Yeager & Boyd:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQ9_Y3oGihU

http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/2007/10/14/yeager-meister/#comment-135613

As for Welch, sonic booms were reported on both occasions, and the same plane was later confirmed at speeds over Mach 1, so it seems pretty clear that Wheaties did better than “almost”.

In any case, my point was not to usurp Yeager, but just to point out that there are some other guys who ought not be forgotten.

From one airplane geek to another – salute!

Unlike the flying record, where a human broke the sound barrier only about 6 years after the V2, it took 49 years from the first ground vehicle breaking the sound barrier to the first human doing so.

It’d be kinda silly to say “hey let’s build a fighter jet. Oh, I know, let’s shape it like a coke bottle!” hehe. I’m certain a lot of math and theory went into it long before they started looking around for further inspiration.

Of course, sometimes you have to look back to look forward (like NASA’s next-gen manned probes, to replace the shuttle fleet).

Yojimboken- George “Wheaties” Welch did almost get supersonic, but almost only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. He was in a dive, not in true controlled flight. A lot of pilots in WW II ran into what was later recognised as compressibility effects, especially in late model Spitfires and P-38 Lightnings. BTW, early F-86 models didn’t have the all-moving tail- that came along on the F-86E if I recall correctly. If you really want to get into the nuts and bolts, read “Supersonic Flight” by Richard P. Hallion- he describes in massive detail the Bell XS-1 and Douglas D-558-2 Skyrocket projects. Most of “The Right Stuff” is reasonably accurate, at least in the book. The movie takes a lot of license. Also- Welch survived Pearl Harbor and was the pilot killed in testing the F-86′s big brother, the F-100. That’s how inertia coupling was discovered, and why jet fighters have big single or double tails, incidentally.
Jest- the deal with the Arrow had nothing to do with coke bottles originally- it’s called Whitcomb’s (he also invented winglets, like on passenger planes) area rule. Aerodynamic drag is reduced if the cross-sectional area of the plane increases and decreases smoothly according to a particular function. The fuselage pinches in where the wings attach so as to keep the total area increasing smoothly. Modern jets do the same thing, but in a more subtle fashion. Wings and fuselages are generally blended together so the area ruling is not as blatantly obvious. Check out a picture of a Convair F-102A, which predated the Arrow (which I LOVE but the fools tried to build an airframe, an engine and a fire control system all from scratch, guaranteeing MASSIVE cost overruns).
OK, so I’m a airplane geek, too.

Keith Harwood – I remember that film. Just “reverse the controls…” I think it is highly likely that Yeager (or Welch) was not the first to go supersonic – just the first to be confirmed as doing so by accurate measurement. German fliers in the Me 163 and Me 262 probably did it, as well as a few piston driven planes – the P-38, P-47 late models, Do-335 and other piston fighters were certainly capable of the raw power required. The problem was doing it and surviving, a much trickier proposition. I suspect the sound barrier was broken many times by pilots who did not live to tell the tale.

Actually, currently THERE IS at least one theoretical way to have true >c speeds: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_effect There might be a possibility to create a “less dense” vacuum which allows light to propagate faster.

Testing if it’s true is not currently possible. But I hope that one day someone will discover a way to create FTL engines based on this effect

It’s funny how little innovations go a long way.

Hats off to Chuck, absolutely.

Anybody reading this article should really do themselves a favour and watch The Right Stuff. I have no idea how accurate it is, but it’s hugely entertaining.

DJ Barney

Welch is a fascinating character. He was one of only a handfull of pilots who got into the air during the Pearl Harbor attack (he’s shown in the movie “Tora, Tora, Tora”), and probably became an ace that day, but only had confirmation for four planes shot down. He went on to successful combat experience flying P-39′s and 38′s, became a test pilot after the war, and died while testing the XF-100.

Chuck Yeager is a legend (and deservedly so), but there were a lot of other guys with “the right stuff”, like Welch, Marion Carl, Joe Walker and Scott Crossfield – it’s just too bad they don’t get remembered too.

If I am full of crap, I’m sure somebody will let me know …

By the way, the speed of sound limit and the speed of light limit are so different that it makes little sense to compare them. As Phil said, breaking the former is an engineering problem, breaking the latter would require a fundamental change to our understanding of the universe. It’s nice to dream about, but it’s not going to happen. Luckily, we already live in a paradise, in a galaxy that is not altogether friendly to life.

On a slightly related topic is the speed of light variable, depending on the medium it’s travelling through? It’s maximum speed is fine but I’ve read that, through sodium, at -272 deg C it can be as slow as 60 km/hr. Can this be true? I hope it is ‘cos if so I’ve broken light speed today on my bike!
(pedals, not pistons!)