 minutes [not 2.5 minutes].

"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. We'd go to
60K feet at 1.5 Mach.  Bell engineers suspected at 2.3 Mach, it would go
`squirrelly' because the shock wave would hit the stabilizer. On the 4th
flight: .8 Mach at 45K feet and the pressure suit's face plate would fog
up and I couldn't see anything. I was sitting in front of the frozen gas
and we didn't do anything to heat the cabin. I'd `push over' At 60k feet
and I was getting level at 80K feed and I was doing 31 miles per second.
I hit 2.3 Mach and it yawed to the left. At 40 degree, I was at full right
rudder, 3 Gs. Now I was revolving twice a second [out of control]. I was
hitting high Gs and was disoriented. I think my helmet hit the canopy.
I turned up the rheostat to defog the flight suit faceplate. At 25K feet
I pulled out 60 miles away from the base.  All in 51 seconds. Here's the
[now declassified] transcript with some West Virginian colloquialisms.
[ He showed it along with and a short film of his revolutions before
the camera broke loose. ]

"On December 12, before the flight at 4:30 AM that morning I went duck
hunting. I got home afterwards and my wife Glennis [for which the X-1
is named `Glamorous Glennis'] saw my bloodshot eyes from pulling Gs and
she said, `What happened to you?' At 5 PM that day I gave a talk at the
Army-Navy Club and got home at 1 am the next morning."

In the Q&A afterwards he was asked:

Q: What's your favorite plane and your least favorite?
A: My favorite plane is always the latest plane I've flown. They're like
luxury cars. I'm flying the F-22 and F-23. I flew some Harrier's I didn't
like.

Q: Did you ever want to fly in the space program, the Shuttle for example?
A: I wouldn't have minded the left-hand seat, but I wouldn't want to be one
of the guys in the back barfing into his beard. But I couldn't fly the space
program, because it required a college degree, and I only had a high school
education.

[ It was a real treat, afterwards, to get his autograph in front of a
picture from the Mars Sojourner robot, powered by Java. "...from generation
to generation." ]

Chuck Yeager:

Born in 1923 in West Virginia.
Started as a mechanic.
Flew P39 fighters.
Served in the 357th in the UK.
Later became a test pilot for X(perimental) planes.
Then flew as a research pilot.
He flew 127 combat in Viet Nam.
Was later stationed at Norton Air Force Base.
He has 15000 hours in plane:
  if you were to fly that many hours, you'd be in a plane from now thru May 1999.
He received the Medal of Honor from President Ford.
This is usually awarded after you died, 
  but in Chuck's case they made an exception.

			Bill Petro, your friendly neighborhood historian