Mayday! by David Darling

Author:David Darling
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: The History of Flight, Human Endeavour, History of Aviation, World War I pilots, World War II pilots, Napoleonic balloonist, Stuntmen, Space Age, Daring
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Published: 2015-08-18T16:00:00+00:00

21 Chuck Yeager standing alongside the Bell X-1, which he nicknamed ‘Glamorous Glennis’ after his wife.

The Bell X-1 tests resumed, but by the following summer the air force had grown impatient with the progress of the project. Bell Aircraft were running what the brass considered to be too slow a build-up to the assault on Mach 1 – the speed of sound. Bell’s contract for testing was cancelled and responsibility for going through the sound barrier was handed to the Army Air Force Flight Test Division (the ‘Army’ part of that title was soon to be dropped as the US Air Force became a separate service in September 1947). The new chief test pilot was Charles ‘Chuck’ Yeager, a Second World War veteran blessed with astonishingly acute 20/10 vision (which once enabled him to shoot a deer at 600 yards). During the war, he was the first pilot in his P-51 Mustang group to ‘ace in a day’, accounting for five enemy planes in a single mission. He was also one of the few Allied pilots to shoot down a German jet, a Messerschmitt Me 262.

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