66 Years ago today the Sound Barrier was broken

Perhaps Welch was the first with the XP-86 ?

 

Did they ever fix the SB?





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Great moment in aviation! It was the beginning of almost all to supersonic travel!

 

A loud "boom" was heard at the "Happy Bottom Riding Club" two weeks (Oct 1st) before the X-1 flight that officially "broke" the sound barrier, at the time an XP-86 was doing a flight test and was in a dive.

With the politics involved with an official program that whose objective was to be the first aircraft to exceed the speed of sound, it would not have been "politically correct" for the XP-86 to have done it before the X-1..

Here's the excerpt from Air and Space Magazine talking about the guy running the X-1 program.....

Here's a link to the entire story... Mach Match | History of Flight | Air & Space Magazine

Fact remains that after the X-1 flight the XP-86 routinely exceeded Mach 1 in a dive.. Until the F100 came along no aircraft could exceed Mach 1 in level flight.

Not to take anything from Chuck or the X-1, they both did everything they was supposed to do, but the reality is that most likely the XP-86 actually did go supersonic first. Also, the X-1 got well beyond transonic, they went to 1.35 Mach, which is a lot faster than 1.04 that the XP-86 could do in a dive, and getting through the sound barrier was really just the first part of the program.

 

I googled "Mach 1 Day"

Google replied with "(Mach 1) Day = 29,401.056 kilometers"

*headscratch*

OH!

(340.29 m/s) * (86,400 seconds/day)= 29,401.056 km

Or something like that.

Dang, google is smart.

 

The display text with the X-1 in the National A&S Museum says something like: “first to exceed Mach 1 in level flight”. It is very intentional written that way.

I wounder were the XP-86 is?

 

There were 3 of them.

It looks like number 1 apparently crashed.

According to wiki, it was probably number one (s/n 45-59597) that was the sound barrier plane.


The sound barrier plane would not have been number 3. Number 3 had gun ports and the sound barrier plane did not.

Numbers 2 and 3 were retired... have not been able to find out where they ended up... scrapped, probably.

Anyone know?

 

Would not surprise me if something earlier had made it through mach 1. Several Me-163 pilots and Me-262 pilots described mach tuck, which shows up at transonic speeds from about mach 0.94. About where the airspeed and altimeter instruments start to flutter and continue to do so until you reach about mach 1.05. In modern fighters, that is about the only indication you are going supersonic. Not a great regime to try and drop bombs, even with an INS and GPS. Unless they are PGMs, which most weapons dropped now by the US are.