To properly understand flight at these speeds, manned aircraft would have to be flown by test pilots. As the air was blown through at faster velocities, shockwaves would form that bounced off the tunnel walls and the models within. Wind tunnels, like one built at NACA's Langley Memorial Aeronautics Laboratory, proved useless. ![]() Towards the end of the war, the US National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA, the organization that eventually became NASA) wanted to explore powered flight at these transonic speeds. It would be more than 200 years before a human could attempt to travel that fast, however. Derham used a telescope, a pendulum, and his church tower in Upminster (now a far suburb of London) to arrive at the answer by observing the interval between seeing a rifle flash and hearing its crack. Throughout the 17th century, scientists in England and France worked to calculate the speed of sound, getting ever closer before William Derham got there-or thereabouts-in 1709. On a warm day at sea level, it's about 768mph, or 343.2m/sec if you prefer to think in SI units. Luckily for Green, Baumgartner became the fastest man en route to Earth.Īll three of these historic supersonic firsts happened on (or about) October 14, but the pursuit of speed isn't some endeavor confined to a single day. The speed of sound-otherwise known as Mach 1 after an Austrian physicist-varies depending upon the medium through which that sound is passing. Baumgartner rode a helium balloon from Roswell, New Mexico, (yes, that Roswell) 128,100 feet (39,045m) into the atmosphere and then stepped out of its gondola, breaking the sound barrier with nothing more than a pressure suit and the laws of gravity. It's a title he still holds.īut 65 years to the day after Yeager's supersonic flight, an Austrian skydiver named Felix Baumgartner got his own entry into the record books. Thrust SSC was the name of his ride, and it made Green the fastest man on Earth. Fifty years and one day later (and only about 500 miles due north), another fighter pilot-RAF Wing Commander Andy Green-equaled Yeager's feat but on four wheels. ![]() That day Yeager-an Appalachian farm boy-turned-fighter ace-flew an experimental rocket plane called the Bell X-1 through the sound barrier and into the history books. On October 14, 1947, high above California's Antelope Valley, Charles "Chuck" Yeager became the fastest man alive.
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