What American Pilot was the first person to exceed the speed of sound in an airplane?

Question

What American Pilot was the first person to exceed the speed of sound in an airplane?

Answer 1

Oh you silly ducks, that was Fransouis Mitterand, the famous French pilot who also first invented the airplane.

they invented the speed of sound you know.  Before that it was much much slower.....and cooler.

Answer 2

Captain Chuck Yeager in the Bell X-1 in 1947

Answer 3

Chuck Yager

Answer 4

chuck Yeager an american hero

Answer 5

Chuck Yeager was the first American military pilot to "officially" break the sound barrier .

However, it is now well established that the first person to break the sound barrier was not an American.

Evidence from official British and American military records including Allied test flight results from captured axis aircraft conclusively reveal he was not the first human to exceed the speed of sound in an aircraft. This is now recognised by most international aviation authorities, although it is still an official political position of some American authorities for obvious nationalistic reasons.

This data has come to light in recent decades as a result of freedom of information acts in various countries.

The erroneous propaganda claim of Yeager being the first is similar to the repeated american text book claims of Americans inventing the helicopter.

The first person to reach the sound barrier but not exceed it was German test pilot Heini Dittmar  who exceeded 1000km'hr in 1941 in a prototype Messerschmidt 163A rocket-engined swept wing fighter-interceptor. In 1945 Hans Guido Mütke steeply dived his Me262 twin turbojet fighter at full power during combat from 30,000ft and sent his instruments off the scale. Without letting off the throttle he had to adjust the all flying tailplane as the wing's centre of pressure shifted and he encountered severe buffeting, which as he still accelerated, suddenly stopped and his engines flamed out. He then deccelerated and experienced the buffeting again and the vibration began to damage his airframe.  These characteristics match those of aircraft exceeding the sound barrier. British test reports from 1946 of captured German Me262 report the same flight characteristics and claim that british pilots were able to exceed mach 1 in dives with these, the world's first production jet fighters.

A computer based (computational fluid dynamics) performance analysis of the Me 262, carried out in 1999 at the Munich Technical University, and wind tunnel tests, has shown that the Me 262 actually could exceed Mach 1, confirming the official 1946 test flight reports.

The Me262 did not require an area ruled fuselage (which reduces drag but is not a prerequisite for supersonic flight) and its swept-back thin wings were in fact as thin as some recognised supersonic capable postwar jets.

The Me262 also had a fully adjustable tailplane rather than just an elevator flap on the back of a standard fixed tailplane. The whole tailplane could be moved in flight.



During the war the british Miles Aircraft company became aware of german research into extremely thin wings in the Berlin supersonic wind tunnel and began it's own research program. It determined that the secret to supersonic flight would also include all flying tailplanes rather than two part elevators and it built a test bed, the Miles "Gillette falcon" with super thin (gillette razor thin) wing and all flying tailplane. Miles designed a supersonic capable jet aircraft with afterburner the Miles M.52 .   The design was 90+% complete in 1944. Under a secrets exchange program with the USA, all documents of Miles' designs, engineering drawings and test research were sent to the american Bell company. After realising the significance of Miles' technology, Bell refused to disclose any of its infant research in defiance of the technology exchange terms and set about making its own rocket powered version of the M.52, now known as the Bell X1 based on the british research.  Unlike Germany and Britain, America had no jet engine technology of its own and it used more familiar rocket engines. Just a few months prior to the M 52 test flights in 1946, the new british government cancelled the program, allowing the Bell copy to be completed and make an "official" supersonic flight in 1947.

The designer of the  Me163 rocket fighter, Alexander Lippisch,  also invented the delta wing and was involved in designing a ramjet powered 2000km/hr supersonic delta wing fighter during  the war. A  glider only test version, the DM-1 was captured and tested at Langley and its existence was made public.  However, German and Czech and Swedish documentation indicate the rocket and ramjet engined  powered version , the P. 13 was completed by wars end and later taken to Wright field Ohio with other captured technology as part of operation "Lusty". Swedish documentation from march 1945 report supersonic overflights of a delta winged aircraft  travelling from Norway towards Poland.  Like most other German designers, Lippisch was rushed in to lead american aerospace research and his P 13 was further developed to evolve into the Convair XF-92 and F-102 Delta Dagger and F-106 Delta Dart.  He also led the convair engineers to produce the Convair B-58 Hustler and his other German colleagues led the devellopment of the Convair Seadart, the words first supersonic seaplane.

Wernher Von Braun of course designed the V2 rockets and successfully flew a winged version (after one unsuccessful crash), the A4-b to over Mach 4.5 in January 1945.

Von Braun eventually designed the Saturn V and put man on the moon.

Answer 6

Welch broke the sound barrier in a dive, Yeager was the first pilot to break the sound barrier in LEVEL flight.

In addition, Air Force Secretary Stuart Symington had long before made the decision that a military pilot would be credited with breaking the sound barrier (Welch was a civilian), and it would be done while flying the X-1 research aircraft to justify its great expense. The capabilities of the Sabre were finally released in June 1948 when the Air Force and North American announced that the XP-86, piloted by George Welch, had broken the sound barrier in a dive.

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