Word: speeding
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Demon on the Tail. In the long-ago (to airmen) days of October 1947, the air was like a prison with invisible steel-strong walls. There seemed to be an upper limit to speed. As airplanes flew faster & faster, strange things had happened to them. Hard, unseen fists punctured their metal skins. Mysterious arms reached out of the air to wrestle with their controls. Sometimes a wartime fighter pilot, diving too fast in combat, would feel his stick freeze fast. No matter how he tried, he could not pull out of the dive. Sometimes he did not live to tell...
When a body moves with the speed of sound, the air does not yield smoothly. Instead, hard shock waves (sound waves) form. These are no gentle whispers; they are tough, speeding shells of compressed air, powerful enough under certain conditions to tear an airplane to bits...
Even flying much slower than sound, airplanes can run afoul of shock waves. The air crowding past them has to go faster to get around their curved surfaces. If, in its hurry, the air hits the speed of sound, shock waves form locally. Good design has steadily raised the speed at which an airplane can fly without trouble from local shock waves. But there is a limit: the speed of sound itself.* At this critical speed, an airplane's motion is sure to generate shock waves...
What violence these would do no one knew, but so many airplanes had met disaster far below sonic speed that the "sonic wall" had earned a fearful reputation. Designers and pilots spoke of it with awe. It was widely believed that when an airplane reached the speed of sound, it would disintegrate...
...Love. Test Pilot Yeager knew all this when he prepared to fly the Air Force's odd little Bell speedster. He took over the X-1 from a civilian test pilot, Chalmers ("Slick") Goodlin, who had flown the ominous little ship at Mach .8 (eight-tenths of the speed of sound). Goodlin was offered a fat reward (a rumored $150,000) for flying it at full speed, but he did not like the terms. Another civilian pilot had a try at the X-1 and hastily bowed out. Then the Air Force took charge and gave...