A recent Newsweek article had a quote along the lines of “Chuck Yeager wasn’t the first person to break the sound barrier, he was just the first person to live through it”. Trying to find out who was the first person to break it (and assumedly not land safely afterwards) I came across articles about George Welch, who according to several sources broke the sound barrier not once but twice before Yeager, and lived to tell about it. According to these articles, the only reason Welch’s achievement isn’t common knowledge is Air Force politics. Unfortunately, all of the articles I read seemed heavily biased towards Welch’s side of the story. So does anyone have objective knowledge as to whether Yeager or Welch was first to live through breaking the sound barrier, and if anyone before them made it through but crashed immediately afterwards? Thanks.
The qualifier I’ve always heard for Yeager was in level flight.
I doubt the veracity of the following…might as well get a definitive debunking: I’ve heard rumors of a P-38 Lightning breaking Mach 1 in a dive, which would almost certainly prove fatal, as the wings might pull out of the dive but the big Merlin V12s aren’t likely to go with them. :eek:
::Wile E. Coyote-esque mental image of the wingtips pulling up and flying away as the engines and the cockpit between them plummet to the ground::
I’m not too familiar with George Welch, but there have been several other people claiming to have broken the sound barrier prior to Chuck Yeager. Those people have justified their claims with a lot of questionable “evidence.” Most claim to have done it in propeller driven aircraft (!!!) in a dive. They usually used the indicated airspeed dial to “prove” that they were flying faster than the speed of sound, even though these gauges do not reflect the true airspeed. What I’ve read about George Welch is also questionable. As you said, most sites are a bit skewed in favor of George. It’s possible that it was true, BUT
[ul]
[li]there were no Mach meters on the XP-86.[/li] [li]no ground instruments were monitoring the event.[/li] [li]in-flight instruments were conveniently “turned off” during the attempt.[/li] [li]the unrecorded jumping around of the speed indicator is given as “proof” since it was seen in later tests (this could have been due to transonic causes rather than supersonic causes).[/li] [li]George’s flight log is offered as proof because he wrote that he exceeded the speed of sound in there.[/li] [li]the fact that the XF-86 later did exceed Mach 1 is given as “proof” that it did it before. Just because something CAN happen doesn’t mean that it DID happen.[/li] [li]What I’ve read keeps claiming that George Welch is a highly skilled professional pilot that admits to taking a very expensive prototype aircraft into his own hands and pushed it beyond the limits that the flight test has put in place. He did his first attempt at the sound barrier shortly after the flight was almost called off due to his landing gear not locking into place.[/li][/ul]
It is possible that he broke the sound barrier, but credit can only go to the first verifiable instance. Other prior instances of planes going transonic usually resulted in the aircraft disintegrating in midair. Occasionally the pilot was thrown free and his parachute deployed, but usually the pilot went down with the wreckage.
The problem with propellor planes and mach one is the propellors. The tips reach supersonic well before the plane does. That’s one of the limiting factors to speed in level flight and a big problem in high speed dives.
Most P-38s had Allison engines, not Merlins.
I’ve also read somewhere that there’s strong evidence that some of the German pilots at the end of WWII flying some of the experimental planes either broke the sound barrier or came close to it.
Also according to an interview with one of Boeing’s test pilots (or whomever it was who built the SR-71) the guys flying the planes for the manufacturer generally ran the planes to their limits before turning them over to the military. He claimed that they set all kinds of new records, but because of the “classified” nature of the aircraft, they couldn’t get the credit for it, and it went to the Air Force pilots who merely duplicated their actions at a later date.
Dunno, if its true or not.
But as Arthur C. Clarke pointed out, the first time man broke the sound barrier was whenever the first whip was cracked. (The “crack” sound being generated by the tip of the whip breaking the sound barrier.)
That would be Lockheed.
Many people thought that Geoffrey DeHavilland broke the speed of sound, performing the feat by “reversing the controls” as he reached Mach 1. This impression probably comes from the film Breaking the Sound Barrier. I spent some time at Edwards AFB, and I never heard of anyone being the first to exceed Mach one except for Yeager.
On the other hand, I’ve heard that P-47s and other WWII aircraft would reach “compressibility” in a dive and the controls could not be moved. As Gunslinger points out, this was often fatal. Did they exceed Mach 1? Did they even reach it? I’ll have to leave those questions for others to answer.
I can’t speak to the F-86 issue, but in the case of propellor-driven WWII fighters, the answer is almost certainly not. The aerodynamics of supersonic flight would make it impossible for those old, thick-winged aircraft. Just the fact that they didn’t have flying tails would make it nearly impossible.
The X-1, with four rocket motors, ±18G’s load limits, and a B-29 to lift it to altitude, couldn’t even manage to do it until they re-designed the tail.
I don’t know anything about aeronautics, but I can tell you that my grandfather, before he died told me lots of stories about his brother, David Rogoff. David was supposed to have been some sort of genius, who worked at MIT. He invented all sorts of things, including using clorophyl (sp?) in deodorant.
One interesting thing he told me was that David was the navigator in the first plane to break the speed of sound. He said that it was before Yeager. He told me that Yeager’s plane was the first to fly straight and continue past the speed of sound. My great-uncle’s flight went up, broke the speed of sound, and went down immediately.
I don’t know if this is true, but it wasn’t like my grandfather to make these things up. Unfortunately, David died over 30 years ago, so I can’t ask him.
If anyone could even point me in a direction of how to confirm or deny this story, I would be very grateful.
His flight “went down” as in augered in? (rocket aces never use the word “crash” or so Tom Wolfe says)
I don’t think MIT had such a program and likely only the government had the means to make such a flight in the mid forties. Might take a look at his military record if any. I’m a bit skeptical as it’s unlikely the first plane to break the sound barrier had room for a navigator let alone a need for one.
Geoffrey DeHavilland didn’t fly the DH-108 until the year after Yeager and George Welch did their flights. He died trying to break the speed of sound in the DeHavilland DH-108. His aircraft broke up while going transonic. As for the claims by people claiming to break the sound barrier before rockets or jets, well, it’s not too likely…
The Republic F-106 (redesignated the F-84H before the first flight) was a test vehicle designed to break the speed of sound with a propeller driven aircraft. They gave it an almost 6,000 HP Allison turboprop engine. It flew for the first time on 7/22/1955 and never exceeded the speed of sound. The F-84H became the fastest prop-driven aircraft (I believe the record still stands) with a top speed of 670 MPH. They tested many different propeller designs but the stress of the props turning that fast caused massive engineering problems. The wingtips were turning faster than the speed of sound while the inner part of the prop was subsonic. The ground crew suffered terribly with dizziness, nausea, etc. with the propeller producing around 900 mini sonic booms per minute. Due to this the F-84H holds a second record – the loudest aircraft to fly. If the military and aviation industry couldn’t get a prop plane to break the sound barrier with 1950’s technology it’s unlikely that a 1940’s technology aircraft could exceed the speed of sound, whether on purpose or by accident.
My best guess would be that if any did they would more than likely be either a German Jet or rocket plane during the war.
Good luck proving anyone other than Yeager did though. If it could be, I would have thought it would have happened long ago.
But I guess you never know…
As of this date there have been several attempts to break the sound barrier in propeller-driven craft, and none have managed it.
I used to attend the Reno Air Races (might go again this year), and you can see WWII era planes like Mustangs, P-38’s, and Bearcats, there that are completely re-engineered for speed, with chopped-down canopies, 4000 HP engines, new technology propellers, and in some cases complete wing re-designs, and yet none of them have ever come close to the speed of sound.
Bob Pond had Burt Rutan build an all-new racer called the Pond Racer that they thought *might be capable of hitting the speed of sound. It was a tiny cocoon with a person inside it, a flying boom tail in the back, and two gigantic propellors driven by Prototype Nissan aviation engines that could make 2000 HP each. Unfortunately, it crashed before being fine-tuned, and the project was cancelled. But in the Reno Races, it never won.