Chuck Yeager – Breaking the Sound Barrier
An evening pause: From a 1950s Air Force documentary, describing Yeager’s flight on October 14, 1947. The 75th anniversary of this achievement is thus only two months away. From the YouTube webpage:
Two nights before the scheduled date for the flight, Yeager broke two ribs when he fell from a horse. He was worried that the injury would remove him from the mission and reported that he went to a civilian doctor in nearby Rosamond, who taped his ribs. Yeager told only his wife, as well as friend and fellow project pilot Jack Ridley, about the accident. On the day of the flight, Yeager was in such pain that he could not seal the X-1’s hatch by himself. Ridley rigged up a device, using the end of a broom handle as an extra lever, to allow Yeager to seal the hatch.
Hat tip Mike Nelson.
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Interesting to watch the actual flight, which had remained classified for several years due to suspicions about the Soviets gaining useful information about supersonic aircraft. It’s also interesting to compare the real event with Philip Kaufman’s superb re-creation in his 1983 film “The Right Stuff,” about the test pilots of Edwards and the Mercury program to begin spaceflight. Here’s that thrilling sequence in two parts — though the ending is incomplete. It reveals how Yeager managed to fly the X-1 despite his breaking several ribs the day before after falling off his horse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrEUUSp9_7I and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKGYm_jW60A
Phil Berardelli-
Thanks for those links.
Going (way) tangential here–
The Atomic Filmmakers –
Lookout Mt. Laboratories (1998)
https://youtu.be/7TTlmZLQtes
51:23