Chuck Yeager: First Person to Break the Sound Barrier Chuck Yeager: First Person to Break the Sound Barrier By Elizabeth Howell, Space.com Contributor | June 11, 2014 04:28am ET MORE Chuck Yeager continued to act as a flight consultant for the air force until his last flight on October 14, 1997. Credit: Air Force Test Center History Office Chuck Yeager was an American test pilot who was the first person to break the sound barrier — the point where a speeding object (such as an airplane) passes the speed of sound. Yeager made his history-setting flight on Oct. 14, 1947 in an airplane he dubbed Glamorous Glennis, after his wife. The Bell X-1 rocket plane (which today hangs in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum) passed Mach 1 following a drop from a B-29 airplane. The monumental "top secret" event was kept classified until 1948, but once it hit the public airwaves, Yeager became a celebrity.

He also received a prestigious aviation award called the Collier Trophy, which called his flight the greatest achievement in aviation since the Wright brothers first took flight in 1903. War fighting and escape Yeager had a colorful aviation career long even before breaking the Mach barrier. Born in 1923 in a small town near Hamlin, West Virginia, Yeager grew up working on his father's pickup trucks, according to Yeager's website. His high school graduation in 1941 took place just six months before the United States entered World War II that December. By that point, Yeager was a young member of the Army Air Corps. He was tapped for flight training in July 1942, and quickly distinguished himself among his peers. "He had remarkable 20/10 eyesight, tremendous physical coordination, and an uncanny ability to stay focused in stressful situations. Those traits coupled with a competitive streak and his understanding of machinery caught the attention of his instructors," his website stated. Yeager received his pilot wings in 1943 and served in WWII, flying 64 combat missions for 270 hours in Europe.

He was shot down on March 5, 1944, over Bordeaux, France, but with the assistance of French resistance movement the Maquis, Yeager made it back to neutral territory a few weeks later. USAF Capt. Charles E. Yeager (shown standing with the Bell X-1 supersonic rocket plane) became the first man to fly faster than the speed of sound in level flight on Oct. 14, 1947. Credit: United States Air Force Archive Breaking the barrier Following the war, one of Yeager's assignments as an assistant maintenance officer in the fighter section at the Flight Test Division in Wright Field, Ohio. Yeager's website describes the location as "the center of Army Air Forces R and D [research and development]", and said his main assignment was to fly the fighters being developed there. His flight skills got him some attention: he was asked to fly in air shows and also took part in service trials at Edwards Air Force Base (then called Muroc Army Air Field). Then in 1947, the young Yeager was picked to try to break the sound barrier . Yeager's work on Glamorous Glennis began with three glide flights, then powered flights starting Aug. 29.

He had trouble keeping the plane straight due to pitch problems, particularly on a flight Oct. 10 where he briefly lost pitch control completely. Another crew member suggested that Yeager should move the X-1's horizontal tail very slightly to keep his airplane under control. On his next flight, Oct. 14, Yeager tried out the tail idea at 0.83, 0.88 and 0.92 Mach and found the method worked. "At 42,000 feet, [Yeager] relit a third chamber of his engine," his website stated. "The X-1 Glamorous Glennis rapidly accelerated to 0.98 Mach and then, at 43,000 feet, the needle on his Machmeter jumped off the scale." The speed of sound, Mach 1, is about 758 mph (1,220 kph) at sea level, and decreases with altitude.) After the test Yeager continued his flight testing duties for many years after breaking the sound barrier, including testing Lockheed’s XF-104, an aircraft that was capable of going double the speed of sound.

But Yeager had a couple of near misses as he tested the aircraft, which was always a risky endeavor as he was among the first to fly these types. In December 1953, Yeager turned off his Bell X-1A engine as planned at 76,000 feet. The aircraft began to roll and yaw, then quickly fell out of control despite Yeager's attempts to correct the issue. Yeager managed to pull out safely at 25,000 feet — after falling more than 50,000 feet. Ten years later, Yeager piloted a Lockheed NF-104 aircraft that crashed, but he managed to parachute out safely. "The veteran Air Force pilot suffered burns on his face and neck, apparently from the ignition of pure oxygen in his mask, but otherwise was not injured seriously," the L.A. Times reported at the time . The crash was depicted in both the book and movie versions of "The Right Stuff." (Yeager played a small part in the movie, as the bartender at Pancho Barnes’ Happy Bottom Riding Club.) Yeager's last active duty flight was on Feb.

25, 1975, in an F-4C Phantom II, but he remained an active consulting test pilot for decades after that. In 2012, the then 89-year-old Yeager flew in the back seat of the F-15D to re-enact the 65th anniversary of his record-setting flight. Editor's Recommendations Chuck Yeager - Breaking the Sound Barrier, the guy with the Right Stuff Major Chuck Yeager, formal portrait, late 1940s Chuck Yeager with Bell X-1A Bell X-1 Bell X-1A, first supersonic aircraft Douglas X-3, experimental aircraft First man to break the sound barrier, flying Bell X-1 By Stephen Sherman , Oct. 1999. Updated June 30, 2011. Muroc Field After WW2, Chuck Yeager was assigned to be a test pilot at Muroc Field in California. Muroc was high up in the California desert, a barren place except for sagebrush and Joshua Trees.

The main attraction of Muroc was Rogers Dry Lake, a flat expanse that was covered with a couple inches of water in the winter, and dried out hard and flat in the spring. A natural landing field, with miles of good surface in every direction. In 1946, the whole place was off-limits, a top secret Army base, developing jet and rocket planes. And there was almost nothing there - two simple hangars, some fuel pumps, one concrete runway, and a few shacks. In many ways, Muroc was fighter pilot Heaven in the late '40s: the run-down, Quonset-hut facilities didn't attract many visits from the Army Air Force top brass, and there wasn't much to do there but fly, and drink and drive fast cars. Pancho Barnes' "Fly Inn" was the pilots' favorite watering hole. Breaking the Sound Barrier One of the great unknowns of the time was the so-called "sound barrier." Planes like the British Meteor jets that approached the speed of sound (760MPH at sea level, 660 MPH at 40,000 feet) had encountered severe buffeting of the controls.

At that time, no one knew for sure whether an airplane could exceed "Mach 1," the speed of sound. A British pilot, Geoffrey de Havilland, had died trying. The U.S. Army was determined to find out first. The Army had developed a small, bullet-shaped aircraft, the Bell X-1, to challenge the sound barrier. A civilian pilot, Slick Goodlin, had taken the Bell X-1 to .7 Mach, when Yeager started to fly it. He pushed the small plane up to .8, .85, and then to .9 Mach. The date of Oct. 14, 1947 was set for the attempt to do Mach 1. Only a slight problem developed. Two nights before, after an evening at Pancho's, Chuck and Glennis went out horseback riding, Chuck was thrown, and broke two ribs on his right side. He couldn't have reported this to the Army doctors; they might have given the flight to someone else. So Yeager taped up his ribs and did his best to keep up appearances.

On the day of the flight, it became apparent that, with his injured right side, he wouldn't be able to shut the door of the Bell X-1. In the plane's tiny cockpit; he could only use his (useless) right hand. He confessed his problem to Ridley, the flight engineer. In a stroke of genius, Ridley sawed off a short piece of broomstick handle; using it with his left hand, Yeager was able to get enough leverage to slam the door shut. And that day, Chuck Yeager became the first man to fly faster than the speed of sound. Tom Wolfe described the conclusion of the exhilarating flight in his splendid book, The Right Stuff : The X-1 had gone through "the sonic wall" without so much as a bump. As the speed topped out at Mach 1.05, Yeager had the sensation of shooting straight through the top of the sky. The sky turned a deep purple and all at once the stars and the moon came out - the sun shone at the same time. ... He was simply looking out into space. ... He was master of the sky. His was a king's solitude, unique and inviolate, above the dome of the world.

It would take him seven minutes to glide back down and land at Muroc. He spent the time doing victory rolls and wing-over-wing aerobatics while Roger Lake and the High Sierras spun around below. Click here to read a review of The Right Stuff at Amazon.com. After the flight, the Army clamped tight security on the whole thing, and Yeager couldn't tell anyone. He celebrated with just a few other pilots at Pancho's. He flew a dozen more transonic flights in the X-1, but still under tight wraps. His accomplishment wasn't announced to the public until mid-1948. The Bell X-1 is now on display at the National Air and Space Museum After the establishment of the Air Force as a separate branch of the military, Muroc became Edwards Air Force Base.

Flight Test in the 1950's - The X-Planes Because of his consummate piloting skill, his coolness under pressure and ability to detect a problem, quickly analyze it and take appropriate action, Yeager was selected to probe some of the most challenging unknowns of flight in aircraft such as the X-1A, X-3, X-4, X-5 and XF-92A. Douglas D-558-II Skyrocket The records of the X-1 were soon exceeded by the swept-wing Douglas D-558-II Skyrocket. First flown in February, 1948. Pilots such as Pete Everest, Bill Bridgeman, and Marion Carl pushed the envelope with it, achieving speeds of Mach 1.45 and 1.88. Carl took it as high as 83,000 feet. But its ultimate performance came in November, 1953, when Scott Crossfield reached Mach 2 in a shallow dive at 62,000 feet. X-1A Crossfield's distinction as "the fastest man alive" was short-lived.

Less than a month later, Yeager piloted the rocket-powered X-1A to a record 1,650 mph (Mach 2.44) on Dec. 12, 1953. During this flight, he became the first pilot to encounter inertia coupling. The aircraft literally tumbled about all three axes as it plummeted for more than 40,000 feet before he was able to recover it to level flight. Even his rival, Scott Crossfield, has since conceded that it was "probably fortunate" that Yeager was the pilot on that flight "so we had the airplane to fly another day." Later in 1953, Kit Murray flew the X-1A up to a new record height, 90,440 feet. Only one model of the Bell X-1A existed; it was destroyed in July, 1955 X-2 As flight researchers designed aircraft that could fly at Mach 3, they encountered more problems: severe heating, instability, and worse inertial coupling.

The swept-wing Bell X-2, with a 15,000 pound thrust, dual chambered rocket engine, constructed of stainless steel, was the next in the series to meet these challenges. Pete Everest made the first powered flight in the X-2 in November, 1955 and later flew it to a new speed record of Mach 2.87. In 1956 pilots Mel Apt and Iven Kincheloe (a Korean War ace) were assigned to the X-2 project. "Kinch" set a new altitude record of 126,000 feet on Sept. 7. Three weeks later Mel Apt became the first man to reach Mach 3; he encountered the same inertial coupling and tumbling as Yeager had in the X-1A, but couldn't pull out of it. Both he and the aircraft were lost. X-3 The Douglas X-3 looked like the hottest and faster airplane ever. It still does. But looks are deceiving. Westinghouse proposed J46 turbojet engines grew too large for the X-3.

To get the plane airborne, a pair of J34's were installed, but could never power the plane as intended for sustained supersonic flight test. The X-3 could only exceed Mach 1 in a steep dive. Yeager flew the X-3. X-15 Of course, the ultimate X-plane was the X-15, a true space plane, which pilots like Bob White, Joe Engle, and Neil Armstrong took to extraordinary new records in the 1960's. Joe Walker took the X-15 to a speed of Mach 5 in 1963. Read an article about the X-15 . By latter-day standards, it is remarkable that, while engaged in a wide range of such highly experimental flight research programs, Yeager was also involved in the evaluation of virtually all of the aircraft that were then being considered for the Air Force's operational inventory. Indeed, he averaged more than 100 flying hours per month from 1947-1954 and, at one point, actually flew 27 different types and models of aircraft within the span of a single month.

In 1953, Yeager tested the Russian MiG-15, serial #2057, that a North Korean pilot had defected with. (Click on the link to read about Lt. Kum Sok No's dramatic defection on September 21, 1953.) Command Through the 1950's and 60's, Yeager continued his successful career as a United States Air Force officer and test pilot. In October 1954, he was assigned to command the 417th Fighter Squadron, first in Germany and then in France. Returning to the United States in September 1957, he served as commander of the 1st Fighter Squadron at George Air Force Base, Calif. While he did not enter the astronaut program with John Glenn and the other Mercury Seven, he was appointed director of the Aerospace Research Pilot School (ARPS) at Edwards Air Force Base. One of the planes he tested in 1963 was the NF-104, an F-104 with a rocket over the tailpipe, an airplane which theoretically could climb to over 120,000 feet.

Yeager made the first three flights of the NF-104. On the fourth, he planned to exceed the magic 100,000 foot level. He cut in the rocket boosters at 60,000 feet and it roared upwards. He gets up to 104,000 feet before trouble set in. The NF-104's nose wouldn't go down. It went into a flat spin and tumbled down uncontrollably. At 21,000 feet, Yeager desperately popped the tail parachute rig, which briefly righted the attitude of the plane. But the nose promptly rose back up and the NF-104 began spinning again. It was hopeless. At 7,000 feet Yeager ejected. He got tangled up with his seat and leftover rocket fuel, which burnt him horribly. He hit the ground in great pain and his face blackened and burned, but standing upright with his chute rolled up and his helmet in his arm when the rescue helicopter arrived. This scene was dramatically presented toward the end of the movie, The Right Stuff , and some have conflated this scene with Yeager breaking the sound barrier in the X-1.

He went to Vietnam as commander of the 405th Fighter Wing in 1966 and flew 127 combat missions, and eventually rose to the rank of Brigadier General. In February 1968, he took command of the 4th Tactical Fighter Wing at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base, N.C., and in February 1968, led its deployment to Korea during the Pueblo crisis. In July 1969, he became vice commander of the 17th Air Force, at Ramstein Air Base, Germany, and then, in January 1971, he was assigned as U.S. defense representative to Pakistan. On June 1, 1973, he commenced his final active duty assignment as director of the AF Safety and Inspection Center at Norton Air Force Base, Calif. After a 34-year military career, he retired on March 1, 1975. At the time of his retirement, he had flown more than 10,000 hours in more than 330 different types and models of aircraft. In 1986, Yeager was appointed to the Presidential Commission investigating the Challenger accident.

Back to Yeager Page 1 Sources and Links Edwards AFB - well-designed, easy to navigate site, good use of Flash on main page, lots of history on test pilots, airplanes, and Edwards/Muroc © 1999- Yeager breaks sound barrier - Oct 14, 1947 - HISTORY.com Yeager breaks sound barrier Publisher A+E Networks U.S. Air Force Captain Chuck Yeager becomes the first person to fly faster than the speed of sound. Yeager, born in Myra, West Virginia, in 1923, was a combat fighter during World War II and flew 64 missions over Europe. He shot down 13 German planes and was himself shot down over France, but he escaped capture with the assistance of the French Underground. After the war, he was among several volunteers chosen to test-fly the experimental X-1 rocket plane, built by the Bell Aircraft Company to explore the possibility of supersonic flight. For years, many aviators believed that man was not meant to fly faster than the speed of sound, theorizing that transonic drag rise would tear any aircraft apart.

All that changed on October 14, 1947, when Yeager flew the X-1 over Rogers Dry Lake in Southern California. The X-1 was lifted to an altitude of 25,000 feet by a B-29 aircraft and then released through the bomb bay, rocketing to 40,000 feet and exceeding 662 miles per hour (the sound barrier at that altitude). The rocket plane, nicknamed “Glamorous Glennis,” was designed with thin, unswept wings and a streamlined fuselage modeled after a .50-caliber bullet. Because of the secrecy of the project, Bell and Yeager’s achievement was not announced until June 1948. Yeager continued to serve as a test pilot, and in 1953 he flew 1,650 miles per hour in an X-1A rocket plane. He retired from the U.S. Air Force in 1975 with the rank of brigadier general.

Related Videos Chuck Yeager retraces history in the sky, breaking the sound barrier -- again - CNN.com Chuck Yeager retraces history in the sky, breaking the sound barrier -- again By the CNN Wire Staff Updated 11:54 AM ET, Mon October 15, 2012 Chat with us in Facebook Messenger. Find out what's happening in the world as it unfolds. JUST WATCHED Chuck Yeager re-enacts milestone 02:37 Story highlights Chuck Yeager was the first test pilot to break the sound barrier In 1947, he flew past Mach 1 after being dropped from a B-29 bomber at 45,000 feet Yeager said he "laid down a pretty good sonic boom" over Edwards Air Force Base Chuck Yeager retraced history on Sunday, 65 years to the minute, as the first test pilot to break the sound barrier, taking to the skies once again to fly faster than the speed of sound. The 89-year-old Yeager broke the sound barrier in a U.S. Air Force F-15 at 10:24 a.m.

over the Mojave Desert, the same location where he first flew past Mach 1 on October 14, 1947, the military said in a statement. Yeager, flying in the F-15 with an Air Force captain, told CNN late Sunday that he hit Mach 1.3 and "laid down a pretty good sonic boom over Edwards" Air Force Base. Yeager's reenactment of his historic flight came the same day that Austrian Felix Baumgartner became the first person to break the sound barrier as a skydiver, jumping from a balloon at the edge of space to make the 23-mile journey. While Yeager's sound-breaking flight was news in military and aircraft manufacturing circles, his popularity soared when Tom Wolfe detailed Yeager's flight in the book "The Right Stuff" and its subsequent film adaptation. "I really appreciated the Air Force giving me a brand new F-15 to fly," Yeager told CNN. Today, fighter jets can easily break the sound barrier. In fact, Yeager's flight Sunday did it at an altitude of about 33,000 feet, according to a statement provided by the Air Force.

But in 1947, the golden age of flight, Yeager was dropped in an experimental rocket-propelled Bell X1 jet from a B-29 bomber at an altitude of 45,000 feet. "That's the only way we could do it," he said. "It took the British, French and the Soviet Union another five years to find out that trick. It gave us a quantum jump" in aviation advancement, he said. On Sunday, Yeager took off from Nellis Air Force Base near Las Vegas in the second seat, the one behind the pilot, though he said he was flying the F-15 when it broke the sound barrier over Edwards. "We had to keep it below Mach 1.4. If you want to go Mach 2, you start breaking glasses and cracking roofs," he said. But Yeager hardly sounded disappointed. His final aerial move, he told CNN, was a fly-by, buzzing the tower, at Nellis.

First Supersonic Flight: "Breaking the Sound Barrier" 1947 USAF; Chuck Yeager in the Bell X-1 - YouTube First Supersonic Flight: "Breaking the Sound Barrier" 1947 USAF; Chuck Yeager in the Bell X-1 Want to watch this again later? Sign in to add this video to a playlist. Need to report the video? Sign in to report inappropriate content. Rating is available when the video has been rented. This feature is not available right now. Please try again later. Published on Mar 26, 2013 more at Silent but detailed documentary of Chuck Yeager making the first supersonic flight in the Bell X-1 "Glamorous Glennis" on October 14, 1947. Public domain film from the US Air Force, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and mild video noise reduction applied. The Bell X-1, originally designated XS-1, was a joint NACA-U.S. Army Air Forces-U.S. Air Force supersonic research project built by the Bell Aircraft Company.

Conceived in 1944 and designed and built during 1945, it reached nearly 1,000 m.p.h. (1,600 km/h) in 1948. A derivative of this same design, the Bell X-1A, having greater fuel capacity and hence longer rocket burning time, exceeded 1,600 m.p.h. (2,575 km/h) in 1954. The X-1 was the first airplane to exceed the speed of sound in level flight and was the first of the so-called X-planes, an American series of experimental rocket planes designated for testing of new technologies and often kept secret... On 16 March 1945, the U.S. Army Air Forces Flight Test Division and the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) made a contract with the Bell Aircraft Company to build three XS-1 (for "Experimental, Supersonic", later X-1) aircraft to obtain flight data on conditions in the transonic speed range.

The X-1 was in principle a "bullet with wings", its shape closely resembling a Browning .50-caliber (12.7 mm) machine gun bullet, known to be stable in supersonic flight. The pattern shape was followed to the point of seating its pilot behind a sloped, framed window inside a confined cockpit in the nose, with no ejection seat. After the rocket plane ran into compressibility problems in 1947, it was modified with variable-incidence tailplane. An all-moving tail was developed by the British for the Miles M.52, but was first used in transonic flight on the X-1, allowing it to pass through the sound barrier safely. The rocket propulsion system was a four-chamber engine built by Reaction Motors, Inc., one of the first companies to build liquid-propellant rocket engines in America. This rocket burned ethyl alcohol diluted with water with a liquid oxygen oxidizer. Its thrust could be changed in 1,500 lbf (6,700 N) increments by firing just one or more than one of its chambers.

The fuel and oxygen tanks for the first two X-1 engines were pressurized with nitrogen gas, but the rest used steam-driven turbopumps. The all-important fuel turbopumps, necessary to raise the chamber pressure and thrust while making the engine lighter, were built by Robert Goddard, who was under a contract with the U.S. Navy to provide jet-assisted takeoff (JATO) rockets... On 14 October 1947, just under a month after the U.S. Air Force had been created as a separate service, the tests reached their peak with the first manned supersonic flight, piloted by Air Force Captain Charles "Chuck" Yeager in aircraft #46-062 that he had christened the Glamorous Glennis for his wife. This rocket-powered airplane was launched from the bomb bay of a modified B-29 Superfortress bomber, and it glided to a landing on the dry lake bed. XS-1 flight number 50 is the first one in which the X-1 recorded supersonic flight, at Mach 1.06 (313 m/s, 1,126 km/h, 800 mph) peak speed.

As a result of the X-1's initial supersonic flight, the National Aeronautics Association voted its 1948 Collier Trophy to be shared by the three main participants in the program. Honored at the White House by President Harry S. Truman were Larry Bell for Bell Aircraft, Captain Yeager for piloting the flights, and John Stack for the contributions of the NACA. The story of Yeager's 14 October flight was leaked to a reporter from Aviation Week, and The Los Angeles Times featured the story as headline news in their 22 December issue. The magazine story was released 20 December. The Air Force threatened legal action against the journalists who revealed the story, but none was ever taken. On 5 January 1949, Yeager used Aircraft #46-062 to carry out the only conventional (runway) take off performed during the X-1 program, reaching 23,000 ft (7,000 m) in 90 seconds...

Category Chuck Yeager, still soaring at 89 Chuck Yeager, still soaring at 89 The test pilot legend made famous in 'The Right Stuff' talks to USA TODAY about his life. Post to Facebook Chuck Yeager, still soaring at 89 The test pilot legend made famous in 'The Right Stuff' talks to USA TODAY about his life. Check out this story on USATODAY.com: CancelSend A link has been sent to your friend's email address. Posted! A link has been posted to your Facebook feed. 33 To find out more about Facebook commenting please read the Conversation Guidelines and FAQs Chuck Yeager, still soaring at 89 Marco della Cava, USA TODAY Published 6:07 p.m. ET Dec. 5, 2012 | Updated 3:33 p.m. ET Dec. 6, 2012 CLOSE x Share Chuch Yeager, aviation legend, talks about his journey with the Bell X-1. Kaveh Rezaei, Martin Klimek, The test pilot legend made famous in 'The Right Stuff' talks to USA TODAY about his life. Gen. Chuck Yeager, 89, stands before a prop-driven tail dragger.

(Photo: Martin E. Klimek for USA TODAY) Story Highlights Yeager celebrated the 65th anniversary of his record with another supersonic flight at age 89 The aviation legend would have liked to have gone into space, but 'doesn't cry over spilled milk' His days are filled with honorary appearances, hunting, fishing and flying (still) GRASS VALLEY, Calif. – In the parking lot of this small Sierra Nevada town's airfield, a decommissioned F-104 Starfighter jet looms over a series of plaques. They honor the exploits of one Charles Elwood Yeager, better known as Chuck. But while the display has a posthumous vibe, the local legend in question is very much alive and well, sitting in his hanger a few yards up the road. "I'll be 90 in February, and while I'm not gonna run no marathon I still hunt and fish and fly," says Yeager, resting in the shade of a tail-dragger prop plane that he solos in regularly. Parked nearby is an old pickup whose plate reads BELL X1, the rocket plane he rode into history when it broke the sound barrier in 1947.

Living legend is an overused term, but it applies to this American original indelibly captured by Sam Shepard in 1983's The Right Stuff. Not that Yeager is remotely Hollywood. For him, life boils down to "duty, it's that simple." The General, as he prefers to be called, doesn't particularly enjoy interviews; navel-gazing isn't his style. But he agreed to speak with USA TODAY to draw attention to the foundation that bears his name, which supports a scholarship program at Marshall University in his native West Virginia as well as the Young Eagles, a non-profit program chaired by pilot Sully Sullenberger that gets kids airborne (Yeager is Eagles' chairman emeritus). MORE: How Yeager got 'the right stuff' Yeager may be in a dogfight with Father Time, but his bearing is still ramrod straight. He says his famously acute 20/10 vision remains sharp, although his ears are another matter. "I can't hear well," he growls in his iconic drawl. "Damn P-51 Mustang noise. You go sit behind that engine for eight hours, with a leather helmet on. But that's a handicap that came with the job." Job.

That three-letter-word has defined Yeager's life. And what jobs they were, from World War II combat ace to, famously, Air Force test pilot who 65 years ago broke the speed of sound in that Bell X-1, which now hangs in the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum. Yeager's name popped back onto the cultural radar Oct. 14, the anniversary of his first supersonic flight. On that day in New Mexico, Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner made history when he jumped out of a capsule at nearly 130,000 feet and broke the speed of sound on his descent. While some 8 million people watched Baumgartner jump live on YouTube, Yeager wasn't one of them. He was over at Nellis Air Force Base outside of Las Vegas, strapped into a borrowed F-15 fighter. He proceeded to repeat his own record flight by laying down "a big ol' sonic boom over Edwards" Air Force base in the Mojave desert, where he'd run a pilot training program a half-century ago.

Always on the go, a few days later Yeager was hunting deer with the governor of West Virginia, and a week after that he was grand marshal of the Veterans Day parade in San Diego. "There's little question that (first) supersonic feat transcends the feelings any military officer has for their own branch," says Jack Hawkins, director of the parade in San Diego, a decidedly Navy town. "I have pride in my Marine Corps, but when you look at what Gen. Yeager has done, you have pride in America." Often imitated, never duplicated Yeager's place in history "is secure," says Bob van der Linden, chairman of the aeronautics department of the National Air and Space Museum, noting that Yeager laid the groundwork for a historic test pilot program that eventually trained NASA's astronauts and in the process created a legendary template. "He became so iconic that it seemed every test pilot after him had to affect some sort of drawl, down to many commercial pilots you hear on the intercom today," says van der Linden. "He was that aw-shucks guy from the country who knew machines intimately.

And while he wasn't known outside the military for a long time, The Right Stuff changed all that." (Photo: 1947 AP photo) That 1979 Tom Wolfe book-turned-movie starred Shepard as a taciturn, rugged and fiercely independent maverick who respected authority but never second-guessed his gut. Those traits still define the man. A few hours in Yeager's company are a mix of history lesson and lecture. To wit, he feels Baumgartner was merely "doing what (Col.) Joe (Kittinger, the Austrian's 84-year-old advisor) did in 1960 (from 102,000 feet), so what's he proving?" And NASA made a mistake wooing its first astronauts with "a free house (and) a cut of the goddamn Time-Life (publicity contract)." But wouldn't the ultimate test pilot have enjoyed going into space? "Sure, but I couldn't, I only had a high school diploma," says Yeager. Couldn't the rules be relaxed? Yeager leans forward in his plastic chair: "Rules aren't for relaxing. Look, I don't cry over spilled milk.

Everything I did was for duty, not for publicity." What Yeager did in 1947 was take a volatile experimental aircraft to a speed that many were convinced would kill him. In subsonic tests that led up to the X-1's supersonic flight, the plane seemed to lose stability and be on the verge of disintegrating the closer it got to Mach 1. Undaunted, Yeager and his chief engineer Jack Ridley pioneered the use of a "flying tail," transforming the rear horizontal stabilizer into an active part of the aircraft. "It took the British, the French and the Soviets five years to find out that little trick," he says with a laugh. "It gave us a jump on the world." Soon everyone knew not only Yeager's name, but also his effortlessly cool persona in the face of danger. Even today, he describes the day he almost died when the X-1A spun out in 1953 as if it were just a bad day at the office. After rising at 3 a.m. to go duck hunting, Yeager cheated death in the X-1A. "When I landed they took me to the hospital but I was OK so they let me go home,' he says.

"But I had to drive to L.A. to give a speech at the Army and Navy club. Got home at 2 a.m. and went to bed. That was my day. That's the way we lived." More than just flying These days, Yeager's exploits still command reverence, especially among aviators. His website, chuckyeager.com, offers fans signed memorabilia, and his second wife, Victoria, 53, (first wife Glennis died of ovarian cancer in 1990) is hopeful there could be interest in making another movie about the pilot's life. "People know about the X-1, of course, but there's so much more to him than that," says the former actress who married the general in 2003. As the sun starts to drop in the mountain sky, Yeager is keen to return to the glorious past. More tales about risking life and limb, told with a casualness that belies the obvious danger. Wasn't he ever afraid? "What good does it do to be afraid? It doesn't help anything," Yeager says. "You better try and figure out what's happening and correct it." So none of his feats were heroic? Yeager shrugs.

"A lot of it was just being in the right place at the right time." With the very right stuff. Breaking the Sound Barrier | The Greatest Moments in Flight Breaking the Sound Barrier | The Greatest Moments in Flight By Nola Taylor Redd, Space.com Contributor | July 23, 2012 04:43pm ET MORE Chuck Yeager and the X-1 research plane that broke the sound barrier. It can be seen today at the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum in Washington, D.C. Credit: Air Force Test Center History Office This is part of a SPACE.com series of articles on the Greatest Moments in Flight, the breakthrough events that paved the way for human spaceflight and its next steps: asteroid mining and bases on the moon and Mars. A booming thunder roared across the clear skies of the Mojave Desert on Oct. 14, 1947, as U.S. Air Force Capt. Chuck Yeager nudged an experimental rocket-powered plane faster than the speed of sound. Though only a handful of people realized it at the time, an aviation record had been set.

In 1935, a simplified explanation of the challenges of supersonic flight led to the creation of the term "sound barrier," which seemed to imply a physical wall that could not be overcome. Bullets and cannon balls had exceeded the speed of sound for hundreds of years, but the question loomed as to whether or not a plane—or a man—could withstand the pressures that accompanied it. The U.S. Air Force set out to answer this looming question. Sponsored message: The plane The Bell X-1 broke the sound barrier with Col. Chuck Yeager at the controls on Oct. 14, 1947. Credit: NASA A bullet-shaped plane, the Bell X-1 (originally designated the XS-1), was modeled after a .50 caliber machine gun bullet, an object known to be stable as it exceeded the speed of sound. Four rocket engines propelled the X-1, and it was built to absorb 18 times the force of gravity. Unlike most planes, it didn't take off from the ground, but was instead dropped from the belly of a B-29 Superfortress, rapidly accelerating in the air on only a few minutes worth of fuel before gliding back to the dry lakes below.

The historic plane, nicknamed the "Glamorous Glennis" for Yeager's wife, slowly approached the sound barrier over the course of nine flights. Muroc Air Force Base—now known as Edwards Air Force Base—in the empty southern California desert provided an ideal spot for testing a variety of experimental vehicles, including the X-1. The pilot The man who would go down as the most famous test pilot in American history was born in West Virginia on Feb. 13, 1923. Charles Elwood "Chuck" Yeager enlisted as a private in the U.S. Army Air Corps at the age of 18 and served in World War II, where he flew 64 combat missions. In 1945, he was assigned as a maintenance officer to the Flight Test Division at Wright Field, Ohio, flight-testing the planes. Col. Albert Boyd, in charge of the test program for the Air Force, invited him to become a test pilot, and Yeager accepted, transferring to Muroc to enroll in the Flight Performance School. It was there that Yeager was selected to be the first person to attempt to exceed the speed of sound.

The flight Yeager's first test launch of the Glamorous Glennis took place on Aug. 29, 1947, with subsequent attempts increasing speed by two hundredths of a Mach number. Mach is a unit of measuring the speed of sound in a given medium; a plane traveling at .2 Mach moves at only two-tenths the speed of sound, while Mach 1 is equal to it. (The speed of sound is about 758 miles (1,220 kilometers) per hour at sea level, and decreases with altitude.) Reaching .86 Mach on the sixth flight, the X-1 began to experience turbulence from the shock wave formed by the compression of the air. On the seventh flight, at Mach .94, Yeager lost the ability to control the plane's elevator, a problem since the shock waves caused the nose to pitch up and down. He cut the engines, dumped the fuel, and landed safely in the desert. Another pilot suggested using the horizontal stabilizer to correct the problem, and on-the-ground tests seemed to suggest the alternate method of control would work. Two days before his historic flight, Yeager was thrown from a horse while riding with his wife and broke two ribs.

Knowing that he would never be allowed to fly, he traveled to a doctor off base and had them taped up. Unable to close and latch the side door by hand, he utilized a broom handle at the suggestion of a fellow pilot. On Oct. 14, 1947, Yeager and the X-1 were dropped from the B-29, and quickly accelerated away. When the controls locked up, he successfully used the horizontal stabilizer to keep the plane stable. As the plane accelerated to Mach 1.06, controllers on the ground heard the first sonic boom . (The end of a bullwhip moves faster than the speed of sound. Some say the "crack" is a small sonic boom.) After exceeding the speed of sound, the buffeting decreased, creating a smooth short flight. The plane remained supersonic for approximately 20 seconds before Yeager turned off two of the four engines and slowly decelerated. The follow-up Chuck Yeager continued to act as a flight consultant for the air force until his last flight on October 14, 1997.

Credit: Air Force Test Center History Office Yeager continued to fly experimental aircraft for the Air Force, and was appointed director of the Space School, NASA's precursor, where he trained astronauts to prepare for launch. He flew more than 120 combat missions in Vietnam. After 34 years in the military, he retired in 1975 at the rank of brigadier general, though he continued to serve as a consultant. His last flight as a military consultant occurred 50 years to the day after he broke the sound barrier. In 1979, Tom Wolfe's best-selling nonfiction book, The Right Stuff, and the subsequent 1983 movie popularized Yeager's exploits to a generation too young to remember them. Yeager and his wife, Glennis, had four children before her death in 1990. He remarried in 2003. —Nola Taylor Redd Bell X-1 + Contact Glenn Bell X-1 History On October 14, 1947, USAF pilot Captain Chuck Yeager became the first man to break the sound barrier in a Bell X-1 at Edwards Air Force Base.

He had named his aircraft "Glamorous Glennis", after his wife. The .50 caliber bullet shape of the fuselage, strong thin wing sections, and an adjustable horizontal stabilizer were engineering developments used in the design of the X-1. In order to reach its testing altitude, the X-1 was air-launched from the bomb bay of a Boeing B-29 Super Fortress, and then used its four-chambered rocket engine to climb to 13000 meters (43000 feet). Related Pages:

Question: In which year did Chuck Yeager first break the sound barrier in a Bell X-1 rocket plane?
Answer: 1947