The Sound Barrier is Broken on this day in 1947

Originally shared by +Michael Interbartolo

The Right Stuff – Yeager Mach 1

There was a demon that lived in the air. They said whoever challenged him would die. His controls would freeze up, his plane would buffet wildly, and he would disintegrate. The demon lived at Mach 1 on the meter, seven hundred and fifty miles an hour, where the air could no longer move out of the way. He lived behind a barrier through which they said no man would ever pass. They called it the sound barrier.

— Ridley in the 1983 movie The Right Stuff

On October 14, 1947, US Air Force Captain Charles “Chuck” Yeager smashed the sound barrier aided by the Bell X-1, the first of many X-planes to come.
The Bell -X-1 was a joint US Army Air Force And NACA ( National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics – which later became NASA ) supersonic research project. At age 24, Captain Charles “Chuck Yeager, a WWII veteran and test pilot at the Muroc Air Field ( now Edwards Air Base ) broke the sound barrier with his X-1. He named his aircraft “Glamorous Glennis” after his wife Glennis Faye Dickhouse.
The rocket-powered “bullet with wings” was launched from the belly of a modified B-29 Bomber. Yeager reached a top-speed of Mach 1.06 at an altitude of 45,000 feet (13,700 m). It was flight number 50 for the Bell X-1, a flight that was to make Yeager famous. Two nights before the scheduled date for the flight, he broke two ribs while riding a horse. He was so afraid of being removed from the mission that he went to a veterinarian in a nearby town for treatment and told only his wife, as well as friend and fellow project pilot Jack Ridley about it.
The 1948 Collier Trophy was awarded by President Truman to Larry Bell for Bell Aircraft, John Stack for the NACA contributions and Captain Yeager for piloting the flights.

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