The first plane flew slowly. In 1903, the aircraft flew about 30 miles per hour (50 kph). During the early 1900s, planes got faster and faster. On October 14, 1947, pilot Charles E. “Chuck” Yeager reached a speed no human had ever flown before. He flew faster than the speed of sound!
Some people didn’t think this was possible. When a plane approaches the speed of sound, it creates shock waves in the air. That can cause the aircraft to lose control. “It wasn’t a matter of not having airplanes that would fly at speeds like this,” Yeager once said. “It was a matter of keeping them from falling apart.”
Yeager was an experienced pilot. He flew 64 missions for the U.S. Army during World War II. Yeager was a test pilot after returning to the United States in 1945. That’s where he flew an aircraft called the Bell X-1. Yeager named it “Glamorous Glennis” — after his wife.
Unlike most planes, the Bell X-1 had rocket engines. To help it stay stable at high speeds, the body had the shape of a bullet. Special controls let the pilot adjust the plane’s tail. On October 14, 1947, a bomber carried the X-1 — and its brave pilot — over the Mojave Desert in California.
Yeager climbed down into the X-1. The X-1 dropped from the bomber and soon reached a height of 43,000 feet (13,100 m). Yeager began to . “He got almost up to the speed of sound,” said expert F. Robert van der Linden. Then the pilot moved the airplane’s tail. “He made a tiny adjustment,” van der Linden told News-O-Matic. The plane’s speed jumped!
The Bell X-1 reached 700 miles per hour (1,127 kph). That is faster than the speed that sound travels. Many experts believed that speed was a “barrier” for planes. But Yeager broke the sound barrier!
The U.S. government kept the flight a secret. But it had a huge impact on aviation. Engineers used the design of the X-1’s tail in future jets. That includes the Air Force’s first fighter.
Yeager continued flying for many years. In 1953, he became the first person to fly twice the speed of sound. Yeager flew more than 100 missions during the Vietnam War. He from the Air Force in 1975 and died in 2020 at age 97.
Yeager made his record-setting flight 75 years ago. Now the world remembers how he flew faster than the speed of sound — and into the history books.
Updated October 13, 2022, 5:02 P.M. (ET)
By Lucy Albright
