![]() Or if the Americans had kept to the agreement perhaps the British would have been first anyway. If the British had not handed over all their information they could have been the first. To be the first to break the sound barrier had been loaded with prestige, to such an extent that two closely linked countries then went behind each other’s backs and misled each other. Yeager then landed the aircraft as usual. “Glamorous Glennis” was released from the bomb bay of a modified B-29 bomber and reached a speed of 1299 km/h or Mach 1.06. He was the first to break the sound barrier and survive. Chuck had named his aircraft “Glamorous Glennis” and it was rocket-powered, like the German Me-163.Ĭhuck Yeager poses in front of the Bell X-1 “Glamorous Glennis”. ![]() Charles “Chuck” Yeager sat at the controls of the Bell X-1 experimental aircraft that was in many ways similar to the Miles M.52. Then on October 14th 1947 the sound barrier was officially broken by a human. The British received no information in exchange. After the Americans got all the information concerning the British tests, they reneged on the agreement. Engineers in the American company Bell Aircraft received detailed information about the Miles M.52 British test aircraft that many considered to be very close to actually breaking through. Great Britain and the USA both tried to break the barrier and had an agreement to exchange information and data. Towards the end of the War the German V-2 rockets that were being used to bombard Britain regularly went through the sound barrier but could a human do that and survive?īritish researchers and designers succeeded in coming very close to the barrier and could well have been the first to break through it. It could therefore never be established whether Sieber and his Natter really did go through the sound barrier. Sieber died and the Natter was totally destroyed. The flight lasted only 55 seconds but Sieber and his aircraft crashed. But a colleague of Dittmar, Lothar Sieber, may have been the first person to break the sound barrier on March 1st 1945 when he test flew the experimental Bachem Ba 349 Natter aircraft, which was an attempt to build an aircraft that would take off vertically, like a rocket. Despite this, Mutke to the last persisted in believing that he had broken the sound barrier.Īnother German pilot, Heini Dittmar, who flew the Me 163 Komet rocket-powered aircraft did reach speeds that caused him to experience compression turbulence similar to that generated just before passing the barrier, and so Dittmar is considered to have been the first person to knock on the door of the barrier and survive. ![]() However several of Mutke’s colleagues were very sceptical of his claim, and later German tests and experience after the War showed that even if the Messerschmitt 262 could reach a speed close to that of sound it was impossible to actually reach it. The first pilot to claim that he had broken the sound barrier was a German fighter pilot, Hans Guido Mutke, who said that he had broken the barrier in his Messerschmitt 262 jet fighter aircraft. Consequently, would an aircraft going faster than sound cause a sonic bang, and if so what would then happen? Knocking on the door It may be small, but it really is a sonic bang. It was known that the barrier could be broken, and an early example of an object doing so was the tip of a whiplash when it is cracked, making the bang because it is moving so fast. The stresses that an aircraft approaching the sound barrier may be subjected to led some people to believe that it would be impossible to go through the sound barrier and survive. Mach 1.0 is reached when the aircraft is travelling at the speed of sound, whatever the altitude may be. The higher the Mach number, the closer to the speed of sound. This is why a different concept is used, namely the Mach number, for an aircraft’s speed relative to sound. Now this is not the whole truth, because the speed of sound in air also depends on altitude. At 15☌ sound travels at 1224 kilometres per hour (340 m/s) and this is the figure used when referring to an aircraft at the speed of sound. Sound travels at different speeds through different media, but the one most often meant when referring to the speed of sound is air. It seemed that available traditional technology would be unable to get through this barrier. When the speed got closer, a number of changes took place, including an increase in air resistance and a change in the effect of the rudder and elevators, so much that the speed of sound came to be regarded as a veritable wall. As the speed of military aircraft continually increased, so these aircraft rapidly approached the speed of sound.
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