Faster Than Sound

The only known barrier to speed in the air has been pierced. This week the U.S. Air Force was ready to announce that a piloted airplane had broken through the transonic danger zone and that three Americans had flown faster than the speed of sound (760 m.p.h. at sea level), faster than any men had ever flown before.

It was the longest step in aeronautical development since Orville Wright first flew at Kitty Hawk, N.C., 44 years ago. But the Air Force's pride of achievement was dulled by the fact that it had not succeeded in guarding the secret of basic aerodynamic design which had opened up the supersonic speed zone. The Air Force' could and did keep secret the speeds which had been attained in its epoch-making flight.

It confirmed these essential facts, The XS-1, a small, thin-winged, rocket-propelled airplane, built by Buffalo's Bell Aircraft Corp., had been flown through the barrier several times in recent weeks at the closely guarded test center at Muroc, Calif. The chief test pilot was 24-year-old Air Force Captain Charles Yaeger, World War II fighter pilot. The other pilots were Howard Lilly and Herbert Hoover, civilian flyers of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. The airmen had experienced almost none of the difficulties predicted by scientists to be lying in the transonic area in which other aircraft had wobbled or plunged out of control (some had disintegrated). The XS-1, launched from the belly of a B29, had also reached altitudes never before penetrated by airplanes--up to 70,000 feet (previous record: 56,046 feet, set in 1938 by Colonel Mario Pezzi, an Italian).

The Air Force told its official story after Aviation Week, a fortnight ago, published an account of the XS-1's successful flight, which the Air Force had hoped to keep secret. The significant security point was that the other nations already had pictures showing the XS-1's straight-wing design; the Air Force had unwarily released them twelve months ago. Much U.S. supersonic research--and presumably that of other nations--had been centered on a swept-back design (i.e., wings slanted backward from the fuselage). The effect of publication was to tell all other nations and potential enemies: forget the swept-back design; as of now, at least, the straight wing is it.

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