What was the risk Chuck Yeager took?

Answer 1

The risk of breaking of the sound barrier, or coming even close for that matter, in a piloted airplane was thought by many to be a very risky proposition. Many pilots in WW II high-speed fighters had lost their lives when trapped in unrecoverable dives when their airplanes disintegrated in flight or collided with mother Earth. This flight regime was almost completely void of theoretical understanding by the world's most knowledgeable aerodynamicists. This was a very dangerous realm for any daring pilot to enter and quite literally a realm, if penetrated, of little or no chance of survival. The only way to break the barrier was to construct a very special airplane and conduct a very careful series of flight-tests and ultimately go do it.

By early autumn 1947, the United States Air Force, had constructed the very special airplane, the rocket powered Bell XS-1, gathered a very special group of men and women, and situated them in a very remote portion of California's high-desert and gave them instructions to: " . . . achieve supersonic flight in the shortest possible time . . ."

The XS-1 airplane was constructed exceptionally sturdy at about three-times stronger than any fighter plane of the day with a very special very thin high-speed wing and tail surfaces. The pilot selected, from among many, was Air Force Captain Charles E. "Chuck" Yeager. By mid-October, all preliminary groundwork and flight-test had been completed and the only thing that remained was to go fly.

Some, so called, experts and prognosticators predicted that the airplane would blow up, another that the airplane would come completely apart at a Mach number of 0.9, and another that the drag would be so high that sonic speed would never be reached. In short: nobody really knew what would happen.

On the ninth Air Force flight, on the morning of 14 October 1947, was an epoch making event in aviation history. On this flight Chuck Yeager shattered the so-called sound barrier by flying the XS-1 to a Mach number of 1.06 at 43,000 feet (13,106 m) at about 700 miles/hr (1,127 km/hr). This event and result was not made officially public, until mid-1948, due to the SECRET classification placed on the program by the USAF. In late 1947 he press, however, reported in a magazine article and then in newspaper headlines

proclamed

that a "U. S. MYSTERY PLANE TOPS SPEED OF SOUND" much to the chagrin of the Air Force. The news story wasn't quite right, but the "secret" was now public knowledge. The Government threatened to prosecute the journalists responsible, but nothing, apparently, came of the threat.

In retrospect, there was no one who really knew what would happen to a winged airplane as it approached sonic speed. Nobody knew what the drag would actually be, 2 or 20-times subsonic values, or what the vehicle dynamics would be like. Would the airplane shutter, shake, and buffet, then go out of control and proceed to come apart as some predicted? As it turned out, this piercing of the sound barrier, to Chuck Yeager, was somewhat of an anticlimax due to the ease of achieving the USAF's primary goal or as the British, in their penchant for hyperbolic understatement, would put it: It "was a piece of cake." Were there airplane buffet, instability, and trim changes? Yes, but these things were mild and controllable in comparison to what some so-called experts had predicted.

Was the breaking of the sound barrier by Chuck Yeager a risky venture? It was indeed a flight into the unknown. It could have just as well ended in a flight to oblivion.